my careless contagion

September is changes. Small at first, then bigger. By the end of the month, we hardly recognize you, September.  She begins when it is still summer. When she leaves, it is autumn. This year, when she began, I was in one place. When she ends, I'll be in another. To some, this may seem like a small change, but for me, it is big. It's bigger than the change in the air or displays in the shops.  September means the beginning of autumn. This autumn will be different from the last several. I'll get lost in it. Swallowed up in it. The leaves will change later. The snow will fly later, too. Last September, we had snow the first week of the month. Here, I don't know when it will fall.  September is my birth month. In grade school, I was one of the earliest to celebrate my birthday. I recall the school principal would come and give me a birthday card and how that felt. Surely, this man was the busiest man in the world, yet he came to wish me a happy birthday. What a wonderful mom...

I'm honestly starting to feel sorry for my readers at this point. It's probably not much fun looking in on someone's life when all they see is a repository for bad shit. However, if you think reading this is a downer, try living my life. This is part three of four examining my childhood. I promise the fourth post will end this retrospective on a high note.  The butterfly on the windowsill makes for a pretty picture but is trapped and will die unless someone lets him out. No, this is not a post on monarch mind control programming (though there are eerie similarities to how I was raised), but there's plenty of information out there if you'd like to deviate from this sadness to another sort of sadness.  No, the butterfly is symbolic. It is a symbol of my childhood. You see, there was an actual butterfly. When we still lived in the town I was born in, I tooled around on my bike quite a bit. It was freedom from the adult world where I was tethered to places...

What is the nature of failure? What defines failure?   No, this isn't another post about how much I hate myself or my life. Really, I'm just asking questions and positing the truth. So, before you say, "Here we go again," relax. This isn't another I-hate-my-life post. It's just an honest assessment. A child has many people to look up to. But, a child also has many people telling him (let's assume it's a boy for our purposes) he's wrong. Tell a child this often enough and he becomes angry or sullen. And then he assumes he is always wrong. How do I know this? I was that child. In fact, I am still that child, and those same people who told me I was wrong back then still tell me I am wrong today. In fact, I feel I've never been right about anything. I've been swimming in a sea of wrongness my entire life! On a fairly recent and random Saturday, I realized in many people's eyes (or, potentially, if they have all the facts), I am a fa...

The title How to Fix a Broken Heart (by Guy Winch) seems the perfect remedy for what ails me. I bought the book and welcomed it onto my lap many evenings after my son had gone to bed. What this little book taught me was what I had gone through needn't break me. Heartbreak is a common affliction, though we don't treat it as it should be treated, and sometimes we simply ignore it. Well, I couldn't ignore my bleeding heart if I tried. It has been broken for far too long. I cried as I read this book many times, most notably because I realized that the woman I loved was going through hell of an unspeakable kind — a kind of hell she wasn't even able to verbalize — yet I was valiantly trying to have a relationship with her. When she could barely get through her days, I was feeling rejected because she didn't want to talk about whatever stupid thing I thought was important. She surely saw this as a personal failure (or a failing of our friendship), and certainly as ...

In 41 years, I have accomplished very little of lasting importance. I haven't amassed a large amount of money. I've built no grand estate. I have a handful of friends I don't talk to. My family is basically estranged. Or I wish they would be. I've made no career for myself. I have no laurels to rest on. In short, I'm a failure. There's one thing I have done, though. I have loved big. Let them put that on my tombstone. As big as I loved, it wasn't enough, which is a puzzlement. It was like pouring a bucket of water on a vast desert. Simply not enough.  In spite of the ineffectiveness, it's perhaps the only thing I'm good at. I love big. I love hard. That's the way love should be. No, I'm not making a dirty joke. But love should have dimensions to it, a magnitude, a power. You should be able to feel it move from one chest to another like a force. It should be kind and gentle but should make itself known. Love is the one thing I...

Where do I start? I feel like I've always been a failure. When did I start believing that? As the youngest child, you do everything later and slower than everyone else. Then you have two parents (ideally) to compare yourself to. You never win the comparisons so you stop trying. I did well in school for the most part. I did okay in athletics. I wasn't ever popular, nor did I desire to be. Those kids were assholes. The older I got, the more the world I knew lurched away from me. I was lost.  I've never been good at any job I've ever done. I just kind of wing it. People have a propensity to hate me because I'm so bad at what I do and I really should feel bad about it, but I don't. I struggle and no one helps me and that's okay. My life is struggle and failure and an occasional success that scares the shit out of me. Like, where did that come from? The law of averages gives me an occasional home run.  When you've been a screw-up as long as you ca...

With any great hurt or disappointment, there are a number of stages one walks through in the aftermath. There is usually some anger, wildly fluctuating feelings of betrayal, etc. The range of emotions can take your breath away. Somewhere in there, you will probably do a "what happened" sort of retrospective. I've been writing these pages in the effort to gain perspective on what the hell went wrong in my life. For all practical purposes, I'm nearing the end of this process, and, I believe for me, the next stage is acceptance.  I have to accept things about my life I'd rather not. But, there is no way to move on until I do. I've accepted the fact that I couldn't save my marriage. There were things in both of us that conspired to destroy it, things I didn't even see until years after the damage was done and all the goodness leaked out. Likewise, I couldn't save any other relationship I've been in, however strong it may have seemed in the ...

When I sit alone in my little apartment. When I toss and turn in the night and you aren't there. When I talk to my son and he seems so far away. When I think of all the times you took advantage of my heart. When I see the damage that you've done to me. When I realize what a waste it was to love you. When I cry in my car. When I cry at night. When I get down on my knees and break once again. Sometimes all that's left is anger. If you hadn't been so callous and cold-blooded. If you hadn't mistaken me for an average man and an average love. If you hadn't spent so many hours with other men. If you hadn't disregarded my feelings, even as I broke before you. If you hadn't fooled me with your foolishness, been so careless with your carelessness. If you hadn't been so wonton. If you hadn't been so utterly stupid and reckless, so endlessly belligerent toward my soul. If you hadn't been so maliciously selfish. If you hadn...

It's time to embrace what I am.  If loss makes one a loser, then I am a loser. I've lost more in the last five years than I can even count. If it wasn't one thing, then it was another. Then, it was everything.  I walk around each day in a state of disbelief. I can't wait for this to finally seem real because then the real shitstorm will begin.  If trying and failing makes you a failure, then I'm a failure. I sit in a pile of it, surrounded by it, on top of it, breathing it in.  This is my legacy. There hasn't been a single thing in my life I've accomplished. Oh, wait, I'm pretty good at getting out of bed and feeling sorry for myself. Does that count? Okay, I'm not good at getting out of bed; you got me on that one.  It's starting to look like I don't even want to succeed. I want to be a failure. I want to crash and burn and scar the earth with my miserable failure of a life. Do I want to torpedo everyone around me?...

    It's an odd sensation to walk through your days in a daydream state. I know my mind is just protecting itself from further trauma. If only my heart could do the same. I see that girl as a dream because she's long gone. The time I spent with her doesn't seem real anymore. My world is a drudgery that marches to the sound of a dirge. I can hear Ed Sheeran's "Perfect" slow to the pace of a waltz, then distort, then turn to static, and now I just hear the rain. It's somebody's wedding right now, and that song is playing. My heart goes out to them. What happens when all you have is love for the memory of someone but the memory keeps fading? Well, you panic. Then you have to accept it because none of us can bring anyone back once they start to fade. Somone's in the darkroom of my mind, and they didn't mix the developer right; everything's coming out light and faded. I keep telling them to get it right, but they keep...