The One About Happiness, Loss, Grief, Failure and Survival. AKA A Recalibration Of Sorts

I wake up punching my mattress again. It happens every few nights. Sometimes I knock things off my night stand, throw things across the room. In the past I have awoken to see that I had written nonsense on the wall above the mattress I was sleeping on. This time I was punching. Punching my father in a dream. I punch my father a lot in my dreams.

I feel obligated to recap my year as it's been momentous, joyous and traumatic. But I want to do it quickly. It's like a math problem. Everything that happened since May 2017 adds up to where I am June 2018 and my decision to really, really try to write again. To stop posting my stuff in Facebook chunks. To flesh it out and feel it and share that and see if that works for me. Not knocking FB. I'm a FB defender. I love it but I love it in the way a dog loves eating it's own shit. Ponder that.

My year:

• May 2017 got first job in 5 years
• August 2017 started dating first woman since 2016
• October 2017: saw Screaming Females for the first time. Street Eaters opened for them. Met Megan and John from Street Eaters. Even became FB friends with them. They rock.
• October 2017: saw Surfer Blood, with my then 14 y/o daughter. Met the band and got a picture. First brush wish indie music fame.
• November 2017: 18 y/o crashed car, could have died but walked away unharmed
• December 2017: Christmas with girlfriend and her family. Gave her tickets to Wicked, which she had always dreamt of seeing. Started to really see a future with her.
• January 2018: girlfriend and her daughter move in with me and my daughters. Job going very well.
• January 2018: Saw comedian Brian Posehn. Met and got pictures with him. Surreal.
• February 2018: Turned 47, an entirely unspectacular age.
• February 2018: took daughter and g/f daughter to Brockhampton hip hop show. Much fun.
• February 2018: see movie ANNIHILATION, a head-scratching sci-fi horror hybrid about love, evolution and the nature of self and identity. It rocks me.
• March 2018: Saw Screaming Females again. Met punk rock goddess Marissa Paternoster and was over the moon.
  
• April 2018: drunkenly asked g/f to marry me. She said ask me when I'm sober.
• May 2018: finish reading book ANNIHILATION, a head-scratching sci-fi horror hybrid that reads like Thoreau on acid and is about love, evolution, identity and is different from the movie but both are equally great. It rocks me.
• May 2018: took 15 y/o daughter so see Frankie Cosmos. She met Greta Kline. I was so happy for her.
• May 2018: Scott Hutchinson of current fave band Frightened Rabbit commits suicide and girlfriend leaves me for confusing reasons on same day.
• May 2018: discover girlfriend was cheating on me. Confront her, get her to admit it. Angry, hurt and mentally unstable.
• May 2018: one week after g/f left lose my shit on a co-worker while holding a knife in my hand. Get sent home. 2 days later I am terminated, mainly because I was hold that fucking knife and apparently pointed with it. Bad form. This is a decision I both understand and think is unfair. Still think that employee is a major douchebag and stand by every word I said. He did not, however, deserve to have a knife pointed at him.
• Start taking some legal action against former employer which is still pending.
• Bottom out. hallucinations, voices, suicidal thoughts, paranoia, depression. A living hell. Lock myself in my room.
• June 2018: start to pull it together. Get new job. Make financial cuts. Go to therapy. See doctor. get med changes.
• June 2018: start new job and somehow it's fine despite being drastically underpaid.
• June 2018: take daughter to see Depeche Mode because I couldn't sell the tickets. Had fun.
• June 2018: see movie HEREDITARY, a head-scratching horror drama about grief, loss, family curses and fate. It rocks me.

So May 2018 kind of sucked, huh? In order of the three things that hurt me most are:

1. Job Loss
2. Scott Hutchison's suicide. He'd written so many songs about doing and they were cathartic. Then he did it and now it's heartbreaking.
3. Cheating bitch girlfriend leaving.

Prior to all this I went through 30+ years of mental illness, much of it wrongly diagnosed. I lost my marriage and family. I battled drug and alcohol abuse. I battled impulsive and dangerous sexual impulses and impulsive behavior of all sorts. I was hospitalized for mental illness and self harm 3 times between 2011 and 2012. My ex-wife died suddenly in 2013 and I became a single parent living on disability. I got pneumonia 3 times between 2013-2014, spent days in the hospital, and almost died.

I also survived all of that. In 2009 I was properly diagnosed. I was further diagnosed during my hospital stays. I have been on more meds than I can remember and continue to take them every day and night. I've learned grounding techniques, ways of battling and surviving. Ways of controlling my outbursts and delusions. They don't always work (hello, job loss) but I persist. I keep going. This world wants me dead. I think people want me dead. Phantoms and ghosts and enemies. But I keep going. I'm going to be screened for PTSD soon. No kidding.

Those experiences helped me through the recent crisis'. I was able to just barely hold on. I'm still struggling. Things don't always feel real. I don't feel real. I feel like frost evaporating from a window, and I'm looking through that window. I question everything. Do I even have a job? Is that my dog over there? Who is pounding on my bedroom door?

I believe my romantic life is over. The universe has punished me continually for what I did to my ex-wife. It's not going to let me off the hook. No mas. It continues to mock me as I sleep and dream.I dream of Alisa all the time, sometimes waking up thinking she is laying in bed beside me like she did for almost 18 years. I reach out to touch her and she's not there. I scream and cry and cry. It happens a lot.

I'm not trying to make anyone feel sorry for me. I'm telling it like it is. I feel there have been bad and unfair things that have happened to me but in the end I own everything I have ever did. I own all of my words. there's a reason for everything I've ever said to anyone. I own every word whether I was right or wrong. I've apologized for some. For others I NEVER will. I am, if anything, the most genuine motherfucker you'll ever meet. I have no filter. I am candid and I wear my heart on my sleeve. I truly wish Donald Trump would die and I'm not afraid to say it. My heart is flapping away on my sleeve and it has cost me dearly but I won't have it any other way. I will go down in flames before I change. I am, essentially, hard to deal with and live with. Look at the trail of dead relationships in my wake.

I will try to not make the same mistakes I've made before. I will not fall for damaged women, convinced I can save them. I can barely save myself. I will not rush into a relationship, if I even have another one ever. I will not put my nose where it doesn't belong. This is a tough one but I have to do this. I will not, in most cases, mistake workmates for friends. Big error. I do have some good friends from jobs in the past. Recent jobs? I don't know. A few people have come through. Many have not. They have their reasons, I know, but maybe some of those reasons are they are phony people. Time will tell.

I will continue to shapeshift. When my girlfriend left I reclaimed my space. Made my house fully mine again. I have changed directions and reinvented myself many, many times. We all have to do it at some point. When I moved from NY to Illinois I welcomed leaving my past behind and becoming a new person. With every failure and loss since then I have had to do it again and again. And so I do it. I pushed myself to annihilation (word intended) and reconfigure as a mirror of what I once was but with new knowledge and experience and goals and scars.

I will try and use this space more regularly. As a thought dump. Ad therapy. As entertainment. As annihilation.



--Bill 6/13/2018