Friday, December 15, 2017

Pissed Off Kid Becomes Surly Preteen With Predictable Results


I've been reviewing the progress of this journal recently and it appears that there have been 731 posts-yes folks, you read it right-it's a regular volume of the scurrilous and the profane as well as a place for a sort of barnyard levity. Rude jests and japes are the stuff of which the Dougloid Papers is made.

We started back in early 2006, after I'd been booted off of airliners.net for the last time for saying "fuck" and I figured I had better escape from that den of Eurosnarkiness and gloomy bauhaus apartments to more salubrious climes of my own choosing.  At some point I acquired the image of the screaming kid and it seemed apropos for what I was puttin' down.

Part of that was moving across town to our own place two years later and I haven't regretted it a bit or been aroused from my slumbers by drunken neighbors collapsing in our shared doorway. Yes, that happened. Any noise here is generated by me and my collection of stuff.

I've acquired some interesting tooling-a Miller MIG welder which is a nice piece of kit, a Lincoln stick welder that I can't use because I need 220v three phase but it looked cool and it was cheap, a Harbor Freight 20 ton press and a Sears combination disc and belt sander. Good for shaping metal tube.

We learned yesterday that my lymphoma hasn't really gone away, but is merely lurking. It expressed itself in a swollen lymph node which I am told may get bigger, smaller or stay the same so we watch and wait and monitor the situation. Chemo at this point would be overkill I think.

I feel pretty good, overall.

She Who Must Be Obeyed retired this year and she prepared for it by mastering the intricacies of Medicare, supplemental insurance and prescription medicines. That was helpful because we now have a relatively steady income with no surprises and we know what our expenditures are. There will be no carnival cruises or vacations in Florida in our future but we're warm, have a well stocked fridge and generally see ourselves as fortunate.

My relations with the other side of the family continue to be problematic. I was contacted by a person, a stranger to me, who took me to task on Facebook and proceeded to relate to me chapter and verse from my former spouse's script, complete with all the slag and accusations. She stands in the way of having any relationship at all with our grandchild and makes whatever relationship I do have with my daughter and her family sometimes tough to navigate, by repeating the same old accusations to anyone who will listen. Repeating such things to strangers without any context is a mistake, I believe.

Also, not acknowledging the bad things we all have done to each other is, in this season of reconciliation, making any reconciliation very difficult, if not impossible.

I try not to wash my dirty laundry in front of strangers.

I wish she'd get off it. I've paid for my sins many times over and have only recently given up on my late night hobby of torturing myself over the errors I made forty years ago.

Her issues are her issues, and I am not going to engage in a tit for tat struggle although I've got some fairly competent ammo and a long memory. I did burn the entire dissolution file in the charcoal grill some years ago, thinking "Why am I lugging this around?"

It's simply not public. It is a private matter.

As for the screaming kid turned surly pre adolescent, I hope he's feeling happier and that things turn around for all of us.







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