It’s been 40 years. I’m not the
smartest guy in the world (or the most original considering that opening line),
but I pay attention to things around me and I pick up stuff. I make
observations. I think about some topics far too much. Out of that time spent
thinking, however, I come up with ideas and thoughts and opinions and insights
that I don’t normally see other people talking about.
I’m not sure if I can get all this
out in one sitting. That’s why I’m starting this on October 1, 2015. Its 12
days before the actual 40th anniversary of the day that my mother
had to miss a night at church to give this world the wonder that is me. I hope
you read my sarcasm. Coz some people really don’t like themselves and really
hate it when other people do like themselves. They call it narcissism. I call
it enjoying being me.
What have I learned in 40 years? Why should you care? Well, if it was me reading this, I'd just take it as one person's observations. Most of all though, I feel I'm actually writing this for my daughter. I have it saved separately from here and I hope she will take the time that most of you might not.
I
have to say, the past eight years since I got out of the military have been
straight up “school of hard knocks” for me.
Just as getting my first apartment, when I first got to California in 2003,
resulted in more than a few lessons learned, so getting out of the comfortable
misery of day to day active duty routine and steady paychecks was a kick in the
ass.
I mean, don’t get me wrong; going
from high school and living in mom’s house, waking up at 10:30 to go make pizza
dough, to 11.4 years of “DO IT NOW!!!”, to “I do what I want…” was kinda great.
It was awesome, actually. Moved in with my girl, drank when I wanted, went
where I wanted, when I wanted, shaved and got a haircut when I wanted. That was
awesome.
Then life took over. Bills,
marriage, a kid, bad credit, debt. What did I learn along the way?
Well, for starters, don’t ever
settle. If this job pays $12 an hour, what do I have to do to get $20? If you
end up making $20, what do I have to do to get to $30? 45k a year? How do I get
70k? Screw that, what do I have to do to get to 6 figures???
Education. Well, there were a lot
of paths I could have gone down as a young man. I could have hung out with people
that didn’t think school was lame. I could have avoided drugs. People hear that
and say, “Oh well, woulda shoulda coulda.” Though I can’t go back and change my
own life, as a parent, you always hope you can at least change your kid’s life
and inspire them to do something better than what you did. I don’t want my
daughter looking back one day wondering what she could have accomplished if she
had applied herself. I don’t want her watching college graduations, seeing her
high school friends go on to have successful careers and running for political
office or owning businesses, and thinking …”Damn, if I had just tried.” Because
yes, some days, I do look back and regret my choices. There are people I went
to high school with that have lived abroad (so have I), served in wars (been
there), run for political office (and won!), started businesses, been in
magazine articles (actually, I have too…), gone on to produce movies for Pixar,
you name it. I didn’t do most of that, mainly because I was too busy letting the
rest of the world around me tell me who I was and what I should do. I smoked
weed, I dropped acid, I hung with criminals. I flunked classes, I chased after
girls that were light years outside of my league (and creeped them the hell out
in the process most times). Most if not all of the people I hung out with in my
teen years ended up in jail at one point, or addicted to far worse things than
weed. Or both. Or dead.
Most have gone on to make the best
of their lot and I congratulate the ones that saw a way through it. For me
though, I want more.
I grew up poor. I grew up really
poor. We never had cable tv. We usually had dirty laundry and had to wear
smelly, unwashed clothes several times over before we finally would have to
load up my mom’s car and go spend the better part of a Saturday night at a
public Laundromat. Why is that important?
It’s important because it makes me
value every little thing I have. I have the ability to wash my clothes every
single day. I have over 220 channels and any number of stuff on demand that I
can watch on a flat screen TV in high definition with the touch of a button.
When I was growing up …we had an antenna, 9 channels (I’m not kidding…), and a
tv that you had to get up and walk over to to change the channel by turning a dial.
We got a VCR and thought it was the awesomest thing in the history of forever
…then we had to take it back to use the money for groceries or a bill or
something. I can’t remember. My brother eventually bought one with his own
paycheck from his fast food job. We rented movies from “Video Village” and it
was AWESOME.
I guess the point here is …hard
work is worth it because money really does buy you at least a happier state of
being. I’m not apologizing for saying that because it is absolutely true. Name
brands ARE better than store brands, sorry to tell you. The 99 cent store is
great and all but the reality is the stuff they offer is there for a reason. I mean,
I’ve lived poor so I understand the psychology of scoffing at the price of coke
and saying “Ha! Shasta is the same thing…” NO, ITS NOT. Sorry. When you spend a
few years poor and buying your groceries at the dollar store and using 1-ply
toilet paper and buying cheap gas from ARCO, then see the other side of things,
you’ll see the difference.
Although I will give you this …I
spent $200 on a pair of Oakley’s not once but twice and I can tell you …they
wear out just as fast, get scratched up, bent and broken just as fast as cheap,
$12-$16 glasses at Target. Difference is, having to replace $200 sunglasses
after less than a year of wear is a whole different experience I would much
prefer not to have to go through again.
Friends. I’m gonna say it. They
come and they go and most of them are better off staying gone. When someone is
in your life for too long, you either notice you are purposely trying to
conform to their expectations to make them happy or you constantly have to
defend yourself for being you for you and not for them. I’ve put my friends
through hell several times over, never meaning to. But the ones I still call
friends are the ones that saw through alcoholism and depression and said
“That’s not Jeremy” OOOoorrrr they were at least able to come to the conclusion
that there are some things we just ain’t gonna agree on. Ever. Doesn’t mean we
can’t love each other. Several people I once drooled all over and ranted and
raved about being the bestest thing ever have ended up being the worst people I
could ever imagine calling a friend. I guess people change. Just as well. At
some point, realistically, you have to ask yourself what you are getting out of
the deal. That’s not a selfish thing to ask. Even if all you get is a cozy
feeling hearing their voice, that’s something.
Religion… dammit I guess I have to
say something about how I ended up here. I had religion …I wanna say shoved,
beaten, forced down my throat …but instead let’s say I had it “introduced” to
me from the youngest age. As the years went by and I got into my teens I lost
my infatuation with it. It didn’t keep my attention anymore. Church became a
bother, a boring ritual, and all of the “good church family” began to show
themselves to be just as flawed, just as broken, and just as vindictive and
spiteful and judgmental as anyone else in the world. At some point, the kids I
had considered my friends for so long became just another clique that I wasn’t
cool enough to be a part of. That really sucked because for the longest time,
church was that one place where I could escape the bullies and the jerks that
laughed at me and made fun of me and picked on me at school. By high school
age, the kids at church were no different.
The adults, well, truth started
coming out. People were getting favors within the church and getting appointed
to paid positions through nepotism and connections. Married couples turned out
to be cheating on each other. And I’ll never forget how so many of those good,
wholesome people judged my family when my sister dropped out of high school and
had a kid.
What does that have to do with god?
I’m gonna say this simply; god was
nowhere. Every church is the same. Every religion is the same. Every church
family is the same. None of it serves any real purpose that can’t be found
somewhere else, outside the pews. As I told a dear friend recently, everything
you think that church is providing for you can be found right outside your
door. You wanna sit around and dream of a golden city in the clouds that
assures you that life doesn’t end at death? I get it. But at some point, I
started to question whether I actually had any good reason to believe any of
that nonsense. I didn’t then and I don’t today. I faced death. I was an atheist
in a warzone. I told people I was pagan at the time but the reality is that
those first few mortar attacks really made me examine what I believed. I had
always had this itchy little voice of doubt in my head that said “NO” every
time I told someone I believed in God, Jesus, and later, Inanna. You can lie
all day to someone else. You can’t lie to yourself. It is going to eat you
alive if you try to. All I’m sayin’ is I never really, truly, actually had any
experiences I couldn’t shoo away with logical explanations without being on
some kind of mind altering drug. No god has ever shown his face to me or spoken
in a voice that I could hear. I’ve listened to all the arguments for
his/her/it’s existence. It isn’t there or it isn’t interested in knowing me so
…suits me fine.
I believe my mother, father,
grandparents, good friend Nairin and others simply do not exist. Not anymore.
Their memory lives on in my head like it was yesterday when I last saw them or
spoke to them (not my grandfathers
though. Never knew either). I’ve seen some “interesting” things that were
definitely thought provoking as far as evidence for …ghosts? …But on the other
hand, it’s always been presented to me on TV or the internet and it never
stands up to scrutiny or critical inquiry. There’s gotta be a reason the
“evidence” never gets better. So when it comes to my inevitable demise, to
quote Mark Twain, “I do not fear
death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born,
and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
Semi related to that, BIG lesson I want to share with anyone willing, is
CHECK YOUR SOURCES. I grew up in a black hole. The deep south before smart
phones, internet, Wikipedia and multiple cross referenced sources was just a
really stupid place to live. Everyone had anecdotes about seeing angels and
witnessing miracles and seeing demons cast out of people, blah blah blah. And
coke and pop rocks will make your stomach explode, right? These days it’s all
the anti-vaccine propaganda, the lies and urban legends about the current
president being secretly muslim. Buncha crap. I saw it on the internet so it
must be true, right? That’s just the current version of “I read it in the bible
so …”
Just stop it. Stop it now.
Parenthood. I cannot fathom how I lived without my daughter. She makes me
so angry I scream and rage at times. Yet, I would lie down in a pool of
gasoline and say “light the flame” were I to be given the choice between that
or harm coming to her. She is the love of my life, the greatest thing ever in
the history of forever, as far as I’m concerned. The joy of someone loving you
so genuinely for just being the one that is called "dad" is just something I
cannot put into words. To see this little person that is literally part of me,
physically, is literally a piece of me, growing and changing and becoming her
own person is just a day to day feat of amazement for me. I don’t wanna spoil
my kid. I don’t wanna provide her all the toys I didn’t have growing up (yet that’s exactly what I appear to be doing
so far …). What I DO want to do, at the very least, is provide what I
didn’t have in the most basic sense. I didn’t have two loving parents. I didn’t
have financial stability. Some nights I didn’t even have dinner. I didn’t a
mother that had time for me on most days because she was busy trying to earn
enough money at 3 different jobs to keep us fed and clothed and sheltered. I
didn’t have a parent that was capable of stopping and taking a deep breath and
saying, “slow down, it’s just a kid” whenever they were ready to rage and start
beating the crap out of the little brat before them. My mother, for all the joy
and wisdom and grace she showed in her later years …was the victim of what I
think must have been a very loud mind at times. She talked to herself a lot and
got angry if you called her out on it. She flew into rages over the tiniest
issues. She put her hands on us in anger FAR too many times. I was once choked
until my hearing went out and all I remember is seeing my mother’s angry face
glaring at me as she spun me around the kitchen screaming and cursing at me.
That really happened.
But the last time I ever spoke to my mother, when she called me and told
me she didn’t “feel” that the cancer was back (it was) and was sure at her upcoming exam that everything would be
fine, I told her “I love ya mom!” before I hung up. I never spoke to her again.
There are a great many things I could regret in this life but that one, having
to say “I didn’t get to tell her I loved her before she died”, I don’t have
that one. I named my daughter after her for a reason. She was a victim, I
believe, of a mind that was not straight due to years of depression and anger
and regret that tore her apart inside. Was it an acceptable excuse to beat the
crap out of us as kids? No. But, when you love someone so deeply, so inexplicably much as I did my mother, as I do my wife and daughter now, you
often find yourself seeking to understand what it is that makes that great
person become not so great sometimes, instead of just giving up on them. I can
only hope that’s the explanation for why I’m not divorced at this point…
It has made me stop and evaluate my own childhood just as much as it
makes me second guess myself constantly as a new parent now. How could my
father walk away from three kids, especially when I was less than a year old?
How could my mother beat little children, products of her own body, till whelps
rose up on our skin and teachers at school and church asked questions? How
could she do that? And for that matter, how could I get so angry at my own
daughter that I yell as loud and as angrily as I did at Marines when I was
active duty? So loud it scares her, makes her shudder and cower away in fear of
me. I can’t excuse it. I can’t justify it. All I can do is seek to be better
than the example I was given and never EVER lay my hands on her in anger. I
really gotta calm down on the yelling too.
My brother and sister have accomplished this. They have done outstanding
jobs as parents, especially with my sister being a single mother at 17. My
brother has raised two special needs sons with the help of an amazingly
dedicated wife by his side through that same tell-tale anger that we all three
inherited. We have all struggled with it, trying to emulate the parts about mom
that we adored and seeking to rise above the instinct to lash out in the
violent anger she showed most times when we were younger. Something about being
a grandmother changed her, although honestly, maybe it was just the fact that 3
ungrateful kids weren’t around anymore to drive her further out of her mind.
Whatever it was, she died a much beloved patriarch of our crazy dysfunctional
family and we miss her greatly. Except for the religion part of it, I can
honestly say, just about everything my mother told us was correct.
Lesson? Listen to your parents. I never doubted for a second growing up
that my mother, for all her anger with us, would readily claw someone’s eyes
out for harming us or even threatening to. Parents may do stuff we don’t
understand as kids but as adults, as parents ourselves, we start to get it. I
know situations vary. Some people just have terrible parents. I didn’t. I try
not to be one myself. No matter how bad the physical side of it was sometimes,
my mother didn’t smoke, drink, do drugs, leave us alone to go hang with a
boyfriend, none of that nonsense. She worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week,
sometimes 2 or 3 jobs and made sure we got up on Sunday and went to church and
got up every day and went to school during the week.
Back to money for a little bit more. It really can buy you happiness.
Yes, yes it can, whether you want to admit it or not. Even if you live in the
woods of Alaska, off grid and independent, what about when that generator runs
out of fuel and it is perpetually night outside and 40 below? Yeah, you need
money. It’s just something we all need to admit. It won’t buy you love. It will
pay bills and feed your family and take a lot of stress off your shoulders when
you can throw that disconnection notice in the shredder and the fridge is full.
Stress over money and bills is a HUGE cause of divorces. My mother had the
displeasure of divorcing a man that couldn’t pay child support on time if his
life depended on it. When I was too young to be in school just yet, there were
times when she would send me outside to play while she tore through bank
statements and check book ledgers and screamed like she was dying, screaming to
god and asking why… he never did answer with anything much better than another
kick to the teeth. But we’ve covered this.
Having to ask your boss for gas money or your in-laws for help with the
rent is never a good feeling. Being an adult and having to have some other
adult pay your bills or feed your family destroys your self-worth, especially
as a man, husband, father.
I guess I could go on and on about things like politics or music but
that’s not really a life lesson. All I can say about music is I was raised by a
classically trained voice major and when it comes down to it …I probably hate
what you like. When it comes to politics, I hate extremism. Whatever form,
whatever side of the aisle. I have no tolerance for closed minds, cold hearts
and willful ignorance.
I guess, above all else, I’ve learned that I’m not all that original. I’m
not that unique. I could have probably accomplished much more with my life by
this point. Yet, people die in car crashes on Tuesday afternoons. That sucks. I
mean, some poor guy is just workin’ for his paycheck, cruisin’ along, just
tryin’ to get home and take his shoes off and have a beer and watch the news
and BRAKE LIGHTS!!!!
Boom. Sirens, then sad family members at the hospital. Everyone talks
about savin’ up and planning for retirement. Dude, seriously, Clark Howard?
Nice guy and all but uh … no one has savings anymore. I stopped chasing that
dream. At this point, every day that I work at a lazy ass, ridiculously over
paid job, and then come home to a wife that genuinely cares about me and a
daughter that is so beautiful …I mean really, she’s like, the kinda chick that
wouldn’t give me the time of day. She’s that pretty. Yet she thinks I’m
awesome. Every day I get with that, every time my bills are paid and I can just
come home and sit on the couch and watch Huel Howser and have a few beers and a
good dinner …that’s all that matters at this point. Today. Right now.
I’ve made some terrible, awful mistakes. Said and done terrible, awful
things. But as a friend once asked me, “How long are you gonna spend
apologizing for stuff you can’t go back and change?”
I’ve apologized enough. And now, I’ve said enough.
