12.24.2025

Everything came so fast this year, that I don't think I'll ever do it justice with the written word.

Everything was upended, and it hasn't yet been made right.

I guess the beginning of this terrible time did more or less start with Covid. Like everyone else, it upended my life. It created confusion for me wherever I worked. You might think that an introvert with terrible social skills and likely undiagnosed autism spectrum issues would have fully embraced the work-from-home lifestyle, but the thing is, I'd already worked from home for significant chunks of time in previous roles and always came to hate it.

I can't read human cues very well, and so many dodgy video conference calls with bad reception would lead me to filling in those gaps created by not being able to read their energy while they are in the room with me. I filled those gaps in with whatever the dry drunk asshole ego would snag from that which my low-level imagination might cook up--always slightly suspicious of the motives of others.

I realized soon enough after so many months of ordering alcohol delivered to my house that perhaps things went a little worse with me and my spouse (she was effectively my co-worker during much of this period since we both worked from home and started out working swimmingly together while I played jazz videos on repeat), coworkers and kids after I'd invested too much time in boozing. So, I tried to keep it to non-work nights.

I was heavily into pretending that I would one day end up someone important in the literary world, and so I maintained a WordPress blog, and would go read blogs written by people who had recently posted on the same topics I did. I saw a post mentioning how their child who suffered from ADHD and anxiety was greatly helped by CBD oil.

I had no idea what it was chemically in relationship to the pot I'd smoked in college, or hemp seed oil, and hemp-derived THC. I discovered Amazon didn't sell it (it sold "hemp oil" which does nothing psychoactively speaking) but a local provider did. They also offered a new product that was popular with their customers called Delta-8.

The first time I put a few drops of D8 under my tongue, I was stoned for the duration of the conference call, hearing everyone's voices on the call ricochet around in my head as time got distorted and my short-term memory started to lock up. I was terrified, but at the same time surprised that something this potent was legal. So, I decided I would only take the D8 after work hours.

Except, I soon realized that I needed more and more to even remotely approach that first time of feeling high. It was making me so much more pleasant, though, during those come-down periods before the THC left my system entirely. It would, at times, exacerbate my paranoia and suspicion of those around me, and I noticed my sensitivity to sounds and music, which had always been strong, got greater. I could hear the pizza delivery car within the house while doomscrolling and the TV was blasting and kids were yelling and screaming, and freak out my wife with a countdown to the doorbell ringing. I felt the vibrations of the car, too, and could hear the slam of the door. Wife could hear none of it.

During this time I actually got Covid, and began trying other hemp-derived THC offerings.

I drew and kept a line in the sand that said I would only drink alcohol on vacations and at work social events.

I had already blown off my previous employer from letting myself get caught up in a post-whiskey, dry-drunk moment of rage for how shitty they were treating me. I now fell into another dry drunk rage after an employee outing almost two years in. I drank nothing but beer with the group throughout the night at a minor league ballgame, but said "what the heck" as the group got rowdier, and bought a double-bourbon on the rocks, drank it, and fell into dry drunk rage for the next week or so. And yes, I told that employer off over something stupid.

The next employer, also bearing a fully remote role, came along at the end of 2022 after I left Employer B (honestly, they aren't really worth distinguishing by name or trade) of this narrative abruptly, and it was a pure shithole situation. They had put me into an almost impossible situation. They'd purchased an instance of the CRM tool I manage, while already owning a copy of it via one of the companies they'd acquired. Some of the management hadn't really communicated this to others, and soon I was holding the end of a hard lightning rod of hate from so many different groups in the org.

One day, while my wife had gone out of town on a business trip and I had the kids to myself, the power went out and the house was growing colder and darker. It was one of those weeks in Austin where it stays below 32 all week. It was also a week of full power outage for us, where we had been lucky the severe winter storm the year before by being the only block in Austin that kept its power on.

Then one of the assholes at this company basically was laying into me for essentially carrying out the job I was hired to do and something snapped. All of the strangeness and goofiness I used to feel in my head while being high went away (that kind of silliness that more or less made me into a goofball stoner with friends in college, but even the time distortion and much of the short term memory loss that I was used to experiencing with THC evaporated). Suddenly, it was a case of where I only felt lucid and free of anxiety and anger with a certain acceptal level of THC in me. I honestly have not been able to lower my dosage down below a certain amount since then, before a lapse into a slow downhill run toward pure dry drunk raging at every slight and perceived slight around me.

Not long after this moment, I abruptly quit this employer in anger as well. They were probably the most insanely quittable employers I've ever had aside from the vacuum cleaner sales job I held for two weeks the summer after my freshman year in colege. They were blowing hundreds of millions on buying up new companies with no real path to profit. The one enterprise sales rep they had hired to sell the kinds of projects they would need to sell to be profitable was a poorly trained person who might be at best a BDR at a sophisticated and profitable company. They went bankrupt not long after.

This didn't help my case, though, as I fell into the first era of job-seeking during the rise of Chat GPT. I sent out probably 100s of times as many resumes, had dozens as times as many first and second round interviews and one hard offer that fell apart when they asked me to take a drug test. And when I say "of times as many" I am comparing it to any of my previous most intense, prolonged and prolific job seeking periods.

Right before the offer that fell through due to the drug test, my in-laws purchased a house up in Dallas for us to buy from them once our Austin house sold. I felt like a piece of shit for walking away from that offer, but what could I do? I had carefully flushed out all the metabolites, and then the drug testing place had said I needed to retake the test because my results were "too clean". Of course, I'd already started dosing THC again because that week of going off it and flushing it out of my system had been absolute hell.

I should also mention that right before I quit that bankrupt employer was when I had the big park meltdown that caused my soon-to-be ex later of accusing me of trying to gaslight her (which is so far from the truth, but the truth left the world a long time ago). I was furious that she wasn't hearing our son's screams for help while she stood right there jawing away with the neighbors. She sent me to therapy as I suffered from sepsis and all these sores broke out and my lungs filled up with fluid. I was physically feeling as close to death as I had ever felt, and the wife pinned my outburst to mental health.

I picked up my previous therapist, a woman who does past life regressions and regular talk therapy. We were soon chatting like old buddies and easily summing up how easy it would be to work through some of my issues. I felt like perhaps she didn't take my issues seriously enough. She also was adamant that I shouldn't be using THC to medicate, but only take it occasionally recreationally--she didn't seem to understand that the psychosis so many people talk about having while ON THC literally sets in me now WITHOUT IT, and none of the other therapists I sought after her seemed to no much about THC for PTSD, etc.

I also discovered ketamine while searching for alternatives to the SNRI/SSRI doomloop of ever increasing supporting medicines that takes place when you go for accepted Western psychiatric treatment in this present time and place. The ketamine clinic was a lifesaver (albeit one that probably opened up some of the channels to past memories that would start to come forth with the next therapist) until they ran out of the IM kind, and were making me these troches down at a compounding pharmacy that made me vomit.

The next therapist was a "let's get to the root causes" kind of guy and so he really wanted to get to the bottom of what about my son's screaming that day had triggered such an emotional response from me.

He was of the opinion that my own little boy was likely setting off a memory inside of me when I wasn't being heard by MY parents. This brought me to the classic memory of Dad hitting my older adopted brothers all the time, but only me one time when I intentionally tried to invoke Dad's wrath after hearing my oldest brother's spirit get busted up down in the basement with whacks that got sickeningly harder and harder while brother still had the nerve to laugh through the pain.

But then, it opened up another shadow memory that stays below the fully realized surface. A certain uncle (married to my Dad's sister) had confessed to my Dad that he just loved licking little boys' penises. He was run out of the Philippines after getting caught with a boy.

When I was aged 0-6, we would often visit Oklahoma and my first cousins who where the children of my Dad's sisters. There were a total of seven boy first cousins including me. (My little brother came along when I was 6 which would have made 8, but our entire extended family never got together again).

Uncle D had one of these boys as his own adopted son that he'd adopted as a baby. From what I understand, his son's life didn't go great. For someone adopted as a baby from a hospital in Belgium, be raised by fairly well-off schoolteacher parents who gave him all kinds of culture, etc., it seems incredibly sad that he more or less bounced around through life and finally smoked himself to death in his fifties from a lifelong cigarette addiction among other issues that would be reported secondhand by my Aunt.

I had dreams, vague memories of being held up as a baby and having my penis licked by this man in his attempt to get me...what? I remember screaming in frustration and not being heard in that house when he'd gotten me upset while alone with him. Yet, I also remember feeling special over the extra attention later when we visited him, and I think this shaped some of how I acted around my (step)Grandfather on my mom's side--ie, the last man my grandmother (who'd married many men) was married to. I very clearly remember that Grandfather being irked with me at times with not-so subtle insinuations that I must be gay.

So, the Uncle D stuff just kind of bubbled to the surface along with those past memories of my brothers being hit to the point of me hearing their spirits broken, while my dad hit me once and declared he was opposed to corporal punishment after that. This combined with so many years of remembering how, for instance my oldest adopted brother died of AIDS my first year at college (paid for by my Dad, while my older adopted brothers both chose the military), and my parents seeming to hardly care at all that he'd passed.

I felt like my wife at times was rather skeptical of me, that I really truly had any trauma at all. I've spent a lifetime learning how to mask, cover up, suck it up, and pretend like I can hack it in so many environments I was woefully unprepared to take on (like starting college at a large state University after growing up in a small town not permitted to watch anything but religious programming and some PBS, and having had 2 girlfriends only ever getting to 2nd base and never having been to a single dance).

I can often make myself seem "not too bad at all" when calmly talking to therapists, or covering up a ton of shit to get through the workweek. I had, up until two years ago, used alcohol as a central instrument for this.

Alcohol was a perfect excuse for when I said something inappropriate. Anxiety and stress throughout the day were managed by the expectation that alcohol would soften it all at the end of the day. Anger and outbursts were blamed on hangovers, and more alcohol was needed to smooth it out. Alcohol was a great way to numb your mind and binge watch TV and pretend you really weren't that different from the characters on the screen. Alcohol essentially formed a huge part of my socio-emotional development from the age of 18 onward, and I can say with great confidence that at the age of 18 I was socially and emotionally a 12 year old boy. Not to mention that most people you work with in an average office bond this way. Imagine how I was a year ago with my latest company's sales team at a casino where they were given unlimited booze to work with all night. I almost caved.

So, you can try to imagine if killing the booze and opening up all the old childhood traumas while consuming ketamine and THC in large quantities was going to straighten me out in a jiffy or not.

Not is the answer.

I effectively found myself trapped week-over-week in meeting all the once-used egos I'd embraced and abandoned along the way from ages 12 to 48. It was like I was having to grow up again (while being a grown up seeking new work frantically and being micro-analyzed ever since the one day at the park I criticized Wife's ability to hear Child's screams). By the time my present employer reached out of the blue with interest in my LinkedIn profile, I was probably 24-30 years old in socio-emotional intelligence.

Every night I was beset with insomnia. I lay awake listening to gospel music, reading Buddhist, Daoist, Christian texts, journaling and imagining I was manipulating my Yin/Yang to "ground out" the bad Qi as if it were electricity being grounded out and pulling in fresh good Qi via hand/arm movements. I had no idea what I was doing, but I felt at times like I could at least sense the areas in my soul and flesh where Yin/Yang needed to be restored to balance and goodness.

For the first two months up in Dallas, I stayed alone with the dog in the house that my in-laws had purchased. Though I'd visited here many times with my wife, since this is where she grew up and where her parents live, I still felt so utterly overwhelmed by the bigness and busyness of it all compared to Austin. I'd lived in Austin for twenty-two years. I never felt lost there even if I got turned around in a neighborhood. I have never used GPS--I spot something on the map, and I already have a strong mental map of the area to get there--just the final details of the address need to be nailed down.

I already had sensed something was up. My wife was doing something behind my back, and I'd asked her point blank while we were still in Austin if she was going to divorce me first thing when we got up here. We would fight over the stupidest things. One day, I don't remember what we were fighting over (this was in April or May of last year), she gave me this intense stare of pure hatred--it truly was a murderous stare. And it seemed utterly absurd that two people who had shared so much with each other and had only recently confessed so much love for each other were worked up to this degree over some nothing deal. I was fumbling in my lack-of-sleep brain for the right figure of speech..."staring daggers," "if looks could kill," but wait? if looks could kill--does that actually mean she's really good looking, like drop-dead gorgeous? Well, I don't want to say "you look like you want to kill me"--though she did--but that seemed a bit much, so I softened with "wow, you look like you want to knock my block off...geez..."

And, I said it with a full tone of "can you not see how silly it is that we are getting worked up over such a trifling matter?" And, she turned to me and said, "if you said it, it means you were thinking of actually doing it yourself..." and, yes, it felt like a cheap attempt to lay something on me that was never inside me.

Ever. I have not once thought remotely about such a thing simply because of what I saw growing up (though it has taken me years to also get rid of the full notion of some type of penal thing must happen when a child misbehaves vs. a deeper understanding of their struggle to grow up while full of ADHD, so for sure I have yelled many times at my oldest son when my mom would have reserved the occasion for a large comb or ping pong paddle), and my tone when I said those words to her was full of jest and irony.

She demanded that I go to work ASAP, and I was just stunned. I felt something in my heart fall to the floor and keep on going. Much later, I can see that she had been surfing these moments for whatever she could claim was silver bullet proof that the marriage justified termination in divorce.

After all, if she were to just kick me out of my kids' lives over "irreconcilable differences" that would make her look pretty selfish--ah, the old man is too banged up beyond repair (and we think his mental health issues are mostly an act, anyway, even though both of his kids are diagnosed with autism and share so many of the same traits he did as a kid, but whatever) ...we can milk his salary until he can no longer yield that, and then we've extracted the last bit of whatever value we hoped to ever get from that SOB.

I got to work and wrote her a letter explaining to her much of the above regarding my intentions. That, honest to God, in that moment in my head I felt more like some sitcom dude like Tim Allen from Home Improvement, just baffled at the moves his wife is making and trying to restore some levity to the situation--like he's turning to the fourth wall and saying, 'who peed in her Wheaties this morning?'.

In the moment I said what I said, I really was not even remotely close to being angry with her as I have been at times. So, it seemed perfectly reasonable that a person who had accepted my intentions and apologies for unintentionally saying something that seemed out of bounds would understand this--but, when I got home, she just found ways to rip apart my words in the letter and more or less say to me "no, you're wrong, you really were thinking what I say you were thinking."

Yet, even with her seemingly disingenuous responses to my words, I more or less felt like things resolved themselves to a point after that, and we were slowly rebuilding connections.

Months passed, and I continued to practice all of the disciplines around the religious texts, journaling, and furiously trying to excise all of the reactive kinds of anger left in me. I had seen a place near me on the map that advertised TaiChi/Qigong classes, so I finally took up the initiative to try these in February of this year. They were brutally hard, precise in their movements (unlike my freeform, imagine-driven pushing and pulling of Qi while dancing about). But, suddenly, I was feeling better physically and mentally in so many unexpected ways. Gone were the heartburn pills, ibuprofen, doxalymine succinate for sleep (though this has come back), allergy meds, etc. This was after a month of classes. I had been through three therapists whose suggestions had all never seemed to do much for me when they were things I was supposed to try with my wife to heal the relationship. But now, Tai Chi. And suddenly, the mind was getting better, too.

So, I rolled in to March of this year feeling like an ascendent king. Yes, I wasn't especially thrilled about what was happening with the country. Yes, my wife was just muttering under her breath when I said "I love you" while coming and going and refusing to even give me a tepid hug after a brutal trip to Boston where I ran out of my THC and was unable to procure any there due to their peculiar regulations. I literally explained to her throughout the entire trip how so much of my kids' sensitivity to loud noises and anxiety in crowds and new situations was utterly relatable to me at that point. No hug. Just a "you were just doing your job, like you were supposed to." That was the standard refrain for this job I'd taken that has been the absolute hardest for me mentally and emotionally in so many ways--so many jobs I'd landed in the past through little or no effort had won so many "I'm so proud of you's", but almost a full year at this turbulent employer full of volatile people, messy data and chaotic startup process changes from week to week, I was just doing the job I was supposed to be doing.

But, I was utterly optimistic. I was debt-free and now free of booze for over a year. I'd started running, and my informal track of my moments of losing my temper around my family had seem to dwindle from ten or more times a week when that "you said it and wanted to do it" accusation moment occurred down to 1-2 times a week.

It was easy for her to pin an absurd accusation on me because I did still get upset occasionally. I was still clinging to my ego, and I couldn't see this until afterward. My ego, so precious to me, needing to be seen and heard. My ego, yet driving me to pump these words out, to tell MY story. Knowing full well, that I am nobody. I am just a collection of energy and material that will dissipate when the Maker is finished with requiring this peculiar form.

But then, I would still get upset if I felt like my voice wasn't heard. And frankly, many times big and small, I would watch with amusement as my suggestion, if it had been carried out, would have been the better option--even in nothing moments like going to get frozen custard. She insisted on going into the store so we could sit down and enjoy our treats there, so we wove the kids through a busy parking lot back to the store to find there were no seats inside.

I watched the car that had entered the drive-through at the moment of arrival grab its order and go as we waited for another thirty minutes, then finally grabbed our treats and played parking lot Frogger with the kids back to the one space she could find. I said nothing, and there were many times like that. I was proud of myself for letting her make the inferior decisions, and letting things unfold as they would (even as I worried inside that some bigger choices she was making concerning the well-being of our kids might not be the best ones, either). But, I guess I still got mad too many times.

By mid-March of this year, I was counting like once or twice where I got inordinately upset (my slightest attempts at emphasis in tone, no matter how evenly delivered, were increasingly being called shouting which I sometimes wonder if this just became a way to shut me down) around them per week, once or twice at work, and then pretty much every day on the ride home (but that too was being kept to the car).

So, after almost a full year under my belt at an employer that was prone to firing people who didn't perform, I finally felt the courage to ask for early time off during Spring Break to hang out with the kids for a bit. It was a gorgeous day--Tuesday, Wednesday, I don't know. I'd been running for a couple of weeks and doing Tai Chi for three.

I can't explain enough how auspicious this turnaround day felt. It was like we had passed the darkest days of the marriage and every day now was just getting a little brighter and longer. I was planning our renewal of vows ceremony and had "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" picked out, which in my now-music-soaked brain was a much better pick than the dumb Journey song we let the dance instructor pick for us for our wedding. I mean, Open Arms is okay, but it felt a little generic even then.

Anyway, that day I was focused on spending time with the boys. Also, this was my moment to let the wife know I finally felt good about taking time here and there at work to pick the boys up from school or other appointments. She asked to come along on our walk in the park, and of course, I said, yes. It was such a fantastic, beautiful March day after so many up-and-down Dallas winter mornings. Things were going to be okay.

That's truly how I felt. We now were talking about the path forward to get the house purchased from her parents. My dad seemed to be in a stable, okay sort of routine down in Bastrop. I was pretty guilty over abandoning him, but he understood about what we were trying to accomplish with having the kids near the affluent schools and grandparents. For my mental health, it felt like I had been swimming for the past two years against a rip tide...somehow managing not to be pulled into the undertow, and finally finding my way out of it, landing on shore exhausted, but now re-invigorated with a path forward via this new established life.

She sent the boys to go play tablets in the older boy's room, and called me over to chat with her after we got back home from the walk.

I knew something was up, but...and when she told me that she had filed for divorce, I went utterly numb. I was paralyzed with fear over going to hell for eternity, because a part of me is still stuck with that Christian notion. I was confused since I really thought we had turned a corner and were slowly repairing our relationship. I also had always imagined that my wife was in step with me, that divorce was nuclear and like radiation therapy for cancer--it wipes out so much along with the cancer. Was I truly a cancer to her?

There is couples' therapy, which she turned down because she told me both individuals had to be in there own traditional talk therapy for couples' therapy to work.

I offered to go to a GP, get a referral to a real shrink and talk therapists and submit to the Western Psychiatric Medicine gauntlet (I'd actually attempted this in Austin, and they kept cancelling my appointments)--I was willing to save the marriage by submitting my own private mental health to treatments I didn't necessarily like so much the same way she was willing to save her life and her kids' life by submitting to the Dr+foreceps at the end of one long Doula-led birth, and Epidural+C-Section after another Doula-led birth.

Is that a fair comparison?

Except, in my case, she had to accept my offer and to withdraw the divorce filing. She said no. She referenced the event that had happened almost a year previously as an example of my cruelty and reason for her to feel unsafe. She referenced the day at the park from years ago as an attempt at gaslighting her. In the more recent case, I tried then and now to be as clear about my intentions. And in the older case, I never once thought about messing with my wife's head. I was furious with her for ignoring the child's screams for help after I'd yelled "is he okay?" several times from afar and then asked her again up close (she was not even to be interrupted from the neighborhood adult conversation on that first attempt). Gaslighting? Back then I was branded "hypervigilant." My therapist called it a "firefighter" tendency. That was the first therapist of the most recent three I've had. The moments the second therapist raised from my childhood made the firefighter thing make more sense. But, Gaslighting? Honestly, the closest thing to gaslighting was the weekend of the youngest boy's birthday party at Chuck E Cheese. He was still too undeveloped to understand how to play any of the games and hated it. I kept gently letting her know that perhaps another venue might have been better vs. just asking him if he wanted to do exactly what his older brother previously had done. She kept just saying "well, he liked the tokens booth where you could grab game tokens while they blew around..." finally, at the end of the weekend she snapped at me: "Of course, everyone noticed that he wasn't having any fun!" all the while having made me feel off base and out of touch as if I were the only person who had thought that way. And finally, the divorce itself--leading me along, all the while cooking it up with a lawyer behind my back. If it isn't gaslighting, it is some kind of closely related cousin within the deception family.

I, the dumbass data hack that I am, made her a cumulative vs. trending graph of my less-than-ideal moments, and showed her how, week over week, they had continued to be less and less.

She said, "yes, you're right, over time, you've crossed a line one too many times..." She said I no longer helped out with the kids, did nothing of value for them. Yet, how many moments when I was permitted to interrupt the rigid routine of tablet time, dinner, television, bath, reading, bed, I sought to talk through with them anything and everything going on in their lives and offer the older boy suggestions and show him skills and got him started doing chores he stopped doing.

Another time, I was told we didn't need a cleaning service like in Austin. I was also told I didn't help out at all around the house. Within a month after I left, she ordered a cleaning service. Somehow, those floors and surfaces must have just started getting so much more magically cruddy, perhaps it was the new cat.

But something more fundamental was coming into my head--when did we stop rowing in the same boat? When did something I said stop resonating with her? When did she stop loving me, did she ever? Was she in excruciating pain while we worked at hour separate jobs throughout Covid and I cracked jokes that I thought were bringing us closer together?

And most importantly, when did I stop being funny? I watched Mrs. Doubtfire recently with my kids, and it was painful. When did I stop being funny, if I ever was? My wife's sense of humor? That's hard. She didn't seem to care much one way or the other about Saturday Night Live skits, etc. I made the mistake of often conflating her reason for not finding these things funny with why my mom would have scorned such skits.

I know, that's bad. I compared her once to my mom (her insistence on the kids' having certain kinds of schooling and therapy vs. others seems at times as excessively religious as my mom's own religious behavior), and she was furious for days about that. So, my mom would not find Saturday Night Live funny because she was offended by pretty much any humor intended for people not sitting in Church.

But, I am not so sure now that my ex found no humor in so many things others do because she was a prude. She declared not long before the divorce filing discussion that she no longer believed in God.

That itself was pretty rough as a blow to me, because I'd always imagined my wife to be more grounded spiritually and a more faithful believer than me. I could see her perhaps going from Christianity to general Unitarianism, but just a flat out "I just don't believe in any of it, anymore," kind of shook me to the core. We met in the church. I was (I imagined) guided by a vision to go to that church, and the therapist I was seeing at that time even helped me positively visualize the experience because I was so terrified of strange crowds and their customs at that time.

So, why does one not find things funny (even though they get why others do and they get the point of the joke) if they aren't necessarily offended by adult content? I might attribute it to a much wiser, older or better soul--I don't recall Jesus having much of a sense of humor. That's the thing about my wife. I could never really tell if she was autistic like me or just a much more advanced soul beyond most human-led vanities. Or both. Or none. Perhaps that was part of my problem back then--trying to define everyone under the sun and then hold them to my own rigid definitions. I frankly don't think anyone is as rigid and fixed as we like to think. I am a firm believer that tomorrow, the pauper may be born rich and vice versa in their subsequent lives, not to speak of many other attributes that change up for a soul from life to life.

I don't know. But, I certainly must have let out thousands of things over the years that I though were hilarious, and she perhaps smiled gamely back at me or simply chuckled a bit affirmatively--yet, perhaps she wasn't even outwardly amused and I was still surrounded by too many damn ego mirrors.

I made a to-do list called "Survival Mode". I called my dad and he was pretty sad, but he said I could call him any time I needed to talk. I started looking for new places to live right away. I asked my dad for money but he said it would take awhile to get it out. I was crazily thinking of perhaps making a down payment on a home, not realizing Texas Common Law would have put my ex on the deed if I bought the house before the divorce was finalized. I realized I had been neglecting my weekly calls to my dad so I called him on the first Sunday following wife's dropped bomb to just talk about how our days were going.

He mentioned Stage 4 Renal Failure, and it sounded bad, but he also said he was still exploring what the treatment options would look like. I mentioned some of the places I'd gone to look at with the boys, since they would be living with me part time. "You really need to talk to a therapist," he kept saying to pretty much everything I said. I mentioned the Tai Chi, running, etc. He just kept mentioning the therapist, and I had no strong urge to get into it with him about the six or so therapists I've sought over my life, so I bid him good day and hung up.

I think it was Wednesday the following week, my one-year anniversary at my present employer, that I got a weird text from someone saying they had been trying to call me about my father shooting himself and to talk to the Sheriff. I didn't have the number stored on my phone so I looked it up, and there was a Google result for my dad's friend. It was a lady whose website I'd helped maintain at one time and that's where the number was listed. I realized that there had been some VMs from 512 numbers on my phone, but I get 12 VMs a day from spammy 512 numbers that I just delete in batch once a day, and I guess it had been so long since I'd helped her, the number hadn't ported over across address books.

She was beside herself with grief. I was soon, too. Well, I am now, too. You'd think I guy would get over it, but it's hard. Dad and wife were my last true rocks. Losing both in less than two weeks was a rough go for me.

I had survived the rip tide, but damn the tidal wave I hadn't seen coming. Only, now, a Tsunami on top of that.

Austin radio was playing Kate Bush's Cloudbusting as I drove across 290 in the rain after racing down I-35.

A house full of rat feces, urine, piles of junk everywhere, mold, food...a bed with bloodstains, that weird sicksweet smell of bacteria munching on blood.

Four 20 CU Yard Open Top Dumpsters to haul away items unremediable. One large hauler trailer of equivalent size when the individual hired was supposed to begin helping sort stuff for recycling, charity, resale.

A month head's down in rat feces/urine soaked stuff to fish out the family keepsakes, jumpdrives with passcodes. My emotions ran riot with me. I relived each family member's death as I went through boxes of my younger brother's stuff that they had packed up entirly without much sorting when they left KCMO. I yelled at my Dad and God and others in anger as I worked day after day. I cried in despair. I had moments where I swore I was going to drop dead from my poor diet, inhalation of rat feces and urine, and mad grief.

Two days after he shot himself, a couple of scheduled messages from Dad as to which jumpdrive had the passwords to accounts on it and where the will was. (After likely having thrown it out because it was under one of dozens of laptops on a table overflowing with garbage that had mostly been tossed, yet somehow it wasn't. And the actual PIN number to crack his phone recovered from the Sheriff's office, etc.)

The will, written up on an online legal site by him and notarized by a local bank, full of errors that assign the entire estate to my ex if followed to the letter.

The bizarre, off-the-cuff and unsolicited confessions of my Aunt that more or less validated what I remembered of Uncle (which I relayed to my soon-to-be ex to underscore that I wasn't bullshitting trauma out of thin air as an excuse for my behavior--obviously, it meant little).

Oh, and the weird neighbor who showed up as I was full of all this weird sickness hitting my brain, and talked me into trading him the truck and motorcycle for his brush cleaning and handyman services. He did about $1K worth of work. He reminded me of my oldest brother in his pathetic averice for his own immediate needs yet sweet demeanor. I had a keen sense of perhaps God was ready send people into my life who would play nice with me. (Yeah, that no longer abides--too many other people this year that aren't worth even mentioning)...His pregnant wife stopped by wanting to work for one of the other vehicles worth considerably more than what I had let go, and I came to my senses and said no more. But really, a decent man would have put the truck and motorcycle back and really advocated for wife and baby. My one surviving brother is going to snarl at me in disgust when finally learns about that.

The stuff that, new, probably totaled 100Ks of dollars. Weird boxes full of metronomes from an early Ebay impulse buy. So many copies of so many things. So much stuff that gets sold on FB marketplace by someone who you pay so much more to do it than what you get back. About as much stuff went to Goodwill or was sold as thrift as was tossed. The person that did it for me and got rid of more dumpsters of junk that I've forgotten about took all the money I made selling the stuff and then some.

A month cleaning this house to be told by a realtor it can only be sold for the land due to the rats and the mold.

The house sits down there, the mailbox crammed full, because the USPS won't turn off the address with a simple death cert--I think, I guess I should research that again.

The divorce and the estate float around in courts at the whims of people who care not one whit for my life or my wife's, for that matter.

My brother, long estranged is also written into the will, though Dad had said many times he had changed his mind about that. I don't really care much about that, either. I just want all this to be over so I can buy my own house and truly start over.

My boys are slipping away from me. I see them for about 48 hrs every other week and for 4 hours every week (ie, every other weekend and every Tue). I work on either of them with something--and then they stop practicing it. They don't develop many skills at their mom's--it's mostly tablets, computers, TVs... I've seen both of them make great progress when someone works with them 1-1 and doesn't let them give up when the struggle is hard.

I've watched myself teach them a dumb skill like turning your hands over to make an upside-down hand face mask--utterly impossible to teach an awkward, autistic child who has had tons of occupational therapy over the video chat, but he gets it in two minutes during the next appointed visit. A dumb example, I know, but I've watched him relearn to tie his shoes after having dropped off from doing it himself, improve his handwriting, rock climbing skills and fearlessness at the playground--all, when he is pushed by Dad just a little to keep going instead of being allowed to give up the second he wants to give up, because, well, Mom remembers how hard it was and she never really attempted it, either.

I mean, I know they are getting some of this at school and the myriad of counseling services we are paying for, but I always see remarkable changes when I play tough love coach--but my wife sees any pushing as pushing them too hard. Frankly, I push them about a tenth as hard as my parents pushed me to excel beyond basic schoolwork (and I honestly wasn't pushed that hard as those True Coach Dads and Tiger Moms do their kids)--do SOMETHING when you have free time that will develop SOME kind of skill or knowledge beyond how to defeat the next Roblox character.

I mean, I loved my video games, too, on the old PCjr, and I would have probably played forever at times if left to my own devices. I honestly wish my parents had invited even less of that stuff into our home now, as much as I complained growing up about not getting the Ataris, Nintendos and my own TV/VCR like other kids had in their rooms. But, since my dad was a Computer Programmer, and this had more or less rescued us from full Blue Collar oblivion (he was a baggage handler before this), we kind of had to worship at the altar of computers for an hour or so each day.

My parents were ripe to make those distinctions. I get where they were coming from--both from very poor backgrounds, and handed that cross-generational narrative that each generation on American soil must improve its financial status. Also, they weren't that different in terms of employment and finances at the time they adopted my brothers. My dad threw luggage and cleaned airplanes, their dad drove trucks. I remember as a kid, though, seeing the bus driver and the President as being kind of whatever you wanted to do, not having any statistical comprehension of how many people actually get to be President. But for me, the overall importance of the job seemed about the same. One person did one set of complex tasks, one did another, but both were valid.

And, aside from those times in my life that I got up in trying to realize the dreams of my parents (mostly after my little brother died in the car wreck, then my mom died of cancer--where I got all worked up about trying to have a career and show them that I could make something out of their college investment), I honestly have never really seen much of a difference between the Uber Driver who takes me to the Fancy Company Christmas Party and the Hired Counsel at the Fancy Company Christmas Party. Each has his own wisdom and dignity, and provides a valuable role in society and gets to experience a variety of interesting things in his work.

My brother came down, driving days on end, and had his own interesting takes on things. Some twenty-plus years later since I last saw him in person. A police officer and Marine...very much a man who has gone down a different path than me. And, yes, during those above times when I was chasing other people's dreams, like at the big company, I would look over smugly at him languishing in a small town as a Deputy, all because he had refused Dad's offers to him for college (albeit it was only Community College at that time for my brother since Dad's salary hadn't gone up THAT much yet being only five years in as a Computer Programmer). But now, here my brother was, having gotten out from some of his own custody/ex BS and was further along with his life, a full-time Police Officer with a rebuilt life and nice house/wife, etc. And here I was, divorced dad pushing fifty with two little boys, on his way to a rental.

My brother seemed less enamored of his own bio-brother (ie, our Oldest Brother) in his more recent retellings of things that went down at the end when our oldest brother got AIDS. He talked about Dad hitting him some, and I was surprised to learn that Dad had still hit him once or twice after we moved to Missouri. Only Mom hit me, and she stopped once I started laughing defiantly at her hardest smacks. She was, of course, motivated by the "spoil the child, spare the rod" mentality, and I think my dad just had lost control of the whole situation and saw that his adopted kids stopped fucking around as much for a few weeks after a good smackdown. Of course, he paid the ultimate price of losing control for good when he ran my oldest brother off with gun. How do you repair a relationship with someone after that? Not without religion or mediation, and my dad despised both.

My writing is interrupted by my kids' calling me for our nightly video chat. We were all going to go to church together tonight as a family. The kids are sick (and clearly so, this isn't like the ex is wriggling out of it), and this is the trend for 2025. I invited everyone to an art festival. It gets rained out. Traveling museum experiences that end before schedules can align. I mean, I've forgotten the number of weekend ideas where the ex was invited and declined because whatever. I've been as inclusive of her as I could with as little hard feelings as I can muster--and I muster very few these days, thanks to the almost-completely-dead ego.

Why have hard feelings for someone when you no longer lack desire--desire to have your ego be affirmed, seen, heard...loved?

I'm almost finished with the last desire...it seems rather simple to turn off, but then again, no. You try to cordon it off...heart love for dog and kids when they visit, manual overrides for pure excess lust energy, but long for the kind of love that makes someone want to spoon with you when you sleep, to cuddle, to get excited about flowers, and playlists made for them...walks in the park, on the beach, up and down the street, whatever.

A person who is that someone. You might be accused of it, but honest to God, you don't take it for granted when you are married. You are despondent when she stops wanting to spoon and cuddle. When the sex comes less and less. Kisses are perfunctory then none at all...hugs, then none of those...I love you said on auto-pilot then something else is muttered under the breath.

You are missing it, but living in a state of hope, and...faith--oh yes, faith in a God who sees the importance (it's his after all) of the Mission that was started with that Vision you had of the Church you were scared to attend, then finally braved and immediately met your wife. The visions and dreams of having two little boys long before you knew her. The mission was why your littlest boy needed to be heard more that day at the playground (and was, indeed, heard more after that...he sat babbling in that bathtub incoherently in a way that the older boy never did and I was the one who recommended the autism diagnosis).

I was the first one to see both of my little boys' heads in this world, and the first to hold the second one. I not once flinched or was the least bit bothered by the full spectacle of the vaginal child birth with forceps or the C-Section (though they kept telling me to not stand up and look, I did anyway--she was all cut open, so what?) Honestly, the goriest of true medical shit just doesn't bother me. When I held my ego preciously, I would still get nauseated when I heard people talk about heart issues. For some reason, the idea of dying of the heart attack seemed utterly real and present when that ailment was talked about, moreso than any others.

However, I seem to have changed following Covid, Sepsis, Alcohol recovery, trauma resurfacing, ketamine trips, THC excess and THC absence, Tai Chi, divorce and the loss of getting to see my kids very often at all, Dad's suicide.

I run with the Dao now, and hope to never come back here again with anything else so messed up, but I had to get all of this off my shoulder at the end of the year. I run almost every morning between 5:30 and 6:30 AM for 2-7 miles. I do Tai Chi 2X a week, and am seriously considering also signing up for their Kung Fu program 2X week. I lift weights.

I weighed 235 lbs when I first took the Delta 8 THC and began the journey to grow my ass up from where it left off after alcohol began. I weigh 153 now.

I go to work every day. I pick up/drop off my kids when asked without question. I do whatever her lawyers ask. I am trying my damnedest to end the estate case as quickly as possible.

A year from now, I would rather have $0 in my bank account, be completely starting over, and renting, but free completely of these two court cases, than to have this endless cycle of wondering where the money is going to land and how much it might be and whether I'll buy a house and this and that.

My struggle right now is one of wanting to just let it all go vs knowing I should probably at least give a shot to getting back a bit of my inheritance and the money I dumped in extra month after month into OUR house in Austin.

What does the Dao say? You know...Let it Be, Let it Ride, etc. just...throw it away. If it was yours to begin with, you won't lose it. If it goes away, then it was all a mirage.

To be pushing 50 and in the most supreme physical shape of my life, gaining enormous amounts of vitality I thought had passed me by, and in possession of random and various office-y skills that may or may not all be overtaken by AIs, with full potential to move on to whatever life throws at me, that's where I am headed.

Maybe I am utterly deluded--perhaps I was simply punished by God for straying off the singular path of Faith and Devotion to Christian God. However, I'm a little smarter than that now. I've seen too many people in my life with intense faith and prayer get hit with hardships and health issues as much and more than my own troubles.

The "straw dog" concept for how Heaven sees our affairs begins to be more appealing to me, especially after Seminary and that hard look at where God might have been during the Holocaust. And for sure, the Holocaust wasn't even the largest genocide of people on the earth in the last two hundred years.

So then, of course, I have those nights where I consider that maybe I made up the entire concept of having a Mission down here on Earth. Nobody from the Great Beyond imparted me with a precise duty of fathering two sons and seeing them into independent adulthoods. It wasn't even a Michael Newton "Life between Lives" kind of setup...as far as that goes, my lessons here to learn are more fundamental, and the notion of whether I have kids or not to learn these lessons is perhaps part of it, but not to be taken as the sum total for why I'm here.

The biggest lesson I have to learn is to stop depending on others so much for validation. Needing someone to tell me I am smart, good, and then all those specific needs to have someone validate that I am good at--art, piano, writing, etc. Needing someone to hear my story as if I'm so special and important. Looking clearly at the lives of many, I can see that my life is, at best...another life lived by a soul with a lot of growing left to do, and not much else. How much I actually grow from here on out is difficult to tell. Often, I find myself just saying--breathe deep, clear your mind, and listen within for the next needed steps. If you want to walk with That Which Cannot Be Named, then why do you keep naming goals for yourself?--go walk with them, if you please, or come back to That Which Cannot Be Named But Always Abides. And yet, most, if not all goals will eventually be fulfilled in the end because nothing that needs to be done is left undone whether you do it or not.