How did I get here?

March 14, 2013 Leave a comment

… waking up before 8 am on a Thursday morning with a half drank beer on my nightstand and four days worth of blogging to catch up on.

I didn’t mean to go to bed so early last night. It would have been nice to get some writing done but I was exhausted when I got home from work. I didn’t get home until 9:30 pm, much later than usual. That’s because I had met a dear old friend for diner after work. I couldn’t pass up that opportunity since I hadn’t seen her in far too long. We live in different cities but as it turned out yesterday we both found ourselves in Lakeville at the same time.

You see, I was running late after over-sleeping. I had been up drinking and talking on the phone until 3 am the night before. That was actually my second two hour phone conversation of the night. All that after spending two hours and forty-five minutes, mostly on hold, dealing with the IRS to prove that I am who I say I am so that I could get my tax refund. It was while I listening to the same 60-second hold music loop over and over again that I first decided to crack a beer.

After dropping off my daughter at her mother’s and picking up some things I needed from Target I returned home to find a cryptic 4883C letter from the IRS telling me that they needed more information to process my return accurately. A quick Google search gave me a little more information about this leter and let me know that I would probably be on hold for a very long time. I’m all for fighting identity theft so I really felt for the woman at the other end of the phone. She has a challenging job to do and probably deals with a lot of stressed out and irritated people.

Earlier that day I played Monopoly with my daughter. Monopoly is an evil game and I hate that I am so good at it. This was even more evil. It was the Star Wars edition. My daughter chose the Princess Lea piece so being her father I had to choose Darth Vader. I would rather have been C-3PO. He’s so gay. I think my daughter enjoyed the game but I took no pleasure in taking all of her money. At least it wasn’t real money. They were imperial credits after all.

When daughter got up Tuesday morning we called my son, her brother, to wish him happy birthday. We had meant to do this the night since that would have been his actually birthday but we got distracted. Pretty shitty, huh?

Monday had been a long day of running around. I had taken my daughter to her therapy appointment. Yes, even my amazing daughter can benefit from therapy. I just wish that her therapist was closer to either her mother’s apartment of my house. But no, my daughter lives in a third ring northern suburb and the therapist is in a third ring southern suburb. That was not my idea.

Before that I had to pickup materials from one of my delivery clients. We had arranged to meet in south Minneapolis so it was fortunate that I woke up in south Minneapolis. How did that happen?

Oh yeah… Sunday! Sunday was a fun day as Sundays are meant to be. It ended at the 19 bar as many nights do when I’m hanging out with my bff. We arrived at the bar by Pedi-taxi. I totally want to do that. I’ve been trying to figure out what other kind of work I could do to make money and I think biking people around downtown would be right up my alley. We were coming from a fund raiser at Hell’s Kitchen for one of my Harmony Park Kiddie Village friends who is raising money to be a Student Ambassador in the UK.

Before that we had a lovely diner at Cafe Maude in Loring Park. Neither of us had ever eaten there and my bff wanted to take me out after I took her to the Opera. We saw Hamlet; so many murders that day, not to mention the huge murder of crows in Loring Park.

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Moving connections

March 8, 2013 Leave a comment

I’ve been struggling all week trying to write about what happened last weekend. It finally dawned on me that I was making it way more difficult than I needed to. I wanted to capture the transformative nature of the weekend but that is not really necessary  The nature of transformation is that it sticks with you and it continues to change. In other words, there will be plenty of time to write about all that.

What I need to capture is just the events as they occurred and my feelings, thoughts and state of mind in that moment.

If I just gave you the events, it would sound something like this:

I spent Saturday afternoon helping one of my closest friends move out of Minneapolis into her boyfriend’s house in Oakdale. It took two trips filling my van and a pickup each time.

Afterwards we had diner at The Green Room in Stillwater and drank wine from a vineyard the couple had visited in SLO California when they were there over new years.

After that we went to meet the boyfriend’s dad at a karaoke bar across the river. We drank beer, eat peanuts and talked about everything under the sun. The boyfriend did an amazing job singing The Piano has been Drinking by Tom Waits.

After the bar closed a group of us returned to the boyfriend’s parents house to hang out. We drank and talked, I played the piano for a bit, and we partied ’til the sun came up.

Boring! I mean the day was in no way boring but what made it exciting was not the things I did, it was the connections with other people that made it meaningful. The events alone make it no different than any weekend in my life. What makes my life special are the people involved.

I was so grateful to be asked to participate in this move. I love helping people move and I’m pretty damn good at it by now. Moving is a major life change and I feel very privileged to be part of these monumental events. As I was helping my friend move I hearkened back to the last time I helped someone with a move out of this residence. That was a much more solemn life change filled with negativity and destruction. This time had it’s share of negativity but it felt like a move forward. It felt like growth and new opportunity.

What was so special about being asked this time was that they didn’t need to ask. I’m not talking about not needing to ask because I would help regardless, like I already had it on my calendar – which I did. No, I mean not needing to ask because they didn’t really need my help. I’m sure that the boyfriend could have just hired movers and have been done with it but he didn’t. They took the risk and asked for help. I find that noble.

My brother-in-law once said, “any problem that can be solved with money is not a problem”. I like that. I believe that. By the way, I think that poverty is a problem that can be solved with money, but that is clearly outside the scope of what I am trying to accomplish with this entry.

My point is that the boyfriend could have simply solved this problem with money. I’m sure he’s got it. He drives a brand new Lexus, works for his dad’s company which from what I could tell is doing perfectly well. His parent’s house reminded me a lot of my dream house which I have created in my head just in case I wind up rich. Their’s might actually might be a little bit bigger and I’m sure it’s not their only house. Surface it to say, they have more money than most of my artist friends.

… but not all. I feel very fortunate to have friends at all levels of the socioeconomic scale. It’s all part of my love of diversity thing. I believe it takes all types to make the world go round. I just don’t like it when some people are valued more than others. I grew up in a middle-class family that struggled financially at times. Nowadays, my parents could be considered rich I guess. Saturday I was asked how I define rich and I responded, “if you have so much money that you need to pay someone to spend it for you, I would consider you rich”. My parents do that on occasion.

Me? I’m pretty fucking poor. Most of my friends are poor. It might just be that our economy is totally fucked up. I mean most people are pretty poor and this is the richest nation in the world, right? Per capita, we are number seven but again, I’m getting beyond the scope of this post.

What I am saying is, regardless of your income, race, sex, disability or any other way we want to categorize people, we are all human. We all have the same human limitations. We all need to eat, sleep and shit. We are all constrained by only having 24 hours to each day. We all get older and we will all one day die. In that, we are all the same.

Money cannot buy friendship, not real friendship, certainly not my friendship. That’s why I was asked to help with the move; to build friendship. I was asked to be part of a meaningful life event not because my help was necessary, but because I was wanted. That means the fucking world to me!

They didn’t get off cheap either. I think I only bought one beer all night and I can drink! The boyfriend covered my gas and took me out for a really nice diner. You know what? Hiring movers would probably have been cheaper.

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Life goes on

March 7, 2013 Leave a comment

I woke up at 5:30 this morning. That’s what happens when I go to bed early. At least it gave me a couple hours to write before going to work. I’m still not done writing about the weekend. Haven’t even finished Saturday.

Actually, I’m starting to think that I’m doing it all wrong and should divide it out into two separate things. Also, thinking I should just slap it together and be done with it all. I’m also starting to think that writing a blog about how I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing is a brilliant idea! I’m still hoping it can become something more though.

So this is the challenge I faced this morning: My band leader and hir wife needed to get to the airport and I needed to fill my van with newspapers to deliver my route. I could have put a back seat in my van to transport both of them to the airport, then driven back to my house, removed the back seat and drove to CityPages and loaded my van with papers so I could go to work.

I could have done that but it would have seemed completely back ass-wards to me to have done it that way. I used to program logistics systems – it’s still in my brain.

The airport is in the same city as my route. The road to the airport takes me:

FIRST: past CityPages, where I pick up the papers

SECOND: past the lovely couple in desperate need of getting to the airport.

And they were desperate… well not that desperate… they could have called a cab but they would rather give their twenty dollar cab fair to a friend. Lucky me! I got to be that friend. After being rejected by five other people they turned to me. I’m a pretty safe bet. If you need me, there is a good chance that I’ll be there for you. But this system only works if you try everyone else first. Oh, and you may wind up sitting on a stack of newspapers.

I don’t even care about the twenty dollars. If you need my help and I can give it to you, I will. It’s never about money to me, but I’m not so rich, or so proud as to not accept it. I kind of think this is the ideal place to be. I want to be in a place where I don’t need any more money but if it comes my way I can use it to make my life and the lives of the people around me better.

My friend who I visited with after work asked if I could pick her up some Vanilla Almond Milk before coming to see her. She said she had ten-spot if I could give her $5 change. Seriously?!? The milk is $3, with my co-op discount, even less. Still, she insisted that I take the $5 as a delivery charge; so I did.

All totaled, I made $200 today for doing my newspapers, $20 for delivering my friends to the airport and $2 for delivering milk. I also spent $60 on gas, $6 on lunch, $10 on coffee, $3 on sugar, $125 on an e-cig system and $18 on whiskey, so basically I broke even.

… and life goes on!

 

 

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Shit on the present

February 20, 2013 2 Comments

This quote has been bouncing around my head today…

If you are depressed, you are living in the past

If you are anxious, you are living in the future

If you at peace, you are living in the present

It’s often attributed to Lao Tzu, but given that depression is a relatively new term and Lao Tzu supposedly lived in the 6th century BCE, it’s highly unlikely he is the source. It sounds more like the kind of new-age pop-psychology bullshit that annoys the piss out of me. But hey, if it works for you, go ahead and rock it! It’s just not my life.

I live in the present and my present is home to both depression and anxiety. It’s not because I am simultaneously living in the future and the past. It’s because of the particular way my fucked up brain is wired. Living in the present does not bring me peace but living in the present is my only option; at least until I get a visit from a blue police box. In the meantime, I struggle and I fight and I immerse myself in the mystery and chaos which that battle provides.

Today was not one of those days. Today there was calm on the battlefield. Today had structure and a schedule and I pretty much knew what was going to happen. I was going to go close my checking account (finally), have lunch with a dear friend, go to therapy, pick up my daughter and spend time with her, after which I was going to come home and write about my day. These are all wonderful things and I was looking forward to all of them. They just weren’t what I needed to overpower the chemicals in my brain.

I found myself in tears this morning, overcome with sadness  There was no reason for me to feel that way. I had nothing to be sad about but I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. My chest was tight and I was having a hard time breathing. It’s that feeling you get when you are walking home, all alone, late at night, and you just know Freddie or Jason is about to appear from behind the bushes and attack you. But I was safe at home in my kitchen. I had nothing to fear.

I did find my self thinking about losses in my past and uncertainties about my future but the feelings came first. If anything, I was conjuring up thoughts to make sense of my emotions.

It made me think of this quote, which I believe was first discovered written on a bathroom stall:

If you have one foot in the future, and one foot in the past, you shit on the present.

That’s what I was doing… on purpose. The present was so uncomfortable that I stretched out my legs out in both directions just so I could shit on it.

Well, one glorious thing about the present is it doesn’t last long. That is to say, it’s always changing. Whatever discomfort I was feeling was not going to last forever. However predictable I thought my day would be, it was bound to get disrupted by something. I guess I do find peace in knowing that.

I expected to be able to close my checking account. I did not expect a pending transaction to prevent me from doing so for another two days. I didn’t expect Elsie’s to be out of veggie burgers today but found the bean quesadilla to be quite wonderful. I did not expect my therapy session to be all that helpful since I pretty much talk about everything here on my blog but I did notice my SUDS-level decrease significantly. I did not expect my time with my daughter to lead me to Electric Fetus where I got to see my friends Aby Wolf and Grant Cutler perform.

I did not expect to find in my mailbox, anything of value. I love the US Postal service but since they usually only deliver bills and advertisement, I’m okay with them taking a day off now and then. Let me just say that today was the best mail day ever!

The first thing I saw was a postcard from one of my favorite people on the planet. She is in Bali. I got a fucking postcard from Bali – how cool is that?!?

Then I saw a letter from one of my delivery accounts. They periodically send me bonuses for doing my fucking job. I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s not like it is enough to make me work harder. I do my job because it’s my job. It’s more like it would make me feel shitty if I didn’t get it. That seems kind of manipulative to me. Anyway, I figured there might be money in there so I ripped it open. Three bucks! Whoahoo! Hey, when you’re broke every bit helps.

Then I saw a small envelope, hand addressed in red crayon with a Finding Nemo stamp in the corner. It was from my first true love. I turned the envelope over. Across the seal was drawn a pink heart. I opened it and pulled out a card with a picture of Tinker Bell, colored in with crayon. I opened it and read:

You are Loved!

Please use this gift to treat yourself to a fun night out

and the rest for whatever.

Happy Late B-Bay!

Enclosed was a hundred dollar bill. She sent this after reading about my financial troubles. I guess I called her just after she had put it in the mail, just to tell her I love her, having no idea what she had done. For the second time today, tears welled up in my eyes.

I will leave you with one final quote:

“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle” – attributed to Albert Einstein although there is no evidence he ever said it.

I prefer the later.

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