So this is like a month old.

Fuck it.

/* 2011-08-17

Tonight after explaining to Lurn how my day was, she shook her head and said “Your life.. is complicated.” And while I don’t disagree with her, it continues to strike me as incredibly odd whenever I give it even the semblance of serious thought. My life really /is/ complicated.

Not that that’s untrue for a great majority of people, but for me.. I guess it’s mostly that in my mind, I’m a fairly simple person; and I like simple things. Shepherds pie, cheese sandwiches, earl grey. None of these things qualify as anything other than simple. Fuck, even writing this, I’m using OmmWriter. It’s as simple as you could possibly get. Seriously.

So.. this is my life, and I want you to know that I’m both happy and sad.. and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be. It’s been a hell of a few weeks, though I suppose you could extrapolate that to “months” or “so far this year” fairly easily. If you’re reading this and it comes as a shock to you that I’m in rehab, maybe we need to talk more often. Though it’s kinda been ongoing for a few years, so.. maybe that’s not why you didn’t know. Maybe I just never wanted to admit to anyone or myself that I had a bit of a problem with narcotics. Okay, and sorta amphetamines and alcohol. “Sorta” in the same way that hitting the asphalt after a car changes lanes into your bike at eighty mph “sorta” hurts… and after the second time, I’ve become intimately acquainted with how /that/ feels. If you’ve never had the good fortune to experience detoxing from opiates, do yourself a favor and try your damnedest to never find out how it feels. Unless you’re a huge fan of laying in bed awake in your own, personal hell. In that case, knock yourself out.

Starting to fall down the rabbit hole here, and I guess we’ll see tomorrow how much of this survives the first light-of-day edit. Not much, I’m thinking. Not that that’s stopping me from typing or anything. Anyway.

I guess part of the incoherent, rambling thing I was trying to get at is that for the last.. 33 days now.. I’m sober. Completely sober. No vicodin, no uppers, no alcohol. Which is sorta crazy, in the I’ve-been-awake-for-thirty-minutes-it’s-time-for-the-first-drink sense. And six months without a cigarette. Done. Fucking clean.

Yeah, it really sucked getting here; extremely painful at the beginning.. Still is, more often than not. But sometimes, increasingly more often, it strays over onto the “awesome” side of the scale. It seems like for the first time in.. well, years, really.. I’m seeing the world around me without feeling numb. A couple months ago I told someone that the only time I didn’t feel like I was dead was when I was on the bike, throttle pinned, violating the hell out of.. really, any traffic law you could possibly think of. And I guess for a while that was true.

Now, though.. just give me a soft breeze and the sunset. It doesn’t really take a whole lot. I guess.. maybe this is because I’m.. happy? I’m not 100% on that, because I’m just not sure how that really feels. Not the entire day in blissful oblivion or any hippy bullshit like that. Just.. content.

Often happy, sometimes sad..

“Normal”, I guess, whatever the fuck that actually means.

*/

out.

.  This morning, I awoke in a pain-filled haze to an odd dripping noise. The pain stemmed from my recent ankle surgery, along with my apparent ability to kick myself directly in said ankle whilst sleeping. The dripping noise, as it was discovered, was from the toilet tank trying to refill itself. It wouldn’t normally have trouble, but the water was shut off, as Cat kindly informed me. Apparently someone managed to break a water meter somewhere on our block. My response was to pull the pillow back over my head and ignore everything, hoping that (just this once) the world could just sort everything out by itself. This didn’t happen, of course, and I was forced to get up for an appointment I had with my orthopedic surgeon.

.  The lack of running water precluded coffee being made, and if I ever discover who was responsible, I’ll beat them incessantly; with a cactus, if possible. Things were pretty grim; “grouchy” doesn’t really convey the way I am in the morning before coffee, nicotine, and (post-surgery) vicodin. To use the colloquial biblical analogy, Cat must have the patience of Job.  It’s either that or she’s still searching for a place to hide my body; I guess we’ll see in the next few weeks.

. A quick stop by a local Starbucks remedied what was most wrong with the world; by some twist of fate my mumbled order resulted in the acquisition of a drink with six shots of espresso in it. Six shots. Six. Shots. This level of caffeine is enough to make any day instantly amazing. Obviously, this is what happened, because it was now inevitable.

. Doctor Smith examined my ankle and showed me the pictures taken during the surgery. (If I can remember where I put the copies, I’ll get the pictures scanned and uploaded.) There’s a spot about the size of a dime where the cartilage was dead and meandering about loosely. He removed those pieces and drilled into the bones of my ankle in an effort to get it to re-grow new cartilage. If (when) this doesn’t work, I’ll have to have cartilage and bone dowels harvested from my knee and implanted. That seems a little grim, because of the potential to screw up my perfectly fine knee. Also, I already can’t put weight on my ankle for eight weeks; I don’t really want to consider the recovery time for a more major surgery.

. The rest of the day was spent playing Diablo 2 at an impromptu LAN party in my living room. It’s hard to convey the amount of nostalgia felt for these older games. It almost makes me miss college. Of course, when we played Diablo in high-school and college, it wasn’t usually with Dora the Explorer for background noise. (Lucas had his daughter with him) Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun.

. After the laptops and midgets were packed up and gone, Cat and I also watched “Gonzo: The Life and Works of Hunter S. Thompson”, which was wonderful. HST has always been one of my favorite authors, for (I guess) the usual reasons kids in college fall in love with his writing. Netflix has it via instant queue, so you should go watch it. Go, right now.. I’ll wait here. Anyway, I’ve added all his books to my wishlist, in case anyone needs gift ideas or something.

out.

.  So, I just recently had surgery on my right ankle. To make a long story short, I was riding cross-country on a motorcycle in ’08. I thought I should be the only one in my lane at the time, the driver of a car disagreed. The car won the argument, and I rolled down the interstate at about 60mph. The end result is that two years later, I’m on my couch with a wrapped up ankle, vicodin, and a month off work.

.  I was hoping that I’d be able to use all this time to get a lot of cleaning/sorting stuff done, but as it turns out, it’s more difficult to do those things when you can’t put weight on one leg. Instead, I’m stuck working on cleaning up some computer stuff. So I rebuilt my long-neglected blog and set about sorting through photos and media. If you’re reading this directly off of toasterlizard.net (and I’m assuming that you are), then you’ve obviously seen the new design.

.  I’ve been trying to work on trimming a lot of things down, both on the computer and in life in general. If you know me well, I’m sure you’re scoffing a little bit, because I’m quite a bit of a packrat. It’s a really hard habit to break. I’ve started with the blog and social sites, like myspace and facebook. MySpace was the easiest; I just deleted my account. Facebook was a little harder, since I actually use it and communicate with a few people pretty actively. But then I’d read this not too long ago, and realized that I had done a lot of the same stuff unintentionally. So, I purged my friends list, following the criteria of “would it matter to me at all if this person died?” Not too surprisingly, there were a lot of people deleted.

.  I guess I never really got around to writing about my switch to mac, which surprised and confused a lot of people. My line of thought basically goes like this: You get what you pay for. I know, I know, there are very nice high-end PCs out there. There’s nothing quite like the unibody macbook pros, though. Up until not too long ago, most of my computing hardware was trash, in the literal sense; I salvaged most of it from trashcans and dumpsters after other people had discarded it. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, because most of what I run (linux, bsd) doesn’t need the bleeding edge of technology. Plus, a lot of the stuff that gets thrown out has been quite modern compared to what I had been running at the time. Other than discards, the last machine I actually purchased was the Athlon XP 2200-based system I pieced together when I was still in college and needed more recent hardware for a required programming class. It’s still quite functional as the media centre PC, and servers up HD video quite nicely.

.  Anyway, the mac hardware is quite elegant. Also, I’d been meaning to try out OSX for a while now. Something about a commercial OS built on a BSD base is just exciting. I can use my beloved terminal and ports as well as have the perks of the beautiful gui. I still spend a large portion of my time working from the console, whether it’s local on this machine or running stuff (via ssh) on one of the linux or bsd boxen.

.  Back to the minimalism kick, if you’re using a mac, you should definitely check out OmmWriter.  It’s actually replaced WriteRoom as my favorite distractions-free text editor. I’ve always been a fan of simple apps that pick one thing and do it extremely well, and OmmWriter is a perfect example of this.

.  I guess that’s it for now, except that Cat’s been a bit ridiculous about making sure I don’t need anything while I’m stuck here on the couch. She still refuses to admit that she’s too good for me, which is a bit endearing. No offense meant to any of you that are married, but I’ve got the best wife in the world. Fact.

.  I love you, Cat.

out.

I’m in California now. It was a bit of an adventure getting out here, but we got to spend a bit of time with family about halfway through. I’m not really sure if that broke up the trip, or just made it seem a lot longer. Anyway, here are some highlights:

Out of the states we drove through (Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia again, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California), Texas and New Mexico had the best roads. And it wasn’t by some small margin, either. Some of the roads (interstates, even!) seemed to have been paved by drunken elk. I consider Oklahoma to be the worst, as our entire foray into the state was spent on toll roads, AND YOU COULDN’T TELL THEY WERE TOLL ROADS. Except for, you know, the paying of my hard-earned monies just to traverse the bumpy atrocities.

Also, there were a lot of signs warning drivers against “driving into smoke”. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t usually make a habit of seeing some black dense cloud of smoky fire and thinking “Hmm. I bet there’s something awesome in that cloud, like leprechauns tending purple unicorns and handing out Hindenburg-sized globs of rainbow cotton candy!”. Seriously. (If there /is/, someone let me know. I’ll pay the toll money and drive back, like, right now. Doubly so if the candy is on fire and crashing to earth.)

It was fun in Missouri, as I got to have the kids for a few days, to include fathers day. Caleb and Alexis are both potty-training, though Caleb’s way better at it, since he’s three. Alexis, being a year younger, tends to miss the cues a bit more often and almost-but-not-quite makes it to the potty.

Sunday morning, I was doing something on my laptop and heard some kind of commotion. Upon investigation, it was discovered that both of those two /adorable/ hobgoblins were in the bathroom, where Caleb had used the “big potty” and ‘Lexi the “little potty”. Except.. Well, Caleb had convinced ‘Lexi that she could pee standing up. I’m pretty sure that it had been explained to her that she couldn’t. But I’m equally sure that Caleb will grow up to be a state senator, governor, or some other equally devious criminal. In any case, Caleb looked immensely pleased with himself: “Daddy, ‘Lexis pees just like me!” Me: “Yes.. yes.. I can see that. *pats his head*” And he runs off to convince his constituents that raising taxes will actually lower costs of salable goods. Or, he ran off to play with his toy cars and trucks. You never really know with kids his age.

Apparently, Alexis had made a noble attempt at sort-of straddling the little potty chair, and.. well, it worked exactly as you would think it would; pee was /everywhere/. By everywhere, I mean that a cataclysmic, earth-changing /deluge/ of urine was standing on the floor of the bathroom. I don’t know how she even /held/ that amount of pee. She’s small, and the amount on the floor could have been more justly attributed to a small bull elephant. Or a rhinoceros. I think you get the idea; lots of pee, all on the floor. I was just relieved that the floor was linoleum and not carpet. Also, who installs carpet in bathrooms? That makes about as much sense to me as installing a trailer hitch on a Prius: The two things just don’t work well together. Several large towels and her third dry outfit of the day, and she’s back to coloring.

It didn’t occur to me until a while later that all this was on Father’s day. Then I realized that neither of them had actually called me “daddy” before. Last time I’d seen them they had not really gotten into the whole “talking” thing. Sure, their mother had tried to get them to say “Hi, Daddy” and “Bye, Daddy” on the phone; they’d make a valiant effort to parrot it back. This was just the first visit where both of them seemed to actually attach it as a name. After that, the usual parenting hassles seemed like more of a reason to smile:

Caleb: “Daddy! ‘Lexis needs new underwear!”
Me: “Did she have an accident?”
Caleb: “Yeah!” *proudly hands me said undergarments as visual proof*
Me: “Oh.. Uhmm.. thanks. Can you grab her clean pair from her bag?”
Alexis: *toddles into the living room dressed only from the waist up* “Daddy! I went potty!”
Me: “Yes, I see that. Good job.”

That’s it for the first installment. No promises, but I’ll try to post pictures and write more later.

out.

.  Photos taken of the kids the last time I was home.

Alexis chomping down on a delicious blueberry waffle.

Alexis looking adorable

Alexis getting her hair done by Aunt Betsy

Alexis, as seen through the mirror of the tractor she is

Caleb tearing up from the cold

Caleb and I riding in a trailer

.  This is the story of a guy who started a tradition by accident, and how it’s grown to defining the lives of future generations.  Okay, not really.  But the guy did accidentally start a tradition by being a cheapskate.

.  This was actually written early 2008-12-07 on my blackberry while I was on leave back in Missouri.  I haven’t really read it, but I did scroll through it briefly.  And yeah, I really did write all this shit on a tiny-ass thumb-keyboard. It was late, I was slightly drunk, and I couldn’t sleep. Just another semi-lucid depressive rambling. Enjoy.

.  When my dad was in the Navy and out at sea, phone calls overseas were still quite expensive, so he sent quite a few postcards home. At one point, he realized that he was spending quite a bit of money on them, and came up with a pretty unique way to save money on postage; he started making his own postcards out of cardboard. He would take a box from saltine crackers, cut each side down to the correct size, draw a line down the middle, and affix a fifteen cent stamp. Instant postcard that essentially costs fifteen cents.

.  This practice grew into a habit that long outlived his eventual retirement. Now driving a semi truck, he still writes on random scraps of cardboard in order to keep in touch with his more distant family members. Recent boxes turned into postcards have ranged from septic tank treatments to irish spring soap boxes. Everyone not familiar with this practice displays a marked level of confusion when first seeing one of the cards, but those of us who get them regularly treasure them greatly. All the ones that I’ve been sent share space in the box with baby pictures of ‘Lexi and Caleb.

.  In deciding that 2009 will be the year that I finally put a priority with writing and communicating with family, I’ll be taking up the “weird post card” tradition as well.

.  Or that was the idea I had, anyway. Looking around, I realized that the immediately available candidates for card making consisted of a carton of Djarum Blacks, boxes from camera lenses, and various liquors. My first thought was to just scratch the idea or find other postcard candidates. But then I realized that all I’m doing is hiding who I really am from my parents and friends. Sorry, Mum, but I really am just a guy in his mid-twenties who somehow managed to be divorced with two kids before most people ever consider getting married at all. I smoke. I drink constantly; every day, unless I run out in the middle of a work set and forget to run by the store on the way home. I get depressed and drive ridiculously fast and recklessly, hoping something will make me flip the car or bike; I think I’m supposed to stick around for a while longer simply because I haven’t actually died yet.

.  Waking up in the morning for me is an exercise in figuring out which part of the nicotine/caffeine/alcohol/painkiller cocktail is missing the most out of my system.

.  The only real happiness I have going on is caused by Cat or the bittersweet videos of the kids’ first steps and fire

.  Okay, see that bit right there? Those were the last words that I typed before I finally passed out sometime after 0400.  I don’t know where “and fire” came from.. I think I was going for “first words”.  I’m not really sure, though.

.  Seriously, other things make me happy; I’m really quite well-adjusted.  Not always when I have to go back home, though. Oh well.

out.

.  I was looking through my backups and noticed the really huge gap between the last time I posted a blog entry and the last one I actually /wrote/.  I’m not sure why I haven’t been posting stuff.  It’s not that I haven’t been collecting ideas or even writing, just haven’t been posting, exactly. I’m tired of feeling like I’ve been censoring myself. I’ll start posting again soon. I suppose I’ll just add it to the list of stuff I should really get around to doing; like going through my things and throwing away junk that I really don’t need. (Thanks, mum, for these packrat tendencies.)

.  I’ve really enjoyed using my DSLR.  I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed photography until recently.  I just need to get a decent telephoto lens for the next time we go out to the beach.  I love my 50mm, but it makes it hard to get that awesome shot of the bald eagle by the water. ;

.  On that note, I suppose I should go ahead and edit/post all the photos I’ve been taking recently.  I guess I’ll end this and go get started on that.

out.

.  It’s weird how the tiniest, seemingly innocent things can upset people months later.  When I took Cat to Missouri with me to visit the kids at my parents’ house last January she got upset over something Amy said.  My parents, younger siblings, Cat, Amy, and my kids were all sitting in the living room Tuesday morning.  Dad had just made a fresh pot of coffee and asked if anyone would like some. I was holding Caleb upside-down and tickling him, so Cat got up to grab me a cup. She called from the kitchen “Hey, how much sugar do you like in your coffee, Ben?”  I didn’t hear hear her, but Amy answered for me (Two sugars, light cream.)

.  I didn’t think something so small as my ex-wife knowing how I liked my coffee would upset my recent girlfriend. I suppose it was upsetting that Amy would know things about me that Cat didn’t yet. I mean, Amy and I /were/ married for three years.  Maybe it wasn’t completely innocent on her part; I probably don’t give her enough credit sometimes. She can really be a subtle and petty when she wants to be.

.  I guess I can be pretty oblivious; it took me a few months to realize that Cat had been upset about this.

out.

As an addendum to my response to Chucky’s rant about the stupidity of enlisting.

.  It’s no secret that Chucky hates the army. He’s made it pretty clear why, and I agree with him on a lot of those reasons.  For me however, the army’s proved to be a great environment for something I enjoy a lot; studying people. In the movie Dark Night, Heath Ledger’s character says that the only reason he does anything is for chaos’ own sake; Stress and chaos reveal what kind of person people really are. The military is the best place that I’ve found so far to see the same effects of stress on people; I don’t think I could get away with blowing up buildings and killing people outright. ;]

.  Get a group of poeple together in a common situation, then heap a bunch of stress on them and see what happens. The real point of basic combat training – aside from the training, of course – is uniting a group of individuals in a stressful situation against a common enemy – the drill instructors and the training obstacles – and teaching them to work as a team.  That’s the basic idea; How it really turns out depends largely on the individuals in the group.

.  A recent example is my unit’s upcoming field protection exercise. A large group of the soldiers will break down into excessive whining and moodiness.  Another (smaller) group will endure the unavoidable silliness with a good attitude; They will even try to excel at the tasks placed in front of them. Where else would you get this level of insight into people?

out.