Books

Going through the boxes of books that I've collected over the years certainly has brought back some memories. Finding my textbooks gave me a real trip back in time. One of the books was used in my hardest class that I recall. It dealt with wave propagation and the pages were filled with formulas, integrals and all other kinds of nonsense that I couldn't understand now if my life depended on it. I remember having to picture so many things in my imagination, to understand how electrons and field moved through space...There's a meme that I find on the internet every once in a while about a sunset. What the world sees, a beautiful sunset. What a scientist sees, and the picture is transformed into formulas and vectors. That really was how I pictured a lot of the world and, to be honest, still do.

I also found the textbook of my systems class. It was the worst class I had in my program. It was frustratingly hard, almost futile. It was only salvaged by a gracious curve and one of the other engineers having programmed something in his HP calculator and freely shared it to everyone in the class. That program saved my grade in that class.

Going through other books brought even more introspection, something I'm already prone to do. Let's take a journey into my brain for a bit, shall we?

Wow. I certainly did read a lot about this. I didn't realize how much of this I had.
You wanted to figure it out. There's nothing wrong with trying to figure it out.
Of course not, but I spent so much time, so much effort into trying to make it work.
You wanted forgiveness and acceptance. Most people do. This was how you did it.
Hmmm. Look at this one. My brother gave me these books. I wanted to read so much. It was a new way of thinking and I tried so hard to understand this one. My life would have been different if I actually took my issues to a different conclusion.
You wanted acceptance. You gave up your doubts for that. 
I know. I know. Still, it would have saved me a lot of pain and grief later on if I had just listened to my doubts. There's nothing wrong with doubt. I just crushed it at the time. It was easier to go along.
Do you really wish you didn't make the decision you made back then? Your life would have been very, very different. Do you regret everything?
No, of course not. It took me on a path that let me meet the greatest people I have ever known. I wouldn't have traded that for anything. Yeah, it all didn't go as I planned but I love those people. I don't think they even know how much I love them, and how glad I am that they are in my life. Why all the apologetics anyway? You regret something in your life and people get all stressed that you'll throw away all the good with the bad. It doesn't work that way.
Isn't it natural for people to think that? You are rejecting something very fundamental to who you were, who they are. They would naturally assume you regret them too.
Nope. Some things are big, yes. Some things I'll gladly toss. I don't reject the people along the way. It was my life, it IS my life. I could easily have done without the depression, the guilt and all the problems it created, but that isn't the fault of the people along the way.
So do we keep this book as some sort of lesson?
No. God no. And that book there. That goes. That book should burn for eternity for what it did to me. Nothing, nothing at all redeeming in how that book made me feel. I sometimes feel ashamed because they honor this man so. I did. I did a lot of things I just don't understand anymore. I believed a lot of things that I can no longer fathom.
People change. You've changed a lot these past few years.
Hopefully, for the better. I've always wanted to be a good person. I'm sad that that desire was used against me for so long. Over 30 years. It was only when I saw what it was doing to my kids, how my rationalizations didn't work for them.....I didn't want to put them through the mental gymnastics that I had gone through. I want them to be their own people, find their own path, not mine.
No, this book has to go.
My life is my own. This is the next step in letting go, starting over. It is time to move on. I hope my friends can still accept me, but I have to clear my life of this clutter. I've carried it for far too long. I can't make the journey up the mountain with this dragging behind me.
Hey, look at this....

Drink and Dance With One Hand Free

I recounted to Tracy a time that I spent on my mission where I tried to rebuild after my year-long depression. When I was deciding what to do after I realized how badly messed up I was, I had to weigh my options. If I left halfway through, I wouldn't be able to go back to BYU. I knew that they would never accept me back. That was a hard thing to come to terms with. My adopted culture wouldn't accept me after such a failure. I contemplated how I would go on. My parents would probably consider me a failure. My church and my God would consider me a failure (a huge part of my current depression anyway.) I would have to settle for another school, as education was still important to me. I could probably get into Michigan but maybe not because I had a failure in a class my last semester and that would be something hard to overcome. More important to a young man my age, I probably wouldn't find anyone to date/marry in the church. What woman would have a failed missionary?

I resolved to finish, but I had to do it on my terms. I felt completely useless. I was devoid of most of what I was. I needed to find myself again. I would have to be me as much as I could for the remaining year.

So I was.

I gained a little reputation. I didn't pay much attention to the rules I felt were silly. I always hated authority and the church was a very authoritarian place. I bided my time. I could do anything for a year, right?

There was a song by Steve Winwood, Back the High Life. In it are these lyrics.

I'll be back in the high life again
All the doors I closed one time will open up again
I'll be back in the high life again
All the eyes that watched me once will smile and take me in

And I'll drink and dance with one hand free
Let the world back into me
And I'll be a sight to see
Back in the high life again

I took those to heart. At some point in my life, I would drink and dance with one hand free. My depression was temporary. My feeling of being stuck, trapped, will be temporary. While others found BYU to be oppressive, I didn't. I loved learning so much that I never needed to rebel. When I got back to school, I would do as much as I could to enjoy the life that I had put on hold.

And I did for the most part. Of course, once I became engaged, I became real serious about school again. Stress of wanting to be a success at my career took over, but I enjoyed school as much as I could. I took as much out of life as I could for those remaining years.

I loved that song. I'm glad I remembered it.

Jab it!

When Hayden was growing up, it was taking him some time to find the words to express what he felt. He often acted out. When he was upset, he didn’t yell. Instead he went into our closet and took everything off the hangers.

I think I went through something similar growing up, on a lot of levels. I think most teens/adolescents do. I mean, how do you express all the new feelings and sensations around you? How do you talk about sex with your parents when their entire discourse on the subject is “Wait till you’re married.” How do you talk about all the complexity of love with your peers when all they can do is snicker like Beavis and Butthead whenever the topic was brought up. And to be fair to them, I couldn’t even figure out how to talk to a girl, let alone give any exposition on the matter. I mean, vocabulary is important. I found that out when I started reading poetry and actually enjoying it over the past few years. I am finally gaining the vocabulary I wanted to be able to express what I have felt all this time.

I was thinking about this while driving home from work the other day. I realized how much I “acted out” in different ways as a teen because I couldn’t adequately express what I felt. It also explains why I went more to the hard rock end of the music spectrum. It had the energy that I craved. Perhaps it wasn’t the same kind of energy I felt, but it was there none-the-less. Regardless of what you might think of the testosterone fuelled genre, it provided an outlet for those males that felt passion and emotion in a society that was putting a lot of boundaries on actions. The religious right was gaining power and women were becoming more independent. Couple that with teen angst and that lack of passionate vocabulary and it is no surprise to me that things musically turned that way (hair, spandex, color).

So here I was listening to Metallica on the way home. While I didn’t feel the angst of the song, I felt the energy, the drive. I’ve come to appreciate the words. Yeah, you might not think that words are that important to their songs, but they are essentially poetry. They express a feeling, a sentiment that many can relate to. Since the song is long and if you don’t like their music it could be painful, let me instead put the lyrics here so you can read them, or you can follow along on the lyric video.

Fixxxer

Dolls of voodoo all stuck with pins

One for each of us and our sins

So you lay us in a line

Push your pins, they make us humble

Only you can tell in time

If we fall or merely stumble

Mirror, mirror upon thy wall

Break the spell or become the doll

See you sharpening the pins

So the holes will remind us

We're just the toys in the hands of another

And in time the needles turn from shine to rust

But tell me

Can you heal what Father's done?

Or fix this hole in a mother's son?

Can you heal the broken worlds within?

Can you strip away so we may start again?

Tell me

Can you heal what Father's done?

Or cut this rope and let us run?

Just when all seems fine

And I'm pain free

You jab another pin

Jab another pin in me

Jab it

Here come the pins

Blood for face

Sweat for dirt

Three X's for the stone

To break this curse

A ritual's due

I believe I'm not alone

Shell of shotgun

Pint of gin

Numb us up to shield the pins

Renew our faith

Which way we can

To fall in love with life again

No more pins in me!

No more, no more pins in me!

Lyric Video

I’ll leave it to you to find your own meaning in the song, but this expresses a very powerful feeling/transition, at least to me. I survived my own inability to express thoughts by proxy with bands and songs that pushed the boundaries, those that felt free to live as they wanted instead of from the expectations of society.  Now, I know that music is a business and it was a lifestyle that was marketed, but I was a kid. What did I know about how the world worked?

Anyway, Sunday is Father’s Day. Do Dads a favor and leave them alone. My day will be spent on the bike and playing video games. I hope yours is enjoyable too.

Penny Road

The other day I decided to take a slightly different way home. Aside from a cat and mouse that I played with an SUV, most of the ride home was uneventful. I wasn’t sure exactly sure how Algonquin Road interfaced with Bartlett Road so I was pleased to find a well marked intersection with Penny Road, a road I had seen on an earlier trip. I distinctly remembered how Penny and Bartlett had a 4-way stop.

Penny Road
(Use street view to a better effect.)

So I turned off onto Penny Road and given the lack of population and the mostly empty street, I started to think about something other than driving. I sometimes find driving through Barrington troubling. I say this because the sheer amount of wealth in the city is off-putting. I don’t know if it is because I have no chance of ever attaining this kind of money, being content with being a problem solver of the computer variety, or knowing that I would have little in common with the people that do live there.

I mused over my life at these times. I looked at the huge homes, complete with colonade facades and wondered what kind of stress might reside there. The poor think that being rich leads to an easy life, and that might be true. I would think that being rich has its own stresses. How do you live without losing what you have? How to support those people that work for you. (I still haven’t dehumanized those with wealth.) When I die, how can I leave things to my children. Ok, Ok. Maybe that isn’t such a hard life. But I do know that wealth, stuff, doesn’t make one happy. I’m trying to get rid of stuff.

Carrying these things for the last 30 years hasn’t brought me any happiness. My happiness is in my surroundings, my planet, my family...and my motorcycle. and my bicycle. Well, maybe some things do bring me some degree of happiness.

My wife and I are embarking on a plan to shed ourselves of a lot of the baggage that we carry. Some of that is psychological, granted. Realizing that it is just stuff. Merely stuff. That has done my world a lot of good. I have a goal, a goal that doesn’t orbit stuff. Stuff is merely a tool. When I die, I can’t take stuff. The stuff stays behind. Why leave behind any stuff at all? My kids don’t need stuff. etc. etc.


I think what was most striking to me is how my desires for my life is juxtaposed against those that live on Penny Road. I don’t want to judge them harshly, but it seems that at this point in my life, they are everything that I am not. Perhaps they are what I aspired to at some other point in my life, but I can’t recall it. I think I am happier because of my new desire to let go of desire (to go all buddhist on your ***.) I don’t need this. What I want is a hill to climb, a path to ride on and an occasional cow in her pasture that I can discuss the meaning of life with. My expectations aren’t much, and they don’t need to be. Life is profoundly worth living. It is even better with friends you find along the way. Stuff? I only need it to make sure some needs are met. Otherwise, I think I’m better off without the clutter.

Mid-life Crisis (Part 9a of The Trilogy of Fear)

I’m sitting in the basement. 20 years of bills and boxes of documents surround me. No, this probably isn’t a very common way any essays about mid-life crises start, but it works its way into the story eventually.

I’m probably pretty typical. I mean, really typical. You can read it all in what I’ve posted here. Over the past years I’ve taken a very hard look at my life and redrew boundaries, rethought goals, discovered and acknowledged what my passions and desires are. This has come at a price. That level of honesty with my past, present and future have put a lot of stress on my family. Tracy and I have fought, cried, and spent hours into the night trying to make everything work with who we were becoming. I also want to establish here and now that no marriage is written in stone. From my wife’s perspective, I took a hard left turn in my life and she’s been playing catch-up ever since.

First came long years of my trying to figure out what I believe. That was a painful road. It involved more introspection than I’ve ever done, and I was already a very internal-looking person. As those beliefs evolved and I realized that I felt much more comfortable being in a very different place than I had been most of my life, the negotiation with Tracy, the person who chose to be with me throughout my life, began. I took no expectations there. I needed to know my boundaries. I didn’t want agreement, I wanted mutual respect and  wanted to determine how we were going to make this work or if we were at all.. I’ve seen more than one marriage with my online acquaintances vaporize and I wasn’t sure if that would happen to me or not. A level of frustration with determining if I was loved for me or for my position was constantly on my mind. To be honest and frank, from my perspective, there were several times when I thought my “life” as I knew it would be over. Never before had I argued with Tracy like this. I hated myself but I needed to live as I believed, and not as others expected me. 

Eventually some other things occurred and once again I found my wife at my side traveling the same road. The kids agreed with our new life and we started a different path of discovery.

I found so many other things about my life that I wanted to throw away. I had been seeking approval most of my life. My friends and relationships meant more to me than anything and because of that, I compromised a lot of my own thoughts and feelings. I have always been more emotional and sensitive than I’ve ever let on. I’ve always been circumspect about it. To most people, I am grouchy, aloof and not a very approachable person. My wife had to field a lot of questions and statements because so many people were afraid to talk to me personally. In reality, I feel moments of unreachable bliss and deep depression. I didn’t let that on because it would make me feel vulnerable. I had harbored some other thoughts that the strength of my feelings meant that I might have some mental disorder. Certainly, someone with my exterior can’t feel so broken most of the time. I cried while driving home from work more times than I want to admit. My frequent trips away from my family were to try to quiet the demons that were constantly telling me how inadequate I was and that no one would understand how strongly I felt for them or about anything, really.

I had to start uncoiling all that. Tracy and I again spent time talking about all that we held from each other. That wasn’t easy. These things hurt. I don’t have nearly as strong a fear of abandonment that Tracy has, but I do have one. That is one reason I didn’t express anything. I don’t want to be hurt. Neither does she, but knowing each other’s vulnerabilities helped with overcoming those fears. Acceptance has become more important, instead of less. Acceptance is now different. I want acceptance, but I realize that I can go on without it and that I don’t want to sacrifice who I am for it. 

More recently, we’ve taken on the future. As we’ve talked, I feel less damaged. I don’t feel much of a need for therapy, if that makes sense. We’ve still said things to each other that hurt, but we can use that to go further in our lives. I don’t expect Tracy to be at my side in every endeavor of my life, but we are for the important ones. I don’t feel so guarded and we can talk about some pretty intimate parts of our lives without completely falling apart. Close, but not completely.

So where does this tie in with being hip deep in old documents? Simple really. We’ve decided to get rid of the clutter in our lives and in our home. We have been too tied to our “stuff”. We don’t want to take this any further into our lives. We are purging unwanted and unnecessary things over the next few years. At least, that is the plan. The county announced a recycle day (which isn’t that unusual as they hold a more limited one each month) where we can shred old documents. We had kept (or is it just me) documents from the last 20 years because we had a basement, and there was space there. Well, this was the opportunity we had to purge that. Five boxes filled with old bills and some memories were going to the shredder. More plans created to get rid of other boxes of things were made. I’m determined to get rid of those things that don’t play a role in my life. At some point, we will probably move to a different part of the country, to start a new life in a place where we want to be instead of where the paycheck is. We have plans to downsize with each child that leaves home. We want to enjoy life a bit differently in the future than we have in the past. The fact that we were able to basically replan our lives with little disruption I think speaks volumes to where Tracy and I are now, compared to where we were.

Has this been worth it all? Yes. It was, quite frankly, terrifying. My life has been from one to hold on to everything around me tightly, to one where I can lose it all and I’d still feel content. I’m in a very different place than I was just three years ago. I hope it is a good place.

Love (Take 1,000,000,006)

Several years ago I endeavored to write my feelings about love. I had felt that it was about time I tried to take on the most written about emotion. If nothing else, I could get some practice writing.

Love is a touchy, ever changing thing though. Before I started dating as a teen, I knew that I wanted something deeper than what I was seeing around me. I wanted a romance, someone I could get lost in, someone I could adore. Then the reality of dating hit and it was messier than I had ever imagined. Breakups were difficult and bothersome. Considering that I was the one doing the breakups, I figured there must be something right that I was doing, you know, other than breaking up with the girl.

Then I fell in love with someone that didn't want me lost in her, didn't want to be adored (or so I inferred). Now what the hell do I do? Oh yeah, I could have a nervous breakdown. That will make things easier. (Not her fault or issue.)

After the madness subsided, I had a stalker who threatened other girls that I dated. I had friendships that didn't want to stop at friendship and infatuations and well-thought out romances. I actually had dates with women that were actually fond of me. Married one of them in fact.

So, do I know about love now? Nope. Twenty-six years of marriage didn't give me any insight. The damn thing keeps moving around. At times it is a rush, sometimes a whimper. I still want to get lost in it, but reality keeps intruding. I've realized how selfish it becomes, to the point where someone might not want to be alive without someone. How messed up is that? It controls and hurts. It makes people do foolish things. It makes them question their sanity, over and over again.

It is also great and wonderful. I still yearn to get lost in someone, to adore them. It is a feeling that I've never shed. I have several anonymous blogs where I put things that I'm too afraid to post with my name attached but need to have voice. Love can raise someone up, it can also crush and destroy. I revel in all those aspects. I read romantic poetry, where love and loss are part of the trade. I try to build up my passions, to make sure I keep feeling. I don't want to be complacent in this. I don't want ecstasy or depression to rule my life, but love has always been my focus and it can lead to both of those things.

Perhaps someday I'll put a more honest attempt into writing about love.

Or maybe not.


"It is so scary how powerful love is, how people make it a life or death situation. How could you lose yourself so entirely in someone that, without them, you think you’re better off dead?"
-Unknown.

If I Got Rid of My Demons

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
~Tennessee Williams

I think about this often. I've taken several experiences in my life and used them to change myself. It is something that I've only shared with a few people that are directly responsible. You know, a note or such and such that states, "You've changed my life and this is how..." It was one of the most obvious reasons I became connected on Facebook. There were people that affected my life to such an extent that I felt rather empty without telling them how much they meant to me. Honestly, it was one of the main reasons I believed in the afterlife, simply because I lost track of them and I felt that would be the only way I would ever find or meet them again. Facebook changed all that and gave me additional impetus to change my life even more.

My demons (experiences) held a good deal of control in my life. I would travel alone to meditate on my life, think about how to improve and perhaps shake my fist at the heavens to let God know that I was paying attention to all this and I didn't think it was all that fair. I loved talking to my demons. I found insight, meaning, motivation to change myself in our conversations. I've improved my life a great degree because of our interactions.

Recently, I wrote a post called "Panic". I believe it was fueled by a part of my mind that didn't want to stop talking to particular demons. It rebelled at the thought of not having those conversations. It didn't want to leave that place that had grown comfortable. Like all things though, they move on and my life moves on. A new set of demons needed to start their discourse with me, and the old ones needed to vacate. I needed to learn different things, improve in different ways.

I'm not sure if this makes any sense.  It wouldn't be the first time.

I love my demons. They build who I am.

I'm not sure if I ever had a conversation with my angels. I think they are afraid of me.