So, as a way to keep track of where life has led me during the past few months, here is a recap of all that has happened since I last posted anything.

I lost my job in Royal Oak, which was a blessing.
Was unemployed for like 2 months.
Found a new job while helping my baby move to a new town.
Relocated to said new town.
Lived in a little room through the winter.
After February my baby and I moved in together into a two bedroom apartment.
We've had some ups, some downs (more ups than downs, thankfully).
Summer arrived.
Have been spending loads of time at the beach.
Working my way to facing the Lich King and finally bringing him down (WoW nerds will know what I'm talking about).
And now I'm planing to hit Detroit for the 4th weekend.
Thrilled about the upcoming Cataclysm expansion (again, WoW nerd reference).

Fun stuff eh?

Oh, and AVATAR rocks! One of my top ten favorites for sure.

DID I MENTION THE BEACH!

That is my life for the past few months in a nutshell.

-D

Been a while since I've written something I think is worth sharing. Read it and tell me what you think... or not. Up to you.


**************


“Last thing I remember I was speeding out of that convenience store parking lot like my ass was on fire. I had shot the clerk and his wife, emptied the register, and taken a beef stick. I always did like those beef sticks, the Teriyaki flavored ones, you know. Anyway, they must have hit some sort of silent alarm when they saw me pull my Magnum, and so the cops were in my tail before I turned the corner. Shit, my brother always did tell me not to knock off a place close to a cop shop. Fucking overconfidence was always my downfall.”
“Now, I don’t care how good a driver you are, trying to outrun the cops on surface streets is fucking hard. They got those Hemi engines in their cruisers that can outrun a pack of racehorses, plus there are all kinds of dumbass drivers that won’t get out of the way like they’re supposed to when they hear sirens. Of course it was only a matter of luck that I managed to make it ten miles without hitting something more solid than those two pedestrians I mowed down on the sidewalk while avoiding an Impala... I think they were two. Who knows. So I ended up ass ramming this big fucking SUV with the yellow “baby on board” sign on the back window. Fucking thing was built like a tank, so it took the hit like a champ while the front of my Supra crumpled like a beer can.”
“Thank God for airbags, you know. They do save lives. I was pretty banged up, think my right arm was broken. Luckily you can still shoot with only one hand. I stumbled out of the driver side window of my ride and hit the asphalt hard on my shoulder. When I rolled over, I saw that the cops had surrounded me, weapons drawn and pointed. Ha! They do act just like in them TV shows. They yelled all their cop phrases, you know, shit like “freeze motherfucker!” and “on the ground!” and “drop it!” I was never one to take orders well. Just ask my daddy. He shouldn’t have yelled “put that knife down!” Should have known better. Anyway, so I turned over, Magnum drawn and started blasting off. I even managed to shoot off the four bullets I had left, and I think I clipped a cop right in the gut. Saw him fold over and drop to the floor like a marionette with its strings cut off. The cops don’t take kindly to you shooting at them; it turns out, so they pumped me so full of hot lead that I barely had any time to register pain before everything went restfully dark.”

“And now here I am, telling you my last sentient experiences, looking over my dead corpse all bled out on the asphalt like a stepped-on jelly donut. This is crazy you know. Who are you, anyway?”

**********

The man in the black suit looked over at Juan Carlos with kindness in his eyes; those deep black eyes that were all pupil, no iris. He extended his hand and offered it to Juanca, as his very few friends called him, like you would a lost child. Juanca was confused as would be expected, but felt no threat coming from the man. He took the hand, and off they went, away from the grizzly scene left behind for the living to clean up. They walked in silence down the streets of Detroit towards the river. Juanca considered how odd it was for them to be in Detroit, his hometown, when he had just died in Atlanta. It was odd, but everything about this was odd. Maybe this is how it always goes when you die. “Shit, I’ve never been dead before” he thought.
“You have,” stated the man in the black suit with gentle finality in his voice. It was a deep voice that seemed to come from something far larger and with more authority than any human could begin to fathom.
“Are you the grim reaper?” Juanca felt incredibly stupid for asking, but could not help himself. The answer was more than obvious.
“You see, you even remember me.” The man continued to lead Juanca by the hand down the streets, the Ambassador Bridge loomed closer, they were almost to his old haunts. “I am your reaper, Juanca.”
”How many times have I died?”
“Enough to know better, but some take longer to learn their lessons. And some bite off more than they are ready to chew.” The man’s voice was not accusing, it sounded as a very patient teacher gently repeating an instruction to a particularly troubled student.
They walked the rest of the way in silence until they stood in Clark Park. The sight of his old neighborhood filled him with a confusing mix of fear, anger, and something akin to nostalgia. Here is the place where he had played as a child, where he had smoked his first cigarette, had his first beer. Here he had started his business selling drugs to the other kids from the local schools that stood around the park like ponds ready to be fished. Here is where he had taken his first life. At the time he had been so sure he was right. Friends don’t steal from friends. At least not from him, he had stolen from other ‘friends’ plenty of times, though. No use lying to himself now, he was dead after all.
“Are you going to show me my life now?” Juanca could not keep the sarcastic edge off his voice. “I guess you keep your personality when you die” he thought.
“No. You have already lived that, you know what you have done. There is no need. And yes, you do keep your personality; otherwise there would be no point to living.” Again, that patient-teacher voice.
“What are we doing here then?”
“Coming full circle. This is your heart’s home. Here is where it all begun for you and where it all must end.” The reaper reached out his hand, extended his index finger as if to point at something in the distance. A ripple, like when a pebble hits still water, appeared in the air from the tip of his finger and spread throughout the landscape towards eternity.

And then everything vanished. Pitch black surrounded Juanca. He could not see his hand in front of his face. He would have panicked, but his other hand still held the reassuring grip of his reaper’s. Blinding light suddenly exploded all around him. Juanca looked at the scene around him. His reaper smiled at him and let go. He proffered a white folding chair out of nowhere for Juanca to sit and produced another one for himself. They sat in silence for a few minutes that seemed to stretch on forever, mostly because the entire weight of Juanca’s life fell on his shoulders suddenly and without remorse. He knew that he was without excuses, and knew that it was judgment time. The judge was the one person that he could no longer lie to; himself.

Juanca saw in his mind’s eye all the wrongs he ever committed. He was third person witness to all his robberies, all the beatings he had inflicted on others, the subsequent murders, the few rapes, and all the other heinous acts he had obliged in, all with righteous anger in his heart. He had known then, with all certainty, that he was right to do what he was doing. He had deluded himself to think that there was always a ‘good reason.’ He had told countless lies to others, but mostly to himself.
“She deserves what she gets for dressing like that” and “that’s what you get for fucking taking my money”; and “If it’s so wrong, it shouldn’t be so easy” were only a few of his more shameful ones.

All the time the reaper sat opposite of him on that folding chair, legs crossed, arms resting gently on his lap, and waiting with the patience of a saint. He said nothing, offered no comfort or accusation. Juanca felt his presence even though he sat there in his raggedy tee shirt and baggy pants, bloodstained hands on his face as despair washed over him for his wasted, destructive life.
Juanca wept for what seemed like days for all the wrongs he had inflicted on humanity. Every last evil replayed in his head, and he knew there was no hiding. It burned his soul like the flames of hell, where Juanca was sure he belonged. It was an eternity before the pain begun to subside. He looked up at his reaper, who continued to sit impassively. The reaper nodded at Juanca as he knew the decision had been made.

“I am ready. Take me to hell; it’s where I deserve to be.” Dread filled Juanca’s heart and soul, fear like nothing he had ever experience, even looking down the barrel of a gun was nothing compared to this. He had judged himself unworthy to enter heaven, and it was time to pay the piper.
“I’m sorry but it doesn’t work that way, Juanca.” The reaper responded.
He was so baffled that it was a few minutes before he realized his mouth was hanging open. Juanca had been so sure that he deserved nothing better but to burn for all eternity, that now he could not help but wonder why he wasn’t being given the punishment he ought to have. It was then that he started to remember all the good things in his life. How he had loved his mother so much that he had done everything, even the unthinkable, to protect her. His small kindnesses to others at times, the child he had been before he had become so corrupt. And even after, there were redeeming moments. When he had met Jo Ann, and had given up his life of crime for a year, bent on walking the straight path; and the pain he had suffered when that life had caught up to him and taken hers as payment for his sins. There had been moments of true compassion; he had even experienced true faith that had faded slowly from his heart like an iron nail that rusts away with harsh winds and water.
“Even your life had some true hope, Juanca.” The reaper never took his eyes off him. “You have known some semblance of true love for others and even yourself. Even though it was mostly filled with hate, rage, fear, and pain, there was a glimpse of heaven. Don’t be so sure you belong in hell.”
Juanca considered the reaper’s words for a few moments. “So now what?” He asked.
“It’s up to you. You can rest or you can begin again. There is no hurry, we have all of forever.” The reaper actually smiled.
“Begin again?”
“Go back to the living so that you may continue to learn. Maybe this time you will lead a different life.”
“It seems unlikely, don’t you think?” Juanca spat back at the reaper. “Look at the mess I made of my life, what makes you think I can do better? You said it yourself; I have died enough times to know better. Maybe I’m just stupid and don’t learn those lessons!”
He shook with anger from head to toe, and the reaper said nothing while the young man regained his composure. That anger, an old friend, or maybe more like an old addiction. It was both painful and reassuring.

When he calmed down, Juanca slumped on his chair. He was exhausted. The experience was too much too soon, and yet he felt he had been sitting on this chair for eons. It was as if time was both stretched and compressed. His human mind was baffled by it all, but something in his spirit was soothingly aware of the confusion and didn’t allow it to wholly surface to his consciousness.

The reaper said, “It is understandable that you have made mistakes, Juanca. Your life was one of your first human ones. The mere fact that you have even achieved that is enough proof that you can learn, you can move forward.” The reaper smiled a somewhat sardonic smile.
“Are you laughing at me?” The anger bloomed again in Juanca’s heart.
The reaper continued to smile “No, it’s only that we have had this conversation countless times before.”
Juanca could not help but be somewhat confused that this being of such obvious power and magnanimity could display such simple and lowly human expressions as a sarcastic grin.
Doing that annoying mind reading again, the reaper had an answer ready. “I was like you, Juanca. I had to claw my way up and learn in order to be here at this juncture. I had to suffer like you have, and I did things as a sentient being that make your life seem like that of a saint. If you deserve to burn in hell for your life, I deserve to sit right next to you. But that’s not how it works.”
“So how does it work then?”
The reaper put both feet flat on the ground as if ready to stand, but instead dusted nonexistent particles off his pants with his hands. Looking at his lap he said, “Again, you go back or you rest.”

Juanca thought about his life briefly again. He looked around at the white, featureless landscape and at his reaper. He felt completely weightless and yet thoroughly exhausted and grimy beyond anything he had felt before. “I think I will rest. There is much that I need to think about, the lessons that I should have learned, for starters. Also about the ones I did learn.”
“As you wish,” said the reaper, stood up and faded away.

Juanca closed his eyes and dissolved into something akin to light and air. Everything around him vanished. The memories of all his past lives returned with a gentle flow at first that gradually grew into a river wider than any ocean he had ever known in all his lifetimes before. It was all so much, yet not overwhelming; but more like a welcome anchoring in reality with an underlying and powerful feeling of hope. He remembered being bacteria and the genetic memories imprinted in it for the few minutes that he had called his life, and then a series of increasingly complex organisms, not all from Earth, which had a greater ability to live longer and reason higher than the ones prior. He remembered his few human lives, one of them surprisingly short as he had died as a baby. Another he lived to old age as a person with limited cognitive ability. Other lives he remembered as if the memories had always been there, he knew that this was the case, he had never truly forgotten any of it but was simply unable to recall the great majority of this when he was alive.
After another one of those inexplicably short, yet infinitely long, moments Juanca knew that he was ready to go back.

“As you wish,” came the reaper’s voice from somewhere and everywhere.

*********
There was white light again, however, this time it was painful. A sensation of panic filled him as there was no air in his lungs, quickly followed by sharp and sudden pain on his buttocks. It took Juanca a short time to realize that the wailing cry he was hearing from a muffled distance was coming from his own mouth, but the panic faded with the first lungful of air and coldness. Then he forgot his name and everything that he had ever known. There was only fear left, and coldness, and a pain in his stomach that demanded to be fed... and hope.
*********
“Congratulations!” said the elderly doctor in the white facemask and green scrubs to the new mother. “It’s a girl”.
The woman cried as she held her baby. Her sweaty face was covered with soaked hair, she reeked of blood, sweat, and more.
With a love so profound that almost hurt, the woman said, “Welcome to the world, my dear Yoko.”

Wow, it seems loads has happened to me in the past two years. This is why I like keeping a journal, it puts your life in perspective and reminds you of some experiences you had all but forgotten.

On a lighter note, on Christmas the beloved and I reached the two-year mark. Although we were not able to spend it together, I remained thrilled :) After two years, she is still my religion... and more so each passing day.

-A

A lot can happen to somebody in seventeen weeks. You can find yourself flying high on life one minute and the next plummeting to the depths of depression and self pity for no real reason whatsoever. Who says we can't cycle through a plethora of emotions in a short time? Particularly us bipolars.

Damn it has been a rewarding seventeen weeks tho. I've done what I studied my ass off for years to do... and now I'm well on my way to fuck it up. Oh it might take me a little longer than normally it takes me to turn it into a pile of steaming crap, but I can't help but feel that it eventually will get to that point where I will look back on all the bad decisions, wrong turns, and just retarded, bullheaded opinions that I have and made and will have to bury my life along with the rest of my fucking grandiose dreams.

I swear to God, sometimes i really do wonder what the hell my parents were thinking when they didn't smother me at birth. I'm a shitty son to my mom, my dad I keep him at arms length and barely ever call him. I can't believe my whole family hasn't deserted me now. I wonder if I shouldn't just cut off my girl free and let her go on her way... save her years of pain at my side.

Christ, fucking self-pitying ramblings. It's been a long time since I've hated myself, but tonight I do... tonight I find very little that's worth liking about myself... I think this has been coming for a long time, building up slowly on a bed of idiotic choices.

I suppose this is a bad way to start the new year... it certainly does not bode well. I'm scred to fall back on a black, viscous pool of depression and not be able to pull myself out of it this time except by a noose on my neck. Lord knows I've been almost to that point in the past, stopped only by a sincere fear that if I do it I'll go to hell.

Selfish to the end, I guess.

Wow, it's been ten weeks since I've last updated my journal.

One would think that nothing has happened since then, but one would be wrong. The truth is that much has taken place. For starters, I finally obtained my degree. The diploma arrived at my house about two weeks ago. Furthermore, I have interviewed for a position doing in-home therapy which is only waiting for my license to come through. Hopefully that will arrive within the next few weeks.

It's unusual for me to feel a sense of achievement as my whole life I've kind of hopped from place to place with what I consider little effort, but the truth is that I have worked my ass off trying to obtain the little recognition that I have so far.

As people we like to divide the world into finite categories. We like to say that there are those who do and those who wait, those who lead and those who follow, those who take and those who lose... I like to think of our world as those who say and those who listen. In a way I figure we are all a bit of one or the other, we all fall into those categories at some point or another in our lives. However, to me, the truth is that we all have a tendency to follow a certain path which we find comfortable, and personally I am one of those who listen. That's just who I am, and I am pleased to be that person.

I suppose it is my desire to define myself today, and perhaps tomorrow I will find another meaning for my life, but for now I am a listener.

-D

Some people have non-descript, sort of pointless nightmares... I get to have full blown intricately detailed, motion picture length stories. This one was particularly awful, so much so that what woke me up was not fear but sadness.

It all started with an actor obsessed with completing a play or a movie. In any case, somehow (unfortunately or fortunately I can't remember how) he ended up with a woman, older from the looks of her perhaps in her 40's or 50's, strapped down to his bed. She was possessed by a demon and all he could do was recite the Lord's Prayer, which only set her on edge but didn't remove the thing from her. In any case, this woman did something during the production of the play that landed them both in prison. Here in the prison was an inmate that just took the the actor and made his awful time even more so. He came to realize that this person too was demon possessed and just as with the first one, all he could do was recite the Lord's Prayer. This demon seemed more bothered by this and so he ran out to the yard and as he crossed it to get away from the man, a person from my own life walked in as well. She was on her way to see a little girl (why a little girl in a prison, I don't know, dreams don't always make sense). In any case, the demon saw that I knew the woman and so he left the prisoner on his breath and went after her. I tried to get her not to breathe but she did. Now, it's important to mention that I care a lot about this person, and when I saw her possessed I started crying and offering myself to the demon. I saw it leave on her breath and come at me so I held my breath and put my hands over her nose and mouth remembering that demons could only exists outside a body for five microns. In any case, I held my breath for so long that I woke up. Turns out I was really holding my breath. Last thing I remember is that she was trying to breathe and I could feel some of her breath through my fingers. Don't know if the thing possessed her again or not... don't really wanna know... but now I feel the overwhelming urge to call her just to make sure she's alright.

*sigh* I hate nightmares, but they do make good material for stories. I have to wonder tho, what is my subconscious trying to tell me with all this?

-D

Misery is back. Thinking about it, I suppose I deserve it, but still it's no fun.

I think that one of the most admirable features in a partner is not that they never hurt you, but that when they do hurt you (and they inevitably will at one point or another), they are clever enough to realize it, and valiant enough to apologize and make amends.

Thank you for that, beloved. Thank you for being that way.

-D

Hacia años de los años que yo me enojaba de tal manera. Hacia mucho que yo sentia tanto disgusto con alguien. Yo se por que lo hiciste, yo se que el resentimiento te llevo a hacerlo... pero lo que yo te hice fue sin querer, lo hice por descuido y en el momento en que lo hice supe que estaba mal y te pedí perdón... yo sufri por haberte hecho sufrir.... pero lo que tu hiciste lo hiciste aposta y con el directo punto de herirme.

Y me heriste.

Me heriste de manera en la que no te puedes imaginar.

Me querías empujar lejos de ti? Pues lo lograste.

Me querías demostrar que yo me merezco a alguien mejor? Pues lo lograste.

Felicidades, lograste alejar a la persona que mas te quería.

Estoy super enojado con tigo, y no te volveré a hablar hasta que me pidas perdón por que yo supe cuando la embarre y fui suficientemente adulto para aceptarlo... pero lo que to hiciste es peor por que tu lo hiciste aposta.

-D

So I didn't get into the doctorate program at Wayne. I haven't really called or written to find out why, but I am thinking it was due to lack of spots. I'm kind of upset about it because I wanted to just go on and finish my career as soon as I could, but sometimes things just don't work out the way you plan them. Now I have to way until I am able to apply again. This time the plan is to apply to more than just one program and hopefully I'll be able to get into something.

I got a job. Since I don't get to graduate until August, that means that I won't have my license until then, which means that I can't practice until such time. In the meantime I'm going to be doing what I've done for years... meaning, take calls. I started this past Monday and today I started to take calls. I can't say that I'm excited, but I am relieved that I'll be making some much needed money and I'll have something to do other than sitting on my butt with my finger up my nose.

The beloved and I are doing really well. It seems that every day I find something else to love about her, something more that I like about her. I can't believe we have been doing this for a year now. I wish we could be together, but I suppose all in due time.

It seems everyone is leaving Michigan like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Now, another one of my good friends will be leaving on the 18th of May. I wonder who will be next.

-D