Open your mouth, and you are saying, "I have something I want someone to hear."

Then, you pause for a moment and wonder who your words are for.

Does God hear your prayers? Of course, but has God answered each and every one of them?

No. God is, whether you like it or not, like Mick Jagger, in that you can't always get what you want, but when you do try, you find you get what you need from life.

Such is reality, and reality can be pleasant if you are ready to live in it.

Reality could have saved you a lot of heartaches back there. Reality cuts through the dreams and aspirations of Mommy, Daddy, politicians, religious leaders, teachers, bosses, friends, countrymen, etc.

Reality shows you what is happening behind the theater of social convention and geopolitics.

You can still play the role you have been assigned in this life without thinking that you are actually in the midst of something permanent that will last forever.

Reality can be a helpful teacher in getting you to a place of understanding why you are where you are, or how you got to be here, at any rate.

Mommy+Daddy: if you just get to college, you will find yourself, find your mate, find your purpose in life, and all will be well. If we pay for your college, this means you will be 100% focused on your studies and finding a girlfriend, rather than working.

You: I barely got through high school, and never had any home work and winged it the entire time. How am I going to manage to be successful in an alien but nonetheless structured learning format, after decades of not going to any school dances, movies, sporting events, and seeing little of pop culture on television? How can I even know where to begin talking to a girl, and what would I even have to say to her?

So, also You: I shall let my kids watch anything they want on TV, AND pay for their college, and all the gaps that were missing from my childhood (and my parents') will be taken care of, and my kids will run the world once grown.

Reality: An older dad (grandpa on Dad's side) has corrupted DNA (epigenetic drift from working in a Carbon Black plant, smoking, working on Navy destroyers, barely has energy to spend time with his accident of a son. Next, an older dad (mine), has more or less the same "gift" to pass on--DNA wrecked by age, imbibing alcohol+cigarettes unfiltered, and aircraft fuel fumes, harsh cleaning chemicals. Finally, the third generation of Older Dad, with similarly janged-up DNA has a couple of boys of his own.

With each generation, skills aren't passed on in a way that can be taught to the next generation, but at best barely remembered for survival to find the mate and reproduce.

This is understood in ancient Qigong medicine--children of older dads have less energy, less lightning-quick reflexes and nimble brains.

But, we keep thinking that we can make simple copies of ourselves that are identical to us while offering a more affluent environment of more opportunities for future success and security in life.

Fortunately, there are moms that introduce their DNA as well. But, they reinforce the notion that the son can never be the dad.

Dads who try to raise carbon copies of themselves fail, and so do the sons who try to be exactly like their dads. Why? Because we clearly don't possess the exact same DNA as our fathers/sons. Not even close.

Similarly, dads who reject their offspring for being too different and can't bring themselves to see how their own sons/daughters are like them, also fail, and the offspring that strive to be the opposite of their fathers fail. Why? Because for better or worse, we all do have some of our dad in us.

At any rate, life somehow continues.

You find yourself divorced and unable to spend even a fraction of the time you used to with your sons. Maybe this is for the best, but you doubt it. The boys used to be happy and cheerful and are depressed each and every time you call them.

The truth is, you have almost no control whatsoever over what happens with them. And, in fact, you are ready to relinquish even some of the unconsciously assumed control you imagined you should have over them because you are their dad and you are simply falling into patterns of behavior that you learned from your dad.

Look at your own father. He had four sons. Four. He adopted two and made two of his own.

The first died at 25 of AIDS, having produced a little girl your father rejected as a potential first grandchild. The 2nd never really reconciled with Dad either, and had three girls, all of whom will no doubt take the name of their husbands or at least their kids will take the last names of the men who they make the kids with. The youngest boy, your own biobrother, died at 16.

This left you with this overwhelming sense of a mission to find a mate and reproduce, and sometimes you have wondered if there really is such a thing as true love. After all, the soon-to-be ex has made it clear she faked it for too many years to count.

Is there such a thing as a person you might even find especially more fitting to spend time with above and beyond everyone else you've ever known? So you thought there was, but now look at life.

Such reality could become a sad burden, one that you let oppress you, or one that you deny in a never-ending search for a person who does not and never will exist.

Or, you can admit that the entire concept of true love is just some kind of low-grade societal propaganda designed to get people to make children and stay together long enough believing the illusion to get the kids to an age where those kids can now believe the illusion and make more humans.

Yet, it seems like a healthier view of how men and women actually think and see themselves in relation to the enterprise of producing offspring could be in order. Now that as a society we've outgrown the insipidity of yet another comedian carrying out his fantasy as perfect sitcom dad, and we've come to realize that women can be just as shitty human beings as men (after a few generations of women's lib and its feminist antecedents), we can derive a picture of family that looks more like what other human civilizations and tribes have drawn up to order society over countless millennia.

The enterprise of marriage, once heavily underway and including children, truly becomes like running a small business. If you don't take the time to thank the customers, they leave. If you feel at times like thanking the customers is fake and artificial, consider the alternative. They leave. So what? Could it have hurt you to have praised your spouse a few more times each day and checked in to see if they needed anything from you?

But, since you developed this unrealistic picture of Wife as some kind of Supersoul that could handle all of your shit, hers and the kids', and you kept assuming she held a sense of your marriage the way you did (that you were both family that would not give up on each other if one became sick--just like your dad didn't divorce or leave your mom when she had cancer, and her mom hasn't left her dad as he suffers through a myriad of aging diseases, you assumed your mental illness had the familial "safety net" of compassion under it as you worked to get back up on your feet).

You assumed too much.

You assumed that day in March when you left early to spend some time with the boys on their spring break--that day that so felt like the inaugural day of a new chapter, like the earth having passed around the sun through it's darkest day, like stepping on shore after thrashing against a riptide and almost drowning--you assumed that she could see the trend for the better and the end in sight of all the anger and madness brought on by giving up alcohol and revisiting too many childhood traumas at once while suffering from sepsis, diving into ketamine, and still heavily dosing THC.

Then, after six therapists, you discovered tai chi, and within a month, so much that was out of whack was realigned, both inside and out.

It's hard to explain the alcohol part. But, if you show up at college with the socio-emotional maturity of a 12-year old, and don't really begin much of a socio-emotional maturation process with the opposite sex until after college, all while drinking or recovering from drinking or anticipating more drinking to solve whatever anxiety lies before you--you wipe out almost all of however you matured from being 12 on the inside during those moments you relearn to face the world and life without any booze.

The THC helps, and is necessary, but without it, you sink back into being Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining. You are truly a Dry Drunk, and a young man on the inside re-learning how to be a grown up. All while working from home alongside a wife who is growing less and less amused by your changes.

Then, a job in Dallas appears, and the boys are finishing school in Austin. You spend three months up in Dallas alone--utterly terrified that she is going to divorce you or worse, because she has stopped communicating with you her intentions. Her parents have become tight-lipped and at times terse.

Without Tai Chi, you wouldn't have survived the divorce and then your father's suicide the following week, and the month or so you spent in Dad's hoarder house that was steeped in rat feces/urine+mold. Each and every day, you could feel your last vitality draining away, and felt like absolutely no certain thing was left to happen on this earth. The next moment, you could die, or someone could come along, fool a judge, steal the house and you return to Dallas to find the ex has legally kicked you completely out of the children's lives, stolen all the $ from the sale of the house in Austin, and left you with no way to live without begging coworkers to watch your dog while you shift around from short term residence and so on... in short, the world had gone so topsy turvy at this point, and you were swimming in a sea of death--memories of your brothers' deaths, your mom's death, the smell of your dad's blood getting eaten up by bacteria on the bed where he shot himself.

I mean, come on. Tai Chi saved my life then, and though I was out for a month, I returned and have found each time I go to be a complete boost on energy, suppleness of joints and muscles, and inner strength. Each time I skip a class, such things wane (as they did for that month I imbibed rat urine fumes nonstop). Then, this constant reading of the Tao. It's become such a constant companion, that I am ready to toss most of my books.

And, frankly, I still say too much. Surely, I will get better and better the longer I go without feeling like I have to say anything about myself.

After all, I am nobody, but am simply just another soul taking on a life in a human body to ... learn something? Chase mad desires of the soul? Or, perhaps, find my way to a place where bothering to return to do anything here at all will just seem pointless.