JP's Journal

The days are unusually cold and gray. They tick along like the gears of some giant clock that exists behind the everything. I’d like to think that there is some ghost in the machine, but it’s just too hard to believe. It seems more likely that my life exists on a razor edge of being and not being. In any moment it could all go very wrong, but even that would only be for a little while.

But

One has to get up in the morning and that kind of thinking makes one want to hide under the bed instead of getting out of it. It’s best just to push those nasty thoughts to the basement of one’s mind where the monster of reality lives, well chained.

My girl and I have been working. We have a handyman business that we are slowly lifting off the ground. I am not the handy side of this; my girl and I are the business end. We have a 1099 that swings the hammer.

The Florida side of things are ever present. It’s where I make my real living and involves mostly collecting rent and pissing people off. It seems that no one wants to pay rent; and when they flush a diaper, it’s my fault the sewage backs up. I am the “owner”, which means; I am “the man”. “The Man” is never cool.

We also started a web management company, when a friend of ours agreed to a proposal I sent her. We are going to build, migrate, market, and manage her web presence. It’s been fun so far. We are doing the same thing for the Handyman and Web Management businesses.

We haven’t slowed down much lately. I like it this way. My previous life was rather restrictive. I woke up in a box, drove to a box, worked in the box, and went home to a box. Thinking outside the box was not an option.

If I were to talk to some younger version of myself, I would tell him to live in the box for a while. You have to live in the box to know the rules everyone else lives by. Plus the larger the box, the easier it is to slack off. The key is to make sure no one really knows what you do.

The divorce, while ongoing, has been pretty quiet. My youngest daughter seems a little less angry. The ex-wife has not been heaping on the drama yet. Time is flowing ever onward to the day when I write her the last check. I count the days. It does annoy me that my daughter is so infatuated with my ex-wife’s boyfriend. Everything about him is so cool, while everything about me is stupid. Why am I the dork, when this guy was homeless when my ex found him on facebook? He and everyone else over there are supported by my alimony and child support. After three years of living off of me, he finally has a job chasing squirrels out of attics. He wears a funny hat, loves animals, and buys my daughter booty shorts, so he gets to be the cool one. I remember when I was cool, because I took her to Chucky Cheese and bought her Beanie Babies. I miss the kids I had when they were kids. Sure they left the back seat full of cereal and spoiled milk sippy cups, but they were fun too.

I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett’s “A slip of the Keyboard”. He is one of my favorite authors. Perhaps the favorite, if it wasn’t for Stanislaw Lem. I suppose you could call the race a tie. It annoys me that they both had to die. It’s like drinking from a fountain, watching the water slowly trickle away, knowing they will never fill it. Writers should be able to pass their worlds on, like a king passes power to his heirs. This way I could still read new Disc World, Middle Earth, and The Cyberiad novels. If Harold and the Pirates, ever becomes big; I will find a young heir to carry the torch.

Mirrored from Theater of JP's Mind.

Hey ex-wife,

I met you a lifetime ago in the cluttered aisles of Kmart. I hated that job. One needs a certain amount of love for people at their worst to enjoy retail. I wanted to quit before they hired me.

I bought a manual type writer, and I was going to write “the novel.” It smelled like magic, and the hard staccato clicks banged words into existence with efficiency. I was going to be too famous for retail.

I am not sure what you fell in love with back then or what you saw from over your register. You were dating a heavy set hairy guy from sporting goods at the time and you were not happy.

I left Kmart to find my life in the islands of Key West. In a shitty apartment, surrounded by cats, whose descendants were the pets of pirates, I set my fingers to bang out the words. I didn’t know we were writing love letters, but somehow the black lines flowed into the life we became.

It ended on our bed when you rather calmly asked for a divorce. You were pissed when I smiled.

There is so much that I don’t understand about what happened in between. I don’t know when you stopped loving me. I don’t know why we never had a real conversation, one where we connected. We never talked, and when we did, it wasn’t honest.

I know that something was broken with us from the start.

The sex sucked.

I worked so hard, twelve hour days, cooking dinner when I got home, and cleaning. There were times when I thought your only job was to anchor the couch into the living room floor.

I didn’t cheat on you a little. I cheated on you a whole lot. I wish I could tell you that I regret it. I can tell you that it is not as much fun as a healthy relationship.

Do you remember when you had your family empty our house, took the kids, and accused me of domestic violence, so you could get a personal protection order? I do. Do you remember ever apologizing? Yeah, I don’t either.

I took you back, because I realized that every other weekend isn’t a way see your kids grow up. I stayed with you for over decade, because our kids were that important.

You made out pretty good in the divorce. You got alimony, child support and a nice check. Your parachute has been golden.

I was angry at you for a long time. I hated you even. I could list out the reasons why, rank them by rage level, and include a brief justification. But my rage has cooled to a hard dead little ball, and empathy isn’t a strong trait of yours anyway. There is little value in bringing it all up.

In two and a half years I won’t be supporting you, and our house will be sold. The rock we rolled downhill will finally come to a rest and sink quietly into the past. I count the days sometimes.

Most days I just wake up, smile, hug my cats, and smile again. I am living the dream I had when we were together, only I am awake and this is real.

I guess what I want to say is thanks for letting me go.

Mirrored from Theater of JP's Mind.

I like to sit and watch my reef tank naked. It’s an expensive and weird. Not the naked part. Although, I do live with two very judgmental cats.

I have a forty five gallon reef tank with several coral frags, a giant cleaner shrimp, Coral Beauty, and a healthy population of hair algae.

The hair algae had been all that was in there or at least all you could see. It grows in a dense mats all over everything. It looked like I was making biodiesel in my bedroom.

I have since managed to get some control of it using a mini reactor, frequent water changes, a tooth brush, and extreme German granny porn. How extreme? As much sex appeal as a road accident extreme.

I like to lay in bed at night, while my cats attempt to smother me with their asses, and stare into the water. It reminds me of a time when I wanted to be a marine biologist, before I found out that I wasn’t quite smart enough to be a marine biologist.

But where some dreams die, others grow. Well mostly they died. I never became a scientist, or got super powers. I was a tech writer for a bit and some have called me a misogynist. I’m divorced. That was fun. It still is. For any of you men out there that get turned on by financial domination, I recommend it.

I give over half my money away to the ex. My ex lived off the money for a bit, while she tried to run a home daycare. Now she works at Walmart in the lawn and garden section. She has about two and a half years to pay me half of the equity of our house, where she is living. She has a better chance of crapping out a pine cone backwards than keeping the house. When I try to be a good person, I hope that she somehow makes the money. I paid for that house with soul sucking hours. Sure, I wasn’t breaking bricks, some guys have it worse, but four hour commutes, and shitty bosses will kill, eventually. I like to pretend that maybe she appreciates the fact that I enabled her to be a stay at home mom for awhile. There wasn’t much of that when we were married.

I’m not a little bitter about it though. I am like swallowed a whole box of coffee grounds a lot bitter.

But my unhappiness only goes as far as I let it. I like to remind myself of how much better things are now, how my job is not really a job, and how I won at life through sheer luck.

I also like to stare into my fish tank naked.

Mirrored from Theater of JP's Mind.