…she still thinks that “I don’t want to talk to you” means “I should talk to him”. I’m so fully done with everything to do with her. I’m looking forward to things finalizing very much.

All that rubbish aside, Charles showed me some good bands, Trampled By Turtles and The Devil Makes Three, I added them into the hillbilly playlist.

That fiddler and the picker are on all the crack.

We’re going to divorce. She got in touch with our facilitator and finally responded to something. So we should be on our way by the end of the week to a glorious dissolution of our 12 year relationship.

I’m going back and forth but primarily I’m feeling some relief. She had the same problems with me and her life the entire time we were together, and she never seemed to want to fix it. She caught me off-guard with this a couple months ago, and things fell apart pretty rapidly. As I told her, numerous times: if you’re not happy, you owe it to yourself to move on. I tried everything I could to get her to come work things out with me, but in the end she couldn’t do it.

I honestly hope she’s happy someday, and finds whatever it is she’s looking for. I refuse to regret my life with her…I did my damnedest to be a good man. I’m going to go forward continuing to try and be a good man, a good father, and look at the world, in the words of Ashitaka, “with eyes unclouded by hate”.

Right now I feel so low.

I’ve got a lot of bad things happening. My job has disappeared, and I’m not sure how I’m going to make my mortgage payment. My kid’s car is basically collapsing and I’m not sure how I’m going to pay her tuition to school. And my marriage is basically in complete collapse, with my understanding wife saying she may want to possibly at some ill-defined point in the future work things out.

Honestly, I’m not feeling all that great.

I thought it would be good to write about it here, since I haven’t written here in a long time and no one reads it anyway, but it does. not. feel. good.

So fuck this

When I was a kid the big Halloween kerfuffle was razor blades being hidden in candy to slice up children’s mouths. It never happened as far as anyone knows. A friend of mine did have his little brother put a thumbtack in his mashed potatoes once, but that’s just a fucked-up little kid thing. He totally bit into it, too. That hurts my face just thinking of it. But I digress. More kids will get killed by drunk drivers this year than by razor-blade candy, yet people are hardly hysterical about the unbelievable carnage drunk driving leaves on the roadways. I think “safety theater” is more important than actually attempting to be safer, for most people. Like carefully putting on a seat belt, then driving ten feet off another car’s ass on the freeway at 90 MPH. You literally cannot save yourself from a collision at that point. There’s physically nothing you can do. But that seat belt! You’re being safe!

Since the wifey is off in LA being fantastic I have nobody to trick or treat with, and kids never come to our condo complex. Maybe it’s because I sit on the front porch in my underpants cleaning my shotgun, but maybe not. I am a little bummed we get no trick or treaters. It seems it would be fun to scare children. “Soon you will be fat and old! OoooOOOooo!”

I just recently read through the “500 Greatest Albums” list by Rolling Stone put together a while back, and “Nothing’s Shocking” clocks in at #312, “Ritual De Lo Habitual” way up at #55. It’s subjective of course. There’s plenty of albums on there that I wouldn’t wipe my ass with, and a shiiitload too many Dylan albums. We get it, you middle-aged Rolling Stone editors like Bob Dylan. Quit it. Personally, I think Jane’s “XXX” album should have been on there as well.  The funniest part about any subjective list on the internet, of course, is that nearly EVERY FUCKING PERSON IN THE WORLD will instantly start arguing about how your subjective list is TOTALLY WRONG AND HERE’S WHY. Endlessly until your house fills up with bile. In the past, I’ve remedied this by fixing the person arguing with me with a look and asking “Are you telling me my opinion of this [subjective thing] is wrong? You know what I like better than I do?” and that usually changes the subject pretty fast, or ends up in a fistfight. But the internet…oh the internet. So full of anger.

So Omari is the caretaker of an orphanage in Kenya. Pretty dire situation. At one point some local thugs, for unknown reasons, decide to raid the orphanage. Omari, asleep, manages to fight them off. They come back. Eventually, he’s hit in the face with a machete, and ends up in the hospital. When he gets back, after a hard stay, he looks like this:

Yes, that’s a huge machete wound. Notice the smile though? Omari has bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever heard of. So a local American volunteer hears about this. He’s posted about the orphanage before. He puts a link up to this pic on reddit.com, and asks if he community can come up with $2K to build a new fence around the orphanage. Reddit gets over two billion unique hits a month. Within 8 hours or so, they’re over 48 thousand dollars.

That’s right.

The user (“TheLake”) stayed up all night updating the thread as the money poured in. They beat two grand in about an hour. So TheLake posts this pic the next morning (now, here):

On behalf of anyone who reads this site, I want to say Thank YOU, Omari, and TheLake. You give me hope for humanity.

The money’s still coming in! Their webhost kicked in TEN GRAND.

I have a deep appreciation for veterans as a class. I know that sonds bloodless but the feeling behind it isn’t. On an individual basis, they are just the same as any other group, some are assholes, vain, stupid, entitled, some are brilliant, honest, courageous, amazing, most are just doing their jobs. But as a group I stand in awe. The word veteran brings me to the verge of losing it, generally. I don’t believe we do enough to support them.

But (not a dismissive but, a additive but) there’s another class of vets, vets who need vets.

Service dogs who went unquestioning to help their people. No larger purpose, no hesitation. The dog is the definition of love and loyalty for a reason. They made a pact with mankind millenia ago, and have held up their end of the bargain spectacularly.