I scarcely know where to begin. All I know is that I'm pent up. Masturbation holds no draw, nor does eating save the gnawing, nor does sleep save the escape, nor does bathing as I rather like my smell, nor does work though I miss solving problems. If I remain in this state everything will fall down around me and we work with no safety net. I am the most depressed I can remember in a long time. What I really need is a good cry but I can't bring myself to it. I'm exhausted and apathetic. I miss my family. I miss my mother, my grandmother, my sister, her kids... but I can't go back home. Home is a place that exists in my mind and not in reality. I'm just so tired. Death becomes more and more attractive. This will pass, but when? I feel like I'm trapped under ice, cold fingers gripping my torso, pulling me down. I want nothing more than to embrace them.

Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you

That is one of my favorite lines from the Matrix. The lines proceeding it are:

"You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin...I'm going to show [these people] a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."

I know few things in life with crystal clear certainty. I'll tell you what I do know though. I know how progress works. I know that no one truly cares whether or not I accomplish the goals I set for myself. I mean that to say that they do care but they have no internal control over whether or not I get off of my ass. To truly care that another human betters themselves is something left for parents and significant others. Even then there is only so much we can truly do. I know that my fate is controlled by how much I prepare myself for opportunity and then whether or not that preparation has made me able to pull the trigger when that chance comes my way.

I know that my mother bred me with the badge of The Wolf from Pulp Fiction, "I fix problems." It's really the only thing that I'm good at, crisis management. It's the day to day stuff that I have problems resolving. But you give me a problem and I'm like a pig in shit, the bigger the problem, the happier I am. There is no circumstance I am better suited for. This is my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. Age and experience it seems have tempered me a bit to learn to choose my battles.

The problem with raising a person with an understanding of fixing problems and allowing them to believe that that extends to people is the boredom. Eventually, they'll fix the shit around them and then they go searching. Dogs will hunt. They dig up the past and try and fix that too. My father is a fuck up. Other than that he's a great guy. My mom is a fuck up too. At some point in the past my father was less of a fuck up than my mother and for a time he was the iron hand of God that fixed my mothers problems. Problems remembering how to laugh, to enjoy, to raise children, to have stability. He fixed those for her and for a time life was good. The inevitable though eventually overtook reality. The bubble wasn't sustainable and it burst. I studied this history with veracity. I wanted to undo what had been done, what they couldn't manage to keep. But I can't time travel so I looked for it around me. I looked for my mom in another face. I thought that if I could fix what my father broke I could fix the things wrong with me.

You cannot undo the past and you cannot fix people. How many times must I learn this lesson? Salvation comes at your own hands and by your own choices. There is no personal Jesus to take on your sins. We nail our frailties onto our own cross made with our own sweat and we choose the whens and the ifs of impaling. "Where we go from here is a choice I leave to you." People must choose for themselves. Sure, a kick in the ass at an appropriate moment is a grand gift to give but a kick in the ass to someone not already moving will result in them falling flat on their face and then they'll blame you for their fall. That I can't wrap my mind about this is why I have nightmares. Fear is such an ugly demon. Fear of success, fear of that success leaving. Fear of not being helped, fear that once helped that they help will come at too steep a price, fear that the help will leave. Fear of need, fear of consumption by that need until you don't recognize yourself. Fear. It makes you act out, makes you inflict ache so that the outside world will reflect the inside one.

I am a fucked up person trying simply to wake up on time this morning. That is enough for me. The rest of it is a distraction from a group of tasks that I'm frightened to tackle and needs that I am afraid to address. To do so would ground me in the present and some days that is such a scary prospect. No past to pontificate about, no future to fantasize on. Just the simple and frank present to work in. How utterly frightening. How vitally necessary.

Movement

The future lurches at me and sometimes I’m unsure of my way. There are times though that it feels like something steadies my rudder and it all feels better somehow. I think I’ve been in a state of depression the past few days. I know this territory. It is familiar ground. When people decide to have kids I swear they should ask, ‘Do you have a family history of depression?’ My grandmother is seemingly the strongest of us. She isn’t. She just manages to force her depression into a box and deal with life in what she feels is a head on manner, placing her emotional needs into a void of her own meticulous design. Funny, women of her generation do not conceptualize these ‘modern needs’ for ‘talking it out’. Talk it out? Fuck that. She’ll be 80 years old on the 20th of this month. One could only hope to be as mentally clear and physically sound even at the age of 60. It's the emotional deterioration that is most troubling.

The breakdown to my depression is in response to at least two factors. I miss my family. Being banished for having a different religious belief system is painful. I am caught between what is most important, my integrity and principles and a need for my family. The closeness, the condition-less love, the history… I crave it and yet it is absent for me. I can see how people become alcoholics. There are times when being in a haze even for a short time has its appeals. I just can’t be that man. So I face the storm and it batters the hell out of me.

The second factor begins here: It’s going to snow soon. I’m expecting blizzard like conditions. That disturbs the hell out of me since my car is not really meant for snow and my defroster is out. I’d really like to get that fixed but to do so almost makes me feel like I’m giving in. My goal of doing a wholesale real estate deal by months end gets me out of bed in the morning. The idea that money buys happiness is a myth. But having a bit more of it would surely solve some of the more immediate problems and elevate my struggling status at least one notch. I'd like that. I need that.

I'm realizing that this is a rant/ramble but I feel better now like a good old fashioned bowel movement.

Flush.

Family

I was reviewing some old emails between an ex girlfriend and myself. I started with the last one, the nastiest things she'd ever said to me and I made my way backward to the nicest. I found it cathartic and honestly a bit sad. I see this woman who I cared for in a bad situation. It was this bad situation that made me move to Colorado. It made me ignore my better instincts to wait until I had enough money to get my own place. It made me buy a house full of things that she needed. It made me sacrifice sleep to take care of her children at night while she worked. It made me stay when I was the least happy I've been in a long time. It made me think of committing a crime when I discovered that she'd been cheating on me with her ex.

I see this wounded and scared person who acted out of fear that I'd end the relationship acting out toward me. Its funny. I don't think that I would have left her no matter how unhappy I was. I would have stayed because I promised. I promised to help. I promised to care. And what is a man without his testicles or his word? I miss her children. I miss them so much. I miss folding laundry, eating dinner together, waking up next to her. Mind you it isn't the person that I miss. I don't miss her. I miss the semblance of family. I miss the illusion that I could count on someone. I miss the idea that I was having an impact on children. Family anymore is not so much what we are born with but what we make after that birth. And it is the thing that drains me the most yet at the same time it is what fills me to the brim and it is what I am sorely lacking and sorely missing. The evidence of that is that I have to force myself to steer clear of her side of town for fear that I would happily attempt to drink down the very poison that nearly killed me before.