Insane New Year

New Years Eve. 4:30 p.m. The flu hit me. Hard. The most incredible wave of nausea that I've ever felt. Major problem, driving on Southfield Rd going 40 mph. Tried to make it to a parking lot so I could puke. Crossed the 14 Mile Rd intersection. Almost there.

Why are people standing around my car banging on the windows and yelling at me? Why is my car on fire? Why is there a tree on the hood of my car?

I blacked out and went off the road and hit a tree. EMS came and pulled me out of the vehicle and brought me to Beaumont hospital. Spent the next seven hours in a cervical collar while I had all of my clothes cut from my body and endured CT scans and xrays, all the while feeling like I was going to vomit.

Left the hospital with no apparent injuries. While getting a ride home from the hospital, got sick again after about five miles in the car. Started throwing up. Blacked out again and puked all over myself.

And a happy new year . . .

The Holidays

Decided to post something after remaining silent for some time. Christmas was crazy as usual, but it was an unusually good Christmas. We got a dog for our younger daughter. She was so happy that she cried. I will never forget how good it made me feel for her to be that happy.

I swore that we would never get another dog after the first one that we got around 5 years ago. A few months after we got the first dog I decided it would be best to find a new home for her because I was afraid that I was going to get so mad that I would hurt her. She was a terrible dog, and we had a terrible time trying to train her. She was out of control. She bit our older daughter (not breaking the skin, but refusing to let go), she ran through the neighborhood and it was nearly impossible to catch her. When I tried to get rid of her my sister in law was so upset that she decided to take her for herself. Five years later, she still has the obnoxious mutt. She's a much better dog now, but she's still obnoxious.

The new dog is a Yorkshire Terrier. Our daughters named her Miley, after the Hannah Montana character. She's a very cute dog. She weighs only 2 libbies and she's expected to only grow to about 5 lbs. Hopefully we'll have an easier time with this one. I promised the girls that I wouldn't get rid of her.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas, and Happy New Year!

12 years

October 27, 2007 marks 12 years of marriage for my wife and me. It's been a long and interesting 12 years. We've been together for over 20 years. Time has flown.

I'm just finishing watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind yet again. This movie really makes me think of my relationship with my wife. It's easy to focus on the negative, but there's so much positive involved with true love that's easy to overlook. It's so hard to stay positive about our relationship. It seems that we should be happy all the time, but we're not. I'm not. But when I really think about it I wouldn't want to spend my life with anyone else. We just belong together. I don't know why.

I've got a lot of mental and emotional issues. It's hard to deal with that. I used to resort to alcohol to temporarily blot out these issues. I chose to attempt that again tonight, but it doesn't work. It never really worked. It just eased the pain. Now it's not really so much the pain that I'm trying to ease. It's more like I'm trying to actually feel something. The psych medication that I take keeps me from feeling the emotions that I know are there. Alcohol helps me connect with those emotions now. It's not very often that I drink now. Probably less than once a month (as opposed to daily, as I used to do). But I still feel guilty when I do it.

Life is suffering. Love is suffering. It's been a world of suffering for me. It's been a marriage of suffering. But when I really stop and think about it there are beautiful moments that make all the suffering worthwhile.

I'm happy that I've been married for 12 years. I want to be married to her for the rest of my life. I don't want to lose what we've had for the past 20 years. There is too much there.

Our Saturday anniversary dinner should be interesting. We actually have an opportunity to sit and talk without a screaming baby or needy kid or feeling it necessary to discuss some mundane detail about the following day. It's the one day a year that we stop and take time for ourselves. Nothing exciting, but we usually just reconnect. I'm looking forward to our dinner and our night together. I thank God for what I have on a regular basis. I should do it every day. I'm very fortunate. Not everyone's in love with someone. Those of us who are should consider ourselves blessed and thank God for it.

The Big Maroon Song

Check it out . . . The Big Maroon Song by Tinderbox in MP3 format. One of my favorite songs of all time.

Oh crap. I keep getting an encoding error when I try to upload it. I'll let you know if I get it working. Let me know if you want me to email the file to you.

memories

I've been going through my Big Box O' Stuff. I've had numerous spats with my wife over the junk that I've kept over the years. I've managed to hold on to some stuff that's very important to me. I've got a box full of about a hundred cassette tapes. What's on them? That's what I wanted to know.

I knew that the tapes were mostly from band practices and demo tapes. I've got tapes of recordings from around 1987, before Tinderbox existed, when Jamie and I were practicing things that would eventually become songs. I'm actually playing keys on the tape that I'm listening to now. I've got a demo of our best Tinderbox songs, and it still sounds good 15 years later. It's a shame that we never recorded vocals on it, though.

Then there are tapes of band practices for Caustic Levity, when the band was just Matt and me. And then practices with bass and drums and demo tapes. I knew that one day I'd be happy that I kept all of that stuff. That day has arrived.

I've got reams of paper with song lyrics, chord progressions, set lists, etc. etc. And papers from when I was insane, before I was medicated. Drunken ramblings of a lunatic scribbled on all types of paper. Papers of me signing my name hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times and a new alphabet that I had whipped up on whim. I wrote a bunch of garbage in my invented alphabet, but I've forgotten where I put my personal Rosetta Stone. I've got papers with rambling thoughts of suicide and other horrible things that I felt at the time when I was sick. It seems that I was another person at one time. I sort of remember that other life, but I can't seem to connect with the emptiness and sorrow that I must have been feeling. It's so strange to feel disconnected from certain aspects of my past.

So much has happened over the past 20 years, and it's disorienting to dig back into my past. But I'm glad that I am able to do that with the stuff that I've kept over the years.

Oh my goodness, now the tape that I'm listening to has an Elysian Fields band practice. Big Matt, little Matt, Jamie and I are rocking out. Playing "Bad" in Katie's basement. I still get chills when I hear it. And it's not because Matt's vocals are so off key. That was a very cool time.

I hope my kids don't end up with my mental problems, but if they do I hope that they can channel their insanity into something creative and productive as I did. Fortunately I got help before I drank myself to death, but I miss the ups and downs that I used to experience. Now everything's always just so . . . normal. Well, I'm as normal as I can be. I'm still not sure if that falls within the generally accepted limits of normal.