Ah, political discourse

So many Romney apologists, so little time to make excuses left.

If Americans want real change, they'll vote for a third party candidate and start a true dialogue.

The Green Party candidates are both amazing women, intelligent and hard-working, who would probably bring more humanity and heart to the highest office in the nation than it's had in decades.

But no, instead they get handcuffed and spend time in jail while the big boys stand on a stage, point fingers and posture.

You'll get what you deserve, America.

No whining

 Facebook is the perfect place for people to whine about their first world problems.  On the other hand, do the rest of us have to give a shit?  My answer is a rousing NO.  Blow off repairing your car and then whine about it when it breaks?  Boo-hoo.  Spend money on fixing up neglected house problems instead of on something utterly indulgent?  Waaaahh.  Bitch about how the job sucks but do absolutely nothing to improve your situation?  Grow up or shut up!

Honestly, people.  Sheesh.

You can't go back again

My son got married last weekend.  It was a beautiful ceremony followed by a lovely party.  Several members of my far-flung family attended, and I got to meet a number of my new daughter-in-law's family as well.  Everything was perfect. 

Well... except for the ex.

I have been divorced from my children's father for about 10 years.  At the time we separated I was pretty well fed up with him.  I'd tried to make it work for years and by the time I realized it was a losing cause and made the break, he acted like he didn't even know the end was coming.  He fought me every step of the way.  Even went as far as doing lunatic things like calling off Christmas (!!) and telling our children not to speak to me ever again.  (Which would have been quite difficult for my daughter, considering she lived with me...)  Needless to say, by the time I was finally able to let go of the entire relationship, he had destroyed any good will that had ever been built between us.

I moved on with my life, got a good job, bought a house, started long-distance dating a wonderful man.  I had met my Sweetie through the ex many, many years before so subsequently knew him quite well.  Apparently the ex thought that he had an exclusive right to that relationship because he decided that I should not be friends with him, much less date this man.  And it irritated him severely that I refused to acquiesce to his request for me to terminate the relationship. 

In the meantime my daughter grew up, graduated high school and also moved on with her life.  I grew tired of the long-distance thing and of living alone in the small town in which I had spent so much of my life, so I packed up everything I owned, loaded it in a truck and moved across the country to be with the man I now knew that I loved.  Oh boy, did that twist the ex's shorts in a knot!  My children were not thrilled with this development either... My daughter because I was going to be living 2500 miles away, but especially my son who was under the misguided notion that men don't "steal" the womenfolk of their friends.  (Wonder where he got that notion?)  Never mind that I was no longer his father's woman - ugh, still makes my stomach turn just to think of it - nor the fact that the ex had not even been in close contact with my Sweetie for a number of years. 

So imagine the drama when we - my Sweetie and me - moved back across country, this time to Las Vegas, and took the plunge into marriage.  Our reasons were pretty simple: we were going to stay together anyway, he wanted me to have health insurance, and we wanted the advantages only married couples can enjoy.  The kids eventually got over it.  The ex must have had apoplexy.

Sweetie and I had dinner with the ex a couple of years ago, as he held out the olive branch.  We're not the sort to hold grudges so we accepted his invitation.  It was an uncomfortable affair, punctuated by the fact that he was apparently looking for friendship, but chose not to follow through because he didn't contact us again.  That was okay with me, I had no desire to attempt to have a casual relationship with the man; there was too much water under the bridge, too many hard feelings, too much drama.  He has this tendency to want to be the martyr in most situations - and I have no desire to be the Pontius Pilate to his Jesus.

Fast forward a couple of years more and now our lives have led us to Ireland.  The ex asked once why we would want to live in Ireland; can you imagine?  My answer to him was, why not?! He obviously thinks we're crazy - however, it leaves him in the catbird seat, as he gets to play hero for the children full-time. 

So there we were, interacting for the benefit of the children, playing nice in order to make our son's special day as perfect as possible.  And the whole time I was squirming inside.  He wanted to stroll down memory lane, as if there were places and times in our broken marriage that I wanted to re-visit.  I'm not saying the entire marriage was a bust, but it's kind of hard to remember the good times when they were whitewashed so thoroughly by the bad times.  He tried to destroy me because of his depression, our marriage was broken for a very long time before I finally put the proverbial bullet in its brain - and now I'm expected to look back on it as if none of that happened?  Nope.  Couldn't do it.  I was civil, polite, made small talk.  But nostalgic?  Hell no.  And he hasn't changed at all, not one whit.  10 years of being single and he hasn't learned why.  He still talks of the same things, continues to re-visit the past, for some reason refuses to move into the future. 

No, sometimes you just can't go back again. 

Angst, drama, action!

I was musing over my seemingly horrible writer's block the other evening and came to the conclusion that a writer has to have some angst, unpleasantness, discord, conflict in their life to really write something good.  Only I'm not particularly suffering from any of those things on an everyday basis.  I mean, I have those things in my past, but I've spent these last few years in a concerted effort to expunge the negativity from my life.  Regret drags you down and robs you of your health, living in the past prevents you from moving into your future.  As a result, I find it extremely difficult now to delve back into that part of my psyche to dredge up the unhappiness and explore the dark corners. 

And even when I get to a place where I think I can maybe mine for writing gold, I lose my facility for language.  Everything I write sounds trite and overwrought.  I wish I could just let loose and go bleh, there it is, it's all there on the page, just waiting for me to edit and publish. 

Can I create compelling fiction with tools and life experiences from my past?  Do I really want to go there?  How else do writers create good stories except to probe their own life and - I think bravely - share it on the page?

Come on brain, don't fail me now!

Happiness is...

I thought I had everything I wanted and needed when we decided to pull up stakes and move across the world.  We discovered that divesting ourselves of all the extra crap we had been packing and hauling around for years was very cleansing.  It's quite elevating to lighten the load. 

We've found ourselves facing some poverty issues lately, but it's not enough to tamp down the happy.  Living on the Emerald Isle, taking in the ocean every day.  It's so pretty here.  The whole lifestyle is so new.  It's exhilarating. 

I get to fly back to the old home town next week to watch my darling son marry a very lovely girl.  Married!  My baby boy!  Wow.  I get to meet her parents and eat dinner with my ex-husband and all that stress.  I also get to spend time with my precious children and many members of my family.  And that makes me very happy. 

My mother and niece are returning to Ireland with me.  They start their European vacation in our fair city and I get to show them the sights.  So looking forward to their visit! 

Every single day I wake up to the love of my life, the man of my dreams.  Even with all my flaws, he still loves and cares for me.  He puts up with my crap.  He puts up with my cooking.  And for all that, he makes me very happy. 

Happiness is living your life by your own terms.

Brave move, sir

The President of the United States came out in favor of same sex marriage.  I've never been more excited about a politician taking a stance.  Equality now!

Love and loss

So many things have happened to me since I last left you, dear blog.  Sweetie got to see his long-term dream of moving to Ireland come to fruition.  His news came at the worst possible time for me - but how was I going to deny him?!?  Would you want to be the instrument of death for a loved one's most dearly held wish?  Oh hell no. 

I gave away incalculable amounts of possessions it had taken me years to accumulate; books, furniture, my faithful alarm clock, my wonderful bed.  I gave up a job that, while not the most ideal, did afford me time to live a good life and make enough money to pay my way through the world, and I worked with people who were decent, kind and charitable.  (I must say I was quite disturbed and upset at the time that I didn't get the job at the bankruptcy law firm, but that sure worked out for the best in the end.  I had the benefit of hindsight and perspective to realize that it would have sucked my soul out of me after a certain period of time.) 

Now I live in a place that my friends and family see as an idyll, a perpetual holiday.  Ireland is everything people think it is, and more.  It's green and sunny and rainy and windy.  The people are friendly.  The neighborhood in which we live is absolutely gorgeous, so close to the bay that it takes a mere 3 minutes to walk to the water.  The city offers everything we need, including music and culture, and these people have a festival for every little thing.  One cannot drive more than a few miles without running into a castle or some ancient building or structure that deserves one's admiration.  And talk about stunning views... the place is rampant with them.

But - oh, surely you knew there was going to be a 'but' - I'm back to a place I've been before, many moons ago when I was still married to the previous house and the previous husband and the previous life.  I'm not allowed to work for pay.  I can't find part-time work in the US because I'm too far away from their time zones.  (There are other reasons but that's the main one.)  I'm reluctant to try harder to find work in Ireland because the time we have been allotted is so abbreviated.  He is under contract for just one short year, and if the contract does not renew, we're stuck moving back to the States and to a future for which we have not one single clue.

It's taken a while to get used to this new lifestyle.  Digesting the news of my newly diagnosed physical condition has taken a lot of brain cycles and time.  Navigating the world of Irish health care has been very stressful.  Getting used to my new lack of abilities has been tough too.  Only having my feet and the city bus system for transportation has been daunting.  Everything here is so very different, whether the difference is grand or subtle, that it's taken months just to get into the swing of things.  And the inherent nature of our whole reason for being here is so fleeting that it's difficult for me to plan .. well, anything, really. 

So here I am again, flailing about, unsure of myself, blogging again to see if it helps me get my feet planted firmly and my thoughts sorted properly.  This new life is not entirely confusing.  I've learned my way around the city quite well.  I have a volunteer job that allows me to interact with the same people every week and to meet new ones, and gives me a chance to make good use of some of this abundance of free time.  I'm still married to the love of my life, who treats me like a queen; he is my raison d'etre.  My mother and one of my beautiful nieces are going to be here soon to visit, and 2 of our beautiful daughters are coming over in July for a dream-of-a-lifetime vacation on the continent. 

This life ... it's so confusing.  There are so many shades of grey. 

"But remember, no matter where you go, there you are." -- Earl Mac Rauch

On the Wings of Demons

She sat on the warm sand and looked out at the sea, the wind alternately caressing her skin and blustering her hair, as the sea breeze tends to do. She watched the sea birds wheeling through the sky or scurrying down the beach, attending to their birdly duties. Rose had a love-hate relationship with birds – notwithstanding the fact that birds neither loved nor hated her – inasmuch as she admired their grace and beauty, the ability to soar through the sky on their delicate wings, seemingly with not a care or worry except where that next morsel of food was coming from. Yet they also had this tendency to divebomb in a very threatening manner, and an eerie ability to poop on your head from up in the air before you even knew they were overhead.

She supposed this distrust of the creatures came from her having seen Alfred Hitchcock's “The Birds” at too young an age. But how could she have resisted that wonderfully compelling work of the master? The inadvertent viewing of that particular film was the origin of her lifelong love of horror stories. She remembered how she would stay up late into the night searching for something scary to watch on one of the three channels her parents' television could pick up, and feeling like she'd been richly rewarded when a gem like “Black Sunday” (the 1960 Mario Bava classic, not that crappy football story) or the original “Village of the Damned” came on the screen. She read as many of the great classic novelists and modern authors as she possibly could, from Poe and Lovecraft to King and Simmons and all the others in between.

Now, how had her thoughts managed to again wander all the way out into left field? She felt like that happened a lot these days. She would start off thinking of something important, a serious subject like taxes or what to prepare for dinner, and then before she knew it she was off on a flight of fancy or recalling memories from long ago that had absolutely nothing to do with whatever she had begun contemplating. Rose feared it was a symptom of some hidden mental disorder, a brain tumor just beginning to show signs of taking over her life. More likely it was just a sign of a lack of focus. One could never tell, though. She should probably go have her head x-rayed or have one of those MRI things or whatever they used these days. But that would mean having to deal with doctors; oh man, she just didn't want to go there. Doctors are too cautious these days so whatever they do it costs twice as much as it really should just to get them to finally get to the truth of the matter.

Or maybe she was simply avoiding having to think about what was really bothering her. Even sitting on this idyllic beach enjoying the soft weather and warm sun of this day couldn't really take away the sharp, nagging twinge of remorse she felt. It was no use trying not to think about her brother's death. Actively pushing it out of her mind only served to sharpen the hateful thoughts, the niggling pain of imagination. How had he felt in those last instants before the noose tightened? Had he at least felt the onset of peace or had it been just as painful as his entire life had been for him? How had he summoned the courage to toss himself off into the void like that?

Oh God, here I go again, she chided herself. Come on, Rose, get a grip! Tears trickled down her nose, leaked onto her blouse. She stood up and steeled herself. The water looked quite inviting but was actually bitingly cold. As it lapped over her toes, her thoughts began to wander again to the birds. She remembered a movie she had once seen in which the main character was trying to buy a house in Italy and was having no luck in her negotiations with the old woman who owned the property until a bird shat on her head, at which point the old woman laughed uproariously, declared it an omen of good luck and sold her the house. She thought to herself, “Okay, Rosie, old girl, if a bird craps on your head right now, you'll reconsider.” She stood waiting for the earthbound fecal matter to collide with her skull; one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi... Oh, to hell with it.

When Rose's body washed up onto the shore, no one was there to collect her, to mourn her loss. Which is probably the way she would have preferred it to be.

The Great American Novel

Hey blog, long time no love.  Sorry about that.  A lot of shit got in the way between then and now.  Too much to share.  You've been like a faithful pup though, just sitting and waiting for me to return.  And for that I'm grateful.  So let's start over, like we've gone back to square one and are just getting to know each other anew.

I keep talking about writing The Great American Novel, as if it's just that easy.  And yet I read books all the time that I finish and wonder, "Now how the hell did that writer get that thing published?  A second-grader could've written a better novel!"  And then I read something that just blows my socks off and I figure there's no friggin' way I can even write something close to that.

My new friend JS - you haven't met her yet, blog, but then I guess I haven't told you that I'm living in Galway, Ireland now and she's the American gal Sweetie's new boss introduced us to - suggested that I just keep blogging and eventually publish what's in the blog.  Oh, I guess I haven't confessed that Sweetie & I have another blog, one strictly devoted to our life in Galway.  So I'm kinda cheating on you, dear blog, but only in the most limited sense.  And since the new blog is so limited in scope, I thought about starting yet another new blog.  But Sweetie is the devoted type, and I value his opinion above all others, so when he suggested I come back to you, dearest original blog, I decided that was the way to go.

And here we are.  You & me, together again.  And now I'm going to use you again, but this time solely for good.  Well, maybe the occasional negativity will find its way into your pages, but I'm going to try really hard to keep it all on the sunny side.  Until I write a dark, dark story that ends badly for the main characters or something like that.  But you won't mind, will you blog?  Because after all, we will be together again, side by side, leading each other into the frightening recesses of the intertubes and attempting to bash out the one work of art that will makes us both happy and successful - and independently wealthy beyond our wildest dreams.

Heh.  Let's kick this thing in the ass, shall we?

Gay love

Congratulations to the residents of New York! Now if only we could bring the rest of the world into the 21st century.

Found some pictures, wanna share 'em

I would love to know what Sophia is thinking...

(That's just wrong.)

THE LAST BREAKFAST

Ah, the good old days...