Man on fire

 When you are on fire there are two types of people that will come running towards you: those with water and those with gasoline. The trick is figuring out what they have before they reach you. The ones with gas are far more common and unless they can gain something from putting the fire out, they will douse you with the more flammable liquid and take out the competition for whatever game they are playing internally. All too often, they'll be telling you its water until they are close enough to drench you with gas. 

We have to develop our own internal extinguisher. Then it doesn't matter what they have in their bucket, you'll never let them close enough to find out. 

Too often we start the fires ourselves and don't know the difference between the two, pouring gas all over every mistake in an effort to quickly put out fires while making them 100x worse. We make countless mistakes and look to firefighting guides without taking stock of what set the fire in the first place. 

 I suppose writing this to myself is an attempt to fix my internal extinguisher. It was as broken as it gets until about a year ago. I was broken and sought the company of gas holders. I suppose when you love the smell of gas you really don't care if water is better for you. I'm just now learning to love water more. 

Respect in the wrong circles

Respect to me is mutual in any relationship. In order to receive respect you must be respectful of others. 

Being respected is a funny thing sometimes. Often if you are nice and kind (respectful) to the wrong people, you can be disrespected in return. Everyone is trying to get ahead in life, and people have varying degrees of morality in their ways to achieve success. 

I think sometimes I might be blind to a person's moral integrity. That is something to work on, using the great "moral sieve" and weeding out the nefarious among us. After certain life-altering events, a person can gain a new perspective on life and I no longer feel the need to give people around me chances until they are close enough to dole out some real damage. 

Live and learn, c'est la vie and all that... at least now I know. It's just lonely sometimes when you have to leave the majority of your former close friends behind, as they have burned you irreparably. 

Chances and forgiveness do not come easy in this new and improved mindset and way of living, but self-actualization and personal progress have never been more abundant when you subtract the disrespect from others.

About a Girl

 I fell in love with

her Hope Sandoval impression

while she smoked cigarettes in the 

folding lawn chair 

in the corner of my garage. 

 

She could always make me smile, 

and she could always 

rip my heart away from my body in silence, 

with a Cheshire Cat grin 

and her fingers crossed behind her back. 

 

I want you inside me, 

she said. 

And I was too stupid to reply. 

I pushed the door open 

for her to slither onto my bed 

and take my soul away 

on any particular night of the week. 

 

This was a pattern 

and until yesterday, 

I was always more than happy 

to feed her sick delusions. 

 

I was a sucker for big brown eyes and plump lips, 

not too mention 

the rest of her, 

which didn’t show the miles put on 

by a reckless driver. 

 

She was lucky to dodge 

the wear and tear 

many of her experience

tend to show. 

 

She couldn’t have children, 

if she could

there would be 

a few regrets 

biting the ankles 

of the ghosts 

who were dumb enough to ignore the red flags 

for the eyes, 

and lips, 

and the rest of her

 

Rebirth of a Man

 

As far as I am concerned I have died, but for the approximately three people that care about me at this point in my life, I haven't completely perished. I never wanted to off myself, I just hated the guy that warranted disrespect from people close to me. The kid that thought everyone was against him. The asshole that thought the world owed him something. I hated that sucker and wanted to kill him, so I did.

There are parts of me that survived, but the shitty drunk party boy is gone. The poisoned, pleasure seeking and lustful guy that I spent my young adult life feeding substances to is dead. Thank fuck.

No longer bound by internal and primal urges, the mentality of living becomes exponentially better. In a sense you can learn from your past mistakes, keep any good attributes and take the bad attributes out back and line them up like an execution and murder them in cold blood. 

  Allow me to reintroduce myself.  

That part of me no longer exists. The part of me that survived is a better man in every way. Keep the change and fuck off if you don't like it. I'm better now.

 

Good Riddance.

The Kickstart

 Life doesn't pan out the way you planned out. 

That was a big "aha" moment when I figured that out. I always try to plan everything perfectly, everyone else has their own motives and they don't give a shit about your planning. I tried to make things as perfect as I could and that just exploded on me over and over again. 

Countless hours (days, weeks?) spent worrying about others opinions and clamouring for justice has left me sitting here like a goddamned useless human, wasting away the days until I die. 

Thankfully, revelations can exist in our psyches right beside all that negativity and strife that we burden ourselves with. 

I had a revelation. 

Gone are the times of worrying about others, it is time to only focus on the things I can control. It is time to control myself and my family's affairs (my son) only. Everyone else doesn't matter, what they say or do has no bearing on my existence and the only way to succeed is to optimize my own experience on this earth. 

So what does that mean? Start with cutting dead weight, and lose the losers in life. As soon as I am able to, start making money again. Invest wisely in the future. Go to the gym five times a week and have active rest days in between. Eat healthy, don't drink enough alcohol to get intoxicated. Learn another language and learn another instrument. Read and write everyday. Simple as that. The human experience becomes easy to conceptualize optimization and tough to actualize optimization. Make it easy on yourself. Develop habits that change your world from the inside out. 

We all start somewhere. 

 

This is where I start.

 

Motivation

I don't know what motivation is, or how I'm supposed to get it, or keep it. 

Some days I feel destined for greatness and some days I am full of self-doubt and wonder how I can even feed my son for another month. 

I've been put on hold for a year, good. A year of my life hasn't been stolen, this is a gift. I have to look at it as a gift. I can use it to create, to improve and use it as a cocoon towards emerging a fully realized,  super powered version of the man I used to be. That is what will happen. 

Gym everyday, read everyday, write everyday, better man-better person, inside-out. 

But how do I leave the shitty parts of myself behind while levelling up the good parts? Surely I have good parts, I just need to tap into the right aspects to do this with. Destroy the ego, inflate the creative. 

The first draft of anything is shit - that's a Hemingway quote I've subscribed to since I was young and actually wrote, but if it's taken me 10+ years to write the first draft, how the fuck long is it going to take to finish? Do I need an editor? Do I need a therapist? Life coach? Yes

Is motivation enough to pull me out of this deep depression? No matter how it was caused, I think that may be the only answer. Without the crutches of alcohol and nicotine, I may be a bit creatively hobbled, but I will not let that paralyze my output. Alcohol may help to remove inhibitory factors in creativity, but the ideas and the thoughts are mine. They just need to be freed from sober-thought shackles and let out into the world again. 

That's what this year is about. Motivation is breaking the chains of mediocrity and the whispers of not good enough. 

Fuck the hate, return to love. Be the best version of who you are, and never forget the balance to all things.

Somewhere Deep Inside

 I am in there somewhere still. 

I have had a shitty year, to put it mildly. Do not take that statement lightly, I have had a down year to rival all the down years I've seemed to have since being a misguided teenager. Life hasn't been easy. 

Despite this, until last year I always held a silent optimism that my world and precarious life would turn out. No matter what happened to me, I saw the good in people and still held an enormous amount of love for my friends. Looking back now, perhaps that was to a fault, but I saw the good in people until I got got by trusting the wrong ones. 

Perhaps it was a case of misplaced affection (or several), but I truly wanted anyone I was even remotely close to, to succeed, and would constantly have good things to say about people to push them in that direction. I was never one for badmouthing people, and could not understand those who spoke poorly about their "friends."

I have made some mistakes along the way, as we all have, but I would never intentionally hurt anyone and I care so much about my people, no matter how big or small my circle of trust will ever become. 

I am well-aware I live a rather twisted type of charmed life, I fully recognize that I became lucky by proxy of a wealthy father passing away and leaving my caring mother enough money to allow her to travel endlessly and myself enough to chase my ideals of a good work-life balance (otherwise known as "anything but teaching"). I strive to never be that person that doesn't realize how lucky they are, I know I am a fortunate son in some ways, not so much when dad was still around but in the years since he passed I have had everything I need and most of what I have wanted. 

But no amount of money could prepare me (and our family) for this year. 

Bang, my sister died, in a completely unexpected and devastating fashion she died. It tore what was left of our (now small) family from it's roots and nothing was ever the same again. 

Pow, a friend who I had known for years did everything short of trying to bury me alive by completely separating from me in an incredibly vulnerable time of my life. Destroying the business idea we were involved in after I had sunk countless hours into creating a brand and marketing plan from the ground up. My world began to spin. 

Boom, in my lowest state I reached out to a girl who I dearly, dearly loved but was very, very bad for me. We started "dating" again and she defaulted back to her 20 year old self, showing zero support for me and basically using me for her own traumatized support dog purposes. She would never stoop so low to read anything I write but if she ever does, I sincerely hope you find the help you need. Hurt people undoubtedly hurt people and in this case, it was just two hurt people bleeding on each other, no way to heal while they are both about to bleed out. Our little reconciliation lasted about two terrible months. 

Crack (the attempted death blow), I spent most of my adult life working and spending time in pubs, and got involved with some pretty shitty people. One of them, broke up with her boyfriend (who I later learned she was serially cheating on, with me and multiple others), and then when I went to comfort her, she asked me to take a trip to Cuba with her. At first I didn't want to go but then as I had more drinks, the idea of sitting on a Caribbean beach crushing rum with a cute girl started to sound pretty good. After about 4 hours of her asking and looking up places to go, I agreed. I bought the tickets that night and she confirmed through text message the next morning. 

When the 24 hour period to cancel my tickets ended, she must have reconciled with her poor boyfriend and ghosted me. I went on the trip anyways, having a blast. 

That night I went to comfort her I also gave her a women's hockey jersey I had laying around. There wasn't much connection to it, and I thought it was a nice gesture to cheer her up. 

When I returned home from Cuba, I had no intention of ever contacting the girl again, but I wanted my damn Jersey back. So I texted her roommate. This fuckin guy started giving me a hard time and saying that I booked a trip without her knowledge or consent and just expected her to go. This was the proverbial straw.

They then spread horrible rumours that I did some even worse things (I can't even mention these without feeling sick). 

I lost it on three people, the friend who disowned me after Myranda's death and these two complete jackal muppets, for trying to ruin my life. I asked them to gather the whole bar to come to my house and I would kill them all. I also quoted DMX lyrics and did not consider them to take anything I was saying that serious, it was mostly trash talk. I would have liked to fight them at that point, excluding the girl. (Anyone that truly knows me, knows it would be impossible for me to kill anyone, no matter how mad I was). 

This is when they ruined my and my family's life by calling the police and showing them these texts. Doubling down on the deceit and lies in their witness statements, they straw-manned their case against me in the most evil way possible. 

This is where I eventually called a high-priced lawyer to sort everything out. As it stands, I am being tried for uttering threats x3, and face a maximum prison sentence of around 20 years. 

I have struggled with my mental game ever since, I was already reeling with my sister's passing, and now these people were trying to bury me with her. 

I no longer really trust anyone (besides Henry, who is innocent to all this and doesn't deserve his father's punishment, no matter how trivial). 

I often consider ending my life. The spark for continuing on has diminished to a point that the flame is flickering with such a slight bend and has the distinct smell of a campfire after pouring out the final beer of a night all over it. Again, Henry does not deserve that and is the sole reason I stay away from the trigger. 

I also do not want to give these people the satisfaction of ending me. To me this is completely evil. There are a whole slew of former friends that do not know the real story and side with them, thinking I asked this girl to go on a vacation and then threatened her and her friends when she said no. I find so much hate in my heart for everyone involved that knows what actually happened, but do not blame people if they do not know the true story. 

If you have any compassion in your heart, and you read this and know me, please share it. The story needs to be told. I cant work until it is settled without leaving my son, that is not an option. I need the real story to get out. 

These people (and their fake witnesses) are trying to destroy my life. 

I will survive, I will trundle forward despite losing the majority of my friends and a piece of my sanity. I have learned much from this and do not deserve to be treated this way. 

There is still that good human deep inside myself that I am not going to let a bunch of regulars at a shitty neighbourhood pub extinguish. 

I will beat these allegations against my character, my conscience and my mental acuity. 

Karma of knowing the real story will eat them from the inside eventually, but I need the world to know as well, so I can stop being persecuted for what amounts to a girl that belongs to the streets, and doesn't want her boyfriend finding out she cheats on him constantly, and is willing to completely ruin someone else on the off chance of that happening.  

I will get better and prove everyone who doubts me in the slightest wrong.

Thanks for reading. Please pass this along to anyone that needs to read it, as it it is truly a matter of my life. 

If I never received this text confirming she wanted to go, I would've cancelled. Although I have no proof the trip was her idea, it was. And then she ruined my life because of this.