my careless contagion

There is a trope in many Lifetime movies of the psycho woman. She may be a girlfriend or just a friend. But she is dangerous. And she's going to kill you. I used to make fun of this trope and say, "Always get with the psycho girl because otherwise you end up dead." But getting with the psycho girl in this case almost killed me. I've been hearing Sweet but Psycho by Ava Max (not her real name) on the radio for a while now. I don't know all the lyrics. I don't care because it's a dumb song. All I know is the song reminds me of my ex. Yes, she seems like a sweet girl. I'll give her that. Maybe she really is sweet. I don't know. But I do know she is fucking crazy demented. Like house-of-horrors demented.  My son continues to berate me for divorcing his mother. Now he's claiming someone else is on board with condemning me. I think he said her name is Amy. Who the fuck is Amy? Who is he hanging out with besides his crazy mom? Crazy Amy, ap...

In the book of Proverbs, there is a verse that says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." I believe this is a spiritual perishing, but what is true in the spiritual is often true in the physical, as well; otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have used physical truths to reveal spiritual truths. The two realities often reveal one another. I think of the physical realm as the tip of an iceberg. The spiritual realm is the unseen part. It looms much larger than we realize. But we get a sense of it through the physical realm.  While I've been engaged in a pretty intensive retrospective — a retrospective I am not done with, by the way — I have also been thinking quite a bit about my future. Do I have a vision for the future? Am I doomed to perish? Is it too soon? Does it matter? I mean, it feels like my life is over anyway. Given the sheer embarrassment my life has turned into, it's only natural I've retreated to a...

We all have those make-it-or-break-it-moments in life. For most of us, they pass without noticing because we did what we had to do. We made it. We did the right thing. Some of us can't seem to get it right, though. This is about those people. This is about me.  Some of us come pre-loaded with difficulties we have to unravel throughout our lives and make sense of. We're already two strikes down when we get up to bat. I consider this keeping things fair. There's something special about those of us who come from behind and (hopefully) win. It's the classic underdog theme. Underdogs make for happy endings. Life doesn't always give us happy endings, though. This is about those other endings. I'm one of those guys who came pre-loaded with trouble. When I think about my life, it's amazing that ANYTHING WENT RIGHT, as there were so many strikes against me. It's no wonder I've had so many dismal failures. The cards were stacked against me. It wasn...

I have a fear of drowning. Not me personally, though. I fear my son drowning.  Last weekend, my mother said she had a dream my son, Isaiah, went straight into their pool. A few weeks earlier, my oldest brother invited me and my son to spend some time with them on a lake. I declined because I said the water was too deep there, and I didn't feel comfortable having my son around water that deep. Soon after I said that, a friend of our family mentioned her son fell into a river while they were on vacation, and she had to jump in to save him. I felt justified.  This could be considered paranoia. If I didn't believe in the supernatural, I might agree.  I've had more than a dozen dreams of my son falling into water since he was born. Every time I would have those dreams, I would pray over him. When my little family moved to a property with moving water (three different water sources), the dreams remained the same.  I never kept Isaiah from playing near water, a...