I hope you are enjoying yourself and the presence of those you love. It is unique to have such connections to other organisms. We feel, so deeply… it’s what’s amazing about us. Humans.

I am a person striving for tranquility in existence: I have a week-to-week struggle to “make it” financially. Even with my wife working nearly full time… my work is primarily commission based. I’m not a salesperson, and I deal the straight-dope without the confusing vocabulary. People genuinely seem to appreciate that, and I have at least 15 returning customers who ask for me by name, and had me back out 3-5 different times on separate onsite service calls; a percentage of each total bill in my pocket (16% of the profit, anyways). So, I make long-term relationships, not “flash in the pan” sales numbers off single house-call invoices. I don’t know how to be any other way. I’m a terrible liar, and I ruin surprises. My wife calls me a “retarded puppy,” which I found to be a most fitting description. Business a computer technician is slowing down for the holidays, closing the circle, I’ve been wondering how I’m going to make rent this month. It’s an unstable balance, but we have go out there and TRY, and are doing the best we can. Day to day. Survival is my priority, and Jacqueline and I have managed to do that pretty well.

My wife and I are struggling to be independent people, of late; healthy human beings despite our disabilities. She has Depression (Major), and I deal with BiPolar Disorder type 2. My WIFE? WHAT IS THIS TALK. And not even the first one… OMG. Get the fuck out of here. No seriously, back when I lived in Santa Barbara, shortly after I left San Diego, I fell for a married woman, and she left her husband to be with me. And she got a divorce in 2006. And we were married in 2007, but it only lasted until the end of 2009, and was never the same relationship again after I attempted suicide.

She felt like it was may way of hurting her, or something, like MY trying to kill myself somehow means she’s a bad person… somehow intolerable enough to be worth killing myself because of the person she was. Like she drove me to it or something, which was only partially true. There is never just one thing that tips the scales; to where being alive is uninhibited agony. And the reasons for feeling are lost in a blood-like soup of resentment, illogical thoughts and burning anger. Reason is replaced by introspective self-destruction. Spiraling endlessly, down into a place where the core of the evil inside me is king; where life becomes meaningless, wasted moments of an ever-ominous, hateful, unrelenting reality, driving you down into nothing until death is all that remains. Then I thought, hey, why don’t I just fucking kill myself.

So that was a bad idea. Turns out, taking a half-full bottle of Trazodone won’t kill me. Just made my brain clog-up with cobwebs, blurry images of people I hated, and soon, the police. Because my wife called the cops in and had them 51-50 me. Danger to himself or others. 7 days in the mental hospital.

After the divorce, that whole social network up there that my cousin had originally invited me into, was obliterated. The husband and wife I stole, were the core of a fantastic D&D group. LARPed with them, played countless hours of D20 class-games, and had adventures of the rampant imagination a plenty. Our characters in her husband’;s D&D campaign fell in love late 2003, and then, the two REAL LIFE people fell for each other as well. And then we told her husband that we were feeling things for each other. Then we talked about it, and tried to come up with something to do about this Bizarre Love Triangle. He wasn’t particularly happy, because the marriage was already falling, and it just had MY TRULY catalytic influence enacted upon it, and was then blown to smithereens. It was over, and I was with a woman 9 years older than I… and we had such beautiful sex sometimes; she a post-graduate on her way to a PhD in psychology. She was experienced. But her new-found husband is BiPolar, and she hates him for never being what she wanted him to be, the man who romanced her out of her dying marriage, the man who made adultery seem like a magical journey. The very man who when at his lowest, most sad and hateful of states: all she could manage was to truly loath his weakness, his lack of control, his broken mind (so full of squandered potential), his ever accumulating fat. She thought she was a better variety of human than I. To her very core, she believed she was just, plain, BETTER than everyone. So she had a few enemies, and had an intolerance for me, as time drew on, and her dreams about who I really was, finally died. And in the end, my dependency ruined our life together as well. She took my depression personally, and she listened attentively to the most evil and loaded of maliciously spun words my dark and troubled mind could spat-out. She took my anguish into her self, and hated me for it. I’m not sure how it came to be so sick, putrid, and rank a circumstance, but she fought with me, every day, screaming. Just screaming. Looking at me with the burning eyes of hate. . And she despised my parents, who I secretly loved, but hated them too because she wanted me to (at the time). And I tried to be an academic for her, but dropped out of school short of earning my BA at UCSB. It would have been in English, with Literature or Writing as a minor.

My dad says; “If there was one thing, just one thing I wish I could have back, it would have been letting you go to Santa Barbara, back in October 2002. I would have made you stay here, and you never would have met her, and you never would have gone through BiPolar disorder alone.”

Now, they’re the greatest of support structures. They help me, and have ever since my rescue from total financial failure in late 2010. They came in and saved me from my broken life. A life that my wife had left me with, abandoned, overweight, depressed, and in an untenable circumstance.

Jacqueline and I just got back from having Christmas Breakfast with them, as a matter of fact. They loaded me up with cookies and sent the two of us home with more Christmas goodies than I could carry in one trip from the car to the apartment.

I have a more concrete narrative locked away in my head somewhere. Where more facts are laid down. More reason is applied to the memories. Things are assuredly skewed, because I’ve grown in to my disdain of that time, of those faces, of the things I did. I learned things, and sure, it changed who I was. It did things to me that I will never forget. And memories I can’t just un-make. I’m not sure how to swallow it, but there it is. In short, my first marriage to Jennifer.

I will be relaxing, eating a cookie, and be getting ready for a big Christmas Bailey, Co. Feast. 7 bone prime rib, taters, spinach casserole, more bread than you could shake a Galapagos tortoise at.

Have a wonderful day, and I shall continue the tale of progress towards “NOW” anew again soon!

~Wes