Happy and Hating It

A couple of days ago, I was surfing Blogspot, and came across an amazing blog. I was going to mention it here, and then when I tried to go back to it today, I get a “Not Found” error. What the …???? It was a brilliant blog, and it seemed to me a shame that this man’s thoughts and his honesty should be lost (if indeed he has shut down his site). So thanks to Google, I found a cached version of his blog, and would like to share with you some quotes. I love the way he expresses himself, the way that he is so self-aware (if sometimes pathos-invoking). He described his blog as “Sporadic permutations from within a mid-life crisis”. The power in his writing is that, no matter how sad or possibly hurtful his feelings were, he was completely honest about them – and the fact that in this venue he was able to be real (and realistic) without prevarication.

On April 3rd:

Too many people give their perspective as though they have their own lives pretty well figured out. They are madly in love with their spouses and everything. Half the time, I smell a scam. They want to be liked. Nothing wrong with that. The surest way not to be liked is to come off as angry, frustrated, or out of control.

But I want to be real. I don't even know what real is so I have to start by not pulling any scams. I think I've done it before. Don't mean to here but you never know. So contradictions and wild mood swings are to be expected. Dig it.

On April 5th:

Happy
I have a wonderful life. I married a woman of great energy and unique talents. She is smart with money, loves to cook and garden, and is amazing with children. Especially difficult children, such as she works with at school: crack kids, autistic kids, etc. Plus we have two teenagers who are well above average in the great kids department.

Hating It
Examining my ever-wandering and wondering mind I've come to learn I married before I had any clear idea what sort of woman I was looking for. This is not uncommon and frequently people adapt and find compromises that make the partnership "good enough". But I'm now deep in a phase of wondering if good enough really is good enough. I'm haunted by my almost total lack of social experience prior to meeting her. I'm not good at hiding and my doubt and lack of passion have effectively broken my wife's heart. I see my alternatives as a) stay and always wonder (and continue to absorb my wife's own sometimes violently expressed personal issues), or b) break the family and possibly wind up alone. Sadly, sometimes (a) seems worse than (b).

Happy
I have an interesting and challenging job for one of the planet's premier corporations. I get to be a little creative, I get to travel a little bit, I get to tell my kids that my division is doing cool stuff.

Hating It
I never wanted a corporate or even conventional job. I studied engineering because it was more practical than history and graphic arts. Sometimes it is interesting. It's a relatively easy way to make a good living. But my music, my drawing and my writing were what moved me as a child and now that I've gone to work and raised kids and played the game awhile, I'm finding (like many people my age) that the only things that really move me now are the same things that moved me thirty years ago.

On May 10th:

[Some dude] launched into a diatribe of wonder at the ignorance of people. He had been talking to a Muslim co-worker and could not believe the man didn’t understand that the current troubles in the Middle East all stem from the rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael. It’s all in the Bible, he said; everything that’s happening, and everything that’s going to happen. The Jews are from Isaac, and the Arabs from Ishmael. I kept my trap shut and looked it up later to learned that, in time, God will allow for the slaughter of millions as the descendants of Abraham’s sons fight it out for final dominion. Of course, Israel ultimately will win. Personally I find the exercise rather pointless. Why kill so many, why have such a horrible war? But I gather that religious folk see it as the will of God and therefore inevitable and thus, acceptable.

Armageddon seems likely enough. But it won’t be because God said so. It will be because enough people believe God said so. That’s all it takes.

On May 12th:

Time to make time for a long sentence at least

I don't know if I should write a story about a man who follows the irresistible siren echoes of unfulfilled youth and drifts away from his wife in pursuit of romance and new experience and to learn all those things about himself he feels he cannot learn from within a marriage whose purpose and origin has been lost under twenty-plus years of inexplicable experience, eventually to return, wiser and sadder, either to his long-suffering wife or a new partner very much like her, all as an analog to his loss of faith in God and departure from the Church and exploration of alternate faith traditions that eventually leads him back home again to the church whence he came; or if I should write a story about a man who follows the irresistible siren call of secular rationalism and leaves his church and abandons his faith to find fulfillment in reality-based human experience and a sort of life-affirming Epicureanism that eventually leads to acceptance of his spiritual nature and his fundamental human need for a return to ritual and faith-based fulfillment, all as an analog to his emotional separation from his wife of many years and an undeniable need to discover love and self-fulfillment on terms that relate to him and not to tradition and two-decade-old vows but which will lead him ultimately, after much painful experience, more or less back where he started, everything the same except in such details as no longer being a stranger to himself.

He takes my breath away. If his blog ever comes back online, you can get to it here.