My Driving Ability

No this won't be a post extolling the grand exploits of my master stunt driving skills. Anyone who has ever rode in a car with me would call bullshit right away. In the interest of full disclosure I must admit two truths right now, one my balls and taint really itch right now, and two I am a horrible driver. Though I feel that my balls and taint are perhaps one of if not the most important of topics to cover, I am going to save them for a later date and describe my (lack of) driving abilities.

I think we can go all the way back to the day I took my test to get my driver's license to give a good example of why I probably shouldn't be on the road. I barely passed the test, as in if one more point got knocked off I would of failed. The best part was though that after the test was over and I was driving back to the test location I blew a stop sign with an oncoming car barreling towards me and the testing instructor nearly had a heart attack. She wanted to fail me on the spot but technically the test had ended so there was nothing she could do.

This was just the start to many many driving adventures. My first car was an 86 Park Avenue. The car was a piece of shit and broke down constantly but it did not help that it had a madman for an owner. Within an hour of getting the car I nearly rear ended someone. By nearly I mean I locked up the brakes and had to swerve off the road and into a field to miss the car. About a month later in a gas station I took a turn two wide and side swiped a car denting the entire side of the person's car. This person happened to be my mom by the way. I still remember the look of disappointment on her face.

Over the next year I hit two walls, yes walls, backing into them. I ran over multiple curbs and ran an old lady on a bicycle off the road (it was an accident). Since that was over 10 years ago I will admit I didn't stop and kept driving. Hopefully she didn't break a hip. Almost a year after getting my license I rear ended some woman absolutely smashing the front of my car. I forget how much damage it caused my vehicle but it was a substantial amount.

My next car was a 92 tornado. I don't recall any major accidents in that car but I do remember driving home from a girlfriends a bit drunk and woke up as my head hit the roof of my car as I had driven over a curb through a mailbox and into someones front lawn. Luckily I was able to steer the car back onto the street before I took out half the house. About a week later my transmission went out. Also wondered if one had something to do with the other.

I think you get the point by now. The other day my bro said "I notice that your answer to any driving problem you encounter is to mash on the gas." That seems to be the case. Alright I will finish this tomorrow lol there is so many incidents I am skipping over it would be a travesty not to include them. If you are reading this re-read it again tomorrow there will be a lot more.

Sad Man Behind Blue Eyes

So am I resorting to ripping of lyrics from the Who? I guess maybe. Sometimes when you listen to a song the lyrics can speak out to you in a way other forms of writing cannot. This kind of makes sense as songs are essentially poetry set to music. The National Anthem began life as a poem that was eventually put to music.

So why in fact did I chose the song Behind Blue Eyes for the title to this blog entry? I have heard multiple interpretations to the lyrics of the song ranging from it is about a pedophile, to being about a cop, or even being about Pete Townsend and his drug use. I don't really care what some self indulged drugged out rocker meant behind the words though. For me, I take things and apply them as I see fit.

I find more and more that very few people know the true me. This is not without reason since I put on a front or act to nearly everyone around me. Behind my calm but laughing and jovial demeanor hides a lonely and tragic figure who cannot relate to most of the world around him. I don't feel a sense of closeness to most people that others feel.

That is not to say that I do not care about about those around me. If anything I care quite a bit, but even those I care about the most I feel intensely uncomfortable being around them for any length of time. I cannot even pick up the phone and call someone I have been friends with for years without feeling a great sense of anxiety. Even around my own family I feel like an outsider looking in.

Have you ever heard of the story of Atlas? He was a titan of Greek mythology who supported the spheres of the heavens upon his back. That is the way I often feel like, that the weight of the world rests upon my shoulders. It does not make any sense really since I am not a world leader or person of great importance but all the same I feel that stress in my day to day life.

 

I am not crazy nor am I suicidal. I took this picture the other night and it would appear I was either one or the other but I am neither. I am not even sure why I took the picture. I had an extremely stressful weekend filled with so many ups and downs I could fill an entire book. By the time Sunday evening rolled around I was exhausted and had no where left to go but inward. I didn't like what I found there so I searched outward for a means of feeling pain so that I might remember what it felt like to be alive. But I am not one for self inflicting pain so I settled on taking a lame photograph of myself holding an unloaded gun to my head with a semi-crazy look on my face. 

The other day the person I consider closest to me, in every way possible, told me there was something tragic in my eyes. Behind all the laughing and joking there was a look of pain. I tried down playing it at the time but this person seems knows me better than that and saw right through my attempts. 

Certainly the fact that I cannot grow a good mustache does weight heavily upon my mind in this picture but there are far greater implications. Since the person said this, I have looked at this picture often to try and see what they had seen.

I posted a video today on my facebook profile from the 2009 movie Doubt with Meryl Streep. No I am not turning homosexual, I just happened to run across the ending of the movie on youtube and thought it conveyed my own beliefs. I have doubt, such doubts that I will ever be able to be truly happy in life. There are moments in life I begin to feel like I am getting closer to finding a sense of happiness I hear about so often in movies and on television but then it seems like bad news rears its ugly head. Something waiting in the wings to tear it down before it can even grow. In the end I just put on my sunglasses and pretend like nothing bothers me, an indestructible rock devoid of emotions, while inside another piece of me dies. 

What's worse is that I am afraid that I will push away the one person who does understand me. I want to warn them not to go searching further because they will not like what they find. 

With that out of the way and off my chest I will go back to the Jason Act and being the laughing funny person everyone expects. 

---Edited Feb. 2012--- I have for some time debated about whether or not to delete this entry. I have mixed emotions about the post. This was written during one of the most difficult periods of my life. My former marriage had long since crumbled but we were still inhabiting the same apartment. It made for one of the most miserable periods of my life. My ex wife had turned into a very bad alcoholic that was also prone to violence. She had alienated all of her friends and most of her family due to her drunken rages. I was receiving the worst of the lot and had a couple years ago just decided to shut off my emotions completely. 

I had for 2 years or better wandered through life in a daze like a zombie. It was a defense mechanism to deal with a major depression that had set in. I was not happy from the beginning and things just got progressively worse. I did not think there was much chance of any happiness in life and I really just accepted having a miserable life. I think this had a lot to do with my up bringing as I do not think my father was ever really happy in life and I know that my parents marriage strung along for years in unhappiness just for my sake growing up. In hindsight this did me no favors as dealing with a divorce as a child is tough but what kind of harm is dealt seeing a loveless marriage and thinking that is normal. It left a big black mark on my life that followed me into adult hood. 

Then I met someone who changed everything I ever thought about life. I saw things in a completely different light. It is funny how you just don't realize how unhappy you are until someone gives you a reason to be happy. The problem was that we had so many outside our control factors that would work to keep us for being together. When I wrote this entry it was the weekend of my birthday and it just reinforced how helpless I felt. A big part of me wanted to just give up on life and sell off what I owned and just lead the life of a wandering nomad, a ronin with no master. 

That picture of me holding a gun to my head is very controversial to myself. I think it gives the wrong impression that I was suicidal but that was not the case at all. The gun was not loaded and I gave no thoughts to ending my life. Rather it was some sort of expression of how I felt that my life was so far out of my own control at the time. Some people might use that picture against me saying that it shows I am unstable or any number of things. While they have that right it is a distortion of the purpose behind the picture. If that is the best fire power you have against me than that says something about your argument.

Training Updates

Training has been slow the past couple of weeks. Been mixing in more and more boxing/fight training to supplement the lifting which has trailed off considerably. I find it hard to eat lately and even harder to just keep on track. Seems like lately I went from total tunnel vision when I train to my mind wondering to all sorts of things. I know why this is the case and I am fighting hard to counter act it, but I am not sure it is a fight I can win at the moment. So I just grit my teeth and bear with it.

Some Mysteries Revealed

So I found out some answers to some long standing questions I had.

I found out the answer to the riddle of the man-child. It turns out that the reason why I always see him walking around with a backpack is because he does that for fitness reasons. He fills the backpack up with "weight" and walks around town every day. I have actually noticed that in the time since I have moved here he has dropped a good deal of weight so good for him.

No I take that back. He looks like a damn rapist and chances are if you look like a rapist you probably are. I am sure he just walks around looking for his next victim then hits them over the head with one of those weights and drags them into an alley. Sick fuck.

Next is the mystery of what happened to the black lady who moved into the end unit. JC found out from Megan across the street that while Megan was in jail for crashing into a parked car inbetween taking shots of jack daniels our neighbor was in there as well. Apparently she got arrested almost immediately upon moving in and has been sitting in jail since then. Question? How the fuck is her rent being paid. I miss one paycheck and there is a problem getting rent on time but somehow she can be in jail and still not get evicted. Beats the fuck out of me. Do black people have something hardwired in their DNA on how to work over the system? Wait most my neighbors are white and live off the governments tit. Maybe it is just that I lack said DNA so I just have to do that wild and crazy thing called work hard for my money. Oh well.

Training Log Update

Well I completed my 14 week training cycle. Everything went more or less according to plan  despite some initial set backs as far as the squat goes. Never significantly injured my back deadlifting so that is a good sign. I am going to spend the next couple of weeks doing "off season" training then jump back into another training cycle. Since I have already peaked out I have decided to reintroduce some fight training. I will probably still do some during the next training cycle since the next one will probably be more bodybuilding oriented than powerlifting oriented as I really want to drop some weight. That was my goal during the last cycle but as the strength shot up I kind of lost sight of that and just went for as much strength as possible.

Some yesterday I did some boxing training. Later I am going to try to get in some MMA/Wrestling training. Try to split my time between the two. I haven't trained grappling in a long time and want to get back on the mat. Tomorrow I will go over the modifications to my training as far as weight training goes that I make when doing "off season" training.

Long Overdue Updates

Haven't posted on the blog for some time. No real reason why. Most of my neighbors have moved out or are in jail (more on that later). I was on call for a week meaning I had little free time, and I have just plain lost motivation to write on the blog (long story that I am not going to tell you about). Going to kick start things a bit with a few posts tonight.

I finally finished Chapter 5 of my story. It was  struggle but I plowed through it. Thankfully I will be able to go back over it when I am finished and tidy it up because it is really raw and rambling. Still though it contained a pretty big revelation (that was originally going to happen much later in the story but I decided to move up) hence one reason why I struggled in writing it. I hard time conveying in words just how big of a deal it was. I still think I fell short somewhat and who knows when I am done I may end up taking it out and putting it farther back in the story. Nothing is set in stone.

Clarification on "It's Complicated"

It seems that the ambiguity of my previous entry entitled "It's Complicated" has led to many people making assumptions on just what I meant by that post. Much like the mysterious suitcase in the movie Pulp Fiction, there have been many wild guesses as to what question was asked of me and what my answer was.  It is comical the range of guesses that have been leveled my way on the subject in the past day.

Let me let any readers of this blog in on a deep dark secret. Yes, unlike the movie Pulp Fiction, I am going to reveal the secret nature behind the entry. There was no question nor was their any answer. Remember the whole point of a macguffin is that it is irrelevant to what is trying to be told.

One movie I have always been fond of is the movie The Prophecy. I found the unique take on Angels that coincides much closer to their depiction in the bible rather than what we are presented with in popular culture to be quite interesting. One particular scene early in the movie has a detective encountering a mysterious man in his apartment. The mystery man is actually an Angel but the Detective (formerly a seminary student studying to be a priest before having visions of angels locked in a vicious war) is unaware of this at the time. The Angel, named Simon (portrayed by Eric Stolz), asks the Detective, "Do you believe you are part of God's plan?" To which the Detective responds "That's a complicated Question". Simon then replies, "No it isn't".

So yes I basically based the entry off an obscure movie scene reference. I found it to be an interesting exchange that often pops in my head. As I skimmed through facebook I noticed someone on my friends list in the matter of only a couple hours relationship status went from "In a relationship" to "It's Complicated" and back again several times. I think this back and forth lasted no less than 5 turnabouts before settling on It's Complicated. I found this quite ironic and only guessed that the person and their significant other were going through some kind of squabble and the person was using their facebook profile to fuel the fire.

Does that mean the entry is insignificant? Not at all. There were certainly aspects that related back to my current life but so far it has complete defied any ones attempts to dissect it. This is understandable though as I flipped back and forth several times throughout the entry. I purposely left things very vague to keep people guessing just what the hell I meant. Add in that I was not even sure where I was going with it. I only had a vague idea of what I was talking about when I began it.

Is my life a Shakespearean tragedy? I certainly hope not, because quite frankly many of his plays did not end on a particularly high note. That does not mean I was just pulling words out of my ass, as certainly I could draw many parallels but probably not in the way most of you would guess. One secret I will reveal, there is only one person who knows just what the fuck half the shit I say really even means, besides myself.

I find a certain amusement drawing people in and then confusing them by back tracking on what I say. Who knows maybe there really was a question and an answer. Maybe the movie the Prophecy never even entered into my head when I wrote the blog and only later used that movie quote to justify the post. Maybe it is not meant for you to know.

In life not everything has a simple answer. The whole story does not always make sense at the end. This is no after school tv special. Next time you read an entry and wonder if I meant something behind the post, chances are I did. Chances are though you are wrong about what I meant. I only really explain myself to one person. Why is that? I have a strong urge for at least one person to understand me. For everyone else I'd just like for you to read on...

I have some more funny stories on the horizon, so don't worry if you are tired of all the self reflection.