I knew that someday this would happen and I’d be free. I just didn’t think it’d happen for another thirty or so years.  But my sex drive is just….gone.  I wonder what life as a celibate will be like.  Am I going to get more done, be able to focus more on work and less on getting laid?  It’ll probably keep me out of a considerable amount of trouble.  There’s a few things that I’d rather do less, but they all involve pain or imprisonment or a very bad smell.

Yes, I know that loss of sex drive is usually due to medicinal side effects or severe, suicidal depression or both, but I don’t care.  Bring on life; I’m ready to die alone!

You combine this with several other mitigating factors — legal, sexual and romantic issues are only the most prominent — and you realize that it’s over. It’s time to tell the doctor no thanks on that latest round of chemo.  It’s time to pull the plug, enter home hospice care, close your eyes, and go out with some semblance of dignity.

Except I have no dignity left.  Which means it’s time for me to go out shitting my pants, not knowing who my kids are and thinking Reagan is president.  Which means I’ll be discovered by my mother with my belt around my neck, having died in the act of masturbating to Animal from The Muppet Show.

In all seriousness, though, I’m quitting. I’ve got two weeks before Armageddeon hits, robs me of my children and evacuates me from my home.

And somehow, deep in the back of my mind, I’m pretty sure I deserve this. And I’m pretty sure you agree with me.

- “The Worst Joke Ever” by R.E.M.

This is, when you boil it all down, how I feel about my circumstances right now.  It goes like this:  Did you hear the one about the guy who had it all?  See, he had this nice little nuclear family, two kids and a wife, a steady job, a new house, a new car plus one already bought and paid for, and was finally seeking help for his psychological problems.  Then he and his wife split, she takes the paid-for car, he takes the house, she lives in the apartment, he has what would have been – had he not already split with the wife – the mother of all ill-advised affairs, she begins a long-term relationship with the only guy she doesn’t sleep with on the first date, he starts dating some pregnant chick he met on the Internet, she brings the dude home to meet the kids, and he overdoses himself into the hospital.  Awesome, right? But that’s not even the best part!

Flash forward to a year after the split, the ill-advised affair, and the sleeping around.  The soon-to-be ex-wife has been with her dude, who is somehow both rich and homeless, for nearly a year.  The guy who had it all seems  to have it all again:  the pregnant girlfriend has given birth to a beautiful baby with whom his kids have fallen in love, the two are living with the three in the house that he kept, and they’ve bought a minivan together so that they can comfortably fit all three kids. Even the dog — object of the soon-to-be ex-wife’s vitriol at this time last year, when she still lived in the house — is potty-trained.  Everyone finally seems to be happy and healthy and on the right page.

So here’s the punchline, and it’s damned funny:  the guy, the one who kept his house and kept his kids and kept his girlfriend and wants to make her daughter his daughter, that guy, he’s been unemployed since December.  He’s just signed his first client, who pays for writing services at the rate of around $90 per week, which still keeps him under his limit to draw unemployment. Because of an error on the part of his financial advisor, he owes the federal government almost $2000 come April 15th. He’s watching his bank account, in quintuple digits at the beginning of the year, dip below his monthly mortgage payment for the first time ever.  He’s exhausted his resources, he’s exhausted in general, and he hasn’t had a sit-down interview since February. He’s got prospects, but none of them are even thinking of hiring until next month’s mortgage payment will have been late.

Get it?

I’m sick of people in my life creating drama amongst themselves, I’m sick of people creating drama between themselves and myself, and I’m sick to death of people who aren’t in my life at all attempting to cause drama in my life and the lives of those I love.

Make no mistake, I’ve honestly let go of any conflict I once had with any of the women who’ve been in my life in the last year.  I understand that many of my reactions were warranted, and that many of my reactions were overreactions, and that all of my reactions were filtered through mental illness.  Lingba and I are more in love than ever, and for maybe the first time in our eight months together are really having success in our attempt to have a healthy romantic relationship.  GW and I actually had a good conversation today, and — while I’m trying not to get my hopes up — I think that there’s at least the possibility of rekindling our friendship.  VK and I have talked recently, and my mood hasn’t swung; I haven’t attempted to “split” her into angel or demon.  I love my wife, who will become my ex-wife this summer, and will love her until the day I die.  I love my ex-girlfriend, regardless of the behavior either of us exhibited in 2010, and will love her until the day I die.  And I love my girlfriend, am in love with her, and am able to envision a long life with her.  All of these women have loved me, all of them laughed with me, I’ve made all of them cry and they’ve made me do the same.  Point of fact:  all three have, in some way, rescued me from myself, have saved my life.  I’ll never stop loving any of them and will never stop striving for their friendship.

Any conflict I’ve had with my friends in the last year or so, I’ve tried to let  go.  I’ve gone nearly as far as I can in letting go my conflicts with my father; I think I still have a little ways to go.  Besides joblessness, the only real problem I’m having right now is the propensity of people I don’t know to fuck with me.  I know that I put myself in these situations by myself, but at the same time, what kind of a piece of shit takes advantage of those situations, for no other reason than to entertain themselves?

And yet, through all of this, I’m kind of impressed with myself.  I haven’t stopped taking applications for new friends.  I haven’t shut out old friends out of bitterness or fear; those I shut out last year, I’ve tried to open communications with again…slowly, of course.  And, for once, I’m not looking for anybody new to fall in love with me.

So please, dispense with the drama.  I’m simply out of patience.

To the people I have failed, I am sorry. You deserved better out of me.

To the wife I left, I am sorry. I stole from you your youth and your trust in the father of your children.

I cannot fix this. There is only the choice between ceasing to be and being no more than this broken machine.

I will have to sleep on it.

Goodnight.

In recovery, a lot of times, what they’ll have you do, is they’ll have you create these substitute activities lists, shit you do instead of using.  “Today, instead of drinking, I played ping-pong.” “Today, instead of using, I jogged a mile.” “Today, instead of masturbating onto a dirty shoe, I read David Copperfield.”

They’re alternatives to using that you automatically have. You use them, instead of whatever it is your vice may be.  Then you journal them, write them down, and get all happy because they worked.  Most of the time, they don’t.  But then, most people have no fucking discipline.

Today, I felt like throwing myself out of my bedroom window without opening it.  I saw how I’d do it. I’d write a cryptic suicide note on the mirror in dry-erase marker, lock the door, get a running start and hurl myself through the glass.  I’d tumble, cut in a thousand places, down to my deck, where my head would catch on the porch swing, snapping my neck and killing me instantly.  I saw myself carry this action out, felt the sunlight on my face as I fell.

Then I got up, took off my socks, and clipped my fucking toenails.

Clipping your toenails isn’t something you do if you want to kill yourself, right?  Why in the fuck should you care about personal hygiene when you’re about to destroy the vessel that carries you? Why go to all the trouble of grooming one part of your body when you’re about to kill the whole thing?  More importantly, why would you want to make sure that part of your anatomy is immaculate, when it’s so obvious that the rest of you is fucked?

So you get up. You shower.  You clean yourself.  That stupid, broken fucking thing you call your body, you wash it gently and carefully.  You make sure each part is clean, shiny and pink, or brown, or whatever the fuck color the skin that covers your guts is.  And as you do so, you think about killing it.  You think about killing that body that you just took so much care grooming, and you wonder, Just what could I do that wouldn’t mess this up?

It’s like new-fallen snow, a clean suit of skin.  Some people, sure, can’t wait to get into it with their boots on and stomp a mudhole in it, but me…I’d rather just let it sit: perfect, untouched, and glowing.

Well, you can’t kill that kind of a thing violently, can you?  Gunshots, razor cuts, knife wounds, contusions and compound fractures would hide the great scrubbing job you just pulled off.  You overdose on pills or suffocate yourself and you’re liable to vomit and defecate uncontrollably on the way out.  Not after you just steam-cleaned the dogpiss out of that carpet, you’re not!  There’s no way to kill yourself and stay clean.  So you stay alive, because going through with the suicide just isn’t fucking worth the hassle.

Instead of killing myself today, I shaved.  I gave a baby a bath.  I washed dishes.  I reheated pizza.  I procrastinated myself back to life.  Is it a great life? No. But I’m breathing.

Let’s jump ahead to this week.  Even though she legally has custody of them until 5:30 pm on Mondays, GW dropped the kids off with me at 3:30; she had originally wanted to at 12:30 before I talked her later due to a doctor’s appointment.  When she dropped them off, it was obvious that I hadn’t gone to the doctor (you know, due to the SNOW AND ICE) and remarked, “So. You didn’t go to the doctor.” As if I had lied about it so that she couldn’t drop off the kids five hours early instead of just two.

Did I mention that, when she dropped them off, she casually informed me that the boy had been doubled over in stomach pain earlier and had a fever?

The next day, school was still out and so was daycare (when I asked GW what she was going to do if she had no work on Tuesday, she said “Sleep all day so that Saturday will arrive quicker.”), so I kept both kids home with me.  That was a pretty awesome day, no lie.  The kids, myself, Lingba and Bug had a great day and a peaceful night.

Wednesday, there was a two-hour delay at CMS, which didn’t really matter because the boy still had a fever and couldn’t go to school.  Once again I kept both kids home with me, and aside from the illness we had a pretty good day.  That morning, my mother told me that she had mixed up the dates in her calendar and wouldn’t be able to take the kids Saturday night, so I said I would do it. When I told GW this, she acted like I had called her every name in the book. She was furious, insulted and put-upon.  The kids were technically supposed to go over to GW’s custody at 5:30, but she didn’t show up to take them until 6:30.  When I told her that the boy was still sick, she replied, “Nothing’s going right for me today.”

The next morning, the boy was still sick. Rather than take the day off – the kids were technically in her custody – I suggested that he stay with me. After all, I’m unemployed and GW had already taken all of next week off to be with her boyfriend. So the boy and the Bug and I stayed home all day. GW again showed up an hour late to pick him up.

The next morning, it was just me and The Bug. We had a pretty good morning, and all was right with the world…until 12:30.  At that point I received a phone call from the boy’s teacher, saying that he was very sick and that I needed to pick him up.  Taking Bug with me, I did so.  On the way back from school, the boy told me without prompting, “Mommy said the medicine would make me feel better, but it didn’t.  Mommy was wrong.” I asked him when Mommy had given him the medicine.  “When it was time to get ready for school.”

What I deduced was that the boy had had a fever that morning and, rather than take a day off from work on a day when the kids were her responsibility, she filled him up with children’s ibuprofen and sent him off to school anyway.  GW is a daycare provider, and used to complain to me all the time about parents who drugged their kids up and took them to school, only to have them throw a fever when the medicine wore off.  I called her to ask about that, and she confirmed that it was true.  The boy had had a 102-degree fever that morning.

I can’t tell you how dumbfounded I am by all this, nor by the fact that that’s not the end of it.

Lingba comes home from work and I’m completely furious.  She manages to calm me down and, just as she’s about to go out to get a massage — her back has been killing her for the past week — I get a call from the girl’s daycare saying she has a high fever and I have to pick her up.  The girl’s daycare center, by the way, is where GW works. I ask the director to let me talk to GW, who never even suggests that, even though she’s there with the girl and it’s her custody day, she leave work early and take care of her daughter, let alone her son.

Now’s where it really gets horrible. GW has suggested via phone that we split up the kids that night — at that point the girl was not yet sick — with the boy staying at my house and the girl staying with her.  I tentatively agreed, but when the girl got sick I asked her to take both kids.  I had plans with Lingba that night, and if both kids were sick there was no reason to split them up.  Since it was GW’s night, I thought maybe she might want to take care of her children.

She acted as though I were making the most inconvenient imposition possible on her. She complained about it to me on the phone. She complained about it to coworkers. How her ex-husband is a huge asshole for suggesting that she take both sick kids on a night when it was her night.  When she picked them up (30 minutes late), she remarked that, “It’s just that two sick kids is a bit much for one person to handle.”

Oh really? I wouldn’t know anything about that, having been with two sick kids all afternoon. Even if I hadn’t, she was asking me to take care of two sick kids by myself from 3pm on HER Saturday until 10:30 am on HER Sunday so that she could be with her boyfriend, whom she hadn’t seen in a month and a half. “I was kind of hoping we’d get to be alone,” is what she said.

When she left with the kids last night, GW was furious. I asked her why she was mad at me, and she acted as though what she was about to say wouldn’t be appropriate in front of the kids. Meanwhile, I was so emotionally and physically worn out that I called Lingba and cancelled our plans for the evening. That did not necessarily make her happy. Myself, I slept from 8:45 pm until 8:00 am.

Not once during this week did she suggest a way to make up the time with her kids.  Not once did she say, “Thank you.”

When I picked up the girl from daycare on Friday, the first thing she said to me, crying, was “I want Mommy!” What was I supposed to tell her? That Mommy would rather take care of a classroom full of other people’s kids, but not her own daughter? When the boy woke up from a much-needed nap today after GW dropped them off at 3, the first thing he said to me was, “I want to be at Mommy’s.”  What was I supposed to tell him? “Your Mommy doesn’t want you there.”? Of course not.

When I’ve looked back over this week, I see that it’s a pretty goddamn shameful timeline.  I’m waiting until after the boyfriend leaves town to confront her on this — since she still thinks I faked a suicide attempt in order to ruin her week with him back in September — but once he’s gone, she’s getting an earful. Mainly because I’m afraid. I’m really afraid that one of these days, the kids are going to realize that she sees them as an inconvenience and begin to hate her.  I don’t want that, but at the moment it seems inevitable.

So who’s waiting for me at home?  My two children, The Boy and The Girl, along with Lingba and The Bug.  I’ve been with Lingba, off and on, since last July, and The Bug has been around since October.  The Boy and The Girl are 6 and 4, and they met The Bug a short time after she was born.  Lingba’s been in their lives since August.

It may shock you, if you know me, knowing how quickly I move both emotionally and commitment-wise (commit-mentally?), to know that this was the first time I had thought of this five-person unit as “my family.”  To me, “my family” was still myself, the kids and GW.  I have been extra-careful, after moving far too quickly with VK – something she and I now agree on – not to move too quickly, overextend myself, or be too emotionally vulnerable or dependent.  Life got too chaotic for me to do anything but move as slowly and deliberately as I could in all aspects of my life, including the romantic. So it’s come as a surprise as much to me as to anyone that, with my guard down and my mind wandering, I should have gotten excited about nearly being home with my family and including my girlfriend and her daughter in that unit.

I think this means I’m getting better.  It also means that I’m doing what I should have always striven to do, which is to build a family.  My family, between my parents’ divorce and my own, has been split and split again.  For three years, since my parents decided to separate, I’ve been living in the wreckage and pretending it’s a house that’s up to code.  Rebuilding was too hard.  Going over the ruins of my life was too emotionally painful, and even if I were completely numb I wouldn’t have known where to lay foundation from where to install drywall.

I didn’t know where to begin with VK, nor did she with me, and we made a god-awful bollocksy mess of things after our marriages ended.  Throw in the cold hard fact that she came to her senses long before I did, and you can see why the pain of that split plus the pain of my divorce plus my incredible denial about the whole thing from soup to nuts made it nearly impossible for me to think clearly without a dayplanner, a fisheye lens and a crane.

I won’t say that Lingba came along and rescued me, because she didn’t.  She came along, stepped in quicksand without knowing it, and decided to stay still rather than struggle.  I made a god-awful fucktardy bollocksy mess of things early on; I was in and out and in and out and scared out of my fucking mind.  But rather than falling apart herself, or saying to hell with me, or worst of all trying to fix me, she hung in, was understanding, was supportive, was wonderful.

Not that it worked right away, or even after a while.  I did, after all, break up with her for the last time a week after I got out of the hospital. I’m either an asshole or I’m really slow to catch on.

And because of that, because of that relationship as well as the support of my family and friends – you want cliche? you got it! – I was able to gain purchase where I had been slipping and sliding before, and I was able, as I just realized coming home on 485, to begin rebuilding.  No, we don’t live together. No, there are no plans for any kind of commitment ceremony. No, I’m not getting my vasectomy reversed so that we can see what kind of beautiful child our genes would combine to form. But I’m comfortable. And I’m happy. And I feel safe again, at long last.  The ground is no longer shifting beneath me.

And, for the first time in half a decade, I feel content with what I have. Take that as you will.

Let’s go ahead and top it all off, shall we?  As of Saturday, December 11, I will be unemployed for the first time in my adult life.  That’s right; I’m getting laid off.  I’ll be applying for government assistance for the first time since my ex was both pregnant and jobless while I was in grad school making $10K a year.  I’ll be applying for unemployment for the first time in my life.  In order to pay bills, I’ve cashed out my retirement fund.  That should last me through February.

I say all of that to say this:  thank God for imaginary temporal boundaries.  They allow me to believe that all of this misery, misfortune and self-fuckery are neatly contained in one 365-day period which will end in 22 days.  They give me hope that, when the ball drops and we are told by those who make decisions about the time that it is, in fact, a new year, I will start over fresh and that good things will begin happening to me.  I know that to be untrue, in a logical sense.  I know that I am the person who makes good things happen.  I know that I am the only true cause of change in my life, that I have the power to effect positive movement along my life’s trajectory.

But really, is there any other reason to look forward to New Year’s?  We all want a fresh start; some of us desperately need one.  2010 has pummelled me, has beaten me to a bloody pulp and left me laying.  But I’m still here.  I survived, and I’m optimistic.  If whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, surviving suicide – let’s stop the denial and lies once and for all and just admit that the overdose was not accidental, shall we? – must make me invincible.  In fact, I’m not so sure that I’m still unable to fly.  Time to take what I’ve learned, take my new muscles and my scar tissue, and try to make a new and better life for myself and my kids.

Bring on a new year.  I’ve been spoiling for a fight.

I have to stop focusing so much on other people.  There. I said it. Now I just have to commit to it.

My problem has always been that I take care of other people too much.  I worry about their problems, their addictions, their stupid decisions, the people who hurt them.  In that way I often get used up and spit out, and not maliciously.  But people who need help from me usually get it.  The person that they like, that they’re indebted to, that they fall for, is the helper, the rescuer, the KISA.  Then, when they don’t need saving anymore and I have needs, I’m no longer the same person, and they jump ship.  “My feelings have changed.” “I love you, I’m just not in love with you anymore.” All of these are ways for people to say what they don’t know how to say:  “You’re not the same person as you were before, and this new you makes me feel uncomfortable. Where did your strength go? Why are you now leaning on me for support?”

And so I have to focus on myself.  I have to avoid or stay away from or remove myself from situations in which I can play KISA.  It doesn’t mean I need to quit helping my friends and loved ones, but it does mean I need to stop rescuing people, stop looking for projects, and stop trying to be the hero.  I’ve been the hero all year long.  I’m feeling kind of broken and worn out right now.  The people who think I’ve been the villain all year long are probably right, too.  I just need a vacation from being the good guy and the bad guy.

Me, my kids, my house, my job.  Me, my kids, my house, my job.  Let me repeat this mantra for at least a year, and we’ll just see.  Let’s see if I can get healthy. Let’s see.