I’m not sure if it’s sad or not, but this news totally distracted me from the fact that it’s been four years since my dad died. I think I would have gone the whole day without realizing it, if Sarah had not mentioned it. I’m not sure I realized it last year, but I think Sarah’s mom might’ve mentioned it. The Dad memory that came to mind tonight, as we were driving home from our friend Jessica’s housewarming party was about Dad giving me directions. It was one of those first trips that I took from Woonsocket to my parents’ house. I was going to head back the way I came and I mentioned that there’s probably some other road I could take that winds through Connecticut. Dad suggested a route. It was a couple windy roads that did exactly that. The best part was that he said “and you’ll be on this road, and just about the time you say, ‘where the hell am I?’ you’ll hit Route 44.” And that is exactly what happened. I think I even said it out loud… not realizing that I was fulfilling his prophecy until the moment it happened.

I dunno what is more saddening… but the coincidence is morbid.

Every time I see my prescription, specifically, the bottle with my last name on it, I think about my Dad… not some random thought, but something like “is that my Dad’s bottle?” or “Why is one of Dad’s prescriptions out here?” … defying any logical thoughts about Dad being gone for several years now, or the fact that I haven’t lived in the same house as my Dad for eight or nine years. My brain just can’t see a bottle with my name on it and think that it’s mine. Will I ever get used to having a prescription?

The ongoing health issues have prompted lots of discussion about health insurance and Sarah or I needing jobs that have real benefits. Drama being what it is around here, the discussions have often turned into fights or bouts of silent treatment. The whole thing has got me looking back into tech jobs. I cruise craigslist on a daily basis and send an occasional response to interesting looking positions; Haven’t heard anything back from anyone, yet. It’s not something I want to do. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t take another desk job unless I was being paid substantially more than I was in Marlboro… but I was probably overpaid, given my technical qualifications, at the time. Either way, I was not healthy and not happy and I don’t know what the consequences would be if I were to take such a job again. I don’t want to sacrifice my mental well-being for the chance at better physical well-being. It makes me actually take some interest in this health care reform political stuff. I guess there isn’t a chance that we’d have a universal, free-to-everyone system like the rest of the civilized world has, but it would certainly ease my mind of this issue, if we did.

My fondest van memories are attached to the van that I owned: the big red van that we moved The Overtones around in. I paid the same price for that van that Doug paid for his, yesterday: $2,000. It had a huge rack welded to the top of it; the owner swore that it would hold anything I could get up there. On the back of the rack, there were some super bright flood-lights that were fun for freaking out tailgaters. It was the perfect size for the band. There were two big bench seats in the back and room for a third, but no hook-ups… this translated into plenty of room for amps, guitars and drums. We usually took one seat out, so we wouldn’t have to stack the equipment too high.

I kept on driving it after that band fizzled. I remember loaning out my services as van and driver to a friends band a couple times. The craziest van memories include the time I was carpooling home from the tech job in Marlborough, when a crazed cop pulled us over and decided to search the entire van for drugs. I think he found some rolling papers in Sands’ bag. We just hung out by the police cruiser with the other officer, whom we lovingly referred to as “back-up,” and stared in wonder as he tore through every inch of the beast. I think he broke the handle on my sliding door, too. A few months after I downgraded to a station wagon, I borrowed the van from my Dad, to help move my friend Becky back to Charlton, from NYC. I knew Dad was a little hard on vehicles, but the van had stayed pretty strong when I owned it, so I trusted it to handle this move. We made it all the way down to the city, got it loaded and then got all the way back up to Massachusetts, off the highway, to within 5 miles of Becky’s house, and the right front universal joint let go. The wheel slammed into the back of the wheel well and we stopped dead. It happened while taking a corner at 4 or 5 miles per hour or less… had it happened on the 150 miles of highway between NYC and Charlton, we’d have likely flipped and/or rolled and died. We had several hours to contemplate our luck as we sat around and watched tow truck drivers scratch their heads. The first tow truck driver showed up with a regular truck, took one look at the situation and realized that it wasn’t going to be simple at all. The next guy showed up with a flatbed, and we still had to use a couple hydraulic jacks in place of the useless wheel. I think we moved all of Becky’s stuff to a couple other vehicles, in between tow truck drivers.

Dad had taught me how to listen and feel for unusual noises and vibrations that might be signs of trouble… and yet, in the few months that he had driven the van around, since inheriting it from me, he had managed to ingore any signs that there was trouble. And he had plenty of experience with vans… we owned no less than 4 or 5 while he was operating his Pressed4Time franchise (corporate dry cleaning pickup and delivery service). I don’t remember getting the first van, but when he grew his route too large to handle himself, he hired a couple of guys and we went van shopping. I remember buying this enormous conversion van. It had a wooden bench in the back with the kind of cushion you’d find on patio furniture and some sort of bed-contraption in the middle, I think. I thought it was so cool. I was fairly sad when it got the standard white paint job and the clothes racks and support beams were installed in place of the bed-thing. If I had a day off (or faked sick to take a day off), I’d ride around in the back of one of the vans, rolling around with the clothes, all day, popping into some of the offices with Dad and helping carry clean clothes in and bags of dirty clothes out. I definitely preferred hanging out in the back of the vans than going into the super-hot dry cleaners at the end of the run.

Yesterday was a long day, but so much of it stirred up fond memories. I guess it’s the nature of vans, being so versatile, that you always have some custom attachments that you may or may not need… and you do a bit of converting and customizing, yourself.

I did a lot of wandering around in between my grandfather’s funeral and the day Sarah and her Mom arrived. I didn’t make a checklist this time, I sort of winged it. I missed Putnam and Providence and Western Mass, as well as Sara and Drew, but I’ll try and make it up to them over the holidays or something. The most impressive changes were in Woonsocket. I drove around most of town on one of my first free days, while doing some errands.

Improvements since I lived in Woonsocket:

Starbucks: closed
Tim Hortons: opened a second location, with a drive-thru
Main St: more than half of the storefronts were occupied and open

Also, the Game Stop had a Wii Fit in stock.

I caught up with some people and did a little sightseeing around Worcester & Millbury and Webster & Dudley. I ate at Jimmy’s pizza, played Werewolves of London on the jukebox. I did some shopping for New England treats at a Market Basket (where I found the Coffee Milk on the same shelf as all the other milks). I helped Mom start to remake her living room and move beds around.

The girls arrived on Saturday night, right in the middle of what was left of the storm Hanna. They survived their long drive, though, and I was very proud of them. Sarah’s posted a pretty good recap of the first couple days at her livejournal. We saw some family, toured through Plymouth, hit King Richard’s Faire and then went to NYC and played tourist some more; visited the Statue of Liberty and ground zero and a good deli.

Tuesday, we had a little more rain, so we kept it local and did some indoor-type activities. We started with breakfast at Carl’s Diner in Oxford. The serving size has not gone down. We sat at the counter, for the maximum effect. I don’t believe we ate another real meal for the whole day. We did hit Friendly’s for some ice cream, that evening. I believe that was also the day we took in some Candlepin bowling at Mohegan in Webster. It’s still kind of a dive, but its charm is intact.

Wednesday, we met Mom in Worcester, after dropping my car off at the Mazda dealership for an oil change (and to look into the weirdness it went through on the drive out there). We headed to Lexington to visit the historic Battle Green, visited the cemetery where my Dad and my Grandfather are and then met up with Mom’s friend Joyce at Bruegger’s Bagels for lunch. I hadn’t had a Herbie Turkey in a long time, and it was very tasty. Then we drove downtown and walked around Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, had some cream puffs and then went to my cousin Mark’s place, in Braintree, for dinner. Mark made us pick records to play, and then made us play his XBox 360 and his Playstation 3. He cooked his awesome mac & cheese and some amazing burgers for us.

Thursday, we took in Purgatory Chasm. We walked down the chasm and back up on the East side of it. It was very nice, good weather for it. We also went up to Dresser Hill and got some food and shakes. I don’t think the Dairy stuff is as good as it once was, but it’s still the only place I eat fried clams. That night, we went to the outskirts of Worcester and saw Mark’s group, The Accident that Led Me to the World, play in a barn attached to a huge farmhouse that about 20 people lived in. They call it a Collective (read: commune) and the show was a potluck. Lots of friendly modern hippie-types, nice big wood-burning stove in the kitchen, bunch of pretty good music. It was something I’d never expect from Worcester.

Friday, we decided to hit the Big E on opening day, as a stopping point on our way back home. It was fun to go down the avenue of states and expose Patti to all the local culture and flavors. We wandered through some of the vendors and a good chunk of the crafting section. We ate a little and walked a lot. Looking back, it wasn’t a good choice for a stop on the morning of a big drive. We were still pretty exhausted for the first few hours of the trip home, and we ran into torrential downpours and Tornado warnings, but we survived. I think I slept through most of Saturday.

The adapter that came the other day turned out to be the opposite of what I needed, but I took a trip down to Micro Center while Sarah was at work. It took a really long time to get there, due to traffic/weather issues, so I didn’t get to wander around the store and bask in it’s full glory, but it was pretty impressive. Very big store, seemed to have a good selection and someone was there to help me within a minute or two of me walking in. They had the right one, so I’m closer to fixing the fish tank computer, though I still don’t know where or when I’ll tackle that.

In other news, I took some of the money in my ING account and invested it in some stocks, prompted by their eMail about acquiring Sharebuilder. I’ll never use the crazy stock strategies that I learned with Dad at those nutty seminars, but I did include some Food industry stocks in my little portfolio, in honor of his idea that “people will always need food.” I’m about 60/40 Technology & Food industry stocks, so I guess I could do another food stock or some other industry, but I invested about half of what was in the ING account, and I was kinda hoping to see the results of that savings account interest versus the stock gains over time. So I’ll probably just leave it how it is.

I’m in Dudley at my parents’ house, actually, outside my parents’ house and Dad is there. He tells me he’s heading somewhere, some weird location whose name I know was repeated multiple times in the dream, but that I can’t recall at all, now. He said he had to pick some stuff up, but that some people might come looking for stuff… and he started to say, “If they come, it’s…” but then he changed his mind and said just to tell them that he was out. Some people definitely came, and I don’t remember my exact interaction with them, but I do remember that they did finally decide to leave, but that there were a lot of cars in the driveway, so they proceeded to smash into many of them on their way out… one of them was in a little classic dodge caravan type thing and backed into this 80s Oldsmobile looking thing on the grass behind the house and somehow pushed it all the way across the yard and into the fence. I told whoever was standing next to me that it’s ok, “it doesn’t run.” Then he continued his many pointed turn maneuver and pulled in between some small trees onto the neighbor’s yard over their driveway and down to the road. I remember being thankful that my car (which was my current car, my Mazda 5) was parked way behind the house and out of his rage range. I was looking at some awful gold-rust colored Cadillac up on the hill that heads up to the barn and being thankful that they hadn’t hit this one. I think it was partly because it belonged to someone important to my dad and partly because that someone would’ve gone crazy and beat them up, or something. Then I was talking to someone, maybe the same person I had told not to worry about the car on the lawn, about my dad telling me where he was going and that people might come by and I mentioned where he went and they said, “oh, then he’s gone to get the paperwork.” And proceeded to explain to me that he was probably out getting whatever illiegal documents were needed to make this other guy into me, on paper. I don’t think there was good explanation why, at the time.

The next part I remember is a bunch of people gathered inside with Dad, and this guy who was going to become me, and they were all sitting around a table, maybe, but I think we were all on couches. I know that I wasn’t supposed to know about this identity thing… so there was some point in the conversation when my Dad asked if anyone had anything to say, or maybe asked me something directly… either way, I said something about not being able to ever start my own company because “he’s going to be me.” There was some shock, I think, that I knew.

And then it turned into a party, for this guy, because the cat was out of the bag, and my dad explained that he was going to take control of the Voegtlin Corporation and Companies. Somebody said something about him not really needing to be me to do that and whoever was sitting next to them said that it would be cheaper if it was inherited. I remember that I got really mad at Dad at one point, I think he had said something about playing music and not being able to start a company doing that or something, and from my position, half-lying down on a couch, threw a drumstick (a bass drum mallet, one of two I was twirling around in my fingers) at his head, though, intentionally missing by a couple inches. He paused and looked alarmed and after a while, threw it back and I caught it somehow with the other stick. I also remember that I was just lying on the couch and saying very little while this party was going on around me. At one point, this guy who was going to become me, who I’m not positive had a name until this point, was talking about how much he loved certain pills he was taking. There was lots of agreement, including from my Dad, I think… and then there was some mention of his birthday and someone said, “yeah, what are we gonna do for him on his last birthday as Eddie?”

Then some more science-fiction flair got thrown in, someone, possibly me, asked about how he was going to prove he was me, if it ever came into scrutiny, and wouldn’t it be easier to steal Ernie’s identity (my older, mostly incommunicado, brother), and so on… and while there wasn’t really any explanation, my Dad did ask me for a blood sample, and for some reason Eddie was drawing his own blood, too. And then I told them that this wouldn’t work because I didn’t take any pills and everyone took pills, so my blood would certainly show up as irregular and any investigator worth his salt could tell that (pointing at various people in the room) “you’re on…” this and that drug and “you two are both on…” these pills and so on.

And that’s about the time I woke up. Thinking about it afterwards, the weirdest parts were that I was concerned with starting my own business… but maybe I was just using that as an example of something I couldn’t do if I wasn’t me, anymore. Another thing that struck me as odd was that “Eddie” was hispanic. he sort of looked like a bald Carlos Mencia… Dad was just a little bit racist, and it just didn’t seem right to me that he would hand down his whole company to a guy like that, but it’s not like I knew the guy, this was a dream, but it did occur to me right after waking up, so maybe it was part of the dream, too. Then there’s the fact that I had my Mazda. We essentially bought our Mazdas with Dad’s life insurance benefits. And the room the party was in was not like any room in our house in Dudley. It looked like a small, white apartment… but there’s gaps, I don’t even remember Dad coming back from wherever he was, in the dream, it’s possible that we all went somewhere else between the time I found out about the identity theft and the party. Then, in true Mark Mandeville, Dream No. 1 fashion, I started wondering if any of it was true, while preparing my breakfast (Mark wondered if he would drop dead any moment from the poison he drank in his dream, while he was eating his cereal). I wondered if Dad had, in fact, set someone up as a fake me. Of course, then I remembered that Dad was not as maniacal as he was in my dream and that there was no Voegtlin Corporation and Companies to inherit.

Back in the real world, I have some sort of training for Adventure Ed, tomorrow. Not sure exactly what it’s about. But I’ve also got to finish up the stats from last season and eMail the students with the links to the pictures after the training. I miss working a little bit, but I’d much rather sit home and play Lego Star Wars on the Wii… or go out and take some pictures, but it’s still looking pretty gray outside. I put in that order for sunlight on Friday. No tip for the sun god this time, that’s for sure.

-  I miss playing music. I knew that already, obviously, but I took a ride with Mark to a couple music stores, looking for gifts for Raianne, and I missed even that part of the scene. Hanging around talking to music store employees, seeing how knowledgeable they are, guessing what kinds of shoppers the other people in the store are: parents, multi-instrumentalists, strictly piano, garage band kids, etc. I also almost went to a show at Ralph’s. I was extremely tempted, just to see some local music, even if it was metal(!) … but I didn’t end up going, mostly because I didn’t have my earplugs with me, but the yearning was there.

- While the GPS is useful out here for finding out how long it’s going to take to get places or getting around large obstacles like airports or finding out where the bridges over the rivers are, it’s not necessary, since the grid road structure seems to extend forever. It is, however, completely necessary when driving to new places in New England. Grid doesn’t exist out there, except in small pockets of residential suburbia or inner-city areas that happen to be uninterrupted by a river or a coastline or a humongous hill. Most roads go diagonally at some time or another, very few are straight for more than a mile at a time. If GPS is unavailable, a printed out set of directions from a map service is ok, if you have a decent navigator to read them to you. Getting directions from locals works in a pinch, but be prepared for landmarks that don’t really exist anymore (“bear left where The Fair used to be, then go up past the old closed Texaco and turn left at the building that used to be the high school. When you pass the parking lot that used to be the Ford Dealership you’re almost there, you just have to take what was the third exit of the rotary at that big intersection where they installed a light. Then it’s on your right, after the where the mill used to be…”). Of course, if you live out there, you just know which roads go where. I used to have mental pictures of where each road ended and which important roads it might intersect with along the way. Maybe I can start clearing out all the brainspace for other things, now.

- My little laptop could might be able to get me through a weekend or maybe even a week of regular use. It’s pretty beat up and kinda sad, in that it has no CD-Rom and has to have either wireless network or USB ports, since it’s internal USB port fell out. But it gets me to my mail and the rest of the web. It does just fine with that GPS stuff, when it doesn’t do that 25-minute blank screen before booting thing.

I wish the rest of the computers here had such minor problems. Frank’s is due for another upgrade, to be able to play Call of Duty 4. He thinks it’s the graphics card, it probably is, but that’s gonna require a Power supply upgrade … and since we left it in the crazy Gateway case, it’s gonna be easier and cheaper to do a case transfer. Not a huge problem, but still a big project. The fish tank computer was due to have the Reserator added to it, but after successfully fishing out the molex power lead that tells the reserator when to turn on, the machine won’t boot. It seems like a power issue, and the power supply was just the crappy stock Gateway… possibly not the best candidate for oil submersion. Maybe, after the upgrade, I’ll submerge Frank’s equally crappy power supply, instead. removing that tray from the oil seems like a really messy project that I’m not especially looking forward to. And then Sarah’s uncle Paul left his laptop here on Christmas… it was ridiculously infested with spyware and malware and adware, but it also can’t see its audio card… or, more accurately, it can see it, and install drivers for it, but only the line-in gets installed. For output, it says “no audio device.” It’s annoying. It also has a power jack issue, which, I believe i saw something about needing a re-solder in a quick google search. I’ve never been good at soldering.

Shopping for other people really does cause some neat warm-and-fuzzy feelings. I have a fond memory of an extreme example of that phenomenon. My dad took this guy named Danny, who did odd jobs for us because he needed the money, and his kid, Phillip to the mall and had them pick out everything they wanted to get for each other. Then Dad paid for it all. I took the kid around and helped him get over the urge to just stare at and touch things he wanted and think of things his mom and dad would want. It was really nice.

After my sixteen hours of driving, I came home to a cold and smelly apartment, due to the food in the fridge not getting eaten and the windows being left open. Then, when I woke up and tried to get dressed, I realized that a piece of the ceiling had fallen in my closet… there was dirt and stuff everywhere. I thought I had heard something in the middle of the night, but in reality, it could’ve happened anytime in the last two weeks. I wonder if animals from the attic came down to investigate my closet.

Thanksgiving was very different this year, but definitely fun. Christmas should be fun; Sarah is going to come out and spend the weekend with me for Mom’s family feast thing. The holidays last year seemed to be all about adjusting to having them without Dad. This year, I think I’m so distracted by the move to Chicago, that I might forget to really enjoy them. The plan is to have everything cleaned out and be completely moved when I fly out there on Christmas day. Hopefully, the cleaning will go smoothly. Today was supposed to be my day to rest before cleaning, but it turned into a 12 hour workday, instead… bummer.

The last one simply proved that I watch too much sci-fi; Something about sneaking onto the an alien planet on the back of one of their ships. I remember that when I was on the back bumper, or whatever, of the ship, I was talking to someone, and looking at some sort of computer monitor mounted back there. Then I saw some little compartments and asked whoever I was talking to if the driver might see some kind of “Trunk Ajar” warning. I opened one of the little ones, and it was pressurized, and then the computer monitor went out. We flew into a hangar with a giant pool of water instead of a floor and I jumped off the ship into the water. I guess I managed to hide down there and avoid a couple close calls. I don’t remember how, but I got out and into the main building. There were aliens and humans there, but the humans seemed to be slaves or pets or something. The aliens did almost everything by telepathy or telekinesis, but it wasn’t a special skill of theirs because I immediately started developing telepathic abilities as soon as I started talking with people. I also used these new and developing abilities to learn the language on their computer consoles. Then came the funny part. I was reading about the schematics for the planned Alien version of the iPod. The main changes were the user interface being changed from the click wheel thing to some sort of telekinetic thing. I think I was either planning on using the iPod to somehow destroy them or somehow use the information about the conversion process from click-wheel to telepathic interface. I dunno, ’cause i woke up.

Before that one, I had a sorta funny one about death, or some sort of Beetlejuice-like waiting room… except cleaner and sort of like a bank. We were under the impression that getting out the door would mean that we were alive again… and there was some hints about getting out of the waiting room during some past encounter. This time around, we apparently hadn’t really died anyway. We had just gone there to try and convince someone to let our superhero friend come back to life. Our idea was that since he had died in costume, we could just leave the costume and the superhero dead and let the secret identity live. I dunno how that one that one ended either.

The first time I woke up, I remembered a dream unlike any I’ve had lately. It was a very strange dream that I don’t remember much from, but the two or three pieces of information I retained were weird. The first is that my Dad was dead. My dad’s been alive in a lot of my dreams, lately. Usually having something to do with cars. But this time it was him dead, or dying, and it had something to do with a car accident (which is probably how we all expected him to die someday). The only other thing I remember is some other woman being very angry that we occupied a surgeon for him when whoever she was there for needed one.

Waking up three times during the morning and remembering dreams probably isn’t the sign of the best sleep cycle ever. I didn’t happen to check the clock after any of them.

The first one, the earliest, was my second semester at UMASS. I had stopped playing music (for the first time in years), in an attempt to bring my grades up. It was a tremendous failure. I was truly addicted to music and performance and I was just realizing it for the first time. My roommate had left to go live with some friends in another dorm… so I had no one to tell me how crazy I was getting… and there was no one to kick my ass out of bed. I had been down before, a little depressed, not up to doing certain things… but this was extreme. I wasn’t up to getting up. I spent whole days in bed, whole weeks in my room. The bathroom was only a few steps out of my room, and I had a fully stocked micro-fridge. This was, of course, after I decided that I was not going to finish the semester and was going to leave school for an undetermined amount of time. This breakdown probably lasted about a month and a half. I know I spent a little time outside before the semester ended… I even went to the last couple classes I cared about.

The second time I lost my mind was the most fun. It was completely induced by a combination of my physical condition and being completely stir-crazy. I was working at an after-school day care in Woonsocket and I contracted Chicken Pox from the kids. I didn’t realize it until I was down in Baltimore for a gig with Mark, but that’s a story for another day. When I finally got home and figured out what I had, I was given some big blue pills and told to stay home for a couple weeks. I got myself all set up at home with enough food and supplies that I didn’t have to leave for a couple weeks… ready to start the recovery. I didn’t realize how long the itching and fever would last, though. It’s much worse as an adult than as a child apparently. Two weeks dragged by, the TV and Computer and such grew old in the first couple days… so I just sat and thought, and itched, and fevered. And by the time I wasn’t contagious anymore, I was completely wacked out. I wasn’t in my right mind… I’m not sure what had happened, exactly. But I took almost an extra week to get myself back into a work-worthy state of mind.

The third and most recent incident was that long set of circumstances I call “last year.” The whole year, really. At the beginning of the year, my lowest income season, I lost my roommates and became very, very poor… Got some new roommates, and they helped the money situation a little bit. I also joined a band with them, and the combination of wanting that band to be really a really good time and some general job dissatisfaction led to a mini melt-down where I abandoned my hyper-focus on work and decided to “live a little.” That led to falling in love… which led to driving 800 miles to get dumped… which led to some “curl up in a ball on the couch for a few hours every day for a month” depression. The logical course of action would have been to go back to my hyper-focus lifestyle, but at that point, I couldn’t even focus enough to continue playing in the bands I was in. So I limped along, and just about the time I had given up on trying to figure out how to get back to that lifestyle I missed and try to learn how to live without the ability to focus the way I used to, my Dad fell into a coma and then died.

UMASS was a learning experience, which I unfortunately didn’t take in completely, since I went back to school after a year off, only to fail out again. The Chicken Pox were a hellish experience that proved to me that I couldn’t ever really be a hermit/shut-in. But “last year” didn’t teach me much of anything. I already knew about all these eccentricities I have in regards to life and love. Alright, so some of the last year was fun, but I feel like I paid dearly for those fun times by losing my focus and not having it at times when I really needed to have it. What it has left me with, is a nasty inability to focus and nasty little freak-out sessions when I try. I don’t know how to explain it, but when I try to focus on something intensely, the way I used to focus on just about everything, I freeze up. I don’t know what to call it: Mini panic attacks? Mind moving a million miles an hour? Inability to function and communicate? I dunno. It sucks though. Does it get worse from here? Do we lose a little more with each episode?

Again. I may not be 100% … but just the fact that I can look back at all this and have some perspective is progress. Perspective is something I used to be good at. It’s something I used to offer my friends… I gave up offering actual advice because no one ever took it, but I gave my perspective and was asked for it quite a bit, since it was usually so different.

I’m sorry that I haven’t written much lately. I’ve been distracted by life and headaches and TV. I’ve actually had a lot on my mind that I should be writing down. It’s always helped me sort things out when I write them down. I have a little conversation with myself… in writing. I used to have conversations in notebooks with my friends all the time. It started, I think, at a live music venue in Worcester… because it either would have been rude to talk or it was too loud to really hear each other. Either way, we found that while I was not so good at communicating verbally, I was excellent at saying exactly what I was feeling if I was writing it down. I think I still have some of those old notebooks at my Mom’s house… though I’m not sure where they would be. I was just in the closet in my old room the other day, looking for Super Nintendo stuff, and I pulled out a couple boxes full of books, tapes, CDs, pictures and such… but only one notebook was there, and I didn’t see any conversations in it. I did get better at communicating verbally over the years, but I think I’m still better in writing, especially when talking to myself.

So what’s on my mind? Well, the magical financial security is about to run out, I fear. It was very, very unusual to have enough money to pay all the bills and such this winter. The last two years, this was certainly my lowest income period… and I was fully expecting to let some bills slip to the point of being on the verge of cancellation. Then paying them off with tax returns or by selling something again. The gas bill was the logical target, since they can’t turn that off, by law, in the winter. But the winter’s not over… and my foolish spending / debt repayment has cut into my savings drastically.

What else? Inadequacy. Once again, I fear that I am trying to fit myself into something that I don’t fit into. I am different and usually I accept and embrace and enjoy that… but there are times when I try to interact with the rest of the world and it becomes extremely apparent to me, if not everybody else, that my differences might just be too much to make this work. School was the big obvious one. I focus on one thing and do it very well, and school wanted me to be well-rounded. I was not willing or able to change to make school work. Relationships have been the other big failure. I don’t feel the same way other people do. I still believe in the separation of friendship/familiarity, sexual attraction and mate selection. I still don’t put any faith in the concept of Love tyeing those three together in a neat little package and I certainly don’t enjoy the romantic games that have been attached over the last 4-500 years. The difference is that I’ve tried, in the past, to change my thinking, or at least play along, to make relationships work… but they never do. And I’m never the one dissatisfied with it, because I never expect anything from it. It’s always been a choice to share time together and do things together and for one another, but never really anything more. I don’t have a role for someone else to fill, I don’t feel motivated by needs to be filled and I don’t give the relationship a life of its own. It’s always somewhat of a shock to me when someone wants to end a relationship with me. I’m so bad at it… and yet I still find myself trying. And I hurt people, and I get hurt.

I wish I had talked to Dad more. I know we would’ve argued, I’m almost positive of it, but we never really had any serious philosophical discussions. He was a very cerebral and brilliant guy and I wish that I had bounced these ideas off of him… not so much for advice, but just opinions or analysis. I know he once said that he didn’t like the “dark” and “existential” stuff that was on my website, and I tried a little bit to get him to expand on what parts, but I didn’t really dig too far. I know I told him in the middle of a heated argument about my grades in high school that I truly didn’t care what other people thought of me… and, in an effort to appeal to his interests, I got him a book about the international monetary system that had a kind of existential tinge to it… but we never discussed it. He probably hated it. But I would’ve liked to hear that from him and talk to him about it.

Wow, I babble quite a bit when I’m on drugs… even over-the-counter pain medications. I don’t believe in censorship, though, even when I’m drugged up… so, I’m gonna title this entry something about my low tolerance to drugs. Did you know that I title my entries after I write them? yep… almost always. Now you know. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be making the headache go away, yet, but I think I can sleep, now. I hate to think that I might have to call a doctor about this…

From the girls moving out… to the guys moving in… to the guys moving out… it has been a revolving door down in Woonsocket. It’s never really been a stable place, but this is a lot of people in and out, around me, in one year. It’s been quite difficult, especially financially. But Sara has proven to be a great roommate, and hopefully the revolving door has stopped spinning for a while.

Early in the year, I felt some general dissatisfaction with my job, at least parts of it, and left the after-school day care, probably for good. Again, probably not a good financial move, as the position had pretty steady hours. It also put me in a weird position with some of the people I enjoyed working for (i just wasn’t enjoying the work). But the teen center is a good position, too, and I definitely enjoy it as much or more than the asdc. And I still have the team building/ropes and Andy to look forward to in the good weather.

These changes and general dissatisfaction with things in the winter led to a change in my overall lifestyle… by the spring, I was totally immersed in hanging out with friends as much as possible and “living.” Seriously, I cut my hair… this was drastic. I even rekindled an old love… but that didn’t really end up going so well. And what I thought was the logical course of action, going back to my old kind of lifestyle, didn’t go so well, either. So I found myself stuck in this foreign mindset and unable to focus very well. It was pretty depressing. I’ve started to be OK with where my head is at now, though, and have, at least, stopped agonizing and trying to figure it all out all day.

A bunch of stuff happened musically. I started getting into new music and rediscovering old music with the help of my Sirius radio. It’s been fun to really dig into artists’ catalogs and soak it all in. I did a lot of playing this year, too. Snakes was pretty active and when the guys moved in, I was involved in the beginnings of a new musical project with them, called Das Happening. Playing was fun and was really fun when I injected that does of “live a little” into my life. One of the reasons I wanted to do that was to try to recapture how fun it used to be when I played in Just For Sundae, back in the day. Unfortunately, with that breakdown and the lack of focus afterwards, playing was really difficult and not fun, because I couldn’t devote enough focus to it to do it as well as I wanted to… so I stopped playing. I dunno if, or when, I’ll be able to enjoy playing again.

The bands were not the only thing that was difficult to deal with because of my weird state of mind… I was definitely not in the best mental state when my Dad’s condition sent him into a coma and eventually took his life. Fortunately, there was a lot of family around, but I don’t feel like I was very helpful to any of them, the way that they were for me.

Those are the major events. Throw in the usual car troubles, computer breakdowns & hard drive failures, web host problems & web site moves/rebuilds, financial woes, blog-hopping, making a couple new friends & reconnecting with some old ones and you have my 2005. I’ve never really thought of the new year as a time to start over, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a year with so much stuff I’d rather just put behind me and forget about, either. Bring on 2006.

We used to have a yard sales on Columbus Day weekend. It was a big event and we went all out getting stuff prepared. Dad would advertise in all the local rags with some very detailed information on some of the collectibles and antiques that we had. We’d also go out and put signs on all sorts of poles around town… and the next town over. We had the whole driveway, which is huge, set up as selling grounds, as well as the “inside garage” (the previous owner of the house had the garage turned into an enclosed room). That room held all the real cool stuff that we’d collected from various auctions and flea markets and such. We sort of cleared a couple aisles through all the stuff and let people wander on through. Sometimes, we had bidding wars. I think we even sold a couple cars at those yard sales. I remember getting to keep the money that my old toys brought in… even though that was sort of ridiculous, since they were all bought by Mom and Dad. We served cider and coffee and some sort of food. I broke out that ridiculous metal change counter thing that you wore on a belt; Coins would get jammed in it and I would get flustered.

Anyway, I took some pictures of the photo paper and Death_Machine and some random stuff around my room and posted them all in the Objects gallery.

I have no idea when I’m working… I forgot to write it down. oops. I guess I’ll call? I’m glad I get a few hours on the rock wall here and there through the winter. At the very least, it keeps my hands in practice for belaying at the ropes course in the spring. I really miss the team-building during the winter… though, I am sort of looking forward to all the down-time, even if it does cripple me, financially.

Our first holiday without Dad has passed. It was weird. There was a lot of stuff that I almost felt obligated to do/be in Dad’s absence, especially when we hosted Mom’s side of the family here. I tried not to dwell on it too much. Mom did a good job and we had a good night and great dinner. Visiting with Dad’s side was interesting, too. Definitely felt different.

After my last victory[/hack] with the plugins on this site, I decided that a nice little list of all the things I’ve added and tweaked would be cool… which is when I found the “plugins used plugin.” What a great idea. So I made this page which lists all the active plugins. I’m using almost all of them. Not really using the Tags at all, but maybe in a couple months, or when they’re good and out of style, I’ll check out what a Tag cloud for this site looks like.

In exciting family news, tomorrow morning is the big vehicle-swap. We drive the old beater to the Nissan dealership and drive home in the nice shiny minivan. I’ll be sure to take some pictures… even if they’re only with my phone. Grandpa is actually purchasing the vehicle, and it will be used primarily for moving him around, but it’s still very exciting to be getting a reliable and fairly new vehicle in the family. It’s been 10 years since we got anything close to new. Dad was an awesome used car shopper, but he was also willing to deal with keeping an older car in shape more than Mom really has time to be. We’re doing that fairly early, so I’m sleeping in the lonely little bed downstairs in Dudley again. And it’s about time to head there.

has decided that an appropriate prize for being the closest guess on the penny jar dollar amount would be [another] mix CD. I will get to work on that immediately. Feel free to make suggestions.

More food tomorrow… but not before I go work for a while, then stay in Dudley tonight, then get up early in the morning to take my Mom and my grandfather to the Nissan dealership to pick up their new minivan. YAY! A reliable car for mom, and one that Dad can’t ruin! Then, once that’s safely home, we can start preparing for her side of the family to come over for dinner. I think she said she was gonna do pork, since everyone had Turkey yesterday…. mmmm, pork.

There were two years in the past where I worked a retail job on this day of the year and it’s not fun… you think shopping is hectic, today? Try being the guy who’s supposed to keep the shelves stocked. Especialy when your shelves are actually stacks of VCRs, TVs, computers, stereos, etc., in the middle of the aisles. I believe the wheels of my two-wheel dolly were actually warm to the touch a couple hours into the shopping day. If I can help it, I’ll never work retail in this season, again… of course, we have yet to see if the teen center hours will cover my expenses. It’s kinda nice to not even consider shopping today, since I have no money