Sometimes I don't know

I don't know what to say right now. I'm stressed and despairing and angry and confused and I just want to be alone. Maybe I'll get my thoughts in order later.

The mess inside...still there

I have some things I want to talk about soon. Not now because it's too late at night, but soon.

I think it might be because the other day when I decided to visit this blog for the first time in years, I perused through some of my old posts, reliving some moments in that place where my mind was so many years ago, and found some old wounds still festering. Bleeding pus in the darkness.

I will try to sort through these here shortly. I need to. 

You're still here, I'm still here

Well, how about this? It's, what? Eight years since my last communique, and the old blog is patiently awaiting my return. Hell, I was even still signed into my account. 

Doubtless no one other than me knows this blog exists or cares that it does, perhaps they never did. So why come back? Perhaps nostalgia, perhaps a need for a safe place to write what I feel without my entire social circle and beyond ready to cancel me into oblivion for saying the wrong thing. Not that I would commit such a severe faux pas, but you know what I mean. I gotta talk. 

And there are lots of things I want to talk about, too. As always, I do a lot of thinking, some of it out loud, continuing to try and make sense of my life and the ever-fermenting soup I swim around in every day. I learn something new, I gain a new insight, I grow a little (maybe a little too much around the middle, but nevertheless), and I still don't know if I'm a better person for it; but I keep moving forward in my continuing long-distance walking trip, because that is what I must do. What else is there? 

So hopefully I will pick up this written record of my travels where I left off, and keep adding to it. Certain activities need to be done if I am to stay sane and happy (metaphorically speaking). Music is one. Drawing is one. Writing is one. They don't need to be huge projects. They don't need to be technically perfect or sanded to a mirror finish, they don't need to be profound. I will make an effort to not go back and edit. This is an approach I picked up relatively recently when I developed an interest in typewriters. Also reflected in my gazillion doodles that I make at work when I don't have customers (mainly when I'm manning the Starbucks kiosk, where I have an endless supply of unwanted receipts piling up). Joyfully rough and spontaneous. 

Starbucks? What? God, I really have been gon a long time. So to quickly bring you up to date: after an ill-fated nine months or so at a Whole Foods Market here in Columbus and a brief blip at a local restautrant that I won't even give the courtesy of naming, I have been working for Kroger since about October 2017, at the Graceland Shopping Center location. I've bounced around several sub-departments within the Deli-Bakery department, including a spell as the lead in our Starbucks kiosk, and now currently the lead in our Murray's cheese shop. At nearly 8 years on the job I've become one of the long-timers at our store, hopefully that means something good to the people that matter. It seems I've earned a measure of respect and trust. Yes, this lowly supermarket gig is shaping up to be the longest stretch of continuous employment in my odder than odd "career". This after my second longest stretch...also working for a supermarket. I think it's safe to say that my youthful, naively optimistic adventure in the respectable middle class world of the creative professions is well and rightly ancient history now, dead and full of cobwebs. That world doesn't exist anymore. Print gave way to the web, which gave way to social media, and now we've got artificial intelligence making human designers/artists/musicians/writers/etc obsolete. Last time I wrote here, that sort of AI was still science fiction. 

So yeah. I'm 51 years old now. I work in retail now, and I probably will for the forseeable future, and I'm cool with that. I ain't going nowhwere, no how. Fuck that job-hunting rat race shit. 

 Remember who I referred to as my "former partner"? She's back in my life. As of 2022 we have been living together again. The short version of the latest section in our long and convoluted shared novel: after I returned to Columbus to continue on my merry solo path, she got involved with another guy, that relationship turned into a dumpster fire but not before producing two children, and after a few years of hardship I invited her and her kids to come live with me here so that I could help her get back on her feet and help raise her kids in a somewhat more congenial environment than northeastern New Jersey (blech). She accepted. And so, for the second time in her life, she lives in Columbus; first time for the kids. We're platonic this time. We're both just fine with that. I'm trying to be, if not a surrogate father, then at least a positive male adult role model for the kids. I like them. They seem to like me. This may be as close to a family of my own as I'm ever likely to have. 

We live in a rental house in the Linden neighborhood. Along the way I had to give up both of my cars; since winter 2022 I have been relying on COTA and less often Uber to get me around. It's expensive for one breadwinner on a supermarket wage in 2025, but somehow, some way, we're hanging on. We're nothing if not resilient. 

Certain people were urging me to give up and abandon my partner and her children on the grounds of "this isn't sustainable", "supporting them is neither [my] responsibility nor [my] problem", and pressuring me to quit Kroger and return to the job market to look for a "real job" because "[they] can't figure out how [I'm] doing it"...they were saying this three years ago. 

I'm still here. Ha! 

I need to get going for now, it's already 1:30 am. More soon.

Time for a new blog?

I have no idea who on the great digital high seas actually reads my ramblings and rantings, but A Flubber Room, in my mind at least, is a book I'd just as soon shut and put on the shelf for future generations of psychiatrists to study.

I've tried before to start a new blog, free of self-pity and bile, and look how that turned out. What's to say a new one now won't degenerate anew into pathetic navel gazing?

Well, the past is the past. Lessons have been learned, software has been updated. I can't say that I'm a different person, exactly, or that the wounds have shed their scabs completely, but I've found other, possibly more satisfying ways to express my personal mess that won't grate on the nerves of the few people who actually bother with my blogs. Poetry, for one. Songs, for another.

It's been a year and a half since I moved back to Columbus. The New Jersey chapter of my life represented in A Flubber Room is thankfully over, done with. A lot of my old assumptions and aspirations are history. A lot of it didn't work, some of it disastrously so. It's time for something new. I'm currently somewhat adrift, unsure of where I stand in the world and what to do with the rest of it. There's no skirting around the fact that at 43 I'm now in early middle-age, unemployed, broke, single, childless, living alone again in the same house as when I started blogging in my late 20s, feeling that the world has left me behind and now struggling to find my way back onto the road, never mind "catching up", whatever that means. I still suffer from depression, but now the panic-stricken desperation to fit in and "make it" has been replaced by a kind of resigned, jaded lethargy. I'm now free again to pursue what I was really meant to be, but I have no idea what that is. It's like the first year after college all over again, without the benefits of youth and its attendant boundless optimism. There is something liberating about no longer feeling obligated to play the game that society has forced us to play but has not equitably prepared all of us for. Sometimes the best way to survive a losing--arguably rigged--game is to walk away, and find something else to prove your virility and cunning. There is something liberating in being able to say what you are, but even more so what you are not. I am not a graphic designer. I am not a corporate prostitute. I am not a loser. Useless, perhaps, but at least I don't spend my days playing XBox and complaining about poor Mexicans taking all the good jobs that I should have instead. They're not the ones writing the candidate requirements in the online job postings, or programming labyrinthine web-based employment applications that read more like Homeland Security border interrogations.

Oops, I did it again. I'm done ranting. And yes, I'm going to leave it up, not delete it as being exactly what I didn't want to do. I spent all that finger-energy typing it, and I LIKE my way with words, dammit. So there.

Maybe I WILL start a new blog. But not today. It's too hot. My mind isn't on the wonderfulness of my new outlet; I have a gig with my band in Las Vegas this weekend. I'd rather think about good things. Some bad things have happened in the last week. I should be disgusted by it, and I am, intensely. The Neo-Nazis and Klansmen and the rest of the alt-rightwads can shove their bullshit right back where it came from. They want to start a race war. I want to play music and do art and go bike riding and make things. I want to leave the country and the planet a better place than I left it. I want people to be happy, including myself. That starts now.

Moving day is getting dangerously close now...I don't have a lot of time to write but I will soon. There's a lot of reflection and commentary to be written on this chapter of my autobiography which is about to end. But first, many boxes need to be packed, a lot of garbage thrown out, and some threads to be tied up--and a few that need to be cut. There always are. (Emotional ones, not personal ones. Don't worry. Friends are like solid gold bullion to me.)

And now I'm cleaning out the trash--my kitchen physically; my soul spiritually

It's turning out to be a fine day. I'm off work, I'm rested up (well, somewhat), and I'm tackling the awfulness of the kitchen. Every day that goes by the new peace in my heart keeps growing, the acrid bitterness and dejection giving way to love and gratitude for all that I have and all the people, wherever they may be, who continue to care for me. It's astounding the difference a simple decision to turn a doorknob makes. Suddenly, the room is flooded with light.

That's it for tonight

I'll dredge up more later.

time to take my pill again (August 2008?)

"Right wing airhead" = Sarah Palin.

==

Haven't written in a while. Probably to be expected, as I've been up and down emotionally lately. Still no job. I had an interview last week and thought it went well, but you can never tell what they're thinking. They sure haven't called or written me back. I'm pretty much broke. Don't know how the hell we're gonna pay the rent next month. I'm behind on everything. Now I'm hearing even more bad economic news, everybody's laying off and on top of that there's that right-wing airhead who's running for VP with McCain. And people seem to really, really like her. Hoo boy, well so much for things getting better, so much for something to look forward to. I swear.

It didn't drag. (late 2008)

One more. Obviously at the beginning I was having a very, very hard time adjusting to my new *ahem* career. I wouldn't have guessed at the time that six and a half years later I would still be on board as one of the team's highly respected and beloved veterans. For what it's worth, I outlived my "de facto superior" by several years.

==

It just sucked. What a debacle. My de facto superior on shift tonight was constantly on my case, I didn't get around to taking my "lunch" break, and I still wasn't able to get out of there until a quarter after 11 pm. Cherie suggested I talk to one of the important people about transferring to another department. That might not be a bad idea, because right now I'm getting seriously dispirited with the whole thing.

Thanksgiving has come and gone... (more old stuff)

Another painful rant from the early days.

==

I dunno. Thankful for what? That I at least have a job in the middle of a dismal recession...never mind that my entire paycheck is disappearing just like that for the rent, and so I'm looking at another two weeks of being broke. (Cherie's too...and even that's not enough. Her mom's covering the rest.) That I have Cherie and her family with me so I don't have to face life alone here so far from my family. That I still *have* a family somewhere, and that my cellphone hasn't been turned off so I can still talk to them every night while I'm walking the dogs. That we managed to have a nice dinner yesterday and everyone over, and that I had a moment or two of happiness jamming on the guitar together with Cherie's nephew and her sister's boyfriend. And in spite of all that, I feel absolutely miserable. I LOATHE LIFE RIGHT NOW. I'd like to fall asleep into a pleasant dream and never, ever, wake up until all my creditors have gone bankrupt and every bill collector in every call center in the world has died of typhoid, and I don't have to have a fucking pissant job to pay things I don't want to have to pay for, and I can do the things that I want to do to make myself happy, and I can be with my family again and no one will be hurt or angry by my wanting to do so. I HATE MY LIFE AND I WANT TO GO HOME TO MY MOM AND DAD AND I WANT THINGS TO BE THE WAY THEY USED TO BE GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Soul-searching (a much more recent draft)

Here I think I'm starting to inch up towards some kind of moment of clarity. Again, I must not have finished because it was saved as a draft. I will leave it as is.

==

In every situation there comes a time when you think to yourself: this isn't working. It may be a slight nuance, the realization that your fly is down or there's a blob of ketchup on your chin; or it may be a full blown existential crisis in which you question your whole conception of yourself and how you fit in with the world and the society of which you are ostensibly a part.

I'm the kind of guy who will cruise along for months or years with a "this isn't working" feeling. I'll try to ignore it, try to integrate it with my self-image, project out, but it will keep gnawing at me until I kick the critical leg from under it and the resulting avalanche buries me. I put up with a lot of pain before I blow up, but I eventually do blow up. It's happened several times before. One very painful incident ultimately cost me a friend and led me to finally acknowledge that I suffered from depression and to seek treatment for it.

The most recent one, I think, will also eventually push me in a healthier direction. But this time I don't think medication will be the route to salvation--rather it will be my own actions.

I've always felt like an outsider. As soon as I was venturing outside of my family and meeting with the outside world, I began perceiving it as a hostile place. Without going into all the lurid details of my childhood, I've pretty much gone through my entire life feeling that wherever I went people were actively trying to keep me out. Not necessarily specific people--I have made a lot of good friends, who I'm grateful for--but society in general. Here's one way I've thought about it: for some time I've perceived a kind of mismatch between my inclinations, tastes, and aspirations, and the circumstances in which I lived my life. I generally think of those in terms of socieconomic class; basically, I'm a middle- to upper-middle-class type person who was, through no choice of my own, raised in a fairly rough working class environment. I've never really been able to be comfortable in either world. The kids I went to school with used to beat me up. The clean-cut respectable kids I went to college with mostly ignored me.

For some reason, I've always tended to ally myself with the working class crowd; I don't know why, probably just out of nostalgia or familiarity. I don't really identify with them culturally anymore. I do feel a lot more comfortable with the run down turn-of-the-century duplexes and grass-cracked sidewalks of the North Campus area I grew up in, than with the posh manicured McMansions of affluent suburbia--I would even consider living in the old neighborhood again--but I don't really care for the culture. Maybe it's because nowadays there are more grad students than the old locals living there.

Shaky (draft of post from 2008 or so)

To contrast with my recent happy turn of events, here's a post which I never bothered to publish when I wrote it. I couldn't even muster the heart to finish it, and just stopped in mid-sentence as if it was just too horrible an effort to continue. I'm so eternally grateful and thankful to the appropriate deities that they have allowed me to survive the following:

==

Ah, another morning. That means laying in bed awake for at least an hour with my hands shaking and the 2000 thoughts in my head short-circuiting and overlapping in crackly short bursts like AM radio on a winter night. Getting up and taking a Wellbutrin usually helps some.

It's overwhelming, all this Real Life shit is.

I wonder how much more of this I, or my mind or my body, can take. On the one hand, we are getting by for now, even if it does seem an extremely creaky boardwalk to travel. One screw-up or unexpected change in the routine could unravel everything, until we have a bit more financial breathing space, and right now we have just about none.

Going home, I have to say, is always an option. Emotionally it would be tough on me, not to mention that moving out of state based on fevered emotions without a job lined up has gotten me fucked before. And there's always the spectre of having given up, of having failed, which has already pretty much decimated my self-image and confidence. But I don't know how things will play out, and at some point it may be the most sensible thing I can do. If it comes down to saving my sanity and getting myself back on firm ground financially (if, for example, I can tranfer to one of my firm's outlets in Columbus, or somehow get back in at the YMCA), I may decide to cut my losses and re-relocate. I'm sure it'd make a lot of other people happy. Maybe me too. I do admit that homesickness has been gnawing at me relentlessly for at least a month or two. I suppose, like the old Joni Mitchell song says, I didn't know what I had till it was gone.

I gave Columbus a hell of a bad rap; New York--well, the New York area--seemed like such a glamorous land of opportunity by comparison. I was gonna go into the city often, and just hang out. Maybe even find a job there! Ha fucking ha. The closest I got to New York in the nine months I've been here was the riverfront in Hoboken. When I went there to try out for a (temporary) job. That I didn't get. Meanwhile, bills kept piling up, accounts got behind, savings ran out, credit maxed out, my credit rating has undoubtedly tanked, and--just before Christmas--we even got threatened with eviction. Landlord's sick of being paid late and only in part, you understand. Now he also tells us that, because of his insurance company, we have to clear out everything we have in the basement within, like, a month or two. There goes another unspecified slice of our meager income every month, toward a self-storage space. You know, if I didn't have to throw away half of my fucking income on rent, I might be able to get ahead a little.

Yeah, I'm disillusioned. Not quite ready to quit yet, but definitely I'm not under any illusions anymore. No more stars in my eyes. If the Real World does anything to a person, it takes away every spark

All right, already. I've made up my mind. And damn, bitch, does it feel good.

Oh, my goodness. I'm really going to have to start writing here regularly again, and I mean for real this time because I have a million thoughts that I keep talking about to myself and I'd really like to put them down in tangible form. You see, this blog has been kind of a sporadic road-movie-in-progress. What I have to talk about forms a continuous narrative thread with what's come before. In book terms this isn't a new chapter beginning, it's a new part, I have a feeling, and hopefully a happy, uplifting one. A long, dark winter is in the process of melting away in new sunshine, watering the ground for the inevitable flowers.

Maybe I'd better explain. My adventure in New Jersey is coming to an end. When my lease is up at the end of November, I'm planning to pack my things and make one more one-way trip, this time in the opposite direction--back to Ohio, back to the same house I departed seven years ago.

I think it's a somewhat different guy making the return trip, a rather changed man, older, definitely wiser about the world, certainly battle-scarred but toughened up in the process, and most importantly imbued with a new humility and appreciation for what was left behind. I've had to cast off a lot of expectations and old self-imposed standards which had become boat anchors hanging from my shoulders. At a certain point you have to put aside what you've kept insisting is what you want your situation to be, look around at what your situation actually is, and take new bearings without fear or shame. In my case I've realized:

1) I'm never going to live and/or work in New York. That was probably an unattainable pipe dream to begin with. New Jersey is vaguely close but definitely no cigar, and is maybe 80% as insanely expensive to live in.

2) I've largely lost interest in pursuing a graphic design career. It's just not really what I want to do anymore, whether or not the fickle NYC job market would consider a talented, experienced, but decidedly unhip 41-year-old overweight barista a "desirable" candidate anyway.

3) I've mostly failed to form a viable social network or social life of my own in New Jersey, outside of my work mates and my second of two romantic relationships.

4) In spite of some interesting local institutions and things, for someone of my temperament and interests New Jersey has turned out to be a cultural vacuum. No local arts scene, no local music scene, etc. etc. Hoboken and NYC don't count as local. Great pizza doesn't quite make up for it.

5) In spite of the many wonderful people I've met, and who I hope will remain friends for life, I've never been able to shake the overall impression that I live in an alien, hardscrabble, inequitable, often hostile and uncaring environment.

However:

6) Once I (well, we) were finally able to escape from our horrible living arrangement at the end of 2013, I slowly came to realize that it was just that. As of now, I've lived on my own for about a year and a half, paying more every month than my share of the rent at the old place, and I haven't gone broke or paid a bill late even once. I've even managed to save up some emergency money. I can do something right after all.

7) Speaking of the old place, I know it's horrible to say but the best thing that ever happened to me since I've been in New Jersey was my previous landlord passing away. Oh, the stress and the anxiety caused by that wretched man. My current landlords are dead opposite, an absolute pleasure to deal with, friendly, professional, non-intrusive, and most importantly sane. And the rent is much more reasonable.

8) I am satisfied that my former partner is doing well in her new surroundings; she has her own nice apartment now and is in a committed relationship. I don't worry about her anymore, I think she will do fine. I'm proud of her.

9) Knowing that, and looking at the shortcomings I mentioned, it then just took me a little swift self-kick in the ass to just come out, damn it, and proclaim that which, in my heart, I have desperately wanted to do all along, because:

10) Everything that I'm missing in New Jersey, I have back in Ohio. Family (most important by a country mile), friends (a close second), professional ties, culture, places to go, things to do, familiar streets and neighborhoods, open space--all of it. Maybe not nearly on the scale of New York, but you know, New York isn't the only hip city in the country. See 1) also.

Columbus, on the other hand, is home. Even good ol' Patterson Ave. with its obnoxious keg-partying college kids has 100 times more vitality than where I'm at now. And if I want to, I can use the money I'm no longer spending on rent to buy a drum kit from Music Go Round, set it up in my living room, and drown them out by bashing away on it at 3 am. I may be officially middle-aged now, but this GenXer can still cause some trouble. I can't wait to do battle with some crazy millennial snots. Bring it on, mofos!

I want to make one thing clear, though. I have rationalized my stubborn resistance to moving back in terms of not wanting to give up on my self-imposed mission. I'd convinced myself that returning to Columbus before I was ready would amount to defeat. But I am not giving up. I have not lost at any fucking thing. You know what defeat would have been? Willfully, insistently, staying mired in the middle of this bog, unable to move in any direction, simply because that bog happened to be within 20 miles of the quote-unquote Greatest City In The World and I have some insane, obsessive-compulsive "thing" to prove by doing so. "Just a little longer...if I can only get myself to bla-bla-bla..." Feh. Getting up the courage to change course and move in any direction is a slam-dunk victory for me. The goalposts have moved, only this time I'm the one doing the moving. That feels damn good.

I'll have more to say later, I'm tapped out for now. The saga continues.