it was time

at least a few times a day even after nine months you've been gone, I’m still checking my phone to make sure I didn't miss a call from you. It will be nine months tomorrow morning at 1:48am that the Lord decided that it was time to make your body whole again, to take away your illnesses and difficulty walking and breathing. It was time at sixty-four years old for your son to finally grow up and take on the world without you being here. But the messages I get now are when I see a redbird and it's mate flittering around in the trees at your house or a stray cat looking to me for food like they did you. Important things were never in emails or voice mails anyway and you hated talking on the phone preferring to see and talk in person. You were so right on all the important things.

Our dinners on Sundays I still try to have by myself but they don't taste like they did when you were here and the shows we watched aren't allowed on television anymore. My smiles and laughter as rare as they used to be are even more so now but I am trying because I know that is what you would want. When something does strike me as funny I almost instantly feel a sense of guilt that how could I ever smile again without you here in my life. But you are in my life and the signs are everywhere. I know you want me to lighten up and I'm trying. When I think of you I instantly know how you want me to be alright and you have to be aware that I'm doing the best that I can and I won't stop trying because of the promises I made before you left this earth.

Some days I do OK and that is a change that time and acceptance are giving me. Maybe it's the signs from you and God that I've asked for in prayer, I'd like to think so. I've made it through one closet almost entirely and I hope you are alright with where I'm donating your things. It's hard not to find a thousand reasons to keep everything you ever touched but I know that I can't it's just too hard. So many photos from lives past and I'm trying to sort through as many as I can and get them to those who should have them. My prayer is that you aren't too disappointed in my sadness when I feel it, and the sorrow in my soul you were so afraid would consume me without you being here. I'm afraid of that too but I really am working on it.

I'll see you again one day my sweet mom and I can hardly wait. Keep sending me signs that could only come from you and I'll keep working to be ok. I love you mom. 

when I'm dead

I'd like to just have one good solid epiphany in my life and call it a day but they just keep coming one after another. I've just about gotten over the idea this blog would be useful to the one person I thought might want to know what I was like when I was here. I must have started writing here on the one day I misplaced my skepticism about it but I've definitely found it again. Still, I write for the same reasons that I kept going to school a few days a week knowing they didn't want me there any more than I did.

I read an article today about a comedian I never really cared for while he was alive but I discovered some weird similarities in his life and mine. Garry Shandling died at I think 66 in 2016 of a heart attack. He looked at life very differently than a lot of people did and near the end of his life, he had a habit of just walking away from things he was quite good at if he lost interest. That's the thing that had me reading further to see if we had any other similarities cause God knows most people find something they're good at and then wear it out fearing there might not be anything else left in the tank.

He died at 66 and I'm 64. His last serious girlfriend told of him taking Excedrin every day for the last 5 years of his life would make swiss cheese out of his liver. I've taken Excedrin every day of my life for about the past 30 years. When you have an auto-immune disease that causes you to experience unbearable pain every day, you take what you need to and we sure had that in common. He had thyroid issues that increase your risk of a heart attack, and I have thyroid issues. He ended up walking away from lucrative work opportunities because he would get tired of doing the same shit every day. I can't even begin to count how many times I've done that but many is as close as I can get.

When Garry died he left almost all his modest millions to a charity hospital. For those few who might have hoped otherwise, I too am leaving what's left to St Judes Children's Research Hospital and Shriners Hospital for Children. The similarities from personality to work to health issues are wildly similar to my own and I have felt and said this a few times that if I were to live another 5 years from now no one will be more surprised than me. Garry was cremated and his ashes were given to a friend or family they aren't sure. I've put in my will and paid for my own cremation and having no more family left, just dig the hole next to my mom that is already designated for me and drop my mess in there and be done with it. None of this ceremonial nonsense where people have to make the decision to either go bowling or spend an hour next to my mess when they weren't there for my life in the first place. So no worries that I would want to ruin anyone's afternoon to have to come and pretend to give a shit when I'm finally stuffed in a bottle.

 The final oddity is how I never cared much about Shandling when he was alive and how little I care for myself these days now that mom has passed away so the end of our lives will likely be similar as well, alone, heart attack, and dropped in the ground to be forgotten. When God decides I've had enough here on earth, sometime after seeing my mom again and meeting my grandfather and my uncle Dub, I want to meet up with Garry and talk for a while. We'll have a few laughs and trade a few lies.

the long goodbye

Every one of us has examples of people in or around our lives that have been disappointing or turned out to be someone other than who we thought they were. This was a rare thing back in the day when I was growing up but not anymore. Before there was this connection to the entire world through the internet there were friends we actually knew and didn't want to hurt or disappoint. Back then you would have to pick up a telephone and dial a number you knew by heart to have a conversation with someone you would actually see and talk to in person at some point making civil behavior important. Not having a portal to the world kept most of us from knowing just how many levels of human scum there actually are and their names we would never know. 

With the onset of the internet, people can shout and scream about things they barely have scant knowledge of from sources with zero credibility and they can spew that ignorance to other people who they do not know and never will making the entire exercise of social media one of the most embarrassing wastes of time for all who participate including, by the way, me and this blog post.         

It was something, maybe a moment surrounded by a bad mistake I'd made, an epiphany, it was forty some odd years ago maybe during one of those rare unmedicated weekends that I discovered at least half of all people in this world actually suck. We didn't have headlines to inflame the rhetoric written by fake journalists or internet mobs. Anarchy and rioting only happened in 3rd world countries and would never have been tolerated even by a liberal political party here in the US. That's all changed now and there is no shame for those taking part in it here.   

I began this blog sometime after finding out that my father who I had only met a couple of times decades ago, had passed away. To this day after much research, I still do not know where he was laid to rest nor do I know the names of my half brothers and sisters that I would love to meet one day. But the information in cases like this often results in the same never-ending circles leading back to where I started. My intention was to give someone who is important to me but clearly doesn't realize it, a way to know more about me in the event of my passing than I know about my own father. While the exercise may well fall short of my goal, it's here just in case and I sure wish I had a way like this to "get to know," who my father was, the things he thought about and were important to him, just some stuff like that. 

One thing I DO know about my father and it's ironic I suppose is that he was a no-nonsense kind of guy. According to some of his shipmates on the USS Coral Sea where he served the country in Vietnam, he had a giant heart of gold, was the greatest friend, and would seriously get on your ass for being or doing something stupid that got you in a jam. He did not suffer fools well and when his crew on the ship got into trouble he would back them up to ten thousand percent, then take them aside and ream them out if they deserved it. One said you didn't want to get on his bad side.. Point is, my father would not have tolerated this newfound internet life most people fill their time with today. This all sounds very familiar to me and we could have had some pretty lively talks about it had we spent time together before he passed. But we'll see each other again one day and maybe we'll talk then. But I digress..        

I've deleted Twitter, stopped posting on Instagram, and the last to go is going to be Facebook where I have 5,000 "friends," and don't actually know even 1 of them. The back and forths some time ago on FB forced me into realizing even the people I had actually met and knew personally, I really didn't know much about at all.  I think there is such a thing as knowing too much about someone because the more I saw the more disappointed I became. So I deleted about 900 names on my FB "friend," list, then repopulated the list with those with similar interests only in photography, art, and the visual stuff that used to keep me upbeat and looking forward to brighter days before my mom passed away in November. I thought I could trick myself into finding those passions again that I used to have and maybe even find a new one but it hasn't really happened like that and Facebook will be the next and final "un-sociable media," platform to go when I'm certain my connection to other people in general just isn't in the cards for me. 

The quality of people's character cannot be assessed from a computer screen or the internet, and the likelihood of me ending up annoyed or pissed off increases exponentially with whatever time I spend on one. My conclusion is that in order to regain any meaningful connection to people in general, I'm going to have to find a way to go way back in time when folks actually met and knew each other on a personal level without a cell phone or constant connection to the internet. My definition of a friend comes from a time before the internet was ever thought about and the fact I can count my real friends on one hand assures me that those old traditional character requirements are still in place exactly where they should be. I'm in a place now where mistakes hardly even get close and I can attribute that to the fine art limiting my exposure to folks in general and realizing just how extremely short life actually is not wanting to waste any more of my time. 

There are some good people out there I'm certain there are, just as I am certain the longer one spends on the internet the less likely they are to find them.. My preference is to be completely alone instead of having thousands of fake friends on a computer and to just forge ahead to "be right and to do right," as mom told me just before she went to heaven. 

So the "long goodbye" that has been in progress since November 16, 2019, continues and if by chance the 3 or 4 actual friends I do have remain till the very end, I will consider myself to be the lucky one. And for those who won't be there till the end, I'm even luckier still by your absence.

May God keep his hand on your shoulder and guide you through your journey.

Warsh your hands.

Wear a mask.