When I originally came up with the idea of doing a day of music videos, the original plan was to find 12.  No more.  Most people probably won’t look at more than one or two; I realize that. They were actually all written prior to the blog outage of earlier in the week, and I wasn’t even sure if the blog would be back online before their scheduled time passed by. Thankfully it came back prior to Sept 1.

I could have just left them the way they were intended, but I decided to write a 13th post.  Why?

Things have changed somewhat since the original 12 were written. I don’t normally write specifically about relationships in my life, but this will be an exception. Most times I simply hint at things.  The people who are in the know… well.. they know.  The rest are left scratching their heads, wondering what the hell I’m talking about.  I do hope that certain people read this, but I have deliberately removed the ability to comment on this post… not that I expect anyone would. But you just never know.

I was not familiar with this song until I saw it on a SYTYCD routine. It’s a little different than normal. I certainly was not prepared for the video when I watched it the first time. But that’s fine… the song is still relevant…

I’ve begun to seriously question lately whether I’m emotionally “broken”. In the last year I’ve squandered two perfectly good relationships because I’ve been unable to leap an emotional hurdle.  In both instances the women offered me everything that I could possibly ask for… friendship, companionship, understanding, even love…  And for my part… I continued to hold back.  I was unable or unwilling to meet them half way.  And even though I never intended to hurt them, I know that is what happened.  When you give your heart to someone completely, and do not receive the same in return… it hurts.  I understand that all too well.

I’ve had friends tell me that I’m simply not ready to date.  That, until I can completely resolve old feelings, I will only make things worse… not only for myself, but for the other people as well.  So I’m re-examining some things in my life.  The concept of “The One” is particularly troublesome for me.  Because, if my self-serving definition is correct, I’m essentially useless to anyone else until I deal with that.  And not just say that I’m dealing with it.. but really deal with it.  It’s been pointed out to me by more than one person that the power is mine to choose whether or not to let past relationships eat at me… or to shelf them and move on.  And saying that you’re moving on, and actually moving on are two different things.

So if I’m not moving on, why is that?  Am I biding my time, hoping for a better outcome?  Am I intentionally torturing myself for some past wrong-doing?  I’ve been told that I’m self-destructive.  I find it difficult to argue that point.  I don’t really have the answer to these questions.  Or I’m afraid to admit the answers to myself.

Why take everything you see?
You’ll have nothing left to squander
If you keep pushing me away
You’ll have no one left to love

Why take everything you see?
You’ll have nothing left to squander
If you keep pushing me away
You’ll have no one left to, no one left to love

I think that it’s time for some serious soul-searching.  I’ve pushed away two fantastic women, and I’m not proud of that. A third won’t talk to me.  And that doesn’t even include my failed marriage!  I’ve got to take some time and figure some things out, because I simply can not continue to operate like this.  It’s ripping me apart, and unfortunately it affects other people as well.

The Steve 2.0 plan was supposed to set everything on the right path, but a chance encounter changed my course entirely.

If you keep pushing me away
You’ll have no one left to love

Sometimes my little guy surprises me.  Most times, I think of him as a typical 6… er, I guess he’s 7 now… year old boy. He fights with his sister. He wants to play XBox. He doesn’t like girls. (Give him a few years… he’ll grow out of it)

But then sometimes he surprises me. A few weeks ago he asked me if I liked my job. Huh? Where did that come from? When I tried to find a nice way of putting it, he stopped me and asked me again. Then he said “So sometimes you have to do something you don’t want to do, for money?” Then he gave me a big hug, and walked away. The kid was 6 at the time.

Now he’s 7 and last night I was sitting out on the steps, talking on the phone, and admiring the full moon reflecting over the river. My little guy came out and quietly sat down beside me. After my phone conversation was done, I asked him what he was doing. Quiet is not something that he normally does well.

“Looking at the moon… I’m watching the clouds… the gun just went over it.”

Yup, sure enough… there was a break in the clouds that looked very much like a handgun.  It had passed over the moon a short time before.

I was pretty well stunned. This was very much something that I would do. And if either of my children were going to be sitting out there with me, I would have put money on my daughter being the one, not my son. But there he was, admiring the full moon… imagining shapes in the cloud cover. The gun was easy enough. But then he saw a man holding his thumb up… an alligator with his jaws open… neither of these were apparent to my eyes, but I appreciated his imagination at work. It was me… a tiny version of me… No XBox, or Nintendo DS… just a simple full moon with passing clouds…

And there we sat.

To live in Freedom.  The most fundamental of human rights, yet in many parts of the world, this basic right does not exist.  There, men, women and children live in a world foreign to most of us.  But what happens when that loss of Freedom occurs closer to home?

In the Absence of Freedom, your identity is stripped from you.  Your movements are not your own.  Your hopes and desires are quietly extinguished until all that remains is a broken shell.  Only the strongest survive. Even then, the change is irreversible.  The scars remain unseen, but they are evident to those who know where to look.

In the Absence of Freedom, the cracks surrounding the Soul widen a little more each day.  Once vivid dreams eventually become distant memories.  Joy turns to sadness.   Laughter fades away.  Some turn to Faith.  Others to Darkness.  Salvation seems unattainable. Inevitably, the most hardened will shatter.

In the Absence of Freedom, your eyes become glazed.  Time is meaningless.  Trust is weakness.  Promises are made that might otherwise never be imagined.  The Devil drives a hard bargain.  You struggle to remain one step ahead at all times.  The only one fooled is yourself.

In the Absence of Freedom, the heart yearns for Life.   Silent screams go unheard. Madness is your bed fellow.  You concentrate on the little things.  Each one is a victory of sorts. Contact with the Free renews a sense of worth.  Purpose.  Perhaps Life does have meaning?

In the Absence of Freedom, only the Love of Another can pull you back from the brink of destruction.

Only then, will you be Free.

So I’m driving into work tonight… it’s a beautiful evening… all the windows are rolled down…  I’ve got one elbow propped up in the open window… the other hand on the wheel… listening to Hinder’s Better Than Me as loud as the speakers will go without distortion… I’m lost in thought… but calm… relaxed…   it’s a long stretch of highway…  the only thing I can see are two cars approaching in the distance…

Then one decides to pass the other.  It’s ok.  It’s a legal passing zone… plenty of visibility… plenty of distance between us…

But the second car doesn’t appear to be actually passing the first.  At least not very quickly.

It’s an interesting sight.  There are two cars essentially parallel with each other, moving at highway speeds… one is directly in front of me, and the distance is closing rapidly.  Surely he’s going to move, right?  He’d better, because I wasn’t.

That’s the odd thing about this entire scenario… I didn’t flinch… my hands didn’t move from where they had been on the wheel… I was still leaning against the open window… still listening to Better Than Me…   I was curious about what the other driver was doing, but I wasn’t overly worried.  Even when I saw the second car start to pull off the shoulder to allow the passing car room to get back into the proper lane… I simply looked straight ahead at the oncoming car and figured that he would get back into his own lane if he didn’t want us to collide…

I was right.  At what should have been an uncomfortably close distance he swerved back into his lane.  I could see him quite clearly.  Asshole.

It’s been the one thing that has been keeping the separation from progressing into a full divorce.  The house.  Way back when we decided to build the house, my name was the only one that went on the mortgage.  We felt that her student loans might impact the bank’s decision, and opted to have me go at it solo.  The deed to the house was in both names, so it belonged to both… but the financial responsibility lay solely with me.  The bank thought that was a little strange, but that’s fine.  We did what we felt we had to do, and never even considered that there might be a time when all was not blissful in married-land.

Fast forward a few years, and we have the current reality.  A mortgage with my name solely tattooed to it, for a house that I no longer live in.  Our attempts to have it transfered to her were met with laughter from the banking institution. In the years since I successfully applied for that mortgage there have been several financial setbacks.  While the bank was happy to continue accepting my biweekly payments, the risks of having it transfered were simply too great.  Let’s be honest, I am 100% positive that if I was to get out of this mortgage, and apply for the exact same one tomorrow, I would not qualify.  As long as I continue to pay on an existing one, great.  But that will be the last mortgage I’m able to qualify for, for quite some time.

More than one person expressed disbelief that I would continue to carry a mortgage for a house I was no longer living in, for as long as I have.  It’s easy to see a separation/divorce in a negative light.  We chose not to.  The situation was not ideal, but we chose to work through it… if not for the children, then at least for our friendship.  I’m sure that I could have pressed the point, and forced a decision on the house much sooner.  But to what end?

She’s put a lot of work into the house over the last year.  Ideally it would have been nice to have had it ready to go on the market in the spring, but that didn’t happen.  Better late, than never.

So now the papers are signed.  I have no idea what the housing market is like.  I have no idea whether the house will sell quickly, or at all.  My hope is that it does go quickly, if only so the children are not disrupted through the school year. It would be nice if they were able to move into their new home during the summer, especially if it requires changing schools.

And there’s the next problem for me.  This is the only home that they have ever known, and despite its imperfections, it is home.  They’re young, so they think of moving as a big adventure.  But I have to wonder if it will wear off.  I know that they won’t be going into a house right away.  I hope that wherever they end up, they’re happy.

And once the house issue is finally settled once and for all… I guess that there’s nothing holding us back from signing the next set of papers…

I’ve been doing a little light reading on my days off… some of it can be pretty technical, and I don’t pretend to understand those parts, but I’ll trust that the people who are supposed to, actually do understand these things.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.   Hmm…  that’s a bit of a mouthful.  Couldn’t they come up with something a little simpler?  SSRI?  OK then.  SSRI it is.  But what the hell does it do?  Corrects a chemical imbalance in the brain that may be related to symptoms of depression or anxiety. Sweet.  So it re-wires the brain.  Lovely.

So I kept reading…   approved for the treatment of a number of mood and anxiety disorders including depression, social anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) in adults ages 18 and older. Hmm…. there’s a lot of different stuff in that list.  I think we can eliminate a couple of those right off the top.  premenstrual dysphoric disorder? Yeah, like that one.

So essentially this is a happy pill, like a Smarty or an M&M?  Something to put a smile on your face.  Sounds good so far.  But if that’s the upside, what’s the downside?  There’s always a downside, right?   The most common side effects are dry mouth (OK, no problem.  An excuse to keep a Coke on hand) , insomnia (yeah, unlikely), diminished sexual interest (ummm…  OK), decreased sexual performance (Hey!  Now hold on a minute!), diarrhea (Oh, this is just getting better and better), nausea (But of course!), and sleepiness (Well, now I have an excuse… although doesn’t this contradict the insomnia one?) . Not everyone gets side effects. (Well that’s great.  How many get all of them?)

And then there was the little part about the risk of suicidal tendencies in people under 25, but I’m way beyond that now…

Well I guess that there’s nothing more left to say about that.

I was looking for something specific the other night… a graphic that would give some sort of visual representation to the feeling of “moving on”.  It’s not an easy task trying to find a single picture that conveys a bag of mixed emotions.  I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.  Or if I’d even recognize it if I managed to stumble upon it.

I have to give Google Images credit.  It did a decent job of throwing pictures at me that may or may not have been what I was looking for.  Many of them dealt with footwear and the physical act of moving.  Some were closer to what I thought I wanted… book covers, or depictions of poems or other words of comfort.  But then I saw something that caught my eye… a tiny thumbnail of a crudely drawn cartoon, very similar to the stick men that I sometimes create when I’m bored.  This was not what I was expecting to find…

I clicked on the thumbnail and read the cartoon carefully.  I was blown away by its simplicity and the personal feeling of familiarity.  It looked like something that I could have created…  if I had any ability whatsoever.  I knew instantly that this was exactly what I wanted.

Then I started to read through the rest of the blog.  The cartoon is called HappySad, and that’s exactly what it is.  It’s not fancy, but it’s very insightful.  I’ll admit, I had to  look up what domain extension .be was.  Turns out that it’s Belgium!  I’ve never run into any websites from Belgium before, but I’m very happy that I discovered this one!

If you have a moment, try taking a look at HappySad.  It’s probably not for everyone, but I found it quite interesting.  Certainly many of the cartoons there hit close to home.  Maybe even click on a Google ad, or two.  It doesn’t hurt, and I’m sure that the artist would appreciate it.

And… in case you’re wondering… I present to you…

“Moving On”