JP's Journal

Look at me, humpty dumpty at forty-three.

It's weird that sometimes the world inside my own head is so difficult while the outside is so right. There is something in me that is uncomfortable with happiness.

I grew up odd. You would have voted me most likely to blow up the school. I lived inside my head. My room was my bat cave of wonder. Afternoons were spent talking to the voices in my head. Some of the voices were nice and other's called me a failure. I made friends out of words. They sat with me and held my hand. Perhaps they are here now.

My marriage turned an awkward kid into a bitter old man. I try not to be. That should be worth something. There is an ocean of anger that ripples just under my skin with a leaky faucet. It drips drips drips through my day. I can hear the drops in my dreams.

I think the people that love me can hear it to sometimes. My girl hears it; and yet she stays, doesn't even blink. There is no fear in her love.

My ex would look for monsters around every corner. She saw me and all men as objects of fear, zoo animals really. It's like we were lions, fun to look at in cages.

When I come in contact with anyone that reminds me of her, I feel the drips in my chest. Odds are if you have feminist outrage, we won't get along. It's not that I hate women; more that my outrage rejects your outrage. Words like Patriarchy and rape culture, hold little meaning after everything I have seen and been through. Words like alimony and child custody have far more resonance with me.

Drip, drip, drip, drip

Sometimes I feel like someone has stepped in me and is trying to get me off their shoe.

Two cats are taking turns showing up to my door, while inside Stubs is sitting at my desk watching me type. I intermittently let them in and let them out. I think I may end up with them more in than out. I am becoming a crazy cat guy, and I don't even like cats. I just can't let things suffer, and they keep showing up. Why can't fat guys with money show up to my door. They could buy me things and in return I would feed them.

Tonight I had chicken thighs roasted with onions, fingerling potatoes, carrots. I threw fresh herbs into the mix with just a dab of olive oil. It was better than married sex. I let the chicken smell waft out the door, but still no rich bastards wanting to buy me things, just cats.

I am forty-three and still clueless.No one tells you the things you need to know when you are young. They let you dream about being a star. Everyone wants to live in a Barbie dream house. No one tells you that you may end up alone surrounded by cats.

They never tell you that your job is going to be tedious, your boss an overseer to a system designed to maximise profits. They never tell you that profits are imaginary. Love is as equal to its great joy as it is to its pain. Falling in love and getting married is the easy part. The hard part is dealing with the inevitable loss. You never know when will be the last time you see someone. No one ever makes a movie where two people fall out of love, divorce, and spend the next couple of years fighting over shit. Weddings are a gateway drug, and they aren't even free. We have been sold.

Funny that you have been dead for about two years, but you still come up as a suggested friend on Facebook.

I would add you now, just so you know. I am not mad at you any more. I just realised that. When you were alive, we weren't speaking to each other. I am not sure if you realised that either. I will never know what you were running away from, but I think the drugs made you not notice a lot of things. As far as I know, it was all mostly pain pills and weed. Maybe the world outside your head was just too much.

It was hard to forgive you for breaking mom and dad's heart like that. We were supposed to bury them. We owed them that.

I went to your house after the fire. One of your cats didn't make it, but the other one did. You over fed him, and I think you would have been pissed that I called him a pig with cat ears. Mom has been taking care of him, and he is doing fine. I met your neighbours. They are a cute couple, young, pretty, and the guy tried to pull you out of the house, but you were already gone. He showed us some of the music that he recorded of you on the guitar. I thought it would suck, but it seems you had a lot of talent. It would have been fun to hear you play.

Dad rented your house to them for a cheap rent. They have since got married and moved out.

I got that divorce finally. It was ugly like I thought, and you died right in the beginning of it. Suzanne was a cunt about everything and called me to demand that I move my stuff out of the house during the week I was in Florida because of your death. She threw Tiffany out of the house, and she is now staying in your old room. I took your posters down, because mom and dad wanted me too. We have a box of all your old stuff at the house that no one knows what to do with.. I found your old sketch pad in your closet, next to the mason jar of cigarettes you hid from mom. I was always amazed at the kind of art work you could make.

We never did have a funeral for you. No one could handle planning one. We couldn't find any pictures of you when we tried. I think you hated pictures of yourself. I found one the other day of you and dad. You looked pretty happy. I am going to use that one and start a memorial site with you and the both our grand parents.

I don't know if you knew this, but even when you were a total bitch, which was often, we still love you.

If they sold my visions in a bottle, I would blow someone right now to get it. I think this is how crack babies are born. Instead, I am on my second jumbo mug of coffee letting the stimulants work their magic. This entry has been started many times. Since I found love and beat the nine to five, it has been hard to write anything. I am going to start working on a voice. It just won't be one of those train wreck ones that is an octave too high and scratchy around the edges.

Looking at this journal is like looking down from a dangling rope attached somewhere above; the older I get, the further down it goes, and the less there is to climb. There is more to regret, more to remember, more to think about. Somewhere up there, I will reach the end and become irrelevant. Maybe the parts of me that have been scattered through the universe will coalesced into something new. Maybe death is more of a gift. The dead do not want for anything. They exist only in our memories that fade to black as well.

So....here is a long rambling post disguised as a status update...

In response to a reply my large brained friend David wrote about something on my wall, I have written this massive offensive post about how fucked up the system is in a true punk fashion, but then my beautiful furry baby boy Stubs got sick while I was away in Florida. The system can wait. It will still be fucked up whether I complain about it or not. It has become unimportant.

Stubs got a urethral blockage, which is common in male cats. This is something that quickly becomes fatal. If my girl hadn't found him in time, he would be dead. He spent weeks getting flushed out, but nothing worked. Finally he got a PU surgery, which involves a rather drastic change to his anatomy. I hated doing that to him. It is hard to believe that a PU surgery was the best they could do for him. I begged him to get better. “Dude they are going to cut your johnson off,” I pleaded with him. I think in the end, I care more about johnsons than he does. He hated the e-collar he had to wear to keep him from licking his stitches and the antibiotic I had to squirt in his mouth twice a day. He hated me for weeks, but what makes him the best cat in the world was that he finally forgave me. Mostly after I stopped pinning him down and squirting foul liquid in his mouth.

I don't care who you voted for or whether you are happy or sad at the outcome. In the interests of peace, I will tell you that I voted for Satan, so you can all agree that this is a bad thing. What you can't agree on is whether Satan won or lost.

Last week was full contact sparring week in Tae Kwon Do. I think Rob cracked a rib with a rather impressive punch. It only hurts when I breath or cough, or move, or beat off. I do all these things on the regular, so I have decided that it best I just stop breathing. I don't think I can give up beating off.

This week I kick targets that I pretend is an attacker, who runs crying for his mother after each blow.

With each passing week, I get just a little faster, and maybe Rob won't beat my ass next time. Pain can be a good teacher if you listen to it.

The weird thing, the really strange thing, the thing that I have not really felt before is that I am happy. Not just happy, but peaceful. Sure there are days I pray to Jesus that my ex-wife falls down a well covered in semen; but, for the most part, I am happy. I have a good life. I have a wonderful girl, a beautiful girl, a girl that doesn't just pick parts of me to love, but the whole hairy package. She loves my cat, loves my daughters, loves when I fart on her. Okay, maybe she doesn't love everything,, but at least I don't have to hide who I am from her. I am completely inadequate in telling her how crazy wonderful it is having her in my life.

It is like this. Imagine this... You are running up hill for twenty years. Your feet and legs feel like concrete set in glass, and one day...poof... downhill you go, one foot after the other, flying free like a puppy in a field. Yeah, that is how I feel everyday that I look at her.

A few weeks ago I was required to go to a SPARE class. It is a class for parents in a divided household. I was a bit angry at first. . Making me go to a parenting class after taking away my ability to be a parent is a kick in the balls. At least my daughter is now talking to me. The distance is closing somewhat. She seems a lot less angry. When I took my ex to court, I had a few demands. I wanted overnight visitation, a chance to take her to a psychologist for joint counseling, and back visitation. A few grand later, I realized that the court will give me nothing. It was pointless. The court appointed Ad litem has met with my ex and just about refuses to meet with me. She is integral in approving overnight visitation, so I need her. Maybe I can persuade her to at least let my daughter have just a little bit of a dad in her life.

So imagine this. My ex bad mouths me enough to my daughter so that she no longer wants to see me. I take my ex to court, and here is what the court does, reduces my rights to overnight visitation, makes me go to a parenting class, and assigns an attorney to review me.

My ex took my daughter to a psychologist because of the issues over the divorce, which according to the class I just too, are issues my ex has caused. They keep sending me bills, and I keep not paying them. I am thinking about calling them. If they tell me nothing about what they are doing for my daughter, I will continue not paying them. I think I could keep not paying them longer than they will want the money, but we will see.

We discovered yesterday that my Ex's douche bag e-mailed my girl over Facebook. Apparently, Facebook has this other folder where e-mails are put from people that are not listed as a friend. So far he has e-mailed me a dozen times, mostly for dick comparisons, my girl's ex-husband, and now my girl. We wanted to e-mail him back to tell him what a complete and utter scumbag loser he is, but we didn't. Too much time has passed and my ex-wife has been reasonably nice lately. It is sooo hard to be an adult sometimes. Still I would like for the rest of you to know that he is a lying douche bag of douches, a fetid bag of testicle pus, an anal polyp on the ass end of a cancerous pustule.

Well, you get the point.

I think this entry has reached then of it's rope. Looking back at it, I can't say that it is not unflawed or even correct about everything. Still, I have a certain fondness for the ugly reaching up towards the light. I hope that you do too.

Goodnight all...I will be back soon.

Stubs the cat is sleeping next to my chair, watching me intently from the corner of his half lidded eye as sweat seeps out of my head like a freshly wrung sponge. I have just come back from a run, and I am drinking a sweet concoction of chemicals created by the best and the brightest minds in marketing. Powerade promises to replenish your soul, while tasting like mixed berries. The marketing is so good that one can ignore the fact that it looks like an industrial solution and tastes nothing like berries. Still, it is wet. I wish it could replenish about ten to twenty years. It feels like somewhere along those years, someone replaced my body with that of a fat old guy. My heart is still young, but the rest of me is shouting fuck you as I wait for everything to cool down.

When I run, ravens they cackle at me, and I shout “not yet fuckers”. I want to make sure that death will only beat me once, and cussing at the world keeps me baby fresh.

My wrist still hurts from a faulty block to a well aimed kick. I move it so that I can feel the dull ache during moments when I am thinking to much. I should be twisting it right now.

I saw Julie this weekend. I tried to be the fatherly type on the outside, but inside my head was like a snow globe being swirled around by toddler on so many pixie sticks.

I have always wanted tourettes and narcolepsy. This would have allowed me to shout “whore” and “liar” more than what was necessary at my alimony trial. The judge was either looking down at lot at some mysterious writing on his desk, or sleeping. Considering his decision, I would say that he was masturbating to tranny porn.

For those of you playing my home game, my alimony to my ex will end if I can prove that she in a relationship similar to marriage. I didn't

This is the story everyone believes....

Suzanne met Mike Dorsey over Facebook, and they confessed their love for each other. Suzanne paid for a plane ticket to get Mike to Virginia. Once Mike got up here, he revealed that he was a homo who ,in desperation, used Suzanne to get to Virginia. She decided to let him stay at her house every other weekend, so he could see his kids. He is still homeless and without a car. His father drives six hours from Delaware to Virginia to ferry him back and forth from his house to Suzanne's every other week. My oldest daughter completely made up the story to get back at her mother for calling the police on her and getting her arrested.

Mine was that I found all of Suzanne's facebook e-mails and that my oldest daughter got tired of lying to me and decided to tell the truth. Shortly after she came to me, her mother confronted her, they had a massive fight, Suzanne called the police, and my daughter got arrested for assault. The charges were all dropped.

I am angry over a universe that works this way. I want Karma to kick someone's ass on my schedule. Hell, I want me and karma to go over there and take a shit the size of a birthday cake in their living room.

There is a woman that I know who lost a lot of weight and started getting more attention from men, and this pissed her off. This confused me, because I thought she wanted attention. She said “If I wasn't good enough for you then, you are not good enough for me now.” I have lost a lot of weight, and I will take that blow job, because I damn well earned it. But I have a wonderful girl that loved me when I looked like I swallowed a fat midget, so maybe I already earned it.

Buddhism teaches one to approach life situations with an attitude of non-judgment. Me and my friend have had two similar events with two completely different perceptions. Events are neither good or bad. It is our actions that need to be controlled, not the universe. Keep in mind that if there is ever a zombie apocalypse, I am still going to take a shit in my ex's living room, but I am learning that there is peace in acceptance. Maybe someday I will get there.

Greetings people of the future from the past. The wonderful thing about writing is that everything in the here and now will be consumed by you in whatever future you are currently living in. I can float the thoughts on winds that travel through time and space instantaneously.

I have never been the perfect father, not a bad one; Just not the perfect one. I told my youngest daughter that we got her and her sister and Baby's R Us. I thought that sounded better than she came head first out of her mother's vagina, because I lost my job nine months before, and there isn't much else to do when you are broke with nothing but time. The ex said that you aren't supposed to lie to your kids. It's weird how these rules only apply to me.

My last court date was there to set up another court date. I got confused and thought that it was to determine whether I would see my youngest daughter again. No, I have to wait until September. If the state was trying to put me in jail, would it take this long? The ex came into court with a massive colored binder filled with paper, each one tabbed and highlighted. I wonder what could be in that thing? It is likely that I won't have any contact with my youngest until September. I miss her even though she hates me right now.

Maybe the future version of my daughter will see the thoughts I floated through the wind and hate me a little less.

My legs feel like I bashed them up and down on asphalt for an hour, but that is okay. Well, it is only okay because it is true. My ambitions require a different body, and you could call these growing pains. Or you could call me a fool that is forty and trying to get a last hurah before he gets too old. The pain is a minor little thing and gives my brain something to play with.

I should have seen my daughter today, and I suspect I will not see her until we go to court and a judge makes her see me. Losing a child isn't so easy. Running to the next mailbox when it feels like you might cough up a lung isn't so bad, neither is a back kick to the face. The body isn't so unrelenting as the mind, at least not at forty.

My mother has been here for about a month. My dad left her here and went back to Florida for business. Neither one seems to be in a hurry to move back in with the other. Having her here is kind of interesting. She takes over whenever I try to cook and now I let her just to avoid a fight. She doesn't drive so I have to take her shopping. She seems unable to focus on a list and instead wanders around like a toddler throwing crap into the cart until it is full. She cooks pretty well and uses my dad's credit card when we go out. She has been good for my oldest daughter, so things are working out in an odd way.

The sky has been this clear blue little thing for a while and the grass always seem to be so green. Inside my mother is sleeping in her bed, and Stubs the wonder cat is licking himself on my bed. Inside further still, I am attempting to focus my thoughts into words that maybe you could understand. It is like trying to string fleas on fishing line. And maybe at the end you can't understand completely in the same way that I cannot always understand you. Still, I know I appreciate the effort. I kind of hope my daughter sees the effort and the intention some day.

I thought I would write another entry for my big fan (Suzanne's "recently became gay" friend). He is apparently one of my biggest fans. He is such a big fan that he keeps sending me his favorite entries and threatening to take me to court with them. He is upset and hurt that I have referred to him as a douche bag. The man makes my daughter miserable for a year and a half, and is upset that I call him a douche bag. You would think a guy like that would be used to much worse.

Most of the time he rarely enters my mind, but he seems to like the attention. So this entry is dedicated to my biggest fan. The rest of my entries will be friends only, but only because I think my silence will eat him from the inside out.

My daughter's court case went well. I give Suzanne credit for changing her mind at the last moment and not taking out her anger with me on our daughter. She was rather well prepared to make things difficult. Armed with e-mails and my livejournal, she was going to somehow twist it into "I am going to get your daughter to get at you" kind of thing. Still, at the last second she changed her mind, and I do thank her for that. My daughter just has to get some anger management training and everything will go away. I am really interested in that whole process, like how do they teach that. Is there a person that pisses people off, and they teach them how to deal with it. Can I get that job? I wanna be a professional anger inducer. My daughter says I would be perfect for the job, even legendary. All I can say is that I was taught by the best, my dad.

The real estate business has been going well. Well, my dad at least has been doing well. I am slowly getting things started, but I am impatient. I want an empire of moderately priced rentals. I will rule over them with an iron fist. I will be king landlord. Okay, not really, but I am still going to wear the silly crown.

Someone kicked my guts in today. He was too cowardly to do it in the open. The stages are….

Fear
The news says that they are stress testing nuclear reactors due to the problems in Japan. I can only wonder if this involves shaking them vigorously while dumping the ocean on them.

Anger
BBC America News is no longer on BBC America. It is moving to NPR. The news program was designed to show America the rest of the world. Americans are too self centered and stupid to watch it, so it is on a network without ratings.

Acceptance
Fuck acceptance, I am still angry. I am thinking there is a person I could shove my Red Wings into so far, he will fit like a floppy douche bag slipper. I am also fairly certain who he is. I get the feeling he feels he is doing the right thing. He hears the hysterical side of my ex and feels he must do something, be the hero. I was like that once, and dude all I can say is that it is a short walk from here to there. Your good deed could have hurt my two kids and even my ex. You are lucky it didn’t.

So am I, because I just polished my Red Wings.

They set me up a blog at coralgasm.com, which means I may one day become a kind of professional blogger. Now how does one weave sexual frustration, loneliness, and sarcastic humor into a saltwater aquarium or maybe a country song. Here is an attempt.

A first entry of any blog is like shouting in an empty room, but without it one can never write a second one. I am your humble blog writer for coralgasm.com. Coralgasm is a premiere coral farm and website. See if you bought coral from your typical smuck you would be getting coral grown in the garage. People do that. Most of the coral you see on Ebay are grown in some one's garage next to that old stroller and the paint thinner. Coralgasm's coral is grown on a specially designed coral farm by people that know what they are doing. Their stuff shows it and comes without the exhaust fumes.

The oil spill hasn’t been that long ago and BP, which now and forever will mean Busted Pipe, has dumped enough oil into the ocean to make a the Gulf into a Palmolive commercial. So I got excited when my dad told me that he was helping to build a coral reef farm. I got even more excited when he wanted me to help out. In college I went to the University of Tampa and got most of marine biology degree, and a degree in unsuccessful flirting and making bad decisions during binge drinking.

“So dad do you want me to make sure all the coral is healthy using that C+ average in biology and that D- in chemistry?” I am not sure if he was laughing or crying at all the wasted money he spent. “No son, we have Carl Eby who has been in the business for years and actually got his Marine Biology degree from the University of Maryland. He ran a successful saltwater aquarium store and is like the son I never had. Dad you have two sons. Oh yeah, I forget about you guys. So dad you want me to build all the reef tanks. Son you can barely put your shoes on your feet, let alone build a sophisticated Coral reef farm. I have Rooney doing that. He is an experienced carpenter and salt water aquarist, and he is also much better looking. So dad, what do you need me to do? We needed a person simple enough to describe things in very simple language, and we figured that if it was simple enough for you to understand than certainly anyone else would. Son we needed the simpleton of simpletons and you are the first person I thought of. Wow, thanks dad, I guess.

So this blog is here to answer questions, it is here to describe coral, it is here to tell you about coralgasm.com and it is here to help and entertain you through the world of reef aquariums.

What do think of the entry. :D