And then it was time to be quiet.

Saturdays were like that. Except for the television. It was allowed to be loud — perhaps even encouraged. It would fill that cavern of a living room, with its sideways stalactite bookshelves full of bibles, approved literature, and the occasional children’s book. That old man with some hearing loss probably never knew that sandpaper grit hissing undertone always present in over-the-air signals, even on the good days.

To listen to my mother tell it, my grandfather may have been a bit shaky on the concept of being a father, but he was absolutely dumbfounded at the concept of being a grandfather. I’m inclined to believe her, ostensibly since I have no basis for comparison. At that point in his life he was a quiet man though. This many years later I have a difficult time remembering his voice, because he said so little. He came from an age and a place where men were actively discouraged from speaking unless it was necessary. Five days of work, two days of rest, and two weeks of vacation a year — and he did that for half a century. And then, with his first pension check, he bought that television.

We would end up with some type of snack — usually something with enough salt in it to make Utah jealous and guaranteed to ruin my appetite for dinner later. He didn’t really care, so long as I settled down before the first pitch. Long before ESPN started hacking up hairballs of nervous excitement over every Yankees-Red Sox game in a season, this was what constituted baseball on national television. It only happened a couple dozen times a year, so you were wise to hush up quick and enjoy it when it did.

Away from the bookshelves and that television, the room had both feet cemented, Mob-style, squarely in 1970 — beige shag carpeting, TV-trays that were held together seemingly by magic, a floor stereo that played 8-track tapes, and an absolutely gaudy bronze wall mirror I hoped to be tall enough to actually see myself in one day. It was almost as if time traveled slower inside the walls of that house than it did outside. My grandfather’s chair was a La-Z-Boy with a wooden footrest handle on the right side. It was upholstered with some damn awful orange and green cloth patchwork that made it seem out of place even in these surroundings. Quality American workmanship, I was told. It must have been — that chair outlived him by 22 years.

As was his way, he wouldn’t say much for those three hours or so. Neither one of us did, really. I’ve never known someone so apparently in love with a sport and at the same time so dispassionate about its outcomes. Without a lot of words, however, I still learned quite a bit — about a lot of things that don’t seem to have a lot to do with the sport itself. Things like patience, determination, having pride in your work, and the fact nothing good ever happens when seven men in uniform gather on a small hill. Maybe it was all more for my benefit than his. I’ll never really know. A couple of die rolls of years later he was forcefully taken away before I had a chance to grow up enough to ask those real questions.

Over the next few days, another series of baseball games will take place. The unfortunate storm surge of sports radio and near-continuous sports news has taken a lot of the sparkle off “Opening Day” — it feels like one continuous loop anymore. At some point on a Saturday though, I will sit down and watch a game at random, and I’ll remember a connection held together by not much more than 216 stitches of red thread.

Here’s to a quiet spring.

They’re never easy.

I’m told the hardest part of flying is the landing. I’ve never actually flown a plane so I will have to take them at their word. It’s been a couple of months since I dropped the first round of pills. But this hasn’t been so much a landing as it has been a full-on mental crash, complete with the imaginary fireballs escaping from all sides of the impact crater.

It’s been 12 years since I’ve been in an airplane of any sort. A lot has changed since then. Never mind the piss poor service and cattle driving mentality of the airlines now. You can’t even see your loved ones to their gate, and hellfire rains upon the poor soul purchasing a water bottle on the wrong side. We’ve been trained, socially, to wait — and accept it. The hallmark of western civilization has become our passive willingness to queue. Queue for this piece of paper. Queue for that piece of paper. Queue to walk through a metal contraption and be felt up by government men with blue hands. Assuming we haven’t completely obliterated our species and the planet by then, archeologists 10,000 years from now are going to brush away a ten foot layer of dust off the ruins of our cities and find a series of lines we stood in, rooms we sat in, and vehicles we idled in. They’ll seriously wonder how we progressed at all in our age with all the waiting we did or how we didn’t completely devolve because of it.

The pop psychologists will try to be cute and tell me any landing I can walk away from is a good one. What a bunch of contemptuous, pious crap. Bastards — the whole lot of them. A day off work, hitting a treadmill, and an overdose of Vitamin D just doesn’t fix it. No, sir. You don’t walk away from a mental landing like this. You crawl weakly from it — half-alive, exhausted, with both eardrums completely blasted out, and looking around wondering exactly what the hell just happened.

Kink has become that quarter that rolls uncontrollably under the stove — everybody in the room knows it’s there and it has value still, but it’s just not worth moving the stove to get to it. Some of the shine is off that quarter now, but, in the end, it’s still a quarter. So I either accept it as lost or I find the right tool to fish the damn thing out. It’s not PM’s job to make me happy. It’s not her job to nurse me back to health after these mental crashes. She tries, but she’s in an unfair position. I can’t communicate what I need, because I have no idea what it is. How in the world can I expect her to accommodate that? I would be a jerk of the highest order to demand that. Go out and try to fly somewhere, but have no idea where you’re going. The chances you find the right end location are less than winning the lottery.

Far be it for me to contradict my more avian-like friends, but I am not sure the landing really is the hardest part. I think it goes beyond that. The hardest part is taking the fear out of the suitcase and flying again. Soon — damn soon — I will have to accept I failed miserably at this attempt to better myself, and that failure has consequences. I need to get rid of this luggage. The only real question is how many more failures my sanity and my marriage can handle before one or the other collapses like a hot bucket of melted shrapnel.

For now it’s a new round of pills, a double helping of self-loathing, and another chainsaw tossed into the juggle. No amount of waving my hands while jumping up and down will get me back in the air. No amount of swearing at the clouds will bring them down from their floating perches. Feet on the ground, eyes on the sky, and my heart somewhere in between both.

Eventually I will soar again.

Snow:

In the end it’s all really about someone listening to our stories.

A partial throwaway line in a conversation the other day set this idea alight for me.  This here and now, this spot on the road, this particular step on the spiral staircase of understanding life and kink, is unreservedly a product of my past.  Without with the foresight to install the window, I would not be able to stare though it blankly at the falling rain.  Without experience, I don’t appreciate loss or struggle.

It would be easy to sit here and just write about the present.  It would be easy to turn this mental outpost into another mattress-plopping couple’s sex blog, full of sexy photographs, double entendres, and enough innuendo to fill a sex toy storage bin thrice over.  Those are the easy stories to tell.  Even as risque as they would initially appear to the outside, those are the safe stories.

The hard stories are the ones where I openly wonder if I should have turned left instead of right.  They are the ones where I explain why I turned the direction I did, or why I wish I had turned the other way. Everything from the minutiae of pouring talcum powder into a furnace as a kid; to a lunch on an Indian reservation twenty years ago; to the lost weekend in Denver; to losing my religion, finding it, and losing it again; to my first broken heart; to sweeping up the pieces.

These stories aren’t all that sexy — in fact most of them have little or anything to do with any matter of a relationship at all.  However, if I have any hope of finding peace in my new world order, these stories have to be part of this equation, for one very important reason.

All these stories add up to me.

It was pizza night.

I don’t remember the date, or even the month for that matter.  School was out.  I remember it was warm, but where I grew up warm was always defined as “anything that isn’t cold”, so that really doesn’t nail it. But hail to the goddess Venus, it was her day, and a payday at that. That meant two things to look forward to. Somewhat thankfully, one of those things was taken care of when my father decided his persistent back issues would cancel this week’s measurement of the potential kinetic energy combination of his 14-year-old son and the bedroom wall.

I was used to that part. Well, as used to it as anyone could ever really be. As much as I enjoyed escaping his wrath for what would end up being one final night, I was more annoyed the rare ensuing fight between my parents (because they were actually home at the same time) would delay ordering the pizza at least another hour, probably two, until eventually my father would perform his customary rolling storm chase through the screendoor and off to satiate his pain-killer addiction for another day.

Tonight was different though. Tonight my mother exited the bedroom first, grabbed her keys, and herded myself and my younger sister to be car. I don’t remember where my younger brother was at the time, but he wasn’t with us.  She drove for what seemed like forever — or at least a lot longer than it would have taken to have the pizza delivered anyway. She circled around to the airport. I remember the airplanes: TWA 727s. Red, white, silver, streaking across the endless sky, over and beyond land nobody owned yet. You can keep Pan Am.  I was fascinated with TWA’s color scheme. Still am, really. Love that shade of red. Isn’t there a lipstick in that color now somewhere?

We rolled into the parking lot of some motel chain that has since been bought out three times over.  I would find out later she went there because the rooms were cheaper on the weekend.  Somewhere in confusion of leaving, though, she didn’t grab her purse. No checkbook (back when you could actually write a check somewhere), no bank cards, no credit cards, and the banks were long closed for the day. She didn’t dare go back to the house though. We were left to what she happened to have in her pocket: three twenties, three fives, and three ones — seventy-eight dollars.  I remember it because she asked me to hold it while she fruitlessly looked for more.  It was funny we had three of each type of denomination.  The room was forty-some-odd dollars. We burst into it and bounced across the bed. My sister was quite the giggle-bot at that age, as much as she will deny it now as an adult. We turned on the TV and goofed off a bit.

Meanwhile, my mother ordered a pizza.

Soon enough, we were enjoying our Friday tradition on doubled napkins that served rather shoddily as plates. We sat on the cheap carpet, watched the free cable, and ate pizza.  My sister and I would laugh at something every now and then, and I remember hearing the jets executing their Doppler maneuvers over us in between slices and commercials.  I remember my mother not laughing very much though, even though she did occasionally smile. Soon, we showered, and we slept, and the next day we went home. He wasn’t there, and it turned out he wouldn’t be there ever again.

I would come to find out a couple years later that the fight started because my mother discovered his affair with her co-worker and best friend at the time. And that the actual checkbook balance was much lighter than on paper because he had practically bled the accounts dry to pay this woman’s back rent. And that the bounced check fees practically doubled all that pain.  And that my mother did the unthinkable and went hat-in-hand to my grandmother the next week for money to get by for several months. It wasn’t until after the birth of my own first child that I would come to understand just how close to losing everything we were that night. And yet, down to literally the last nine inked retangles of linen to her possession for the foreseeable future, we still had pizza — because it was Friday, and that’s what we did.

At some point every year since my first daughter was born, I sit down with a map and a checkbook. I pick someplace on that map, generally in some random way that would frighten tailless ponies everywhere, and then I find the closest family shelter. These are places you have to want to go to, like Twin Falls, Idaho, or Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I write the check: seventy-eight dollars.  I usually send it without explaination or note, although I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t alter that practice. Occasionally I’ll get a simple thank you card in return, but most of the time, although the checks are cashed, I never hear from these places again.  I’m sure most of them were convinced they were dealing with some sort of barely-funded and mathematically challenged loon — what kind of crazy sends a donation for exactly seventy-eight dollars?

This kind of crazy, actually. The kind of crazy that knows exactly what seventy-eight dollars means. The kind that knows it can be the difference between a motel room and sleeping in the car. The kind that knows sometimes it’s enough to hold out on until things improve. The kind that knows that sometimes it’ll be okay as long as you can still buy a pizza on Fridays.

With black olives.

It was going to be absolutely perfect.

I woke up the other day with this crazy idea I could sit down and write a great blogger’s blogpost.  It would be a wonderful, detailed, whole and complete dissertation on the merits of this awakening.  It would be a coming out of sorts; a public victory cry as the final, wispy breath of my inner demons escaped between the bars of the shoddily built mental cages I created.

But that’s not what came out when I sat down to the laptop and practically glued my fingers to its keyboard until something resembling words appeared under duress on its overpriced screen.  No.  Instead, what spewed forth from the primordial alphabet soup of my internal dictionary was yet another cold, recycled, run-on whine put to screen, dripping popular psychology ever so messily after being hand-dipped in the infinite loop of my goddess complexes this blog has seem to become more about lately than anything else.

I threw the whole thing out like a dull pail of grey wash water.  It wasn’t until this point I realized how much of a microcosm this specific scenario was in light of the endless list of mental blockers that have attacked me in the last nine months in ways a colony of fire ants would be proud of.  And like these proverbial ants scurrying along an ever-expanding balloon, I’ve fallen into the infinite-dimensional trap of believing I am making amazing progress, but in reality I’m just marching around endlessly in a circle.

I strive to not judge others.  Someone as self-repressed as I am can’t afford the high emotional compound interest rate of being judgmental.  But finding a circle I actually belong within in this new world order has been more painful than the aforementioned marching.  I’m not part of the blogging circle [I don't write enough], the poly/open circle [I'm too insecure], the kinky circle [I'm too scared], the parenting circle [I'd throw myself under the nearest soccer mom's van], the social media circle [I couldn't market a glass of water from the top of an Arabian sand dune], the “Daddy” circle [I suffer from fear and self-loathing], the writer’s circle [This tortured sentence should be enough evidence], the dominant’s circle [I'm entirely too inexperienced], or the sadist’s circle [I'm too self-conscious].

In between all these circles is the maze around my mind, and, as we all know, every maze has monsters.  A few months ago I was on a different path.  I thought it was the right one.  It felt like the right one anyway.  In fact I was as close as I have ever been in this world to being some demonstrable representation of happy.  It wasn’t all flower petals and sparkling unicorns, but it was definitely better than the path before.   Along the way to this point, though, I made a horrible decision: I tried to short circuit the path.  I saw the end game, the goal, the light.  Damn it, it was right there, if only I could get a few annoying little roadblocks out of my way.  I quit smoking.  I put my reservations aside and went to a psychiatrist.  A little something to help me get over that line.  A few little white, pink, and blue circles.

I would never knock someone seeking medication to help right their ways, but for me, so far, it has been an unequivocal disaster.  I should have seen it.  What little of a creative streak I have in writing and photography went straight to hell, bought a ticket, and took a ride.  Beyond the obvious weight issues and orgasm issues the pills caused, I was even more irritable, confused, and generally lost than I probably would have been had I just left everything the hell alone.  So, with my doctor fully informed, I pitched the last of these pills today.  We’re going back to zero and starting over.  Back to the start of the circle.  The last five months are lost, and it will probably cost me another five to get them back.  The bigger frustration, though, is the humiliating failure of trying to better myself, and, in the process, making things worse.  It’s the type of frustration that really makes me want to just quit; to let PM go with my blessing and find what she needs.

Without having to wait around for me.