A Belated Decade in Review , Part One....
I can't believe the decade of the "oughts" has come and gone. I realize this is a bit belated, but I've given up worrying about posting anything on time these days. Every time I do it just makes it worse, or seem more canned. So, I'm getting a bit more "organic" with my posting here in this broke down palace.
I think its taken so long for me to post this because I had so much to digest and contemplate about the last decade. Why? Because it was without a doubt the worst decade of my life, hands down. As a matter of fact, it truly is a wonder I'm still here because there were certainly times when I wanted to, and certainly could have, exited stage left.. And I don't say that in jest either. Until you've looked down the barrel and seen the glint of light of the copper jacketed hollow point you're contemplating sending through your brain you don't know what sorrow, or despair truly are. When you hear the clicking of the hammer as you pull it back, and start wondering just how much pressure your thumb is going to need to exert in the trigger to make the inside of your head the equivalent of a cheese pizza on the wall behind you, shit gets pretty real.
The beginning of the year 2000 saw me 8 months from getting out of the military after a four year hitch. It had been a fun, but taxing enlistment. I was ready to get out, and frustrated because of all the bias, and bullshit I had seen being in. I had been all over the globe, gotten married to a woman who was in another branch of the service, and was ready to start my career in the outside world. And that's exactly what happened....
I left the service and went to a training program up north for four months in Minnesota with the hopes of getting hired by the agency I still ( unfortunately ) work for. It was a rough program, more for external reasons than any others. My then wife had become a born again, evangelical "christian" about a year before I left the service, and it was placing a terrible strain on my life and our marriage.
All of my life I had been a spiritual person. I was also raised to be a Christian. But the shit she fell into was the farthest thing from true religion you could imagine. It was nothing more than a cult, plain and simple... She had slipped from the woman I had loved into a flat out religious kook. I was telling myself that it was a phase, and that eventually she would back off, or let up off of it..
I was wrong... Oh, so wrong....
I decided to try to understand what she was into. I began attending her church services, and even allowed myself to be "baptised" in her denomination. I tried to throw myself headlong into her new found belief system in an attempt to understand and connect to her again. ( our personal and sex life had GREATLY suffered ) What a mistake that was.............
It was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. And as a result, completely "engulfed" our marriage. It was like dumping blood into a shark tank. She completely jumped off the deep end of the Crazy pool. All of the sudden it was church 4 times a week, and her dumping money into the coffers of these crooks behind my back. I should have left right then. But, the best laid plans of mice and men....... Right?
I completed the training program, and returned to Florida hoping to be hired.
Little did I know what was in store for me. Had I known, I probably would have picked another path. Or at least run and hid out in the woods for a few years. Lets just say the next couple of years were going to be interesting to say the least. Her psychosis would only grow and get larger until it ultimately lead to her having an affair with another "christian" and me kicking her whoring ass to the curb in 2004..
I should have done it a long time before I did, but I was just dealing with life as best I could. It took me years to forgive myself for that. Years. We all do stupid shit, and hang on for far too long when you look at it from a "post accident" standpoint. It's just our human nature coming through.
So, I divorced her, only after tanking my career as result of it. Those are details I won't get into, for personal and boring reasons. More personal than boring... So, fuck you. Fly down here to Florida and buy me some margaritas and we'll talk.
I moved into a 2 bed/bath apartment after the sale of our beautiful 3 2-1/2 on the lake shore house we owned. My elderly father had insisted on coming to help me make the transition. The truth be told, it only made things worse emotionally. But, I realized that he needed it more than I did. I was simply numb. I didn't and couldn't feel a thing, at all. Him being there just made my heart ache worse, but I knew he needed it for closure.
I'll never forget the morning he left to go back to Texas. We had been staying in the Wingate Inn on I-75 and on the final morning of his stay we had gotten up early, gone to the continental breakfast ( aka: shitty food ) and packed up. We walked into the parking lot; he to his rental car, and me to the jeep and said our goodbyes. He hugged me with tears in his eyes. A fierce hug that only a father can give a son when his heart is breaking like a Waterford crystal flute being dropped on hot concrete. He told me he loved me and confirmed the directions to the airport as we both swallowed hard and tried to act as composed as possible. He got in his car and waved as he drove away. I stood and watched as he faded out of sight.... It was the most lonely feeling I have ever experienced in my entire life. I was completely and utterly, alone....
The only way I can describe what it felt like ( the whole loss of career, house, marriage and complete upheaval of my life ) would be to say it was like sitting on top of a nuclear warhead in your living room and watching the detonation from the inside out. Complete, utter, savage devastation...
This was in the fall of 2004. I decided to recreate myself the best way I knew how. Working out. Of course, I was drinking like a fish, and smoking like a freight train but the personal trainer I hired lived right below me and had access to all sorts of weight lifting drugs. Human Growth Hormone, T3 thyroid inhibitors, steroids, you name it. I took them all with zero consideration of their impact on my body, or emotions. I just didn't give a shit if it killed me. Not at all..
I dropped 90 pounds in 3 1/2 months and shocked everyone that knew me. I looked incredible. I had developed a long distance relationship with a model living in the Los Angeles area via a divorce recovery website if you can believe that... Her name was Greta and she was an absolutely stunning train wreck of a woman. Millionaire father and mother. Daddy lived in Beverly Hills, and Mommy lived in Taos.
She was in the process of her own ugly divorce and invited me out for Thanksgiving to stay with her in her Topanga Canyon home. It was a wonderful, and horrible time all wrapped into one. I'll never forget making "love" to her with the windows opened to the Sangre De Christo mountains.
It was absolutely surreal...
Her beautiful legs wrapped around my hips.. Her teeth, and fingernails raking into the flesh of my neck and shoulders as we surged against each others bodies. Both greedily taking what we needed from each other in the raw moonlight spilling into the bedroom. I fucked her darkly, and forever. Every stroke inside her satisfied a need within me I never knew existed. And when we came, it was like the most raw, bestial, animal experience I had ever experienced...
She pulled my hair, and I the same.. I owned her, and she, Me.. My penis raw, we finaly collapsed alongside each other, wrapped in the 1000 thread count sheets. Amazing..
I remember driving down to buy groceries in her Lexus the next afternoon and running into Viggo Mortensen, face to face in the produce isle of the little shop.. Like I said, surreal.....
I was going through the craziest period of my life that I can ever recall. Life completely demolished, career ruined, and spending money like a drunken sailor on liberty. I was out of control, but "keeping it together" only because I needed the job to pay my bills.
But the worst was yet to come..
I think its taken so long for me to post this because I had so much to digest and contemplate about the last decade. Why? Because it was without a doubt the worst decade of my life, hands down. As a matter of fact, it truly is a wonder I'm still here because there were certainly times when I wanted to, and certainly could have, exited stage left.. And I don't say that in jest either. Until you've looked down the barrel and seen the glint of light of the copper jacketed hollow point you're contemplating sending through your brain you don't know what sorrow, or despair truly are. When you hear the clicking of the hammer as you pull it back, and start wondering just how much pressure your thumb is going to need to exert in the trigger to make the inside of your head the equivalent of a cheese pizza on the wall behind you, shit gets pretty real.
The beginning of the year 2000 saw me 8 months from getting out of the military after a four year hitch. It had been a fun, but taxing enlistment. I was ready to get out, and frustrated because of all the bias, and bullshit I had seen being in. I had been all over the globe, gotten married to a woman who was in another branch of the service, and was ready to start my career in the outside world. And that's exactly what happened....
I left the service and went to a training program up north for four months in Minnesota with the hopes of getting hired by the agency I still ( unfortunately ) work for. It was a rough program, more for external reasons than any others. My then wife had become a born again, evangelical "christian" about a year before I left the service, and it was placing a terrible strain on my life and our marriage.
All of my life I had been a spiritual person. I was also raised to be a Christian. But the shit she fell into was the farthest thing from true religion you could imagine. It was nothing more than a cult, plain and simple... She had slipped from the woman I had loved into a flat out religious kook. I was telling myself that it was a phase, and that eventually she would back off, or let up off of it..
I was wrong... Oh, so wrong....
I decided to try to understand what she was into. I began attending her church services, and even allowed myself to be "baptised" in her denomination. I tried to throw myself headlong into her new found belief system in an attempt to understand and connect to her again. ( our personal and sex life had GREATLY suffered ) What a mistake that was.............
It was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. And as a result, completely "engulfed" our marriage. It was like dumping blood into a shark tank. She completely jumped off the deep end of the Crazy pool. All of the sudden it was church 4 times a week, and her dumping money into the coffers of these crooks behind my back. I should have left right then. But, the best laid plans of mice and men....... Right?
I completed the training program, and returned to Florida hoping to be hired.
Little did I know what was in store for me. Had I known, I probably would have picked another path. Or at least run and hid out in the woods for a few years. Lets just say the next couple of years were going to be interesting to say the least. Her psychosis would only grow and get larger until it ultimately lead to her having an affair with another "christian" and me kicking her whoring ass to the curb in 2004..
I should have done it a long time before I did, but I was just dealing with life as best I could. It took me years to forgive myself for that. Years. We all do stupid shit, and hang on for far too long when you look at it from a "post accident" standpoint. It's just our human nature coming through.
So, I divorced her, only after tanking my career as result of it. Those are details I won't get into, for personal and boring reasons. More personal than boring... So, fuck you. Fly down here to Florida and buy me some margaritas and we'll talk.
I moved into a 2 bed/bath apartment after the sale of our beautiful 3 2-1/2 on the lake shore house we owned. My elderly father had insisted on coming to help me make the transition. The truth be told, it only made things worse emotionally. But, I realized that he needed it more than I did. I was simply numb. I didn't and couldn't feel a thing, at all. Him being there just made my heart ache worse, but I knew he needed it for closure.
I'll never forget the morning he left to go back to Texas. We had been staying in the Wingate Inn on I-75 and on the final morning of his stay we had gotten up early, gone to the continental breakfast ( aka: shitty food ) and packed up. We walked into the parking lot; he to his rental car, and me to the jeep and said our goodbyes. He hugged me with tears in his eyes. A fierce hug that only a father can give a son when his heart is breaking like a Waterford crystal flute being dropped on hot concrete. He told me he loved me and confirmed the directions to the airport as we both swallowed hard and tried to act as composed as possible. He got in his car and waved as he drove away. I stood and watched as he faded out of sight.... It was the most lonely feeling I have ever experienced in my entire life. I was completely and utterly, alone....
The only way I can describe what it felt like ( the whole loss of career, house, marriage and complete upheaval of my life ) would be to say it was like sitting on top of a nuclear warhead in your living room and watching the detonation from the inside out. Complete, utter, savage devastation...
This was in the fall of 2004. I decided to recreate myself the best way I knew how. Working out. Of course, I was drinking like a fish, and smoking like a freight train but the personal trainer I hired lived right below me and had access to all sorts of weight lifting drugs. Human Growth Hormone, T3 thyroid inhibitors, steroids, you name it. I took them all with zero consideration of their impact on my body, or emotions. I just didn't give a shit if it killed me. Not at all..
I dropped 90 pounds in 3 1/2 months and shocked everyone that knew me. I looked incredible. I had developed a long distance relationship with a model living in the Los Angeles area via a divorce recovery website if you can believe that... Her name was Greta and she was an absolutely stunning train wreck of a woman. Millionaire father and mother. Daddy lived in Beverly Hills, and Mommy lived in Taos.
She was in the process of her own ugly divorce and invited me out for Thanksgiving to stay with her in her Topanga Canyon home. It was a wonderful, and horrible time all wrapped into one. I'll never forget making "love" to her with the windows opened to the Sangre De Christo mountains.
It was absolutely surreal...
Her beautiful legs wrapped around my hips.. Her teeth, and fingernails raking into the flesh of my neck and shoulders as we surged against each others bodies. Both greedily taking what we needed from each other in the raw moonlight spilling into the bedroom. I fucked her darkly, and forever. Every stroke inside her satisfied a need within me I never knew existed. And when we came, it was like the most raw, bestial, animal experience I had ever experienced...
She pulled my hair, and I the same.. I owned her, and she, Me.. My penis raw, we finaly collapsed alongside each other, wrapped in the 1000 thread count sheets. Amazing..
I remember driving down to buy groceries in her Lexus the next afternoon and running into Viggo Mortensen, face to face in the produce isle of the little shop.. Like I said, surreal.....
I was going through the craziest period of my life that I can ever recall. Life completely demolished, career ruined, and spending money like a drunken sailor on liberty. I was out of control, but "keeping it together" only because I needed the job to pay my bills.
But the worst was yet to come..
Comments
Be well, Windy.
No, no regrets Amiga. Like you said, only lessons to be learned. As wacky as they are.
Besos,
Mateo