Archives for April 2015

If you have a clear mind & aren’t caught up in the wrong aspects of a journey, you can gain the answers you’re looking for. That’s the difference between just running out of town to go have a good time, and doing some self evaluation and coming back with personal growth. I’m headed home with the right perspective on my life. I can say without a doubt, after all of the traveling that I’ve done in my life, that this was the most fulfilling thing that I’ve ever done. And I think the universe is telling me that it was supposed to happen this way.
Looking back, I think I was a good person. But I was corrupt. I was self centered, immature, and an alcoholic. Did I deserve what happened in my previous relationships I’ve had as an adult? I’d say no. But perhaps things occurred how they did because I hadn’t learned to acknowledge and correct the aforementioned flaws in my character.
I accept what my mistakes were these past nine months in particular. They were deeply rooted earlier on but really amplified the past nine months when my marriage ended. I take full responsibility. That I made the decision to move past that awful relationship and also get sober at the same time has cleared so much in my head and my heart, I really do feel like a new lease on life has been granted.
I ran an ultra marathon up the side of a mountain today, at 7,600 feet above sea level. I guess I could write about just the race and go on for a while. But that would be much more secondary to what actually occurred out of site inside my head, and the amazing coincidence that happened during my day. I accepted, acknowledged, and analyzed a lot about myself and recent events while I was out there. I also came to the conclusion that I am never drinking again. I can’t. I decided to sober up so that I could put the past tragedy to rest, and so I wouldn’t lose what I care about in my life. And that’s far, far more important than having a drink. Ill do whatever needs to be done to uphold that. I also am never speaking to my ex wife again. I blocked her phone number. I deleted every photo of her on my Facebook. And when I got to the very top of the mountain today, I hurled my wedding ring off a cliff. Alcohol and her manipulation head games almost ruined my life and made me lose everything.
I was introduced to someone through a friend that’s been sober 4 months. He had his engagement called off, thrown out of the house, and his longtime girlfriend almost cut him off from her life completely. He rehabilitated himself and is continuing to get better and hopefully can continue to do so. He imparted some wisdom on what I’m going through, and I think the very fact I met him now, out in New Mexico of all places and while on this particular journey, is the universe speaking. He lost everything, yet in the end the person he loved didn’t give up on him and he’s changed his life because of it. I hope I can be like that too. Oh yeah, and his name is Chris too.

When one door closes, another opens; and sometimes, a monster comes through it.

The universe is terrifying it its ability to alter the alignment of your life. The lessons it desires you to learn are unfortunately carried to you on the wings of a traumatic experience. It’s almost as is if it is mockingly asking you if you have learned the lesson you needed to learn, and as you nod your head with tears in your eyes, it sadistically spits out “are you SURE?” before flinging the door back open and letting the demons of your past come roaring back, reminding you that yes indeed you must change something about your life, lest you become doomed to relive your most painful moments. If you can become aware of these cycles and messages, and sort through the murky waters of depressions, angers, and heartbreaks, you can and will grow as a person. You either pass the examination, get up and walk to the next grade up…or you fail and the unrelenting teacher will force you to re-take it. Its painful. Its hard. And it will grind you until you have been brought to your knees and forced to evaluate your deepest flaws and mistakes. Its the reason people cope so poorly. If it was easy to do these things, there would be a lot more happy and wise people in the world. Instead, we have a lot of people running around like chickens with their heads cut off in the midst of things that cause them sadness and to be upset. They lash out on social media. They go get drunk or do drugs. They berate those around them that care about them. This inability to cope in turn leads to bigger problems and staying upset much longer. It also leads to a missed lesson, which in itself is a tragedy. I also see a lot of people, in both good situations and bad, throw their arms up and say cliche things such as “it is what it is” or “it’s in God’s hands”. You can be a person of faith and still take in life’s lessons. Simply summing up the explicit coincidence’s that occur in life as a one line catch phrase, is like taking the pages to histories most beautifully penned works of literature and replacing the last pages with a comic book or children’s rhyme.
The most important lesson’s unfortunately come as painful & traumatic reminders, complete with cruel coincidence’s. This is the universe slamming its hand down on the desk to achieve your fullest attention as it asks “are you sure you’ve learned now?”

Again you are the smoke that is my breath

This bouquet of regret

For a long time, I had thought the beginning of the end was the night I found out my wife was seeing someone else behind my back. Later, after I discovered it was an affair that had started over a year before, it became merely the most horrible night of my life at the time. One of the things my wife inherited from me was my love of music. She picked out parts of my tastes and adapted them as her own, but in the end she was just a poser. I didn’t really think of it that way at the time, it was a lot of fun going to shows together and I genuinely enjoyed listening to music together. But I often caught her extending herself towards the musicians we met in ways that made me borderline uncomfortable. I’m not some groupie flinging myself trying to get people’s attention, I had a legitimate friendship with a lot of these people. The piece of shit she cheated on me with happened to be in a band we saw open up a show we went to while I was on a trip for work. She looked him up on Facebook and immediately started a disgusting & sexually inappropriate chain of conversations that turned into a full blown affair.
We went to see Dax Riggs on a humid summer night in 2013. The show was in Panama City Beach, at a pretty small bar that was probably used for shows that passed through town just because of a lack of other options. My wife, as usual, showed no judgement or awareness and got black out drunk pretty quickly into the night. This was without a doubt due to mixing cocktails with another substance. She was harassing a couple standing next to us almost the entire show, and just being more and more difficult to even be around. She also took notice of some other young girls standing directly in front of Dax while he was playing and made a snide comment about how they weren’t really important to him. There was something about the way she said it that was bizarre, and made me think “oh, and you are?”. We left halfway through the set because I couldn’t even keep her standing up.
While I was literally carrying her up the stairs, her cell phone fell out of her pocket and bounced down the stairs. I put her to bed and she was completely unconscious. After getting her situated, I went downstairs and picked up her phone. There was a text message as I was holding the phone that made me pause and just stare at the device I was holding in shock. Some other guy checking on her, finishing the text with “love you”. I read through the entire thread and I think I had an out of body experience. An entire relationship unfolded in front of me, photos of the two of them here in my hometown on the beach. She had flown this loser here using my money, after telling me to hit the road to go clear my head. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I called the phone number and left a message demanding that they stay away from my wife. Then I went upstairs and crawled into bed next to my corpse-like wife, and cried like a bitch.
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One of my most vivid memories of Samantha was when we saw Dax Riggs in Chicago a few years ago. We were exhausted from driving up from Florida and having extremely busy days in Atlanta and a beer festival in Indiana along the way. By the time we finally saw the show that night, we were seriously having trouble keeping our eyes open. We ended up seeing Dax before he went on, sitting in a booth alone. We sat and talked to him for a minute, and I took a photo of my wife next to him. This was before she had done anything that would give me cause for concern regarding musicians so I thought nothing of it. The actual show started late. When you go a certain amount of time without sleep, especially in a time frame of several nights with barely any rest, I think something happens to your mind and physical body. I felt like I was high, the lights of the stage blurring in front of me. “I Hear Satan” was the song being played, and my wife swayed in my arms, looking me dead in the eyes. We were surrounded by people, but it felt like we were alone in our own existence. It is the sexiest and intense moment I can remember about my marriage.
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This past Friday, my wife asked if we could at least be friends. She worded things in her usual sweet, hope inspiring style of manipulation. And finally, after all of the years of always giving in and thinking there could be some change, I replied “No”. And deep within my heart, and my mind, I knew that this was indeed the end. Of everything. For good. And fittingly enough, that night I went and saw Dax Riggs. This agent of oblivion had been the soundtrack to this entire fucked up journey of sadness and betrayal, and that night he was performing the last songs of a chapter that was closing forever.