Winter Solstice marks the official end of the year for me. I made it one more full circle around the sun. The boxes in the garage mark both the end and the beginning of both this year and a decade that began when I left beloved Tower Records with my soon to be ex-wife to care for my dad during his last years.

So many boxes a decade ago, not nearly so many today. There is a scene and speech by Al Pacino from an almost forgotten movie, Any Given Sunday, which describes loss, age and the toll it exacts while imploring the cast of football players the camera pans to find the resolve to fight for redemption inches at a time. The team gets the message in the movie. I thank Bill Simmons for providing the clip in his humor filled blog on his Grantland website this past week while doing his NFL picks, which apparently this year have hit bottom just like my marriage.

I'm one in a long line of examples living the message of what getting older means in this world. A lot of what has been gained has been lost, but the quest for understanding this dot in the galaxy, and my place in it, remains worth getting up everyday for, even if awareness comes inches at a time

I see the stars and watch the jets from Miramar, or maybe Edwards, leave vapor trails in the blue-black sky with a palm tree a few doors down silhouetted on the night canvas. Orion's belt hangs above the diffused eastern horizon light with its three main stars beginning the turn from vertical in these late hours of the day to a horizontal view I will catch at 5AM. Sleep seems to come to me in periodic patches during the course of most days, certainly not in the long stretches of time I was comfortable with in the world a moment in time ago. But sleep does come still, and the long dark hours in our 24 of winter help ease me into dreams and numbness.

She sleeps, and I hear her breath in our former shared bedroom. I napped earlier this evening with my old cat on our couch. I'll grab some shuteye again tonight in the guest room with Darby Dog and Bo Kitty squeezing me inside their slumber stretch on the bed. What are they thinking these days? The old man makes a nice breach and warm divide between our adversarial relationship you dipshit dog/cat you?

My dreams now turn from yesterdays mutated brain vision combinations of was and fantasy to possibilities of unknown rooms colored from advertising photos of property offers and old friendships to reawaken. A lot less baggage in the mind today. Hope for a future unexplored. Travel. New beds and breakfasts with familiar voices and faces for a day or two and then down the road for another reunion of hope and inspiration. The high way.

Thanks for stopping by. Peace.



  

   

Going Solo at The End Of The Line

 

I thought this year would be different, and funny enough the damn time signature turned out to be quite different. Just not the way I envisioned. I must remember to be more specific when making those wishes near the New Year. The cosmic genie always lurks, and apparently still works from time to time.

I became hooked on George R. R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" books, and television series, this year.  "Winter is coming." Even for Bakersfield, CA where very mild temperatures fill the autumn days, the growing dark hours and chilly nights sap the tree limbs of their juice and force the annual plummet of leaves to the ground. What once pulsed and thrived in green just yesterday turns to wet brown mulch so quickly. The dampness of the soil lingers throughout much of the day, and the six or eight legged little creatures have crawled back down deep below, or left as a last will and testament to their lives a hopeful promise of progeny attached to some wood or stone. The circular events in the northern hemisphere on a small round rock circling a star hurtle through space with wills of their own. 

Last year at this time my wife and I were celebrating a new car purchase. It was a gift from her to me.  We had a 2003 BMW 525i that ran well but had begun to suffer those annoying little traits that conspire to all parts in the universe with hoses, linings, belts, lights, pads and you-name-it beginning to wear out and need constant replacement. We've lived modestly here for our 10 years in this town, and the repairs on the Beamer were beginning to look like monthly car payments. So Vicky convinced me a new car, just for me, would be the ticket. She had the still sporty Celica, which she loves, to do the commute to her job a few miles round trip each day.  Her dream job as the executive director at a local non-profit was secure, and so we took home a new Hyundai Sonata after trading in the BMW. 

A year later the car and its purchase puzzle me because I find I will be, in the immortal words of Ray Davies, "Going Solo." So low.

All the emotions people confront when their personal universe shifts into brain chaos hit me these past several months trying to work through the relationship woes with the one I love. Everyone knows the three Gs- gut-wrench, guilt and grief when breakup calls. There are plenty of other descriptors anyone can freely apply to note abrupt individual change when it happens to them, but sadness mixed with confusion fits me best today. I made it past anger, finally.

Anger made the scene untenable at the end of the line. After 20 plus years of togetherness being told  four months ago that she did not think the relationship could go on caused all my synapses to fire every round in the their tanks, and put me at a total loss. After feeling so comfortable in my skin being around the love of my life for so long the new order, these past 100 days or so, has meant I now felt childish and unsure at every moment in the day. What to do? How to repair the damage? What the fuck has happened? And how did it get to this?

Different perspectives over time on issues personal and professional, which never resolved themselves, apparently ate away what I considered an unshakeable foundation.

I grew up with arguments. My parents argued with themselves frequently, and loudly on many an occasion. Most of my relatives argued with one another, and often. My grandmother once told my mom when she called one time to complain about a fight with my dad,  "If you don't have a fight with your partner from time to time there is no point in having a partner." She then hung up on my mother. Some people might be made for arguments, others not so much it appears.

It's not as though there were no clues in front of my senses over the past several years that maybe things were not all hunky-dory in our little couple world. The various physical ailments that afflicted my loving partner over our time in Bakersfield, CA were in all probability symptoms of stress, and although many conversations brought up that possibility these talks always ended without a resolution of the dis-eases, or unease of the soul to be more precise. My lingering unhappiness over the failure to land any meaningful work in the Bakersfield job market had to be a constant irritant, and even though I was mum on the subject for the past several years, let's face it a few years of unhappy bitter is hard to live with. 

We had, I thought, compromised on a one earner one stay-at-home lifestyle. All her efforts could be on pursuit of success in the job world, which she has achieved, while all work on the property and household would fall to me. The ten-buck-an-hour gigs that I was able to land seemed pointless to keep pursuing when we had a bunch of aging pets to maintain on top of large properties in a town where poverty was so prevalent and opportunity for home burglary ever present on every street. We just had different perspectives on how that would play out, I guess.

Cue the Traveling Willburys "End Of The Line" on our lives together. This is not, however, a boo-hoo pity party on this page. Just an acknowledgement it is one more time to change tracks with the hope that lessons learned will stick, and that complacency and inattentiveness never reside with me in the years to come. Time for new horizons.

Happy Holidays to friends and families everywhere.

When people become brands who can be schocked by the lies?

Dan Hicks had a great line many years ago, "How can I miss you when you won't go away?" He made a quirky song out of it.



This line always pops into my head when the bombast of world class liars and frauds intrudes too much into my little world.  The song has ebbed and flowed in my brain throughout the forty plus years I can remember first hearing it and then immediately thinking of Richard Nixon, and why he would just never go away. Until, finally, he did one late summer in 1974 just go away with a spastic wave before boarding a taxpayer funded helicopter to fly off into obscurity and exile. The awkward wave was almost Napoleonic in its bizarre parting gesture to a nation. The nation had had enough of Dick.

This first month of January in 2013 we have two characters filling the news pages with their tawdry stories of deceit, Lance Armstrong and Manti T'eo.  Lance utterly fails all attempts to categorize him as a human being. If you read any of the multitude of articles over the years and the many detailed accounts of the lengths his corporate goons went about attacking and ruining any person who actually spoke the truth you just want this guy to die instantly and disappear from recorded history. Sadly, this will not be the case. Lance just reaches the upper echelon of fakes during this age of money fueled  disinformation. Manti T'eo's story, although stupefying and a giant pie in the face to all who cover college football for a living, comes off as a stupid teen prank gone big-time bad for Notre Dame, and Manti T'eo. Of course, this hallmark university of all things college football can mourn a fake girl who died, but not one who committed suicide after getting the brush off from Notre Dame after accusing one of its football players of rape.

Here is a Rick Reilly column owning his swallowing hook, line and sinker every Lance lie. This could be the general media template for all upcoming articles of gullibility and no accountability by members of our illustrious advertising sponsor-paid press corps. The Daily Coyote has more journalistic integrity than nearly all the high paid talent working for big media and their advertisers today. No one pays this lady to spin a yarn a certain way. The photos are honest, not an advertiser's demand.

No rational person in the world should be surprised at these latest liars, just at how many there are these days. Let's be honest, we are still paying off the eight year misadventure called the Iraq War, which was waged on outright lies by the Bush Administration, and whose total cost can never be accurately measured. We have had the nation's key financial advisers fail to tell the truth regarding their casino exploits with credit swaps and mortgage securities bundled together as billion dollar investments not worth a thousand dollars. Major banks and lending institutions lied to their their borrowers repeatedly on what the true cost of the loans they sold would be for a decade. We lived through the 1990s where every baseball game was a fraud, and applauded for every home run until the juice story leaked through the muscled biceps of the armies of players injecting PEDs into their bodies. We have seen the lies at Penn State, and the awful repercussions of those victims, but Penn State certainly seems well enough after a short hiccup in the public consciousness. None in the major media outlets during any of these gargantuan frauds and abuses of power raised a finger to point out the truth, until way after the fact. And wasn't it just yesterday when we saw a different Tiger Woods and John Edwards?

The apologies are not even apologies today, just news cycle spin  filled with crocodile tears for the conglomerate media. The charlatans of today are now brands, incorporated piles of legal teams and media consultants. Sad day when people morphed into a brand of advertising piffle. I can't feel sorry for a brand. I feel pity for all those who swallow up whatever soap, fragrance or charity work the brand sells to make itself more powerful.