I spent the majority of Sunday doing Alleycat Acres farm work. A portion of this was shoveling a few truckloads of woodchips. Later, while planning our next meeting, someone asked “how are Mondays for you?” We joke about how Mondays aren’t typically all that great, because they’re Mondays, not because we aren’t busy as the question was meant. Today reminds me of all the Alleycat Acres Sunday work parties of yesteryear: Mondays are sore. I took the bus to work today, a rarity, because I found that leaning over made me feel like taking a sick day in bed. Not that there is a lot of bending while riding, I suppose exercise felt out of the question when I was fighting to stand and sit.

I hung out with and then had dinner with K last night. She’s wonderfully supportive, and dragged me out to dinner to ensure I ate without any of the dragging. We made plans a couple days ago, but yesterday was a bit, absurd, so it was great timing for a hug. I didn’t talk at all about yesterday though, just the last month and the struggles of figuring out where to head from here. After, I had drinks with J in a surprise effort to comfort someone else despite my circumstance. Naw, I can’t take that credit. J is great at being resiliently happy. This is different than being annoyingly cheerful. It just makes me want to hug her. So the day turned out well after all.

They say, “life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” K offered that making a single choice can reduce a large number of infinite options down to a smaller number of infinite options. Of course, the people in our lives also reduce the number of those options as well. It seems as though most long distance relationships don’t start that way. It’s hard on a relationship to not see someone, harder when you don’t have a base established. Harder when you live the way I do; busy, and stressed.

L once said that she’d be going to grad school in the near future, so it didn’t make much sense in getting too serious because we’d be apart then. I told her that I’d probably be willing to move when that day came to follow her. She never said so, but I’m convinced that I felt that way made her uncomfortable. We never talked about that, nor a great many number of things. She wouldn’t find the time for me, so I would email her my thoughts instead. That almost always ended terribly, despite the fact that we always got along well in person. I always hoped it was her feelings for me in my presence that made this true, but maybe she was just bad at personal confrontation.

I don’t talk to L or M anymore. I tried to maintain a relationship with both, to differing degrees based on what I wanted, but both failed. L finally asked me to stop contacting her until she could decide how to respond to me. I said I wouldn’t again until she asked me to. Or maybe unless. I don’t expect to ever hear from her again. I’ve thought many times about how angry I’ll be if she ever wants to get together to reminisce about the good old days. Maybe I won’t though, I’m probably just coping. M stopped caring, and after I went out of my way a few times it was clear there wasn’t anything there that was sustainable.

Friends used to imply that my breakups with L and M were only so hard because they had broken up with me. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for the relationships to end to some degree, but I knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, that implication bothered me and felt insulting to the conversation at hand.

I’ve said in the past that I thought I could have built more of a relationship with K, something long term, if I had tried. I couldn’t promise anything more at the time, which made it just die. R wants to reconnect in June, and I think about just how much _life_ occurs in a couple of months. Particularly these couple of months, with having to return to Maine to bury my father in May. I don’t know… It’s disheartening, and I know I could do more, but I don’t have the energy right now. It’s all just so, very, hard, and while I don’t want to go it alone, it just seems destined to work out that way until I can find another model through which to explain everything.

… settle for less because we regard our partners are worth the price of admission

Dan savage writes on the “price of admission”. It’s well said and leaves a lot to think about.

Drank an absurd amount of whiskey tonight. Drinking without bike riding is actually worse than drinking with bike rides.

I came home to a letter from ALPA, the Airline Pilots Association, expressing condolences about the loss of my father. Mad fucking props to them. Funny though, getting another “don’t hesitate to call,” but from someone I don’t know and not including a phone number.

Meh, I have a headache. This is a terrible sign.

Sitting at the Owl.

Watching The Usual Suspects.

The coworkers are talking about rligion.

One of then brings up fathers dying with me, who has shared the experience.

Therein is my acceptance.

Credit Card / Line of Credit Accounts

I met with my boss this morning to catch up, and he asked how I was doing. I had a hard time explaining in short detail how I handle stress will externally, but therefore I’m not entirely sure how I’m handling it internally.

I thought this morning on the ride in about the moments when Dad died. It doesn’t haunt me, but it is rough emotionally. Not for the faint of heart. I was sitting on one side of him while my aunt was sitting on the other. My aunt, an operating room nurse, was great because she was familiar with a lot of the process and had a good bedside manor. Dad began to vomit and we rolled him over to me so he wouldn’t choke. My mother ran to get towels to put next to him to absorb the vomit. My aunt was behind him now, and I was sitting next to his waist, half holding him up, but mostly just holding him. Within a couple minutes he had died. It is strange to have had someone die in my arms, let alone a parent.

The house was full of people, some of them quite upset at the news. I needed some space. Mom and I took a walk down to the lake. It was a sunny day, and there was still some snow and ice down on the road.

The family helped clean him up while we were gone. When his parents showed up, I went in with them but I didn’t want to stay.

Later, at the funeral, I was the last one at the casket. His skin was cold. His clothes were full of padding to make him look normal, probably partly due to his death and partly due to his malnourished state. Touching him hurt. It wasn’t like I was pretending he was sleeping, but it seemed more okay to just see him. The realities were further away.

It’s been over two weeks now. I realized today that the twenty year anniversary of the house fire approaches in a few days.

Way back in the before time, shortly after my motorcycle accident, I dated S. I remember her wondering about what I was like before the accident. I thought about that recently, when R was thinking out loud about how I was in Vancouver and in Maine compared to in Seattle, and worrying about what was the cause of the marked difference. Mom and I talked about this for a bit, and she emphasized about how Maine wasn’t normal, because it was an emotionally intense period. Therefore it wasn’t sustainable. We weren’t working as well, so it was somewhat artificial period.

Still, I’m here craving junk food with a sense of tiredness hiding on the edges. It was a long weekend in some ways.

Mom agreed with my disappointment in not hearing from M at all during the last few weeks. Oh well, though. Life goes on, and time passes. Still, she mentioned tonight having feelings that she thought had past stirred up recently. That happens too.

I’m planning on trying to get out of situations that are going to stress me out for a while.

I’m lacking confidence lately. Not in my abilities. It’s like not knowing what I want to do. But I’m not depressed, just, not sure. I’ve admitted this to R mostly, but to others I’ve said what mostly amounts to that I’m waiting and seeing.

Tomorrow I return to Seattle, and back to work Thursday. Fortunately I’ve etched out some time already on Thursday to catch up with J.

K an I chatted extensively recently about how unhappy I seemed to be with my pace in Seattle. I keep thinking about the anxiety I get when the time between finishing my meals and getting the check is too long in Seattle. I think about this while looking out the window into the field, at nothing in particular. Usually birds, actually.

My aunt and uncle came down this afternoon to invite me to dinner and asked the usual questions about what my plans were. We talked a bit about the logistics of moving back to Maine and working remotely from here. My uncle asked what kind of volunteering I would do. I don’t know, that doesn’t fit into this life in the same way. Probably for a while I wouldn’t do any, or much. Like K, I’d be afraid of overextending myself and running around at an unhappy pace. I’ve sometimes considered that I’d find another role with the Red Cross locally, or join a fire department.

T and I joked a while ago about how I should move to a small town in WA and become a Sheriff’s deputy. Mostly because I could play the part really well. Maybe I’ve watched too many westerns.

I mentioned to R that my plans are to pick up everything that I dropped in Seattle when I return. As I take mental stock of that, I feel like I dropped some heavy things that may be too late to pick up again. That’s probably okay. It’s probably a reasonable time to cut my losses and anyone who cares can acknowledge the hardship and start over. I mean, if it’s important they’ll bring it up.

I found myself trying to explain my tendency to have multiple lives all at once the other day. I normally have trouble because I explain the explanations with more stories. Without a solid footing, it was hopeless.

Now I sit, watching the birds, thinking about the trees, considering a walk. After I work my way upstairs for some socks. In a few days I will be back in Seattle, where outside of sleeping, I am rarely home. Where I always eat at bars and ride a bicycle through industrial alleys every day. The pace.

I think a lot about pointing a wireless link at the mountain and turning the spare room into an office. I could work from here and those times I get anxious in the office could instead be walks among the trees. As time goes on, the part of me that talked to L a year ago about how much of me was still waiting for a partner shrinks and fades. I’m not as worried anymore about waiting. I’m not as worried about what I’ll miss out on. I feel like that should be more of a shame than it is.

hmm.