me

Cole (12/25/14):

Hola a todos! 

I hope that everyone is doing well.  I know it has been quite a while since my last post, and for that I apologize.  I really should be better about keeping on top of things.  The thing is, it isn’t always easy when so many things constantly change, fluctuate, and shanghai you out of nowhere.  As I write this, I would have to say that I am in a pretty good place, but these past couple of months have been pretty much all over the charts for me, and just incredibly odd and baffling, to say the least!  I will get to that later, but for now, let me tell you the good news that has me so pumped up and excited about the direction my life is currently taking.  Sometimes I forget what it feels like to not have to stress about my current job situation, after about two years of nothing but ambiguity and wandering sans concrete direction. 

I don’t even need to go back and look at my last post to remember exactly where I was, mentally and physically.  I had just finished my very first harvest, and though I had loved the work tremendously, I had become disenchanted with the hostility that began to wax as harvest was coming to an end.  I felt alienated and under-appreciated, and though I was feeling somewhat distraught, disappointed, and down, I was still dearly hoping to stay in the wine industry, only with a new company, one with a group of people that were forward-thinking, avant-garde, edgy, hopefully even somewhat revolutionary, in a sense.  I mean, I suppose most companies would have to be, to be able to accept and appreciate me, and make the person that I am at the core, truly work to their advantage.  I am hard working, respectful, and eager to learn and adjust, but I am hardly the most “marketable” person (depending on the circumstances), due to my physical appearance (red and purple hair, visible tattoos, Monroe facial piercing, etc.).  So when an “up and coming” new tasting room was about to open its doors, and they eagerly appreciated my “style” as well as my resume, I was on cloud nine when the job was offered to me, just a day after interviewing for the position of Wine Steward.  Excitement can’t even begin to describe what I was feeling when I came home to that email, offering me the job, after what was the most long, drawn out, and painfully awkward job interview for another tasting room, at another winery just an hour or so previous.  I have been working for this awesome new company for close to two months now, and I’m smitten!  

The interview I had for the place I am currently working for was great.  Probably the best job interview I have ever had.  Immediately upon sitting down, they told me they saw my résumé and just HAD to meet me, because I was a “bad ass”.  That was what they said to me.  They told me I was a bad ass.  I was tickled by this!  All this time I thought my random ass résumé was somehow hindering me.  Now I know it was because up until that point, I just hadn’t found the right company.  I mean, it really is all over the charts, but they were right.  It is fucking bad ass!  I just needed to find people “enlightened” enough to appreciate it.  Or else believe it... 

No degree, but two language certificates.  Equal amounts of time in both hospitality and an industrial environment.  My résumé is just as contradictory as I am a person.  I can talk about food, wine, languages, and literature just as well as I can talk about football, hazardous waste, nuclear power generation, laying tile, and firing off a few rounds at Turkey Flats while sipping PBR and spewing double negatives like I was a born redneck.  But this was what appealed to them about me.  They said that I could talk to anyone, and they were right.  I can pretty much talk to any damn person who walks into that tasting room about any damn thing, and everyone who walks out after tasting with me has a smile on their face.  I’ve had several customers ask to have their picture taken with me, give me 22 ounce bottles of home brew IPA, and I’ve been handed more telephone numbers than I can count.  The fact that I’m so randomly acquainted with so many varied aspects of life only works to my advantage, and my awkward nerdiness puts people at ease.  I’ve seen people walk in super stiff and prepared to “hate”, but by the time they walk out they are relaxed, and have most likely bought a few bottles as well.  I think my awkward, nerdy, light-heartedness is disarming, because I just want to have a good time, and I think my passion and lack of ego thaws frigid souls.  At the end of the day, I just want people to have a nice time, and I think my lack of pretentiousness is appreciated.    

So, luckily for me, the lovely ladies interviewing me were not turned off by my somewhat odd résumé, as so many potential employers seemed to be, but were intrigued.  They saw something in me, and that was quite a refreshing feeling, after somewhere around two years of feeling like a complete outcast. 

It felt like my dreams were coming true, especially after having written my last post, where I stated that I wanted to work in the wine industry, for a group of people that would love and appreciate me for who I am.  Then all of the sudden, I stumble upon such a winery, totally randomly, on Craigslist, and almost blew the interview off entirely because I felt there was just no way in hell the company would even consider me, let alone be thrilled to welcome me as a member of their team.  The ladies who hired me fired off that they wanted to be “edgy, anti wine snob, cool, etc”, and all I could think was; holy shit.  This is the avant-guarde place I wrote about in my last post, but did not think possibly existed.  I wanted to work there more than anything, but the interview was not over yet…

Before I left, the main boss brought up the issue of F-bombs.  I thought it was funny, the way she brought it up, and I was just as straight with her as she was with me.  She said something along the lines of: I know construction, and construction people, and I know there were probably quite a few F-bombs thrown out.  Can you refrain from spouting off F-bombs in the tasting room? 

I told her that I couldn’t lie.  I told her that I was quite fond of the F-bomb, and that certainly it had become a word that I said a lot, but that there was also a time and a place for everything, and a tasting room was no place for the F-bomb. 

She laughed, and said that certainly, in the privacy of her office, the F-bombs would fly.  I told her that it was sort of like Christmas morning at my parents house.  No matter how many Bloody Mary’s my brothers and I consumed, you know when to go into “church mode” and speak the way that is proper to the current environment or situation.  I told her that I wouldn’t utter an F-bomb at an opera any more than I would in a tasting room.  We both got a good laugh out of my honesty, and I felt that we understood each other.  I walked away from the interview feeling great, feeling that I had been sincere and had concealed nothing, but not knowing how they would take my honesty and sincerity. 

The following morning I had coffee with my father.  I told him how excited I was and how great I had felt after the interview, and if I should express my gratitude, either by calling or sending an email, because I was really just so ecstatic about how the interview had gone, and whether or not I got the job, I wanted the ladies who had interviewed me to know how grateful I truly was to have met with them and spoken with them on a totally sincere and respectful level.  He said I should write them a little thank-you note, on nice stationary, thanking them for their time.  That was just what I had planned on doing, as soon as I got back from coffee, but another tasting room called me in for an interview. 

I put my plans on hold, and drove to Paso for yet another interview…

To say this other interview was painful would be an understatement.  Not only did I have to smell, sip, taste, spit out, and even re-visit close to twenty wines, into a spit bucket that the current tasting room employee didn’t feel the need to empty, so that toward the end, when I would spit out a decent sized mouthful of Tempranillo, a couple of splashes would “re-visit” my fucking face, it was like pulling teeth just to get the woman who was interviewing me to engage in conversation.  And maybe that was her tactic, her way of interviewing potential tasting room attendants, but it was just really awkward, and she held me hostage for a fucking hour and a half! The wines were decent, but I hadn’t planned on being held captive, to keep guests in her tasting room entertained while she would clutch at my sleeve at every opportunity and not let me go, after our interview was over and I tried to make my polite escape several times, and I just wanted to go home, now more than ever, to write a thank you note to the ladies I had interviewed with the day before, who were bad ass, awesome, and super easy to talk with, on a level beyond the superficial interview level, but on a level that seemed real and comfortable. 

I walked out of that interview feeling defeated and even somewhat used and molested.  I couldn’t wait to get back home, into the safety and warmth of my bedroom, with my dog on my lap, and more than ever, write that thank-you note to the ladies I not only appreciated, but also already somewhat adored for just being real, and awesome, and appreciative of who I am as a person.  But I did not need to go any further than checking my email to love those ladies, my current bosses, any more than I already did, because the job was mine, and I felt like I could exhale for the first time in forever, and not just exhale, but fucking scream at the top of my lungs how fucking grateful I was to have a job, working for awesome people, for a company who makes awesome wines, who accepts me for who I am, and where I walk into every day not asking what the company can do for me, but what I can do for them, so as to stay, promote, appreciate, and love the company more than I already do.  I want to grow with this company, and I want this company to succeed.  They have given me a chance, hiring me despite my somewhat controversial appearance and personality, and I am so appreciative that I want to do everything I possibly can to help this company to succeed.  I even finally broke down and got an instagram, so I can post work pictures and help promote the tasting room.  I’m still just getting the hang of it, but it’s fun enough. 

 

The cool thing about companies who give a shit about you, is that they are comprised of people who give a shit about you.  When people give a shit about you, you feel it, just the same as you feel it when people don’t give a shit about you.  It feels good to work for a company that you know cares about you as a person.  The communication is positive, constant, and reassuring, just the way it is in personal relationships you have with the people you choose to include in your life or exclude from you life.  Work has and always will be my Achilles heel, but I have another, and that is personal relationships, both intimate and friendly.  Having someone shady in my life rubs me the wrong way, whether it be business or personal, and shady people are most definitely my second Achilles heel.  We do have two heels, after all… 

This is a difficult subject for me to grasp, let alone write about.  For me, business is business, and work is work.  No one should ever fuck with someone’s work, someone’s livelihood, someone’s reason to wake up in the morning.  More often than not, my reason to wake up in the morning is my work, but I am human, after all, and sometimes my heart, my soul, my reason for waking up in the morning and hopefully not getting out of bed with incapacitating anxiety stems from personal relationships that have nothing to do with work.  Sometimes I am cognizant of my second, lesser prominent and lesser-recognized Achilles heel.  Sometimes my weaknesses stem from something other than work.  Sometimes my weaknesses, my anxiety, my reason for feeling alien, subhuman, and awkward, have to do with, gasp!, my personal relationships outside of work.  Feelings and emotions I wish I did not have or did not feel, but, nonetheless, I do feel, all too clearly. 

As much as I wish I could just run from private, personal relationships, the older I get, I do not find myself getting wiser at all, or any more capable of simply running away.  In fact, I think I was destined to always be somewhat naïve and gullible, because despite how cynical I may come across, I really do just want to believe the things that people say.  I want to believe in the goodness of people.  I am notorious for giving people more chances than they deserve, and I usually end up getting burned somehow, threatened, stalked, hurt or abused, and that is what I deserve, I suppose, for being so quick to forgive.  But the thing is, I want to believe that there does exist a rare breed of human that actually means what they say and does what they say they will.  I want to believe that my level of sincerity, although at times quite crass, harsh, and politically incorrect, is taken at face value and returned at face value, because although I can say some pretty harsh things at times, and I do indeed, to some extent, lack a verbal filter, when I open my mouth and speak to someone, I speak the truth, and I don’t see anything wrong with hoping that the same level of respect can be afforded to me, no matter how brutal. 

Does it hurt to speak such harsh truths sometimes?  Absofuckinglutely!  But is it sometimes better to rip the truth off like a band-aid so it can just be out there and the healing can begin?  Of course.  Do I sometimes come across as a sad, ridiculous, idiot, asshole, offensive motherfucking cunt when I say the things that most people would not like to hear, but I think they need to hear anyway?  Um… Yeah!  Like, a lot more often than you might think.  Do I feel like a dick sometimes?  Yes.  Sometimes no, but mostly yes.  But I think some things, some times, simply need to be said, and if no one else has the balls to say it, well then I will.  For fuck sake, someone’s got to! 

At the same time, sometimes when we speak the truth, we put ourselves in an incredibly vulnerable place.  Sometimes when we open ourselves up and are honest with other people, we run the risk of being humiliated, taken advantage of, being made fun of, taken for granted, mocked, mistreated, and abused.  For a really long time I refused to open up, to be entirely honest with people, and to set myself up for humiliation and disappointment, because I had too much pride.  Now that I’m a little bit older, I’ve learned to put my ego aside, and just say what I am feeling, because no matter how disastrous the outcome, I would rather say what I am feeling and receive a definitive answer, no matter how hurtful, than to spend the rest of my life kicking myself for not having had the courage to just say what I wanted to say.  At least that way, at the end of the day, I can know that I did all that I could do to make my feelings heard, and even if the outcome was not exactly what I had wished for, I wouldn’t loose any sleep wondering what might have happened, had I just had the strength to put my ego on the shelf and say what I needed to say, what was burning in my heart.  When we are completely, brutally, and sometimes sheepishly honest, we may not always get the answer we want, but it’s better than lying in bed all night, tossing and turning, asking ourselves “what if”?

What if I said what I wanted to say?  What if I had confessed my love?  What if I told my co-worker to fuck off?  What if I told my boss about my epic idea?  You get the picture… 

As per my last post, any follower of this blog will know that the Rapist and I had been communicating via email, and that though I had missed him, the list of things I didn’t miss about him far outweighed the things I did, so I stopped responding to his emails.  He stayed away for a little while, but then he contacted me again.  He sounded sad and distraught, and so against my better judgment, I began responding. 

He said things that lead me to believe that maybe he had changed.  He said things that made me feel sorry for him and the way I had ended things, and my heart-strings were touched, and then pulled ever so delicately back, only to be released again, to spring forward and reverberate, and I started to wonder “what if?”… 

Two little words that echoed and hummed in my head as the strings never ceased their constant vibrating and humming.  

He said all sorts of things.  My cutting him off had left him “traumatized”, that he had started smoking because of the anxiety I had caused him, that he was wrong, deserved what he had got, missed me, missed the funny things I would say, the “sarcastic look” I would sometimes get on my face, etc, ad nauseam.  He said that he had a lot that he wanted to say to me, that he didn’t want to play games, so once I felt that maybe he truly was sorry for the way he had treated me, my heart began to soften, like the inside of a delicious burrata cheese, and began to seep, and then ooze.  I told him that I still had feelings for him, and once I did, he clammed up, only to write me a few pinner lines, once or twice a week, to still keep me interested, or, in my opinion, on the back burner, just in case.  A sort of what if of his own, I imagine, but an insincere one… 

I only have myself to blame.  I knew better than to continue corresponding with him.  I knew I had made the right decision in July to cut him off, and I should never have apologized for cutting him out of my life the way I did in the first place, but that is the person that I am.  I also knew that I was right in my own way, for apologizing for ending things the way I did, but only because it was something I felt guilty about, and in a way, I suppose, wanted to absolve myself of.  Though I knew contacting him and telling him I was sorry was a mistake, it was a risk I was willing to take, because I wanted to do what I thought was right, no matter how emotionally daunting and reckless.  When he started crying wolf that he felt remorse, that he was wrong, that he had been traumatized, I allowed his sheepish words disguised in wolf’s clothing to effect me, when I should not have.  All of this went down right before the Exhibitionist was about to visit from the bay area, a visit I had been greatly anticipating, but I was stuck in the thick fog of emotional roulette with the Rapist when the Exhibitionist arrived in town and I couldn’t see a foot in front of me, and so, just like so many other times, my window of opportunity for meeting up with someone compatible with me closed, my desire to put the final nail in the Rapist’s coffin fled, and I blew the Exhibitionist off, yet again. 

The Exhibitionist came into town and then left, and we did not see each other, as we had so eagerly planned to do.  All of this seemed incredibly stupid to me at the time, but now, in retrospect, it no longer does.  It goes back to what I mentioned earlier.  Sometimes, some things just need to be said, and at least once the truth becomes known, you can’t feel bad about it, or at the very least, you can’t regret that you were true to yourself, and honest with others, no matter what the outcome. 

I was honest with the Rapist, and he shut down and stopped communicating.  I’m glad that he did.  He and I are not on the same page.  I can understand that, I can respect it, and as always, I won’t hate on him for it.  I don’t rely on other people for my own happiness anyway.  I make my own happiness, and happiness is a choice, and it is a choice that I have consciously decided to make, and it is easier than I thought it would be to get back to the person I was two years ago, and certainly work is a huge contributing factor, but it’s mostly just myself, and the way I have decided to start viewing the things in my life.  I have chosen to look at the positives and either fix or ignore the negatives.  It’s quite liberating, and not only do I feel different, everything looks different to me as well.  It’s like I had been wearing sunglasses for the past two years, but I stopped and decided to take them off, and now suddenly I can see, and everything looks different, and brighter, and more beautiful, but I digress…     

  On another note, I was also honest with the Exhibitionist, as I always have been, and he was not rude, cruel, or hurtful in any way, when I told him, just as I had every other time, why I had shut down and refused to see him.  He was kind.  He listened.  He did not make me feel bad or stupid, and said that he understood completely, which only made my heart bleed even more, because I had blown him off for someone completely unworthy of my time, emotions, and love.

True, when the Exhibitionist and I would text and email before, when I was not feeling bad, had long left the Rapist, and was eagerly looking forward to the Exhibitionist’s visit, he and I would talk about how things might go once we saw each other again, in the flesh, after close to ten years (please review previous posts, if unfamiliar with my relationship with the Exhibitionist).  But our “relationship” and communication was not purely sexual in exchange or tone.  We have known each other for over a decade, under odd and somewhat complicated circumstances, so at any given time we have been known to discuss any number of subjects.  He has always just been a very kind, patient, understanding, and also conveniently gorgeous man, who has never once been rude or cruel to me ever since we started communicating again, a little over a year ago, since he learned of my divorce with my ex-husband.  He respected me when I asked him to leave me alone when the Rapist and I were still together, and he has respected me having had some setbacks and emotional obstacles to overcome since the Rapist and I have split, and I did not feel capable of seeing him on account of my feelings still being deeply invested in the Rapist, no matter how much I wished otherwise, and was ashamed for still having such strong emotions for someone who really did not deserve my affections. 

The Exhibitionist may not have understood it (or maybe he did), but he respected it, and to me, that made him a prince in my eyes, while I was still obsessing over a selfish, conceited, old toad. 

So, for all those cynics out there, you may think that the Exhibitionist was just being kind to me so he could get into my pants, right?  I won’t deny that a part of me was thinking the same thing, and who could blame him, right?  Especially after all the ups and downs I have put him through.  But wait to make your judgment until the end of this post.  You might be just as surprised as I was…

I knew that he was coming to town for his birthday, and though I did not know what day his actual birthday was on, once the middle of December came around, I started thinking about him again, wondering if he was in town, wondering if I would hear from him.  I thought about texting him, but thought maybe he would not like to hear from me, because I do tend to be quite callous, snarky, and vicious, when I feel simultaneously like my head is in a noose and my heart is awaiting the fall and fatal slice of the guillotine (that is what being in love with the Rapist feels like).  But he has never been deterred by my pompous nature, and I think he is actually better than most at seeing past my smoke and mirrors, and seeing me for who I actually am.  On December 14^th, I received a text from him, as I was walking my dog.  All it said was “Man, SLO is cold”

As soon as I saw his text, I smiled.  It wasn’t sexual, it wasn’t forceful, it didn’t really mean anything other than what it said, and that he was letting me know he was in town.  He knew that I have had a couple of rough years, in addition to a few emotionally fucked, draining, and confusing months.  His initial texts are always very friendly, soft, and inviting.  Sort of “take it or leave it, but this is where I’m at”.  I texted him back “happy birthday”, he texted back that it wasn’t his birthday until the next day.  I texted back that I would then text him the same thing, the next day.  Our casual banter ended up with us deciding to meet for lunch the next day, in SLO, at a new restaurant, and a sister company to the company I am currently working for.  Our “date” was set up for noon the following day.  It wasn’t exactly a “date”, but my stomach was not at peace with the idea.  No matter how casual it was supposed to be, it still didn’t change the fact that I was going to have lunch with someone who I had been attracted to for over a decade, someone who was intelligent, ambitious, interesting, tatted, quick-witted, gorgeous, and who now knew food better than I did.  A worthy adversary, to say the least!     

Before our lunch, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I had given myself permission to sleep with him, but I wasn’t going to deny myself the act either, depending on how lunch went, and how I felt at the time.  I wasn’t apposed to the idea, but I wasn’t going to do it just because I could, either!  I am an incredibly passionate person, and if for some reason the stars lined up and everything clicked, of course I would have slept with him.  By that same rationale, I wasn’t going to force something that wasn’t there just because it was in front of me and up for grabs.  My brain no longer functions in that fashion.  Maybe it will again some day and maybe it won’t, but for now, I need to be moved to passion in order to participate in the act.  In that sense I suppose I can be likened to my 12 gauge.  I’m always loaded, but if the safety is on I will not engage.   

I don’t care if anyone chooses to judge me on that decision.  He is a man I have known for over a decade.  He is a man I have desired and wanted to sleep with for over a decade, but for whatever reason, due to many circumstances over the years, it just didn’t work out.  (again, if anyone wants to judge, or at the very least, make an informed opinion, I urge you to read previous posts, especially pertaining to my relationship with the Exhibitionist)

I suppose I felt no shame for my decision because he wasn’t just some random, one night stand I would be bringing home from a bar, not that I think there is any shame in that either.  To each their own, and we have all been there.  I gave myself the possibility of permission because I felt like it was natural, it was many years in the making of expectation, and I guess I also felt like we owed it to ourselves, and that it would be amazing.  I guess in the end, I wouldn’t really feel like I would need to justify it in any way.  Besides the fact that it would be no one else’s business, it was something I felt that I might or might not want, but not for perverse reasons, or for revenge, but because it was something that I thought would be amazing, and spectacular, and perhaps after so many years, too many years coming, too many years in the making, too many years of unsatisfied anticipation, it would just be great for what it was: much anticipated, unbridled passion.  Dirty, sweaty, kinky sex.  Uninhibited release, etc, etc…

But what I thought it might turn into did not happen at all, and I am not sorry or remorseful about the way I feel about that either.  I met up with him right before we went to lunch, and it was clear that we were both happy to see each other, but also both slightly nervous.  We went for a nice, leisurely lunch, stayed for about an hour and a half, went back to the place where he was house sitting, and continued to leisurely converse, and that was all we did.  We spent four and a half hours together, laying on each other on the couch, talking about nothing all that serious but nothing all that trivial either, and we didn’t so much as kiss. 

We have tentative plans to meet up again for lunch or dinner when he is back in town in January.  Maybe in January things will go differently, and maybe they will go the same.  Either way, it will be nice to see him again, converse, eat and drink well, and see if we are feeling more relaxed and comfortable with each other…

I spoke before about Achilles heels.  Perhaps the reason I am content to not have an emotional or physical relationship with someone right now is because my Achilles heel has been mended.  At least, my predominant one.  As for my second, I will always have my friends (who are fucking amazing, selfless, warriors.  My friends are the most incredible people in the world, without a doubt.  My friends are the family I have had the luck of meeting, and the honor of welcoming into my life as they have welcomed me.)  The family you are born with will always be your kin, and they will always hold a very special and dear place in your heart, but the family you are lucky enough to choose, these people are your TRIBE.  These people speak the same language, and there are times when you do not even need to speak, because nothing more can be necessary than a glance, a nod, a glimmer in the eye, and they understand everything you are thinking and feeling without you even having to say a word.  You tribe is your adopted family, the people you are fortunate enough to make the fatal choice or whether or not you want this person to have a significant effect on the path you take in life.  In many ways, your tribe is more meaningful than your family, because with actual family, you have no choice.  You are dealt a hand and you can take or leave it, but a tribe is the hand you consciously choose, for better or for worse.  Without my tribe, I don’t know where I would be now, but because of my tribe, I can thankfully say that I am in a good place, and we all continue to support each other in unique ways until we are all standing on our own two feet again, and will look back on our moments of tribulation with a smile on our lips, a laugh in our breaths, and with a little luck, a glass of champagne in our hands. 

So as for my predominant Achilles heel, I would have to say, so far so good.  I think I’m in love.  It’s the best of both worlds, which is so ironically fitting for me.  I mean, why choose between box seats at the opera or smack in the middle of the moshpit at a Social Distortion concert?  Why should anyone ever have to choose between the two if they don’t want to?  Why must it always be one or the other, and never both?  If living life to its fullest to me means being able to equally enjoy both scenarios, then why should I only get one option or the other?  Why let society choose when I can choose for myself?  As far as work is concerned, I get the best of both worlds, and I could not be happier.  One day I’m in the cellar, rockin’ the army pants, faux hawk, no makeup, combat boots, climbing barrels, and the next day I’m dressed to the nines, full makeup, hair done, lipstick on, pouring wine, sipping wine, and talking about wine, or else anything in the entire fucking world from TED talks, to news, to movies, novels, politics, guns, food, languages, travel, hazardous waste, random facts, and any other possible subject anyone can come up with to discuss in the tasting room. 

It’s funny the way life works out sometimes.  Two years ago, I was the lowest I have ever been, because of work.  But the way I see things now, I’m the highest I have ever been, also because of work, but I never would have gotten to where I am now, had I not ever been where I was back then.

As far as what transpired between the Rapist and I, it brings a tear to my eye, but not a sad one.  It’s just a shame really.  I had so much love to give him.  But I will spend my energy bettering myself until I find another who is worthy of all I have to offer. In a way, it, along with several aspects of what has transpired in my life over the past two years, reminds me of how I felt and what I wanted for myself when I returned from studying in Spain, and what I learned from my relationship with the Rapist is that I would rather like to live my life along those lines again, when I returned to the States and decided that I wanted something different for myself and not live my life in some sort of planned out, specific way, the way society says we are supposed to live.  Back then, I truly thought that I no longer believed in love, and wanted to live a life pursuing passion, and passion alone.  I believed then that I would live my life from there on out writing, filling my days with literature, great food, delicious wine, amazing friends, epic conversation, striving to learn and master several more languages, shun actual, committed relationships, and only take lovers from time to time, to satiate my fickle heart and tempestuous moods, and to tickle my clit, of course!  I feel a change in me.  It began about a week ago, and it is exciting, and inspiring, and I feel my life taking a turn for the positive.  It’s about time!  And so the sometimes bitter tear that forms in the corner of my eye, yet never builds enough liquid to actually fall is my determination.  Could I have ever loved him enough to abandon my dreams?  Was I a fool to have believed in love at all?  Perhaps.  But it’s a pain that provokes inspiration, and a new wicked determination.  So now, with narrowed eyes and a crooked grin upon my lips, my convictions have been renewed, and, more than ever before, do I want to voraciously pursue my dreams.  I’ve even added a couple new ones to the list… 

 

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYSVMgRr6pw

 

 

Cole (10/26/14):

Hola a todos! 

I know it’s been a while, and I apologize.  Work was crazy busy, with tons upon tons of fruit coming in, twelve to fourteen hour shifts, and only one day off a week which I usually made plans for (only to later regret it when the time arrived, because all I ever really wanted to do on my day off was relax), and although I always had a blast when I went out, didn’t ever regret the concerts I went to, the rounds I fired, or the plans I made once I carried them out, I was really never getting any more than five to five and a half hours of sleep per night, and, well, I just didn’t really have a whole lot of time to write.  There were several times when I wanted to, but those nights I would look at the clock, calculate how many hours of sleep I would lose, and force myself to try to get to sleep, because though I can function pretty well off of six or seven hours of sleep, I found that only five hours was really pushing it for me, and anything less than that probably would have been emotional suicide, or would have at least severely tested my level of sanity. 

Aside from the lack of sleep aspect contributing to my lack of posts throughout harvest, there was one other thing that I was chary to write about while I was still employed at the winery.  I decided to wait until harvest was over and we were all laid off to bring up something that began to bother me toward the middle of September and became increasingly worse as the weeks went by.

There was a woman I was working with there that became totally insufferable to work with.  She started off great.  Fake, obviously forced smiles and insincere compliments, etc, but a lot of chicks are fake, so I didn’t really think much of it, I just knew that I didn’t want her to get too close to me, and I didn’t want her to know anything personal about me.  Once people know your weaknesses they tend to use them against you, should (more appropriately when) they decide to turn on you.  I have learned this valuable lesson the hard way, and it is one I will never forget. 

In any case, I did not mind working with this woman in the beginning.  She was certainly knowledgeable, as she had worked some 14 harvests previously, but I could just tell she had an agenda, and I didn’t trust her.  She had mentioned something to me about how badly she wanted to stay after harvest was over, which I understood, as did I also want to stay on after harvest, but something about her had red flags going off in my head.  If this was her 14^th or so harvest, in the US alone, and she was still unable to land a permanent job, what did that say about her personality, her work ethic?  Why was she working at a new winery each harvest, and not going back to try again to show her face and be remembered as something special, or as a crucial member of the team? 

I guess the thing about her was that, when everyone else was around, she went out of her way to be jovial, and laugh, and come across as a really happy, upbeat, genuinely nice person, to get people to love her, but when other people were not around, and it was just her and I, she became increasingly condescending and even downright rude and irrationally irate and angry over things I could not wrap my head around.  Examples of her behavior are difficult to provide, it was sort of just something you had to see to believe and understand the underlying hostility, but she most certainly did some weird and shady shit.  One day I was asked by one of the bosses to grab a pump that had just been freed up, after pressing off some red wine from skins and into a tank, and I went and was unhooking the pump and getting ready to move it and all of the sudden she yelled at me “I was just trying to help you!” and she made this gruesomely unattractive face and shrugged her shoulders and shook her head at me.  I sort of just looked right back at her, then around at my surroundings, blinked my eyes and thought, “what in the fuck are you even talking about?”  To this day I have no idea what she was trying to help me with, if anything, but she certainly had her panties in a wad that day over something. 

She always wanted to be some sort of authority over someone else, and toward the end she even started trying to boss around the full time employees.  She clearly had a very high opinion of herself.  It was so high, I would even sometimes hear here being slightly rude to the cellar master, or the wine maker, saying their methods were strange or inferior, or suggesting that they do things her way instead because her way was better.  One day I overheard her telling the cellar master that once more fruit started coming in we would all need to work independently.  I remember thinking she was right, and that I should step up my game and master more jobs so I could do them confidently on my own, yet when the fruit starting pouring in, I was always by myself, doing sometimes several different tasks at once, and sometimes tasks that would ordinarily require two people, and she always had a little sidekick she could boss around, though she was clearly more experienced and less likely to need help, whereas I was so green, yet so willing to please that I would never complain or ask for help.  Instead, I felt proud of myself for being able to accomplish things that someone else as fresh and new as I was would probably not be able to do on their own.  She liked bossing people around.  I understood that about her very quickly, and tried to distance myself, because I didn’t want to spend the entire harvest being her bitch that she would talk down to, and then being left to clean up her mess while she ran off and did some other, more glamorous job.  I didn’t mind cleaning.  I cleaned all the time, but primarily I wanted to learn.  I wanted to experience every aspect of harvest, not just the menial shit, and not just the glamorous shit.  I wanted to do everything, to better prepare myself for potential future employment.  Anyway, she was pretty easy to read, and once I started distancing myself from her, once I was able to work alone and do the work I was doing alone well, she started to sour on me, and her hostility toward me began to build. 

The reason I decided not to write about it until harvest was over was twofold.  One of my co-workers pretty much blatantly told me that my facebook profile was unblocked, meaning anyone could look at it and see basically everything I had on my page.  So after mocking him for facebook “stalking” me, I thought that maybe I should be more careful about what I write about, so that I didn’t say anything that might potentially offend a current employer.  The second reason was that I was starting to think this chick had some sort of morbid obsession with me or personal vendetta against me, as she was becoming increasingly more hostile and uncomfortable to work with, and I didn’t want her reading anything I wrote about her and going to a boss personally and getting my ass fired for calling her out for what she was: a completely ridiculous, hostile, bitter, cunt.  She was only happy when she was bossing someone around or else alienating someone.  Talking shit on people behind their backs seemed to make her the happiest, and she loooooooved to gossip!  I was dumbfounded, watching her try and tell the winemaker the “right” way to make his own fucking wine.  I’m surprised he didn’t sock her in the face.  I would have, which leads to another ridiculous portion of this convoluted story…

Once it had become glaringly obvious, not just to me, but even to some of my co-workers, that this woman had some sort of vendetta against me, one of my homies got out of one of his homies what her beef was with me.  The answer he received had us both in stitches, because it was just so ridiculous!  She had told one of the full time employees that she just straight up didn’t like me (far out.  And the reason???) and she even said that I cussed her out and had threatened to kick her ass!  I found that hilarious on a few levels, but only because it was just so untrue and tragically ridiculous. 

Primarily, the beast had a solid fifty pounds on me, I mean, my co-worker and I didn’t nickname her Shrek for no reason.  She could have passed for him any day, aside from the lack of green tint to her face and her ears looked different.  Not that I don’t think I could take her, I’m just saying, why in the hell would I say that to someone and not just do it?  I don’t threaten.  That is not the way I roll.  I am not bark and no bite.  I am bite and no bark.  I don’t advertise my strategy.  What would be the point in that? 

 

Aside from the fact that I would never, ever threaten someone at work, because work is my sanity and my lifeline, and I think getting fired for something so reckless and unprofessional would be terrible, I would never threaten to kick someone’s ass anyway.  What I would do, if I ever really felt that much anger and hostility toward someone, would be to meet them somewhere outside of work, and verbally provoke them to the point where they would take the first swing, and then I would be down to scrap!  Shit, I would even let them make contact, just to feel the pain and get all worked up, let the adrenaline consume me, lay on the ground for a bit, laughing my ass off like a mad person, and then, and only then, get up and release any and all anger and emotional tumult that has been building up pressure inside of me for however many years.  Then it would be self defense, and I couldn’t legally be held responsible, and I would unleash every last bit of anger and frustration I had inside of me, some of it I probably wouldn’t even know I had.  That is the way I would like to think it would go down, anyway, but how could I know until it actually happened and I was given the opportunity to see what I was really made of? 

The thing that was driving me crazy, and that I couldn’t believe, was that I was beginning to think that I actually hated the woman, which blew my fucking mind, because I could not wrap my head around the fact that I could care enough about someone so tragic and insignificant for me to hate.  It disturbed me so much, that I could feel anything more than indifference for this miserable, insufferable person, that I confided in my roommate how much it upset my psyche that I might actually care, and, to my horror, hate someone who, in reality, should not factor into my life whatsoever.  It just seemed insane to me.  I mean, I have never in my life hated someone that I can really recall.  Shit, I don’t even hate the jackass who got my access pulled from the nuke plant.  Hate simply takes to much effort and emotion.  But at the same time, I have never had to work with such a manipulative, conniving, backstabbing, shady, sneaky, backhanded, undermining cunt either.  So perhaps some level of hatred was justified?  I don’t know.  Foreign sensation.  I’m glad it’s behind me.

Marge quickly cleared things up for me, and assisted me in seeing things more clearly.  It wasn’t the woman I hated, it was what she represented.  The woman was ugliness personified.  She was just sort of a sad shell of a woman, who went from harvest to harvest, never landing a job, always trying her best but in such a hostile manner that no winery ever took to her.  Add to that the fact that she had been with the same man for seven or so years and he hadn’t proposed, though she was hopeful, only reiterated to me that he probably wasn’t content enough with her to propose, but was just comfortable enough to not break up with her either.  I mean, honestly, if I were in her shoes, wouldn’t I be just as miserable? 

I tried to feel sorry for her.  I tried to put myself in her shoes, and imagine how much self-pity I would feel for myself if I were her, but I just couldn’t, because somehow I knew, in the marrow of my bones, that this woman was just inherently evil.  There was, in my mind, no excuse to blatantly treat a coworker so ridiculously unjustly for absolutely no reason at all aside from the fact that on some sad sort of level, she hated herself, and was unleashing her own self-loathing upon me. 

But enough about work!  I have vented and I feel exponentially better!  And after all, that is mostly what this blog is all about.  Venting, assisting, growing, learning, educating, ourselves and others, and moving forward gracefully.  My harvest stint is over, and though I do feel I made the right friends and the right “enemies” where I was employed, at the end of the day I decided that was not the right winery for me, anyway.  I would like to stay in the industry, to be sure, because though I did hate some of the loathsome people I had to deal with, the work itself was incredible, and I fucking loved it!  Now I want to find a winery that is more loved and respected in the industry, and more importantly, I would like to work with a “mad” group of avant-gard, freak flag waving individuals who will respect my own madness, my individuality, and what I have to offer as the person I am.  I don’t want to work somewhere I have to kiss assholes’ assholes.  I want to work somewhere where I am free to be me without fear of being undermined, alienated, or backhanded when no one else is looking.  I want to work somewhere that character is appreciated more than brown nosing and ass licking, and most importantly, I want to work somewhere that back stabbing cunts are kicked to the curb, with or without a chair smashed across their face beforehand. Is that too much to ask?  Probably.  But I am going to look for it anyway!

On another note, seeing as how this blog is about relationshis, failing, functioning, past, present, and future, I would like to touch on another situation that has somewhat consumed me over the past week or so.  It’s a bit complicated, but shit, these days I’m beginning to think that nothing with me can ever be simple and straightforward anymore.  The older I get I think the more convoluted and tumultuous my relationships become.  Is that a sign of becoming an adult, or a sign of emotional deterioration and elderly disgruntlement, irritability, and dissatisfaction? 

 

So the other day I was hanging out with the Tempest.  The Tempest still lives with Mother Hen, but as of that night, it’s all about to change, as she kicked him out.  The hostility between these two very dear friends of mine has been brewing for quite some time, but I wasn’t privy to it, as I had been too busy working to keep in touch with both of them on more than the most basic level.  I knew that they both had their own issues independently, but I did not know that they had been at each others’ throats for so long.  I basically saw the entirety of eight years of friendship crumble before my eyes.  I had one of two choices: Stay and have to pick a side, or go home, and mourn the loss of a mutual friendship between the three of us that would probably never again be the same. 

I went home, but for the rest of the evening I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to cause such anger, hatred, and tumult in a relationship that, two years ago, could not have been stronger.  The three of us have had our ups and downs over the eight or so years we have known each other, but nothing, until that point, had ever really broken a single one of us to make us permanently sour over the other, or cause our friendship to become irretrievably lost. 

I was not myself for the rest of the evening.  I sat in my room alone, and I was sad.  I was sad for things I could not grasp, and I was sad for things I could, but mostly I was sad for the fact that relationships sometimes have to end so terribly, especially when there was still obviously so much love and emotions, and perhaps the love and emotions were the root and stem of the necessity to end things.  I wasn’t drunk, but I was feeling a bit vulnerable, a bit nostalgic for good times gone sour and curdled, and for love that perhaps was not stale, but was no longer essential or vital anymore either.  I started thinking about the Rapist, and the way I ended things with him, and whether or not, to him, it was an ugly way to end things.  I started to feel like an asshole, started to wonder if he was even capable of emotions, or of being hurt or sad at the way I decided to cease our relationship, or whatever one would call it.

I hadn’t thought too much about the Rapist since I had ended things.  Of course, the first month was pretty rough on me.  But once I started working so much, and had other things on my mind and bills to take care of and a financial hole to pull myself out of, he slowly slipped out of my mind and I rarely thought about him at all.  I really don’t recall.  But a couple of nights before I went over to see the Tempest at Mother Hen’s, I had a dream about the Rapist.  I do not know what provoked this dream, as to my recollection, I had not been thinking about him.  In the dream, I was back working at the nuke plant, and I wanted him back, but every time I saw him, he did not see me.  I do not recall anything else about the dream. 

I awoke somewhat disturbed.  The dream bothered me.  Why would I dream about him if I hadn’t been thinking about him?  What might have provoked this dream?  Why did I dream that I wanted him back when in reality, that could not have been further from the truth?  I was content with my decision to cut ties.  I knew it was the right decision for me.  Totally weirded out, I texted Marge.  She did not respond to my text, nor did she later discuss the issue with me, but she and I were on totally separate schedules, both working similar hours, and we really never had time to catch up on anything, let alone something so trivial.  After that morning I let it go and did not think of him again until the night I returned from Mother Hen’s, after witnessing probably one of the saddest and ugliest falling outs I had ever seen. 

So I was sitting on my bed, sort of just staring into my closet, but really at nothing, and I started to think about the ugliness in the world, the ugliness I felt at work, and how I somewhat understood it but that didn’t mean I liked it.  Then I started to think about some of the ugliness in my life that I could control, and I made a decision.  I would email the Rapist and apologize for the way I handled our break up.  I did sort of feel bad for the way things went down, even though I knew it was the only way I would ever be able to leave him, but that didn’t mean that I was proud of the way I handled things.  I just didn’t know what else to do.  So I sat down behind my computer, and I wrote. 

This was not the typical novel of an email that I am known for.  It was nothing more than three or four lines, just to get the point across.  I didn’t want him to think that I was fishing for round whatever in the fuck it would have made between us, and I didn’t really want to chat, catch up, or shoot the shit.  I really was not that over it, to have to hear intimate details about how great his life was going without me in it.  I hoped that it was, but I didn’t need details.  The wound was still not entirely healed.  The slightest bit of salt would have provoked a negative reaction.  I just wanted him to know that I was genuinely sorry for the way I had handled things.  I don’t even remember what I wrote, since I have since deleted our short correspondence, but it was something along the lines of:  “I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry about the way things went down.  Despite everything, I don’t think that you are a bad person.  I hope you’re doing well”. 

It was short, it was to the point, and most importantly, it made one less thing I would have to feel guilty about in my life.  I said what needed to be said, and that was that. 

Over the next few days, or about a week, he and I emailed pretty impersonal “pleasantries” to each other.  Really nothing more than a few sentences, at the most a paragraph, about pretty mundane shit, and I realized that I missed emailing him, texting him, talking to him on the phone, telling him about my day, etc.  It was a somewhat rude awakening!  After all I had gained!  After how well I was doing!  How could I allow myself to fall into this little game of emailing back and forth, no matter how seemingly innocent?  Doesn’t matter.  The sad reality was that I did miss him.  But then I started thinking about the things I didn’t miss, and ultimately, the things I didn’t miss outweighed the things I did…

I didn’t miss waking up at his house with incapacitating anxiety, when he would leave early for work, and I felt like a tatted up little punk rock intruder in his perfect sanctuary of a home where nothing was ever out of place.  I didn’t miss the fact that I never again felt truly loved by him after our brief separation in April.  I didn’t miss being forced to wait on his back patio, despite the fact that he knew damn well what time I said I would be over.  I didn’t miss being disrespected, deceived, or being treated like some trivial, superfluous aspect of his life.  I didn’t miss feeling like he was embarrassed to be with me when it suited him, and feeling like he was proud to be with me when it suited him.  I didn’t like the fact that he would ask me to hide my car in his garage when his carpoolers would come to get him.  I didn’t miss the fact that he would make promises he wouldn’t keep.  I didn’t miss knowing that he would never truly welcome me into his life or introduce me to his friends.  I didn’t miss the fact that he never cared about my feelings, only his own.  I didn’t miss the way he made me feel about myself.  I didn’t miss his selfishness.  I didn’t miss the fact that he never trusted me.  I didn’t miss the way he tried to make me feel guilty for a past that had nothing to do with him.  I didn’t miss that I was the only one making sacrifices he never seemed to notice or appreciate.  I didn’t miss the fact that he demanded the world of me, yet in return I did not receive continents, states, towns, villages, or even a stinky little bodega in South America. 

There may have been things I missed, but the list of things I did not miss far outweighed the things I did, and no amount of morning sex and coffee and The New York Times in bed could make me miss him more than the things I did not miss…

Have a great fucking week, everyone, and kick some ass!                

Cole, 9/14/14:

Hola a todos! 

I hope that everyone is doing well. 

For me, life just keeps getting better and better.  I have work to thank for that, on top of stellar, amazing, bad ass friends, but work is tantamount for me, and I continue to grow, learn, and thrive at the winery I am working at for harvest, and know that that is a huge part of why I no longer wake up with anxiety, why my appetite is back, why I wake up with a smile on my face, no matter how sad I may be to leave my puppy behind for ten, twelve, and lately even fourteen hours a day, six days a week. 

I no longer go to work with “nervous excitement”, just excitement, because everything I may have been timid about before I have excelled at, if not mastered.  Every day, every week, I am granted more and more liberty, responsibilities, and the kind of trust that is given only once a person has proven that they are competent enough to handle some situations on their own, without supervision.  Inoculations, chemical additions, drain and returns, pump overs, racking, barreling down, etc.  Some of these things I am now trusted to do alone, and at the end of the work day, I am so happy I almost don’t even want to go home.  I want to pinch myself!  It’s almost like I can’t believe anyone would give me the authority, would cut the leash and just set me free and trust that I wouldn’t fuck shit up royally, but then again, they did it at a nuke plant, so why not a winery?  So far, so good!  SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fucking good!  

 

Work has become something like a blood transfusion to an ailing body that was about to collapse, something that I SO desperately needed, but before I continue on about work, there is a little something I would like to get off my chest…

There’s a lot of anger and hatred going around, that I simply cannot grasp.  I understand being angry, and getting mad and yelling.  I get that.  I yell at the idiot on the freeway in front of me going 63 in the passing lane.  I give a silent ‘fuck you’ to the asshole who doesn’t know how to park.  I may yell and let off some steam, silently or aloud, to myself, in my car, listening to metal, but this is a different thing.  I have never, in my life, gone out of my way to cut someone to the flesh with acrid, straight razor acuteness and precision.  I have wanted to break a chair over someone’s face before, and I’ve wanted to blurt out some incredibly hurtful and horrible words to someone that I know would have provoked a waterfall of harsh and bitter tears, but I never did it.  I left the chair where it was and I bit my spiteful tongue, because no matter how pissed off I was, I knew that I didn’t want to make the person I was hating on feel bad.  I know what it feels like to feel bad, and it fucking sucks! 

 

I am by no means a saint in any sense or interpretation of the word.  I know I have hurt people, and hurt people rough, but I have never in my life gone out of my way to intentionally hurt someone, either in general, for my own gratification, or to humiliate someone.  That sort of shit is just fucked up, rude, and beyond reproach.  You don’t get to hurt people just because shit in your life isn’t going as planned.  You don’t get to hurt people just because you’re in a bad mood, or because you want to put someone else down to feel better about yourself.  That shit is just fucked up, silly, and positively lacking in self respect.  I’ve hurt people, to be sure, and I am not proud of it, and never intentionally.  People who go out of their way to intentionally hurt other people, and are proud of it at the end of the day, well, those people are just straight fucked up, and should take some serious time to reflect about what makes them so unhappy they feel the need to intentionally hurt other people to feel better about themselves or for whatever other fucked up reason they choose to do it. 

This random, twisted concept of hatred and retaliation came to me as I was driving to work the other morning.  I was happy and excited to be going to a job that I loved, music was pumping, I had a full cup of coffee in my hand, but someone who I thought was a friend of mine had sent me a text to hurt me on purpose the night previous, and though I typically am a pretty happy person and don’t let that type of shit effect me, it did indeed touch a vein, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.  Not what he said, but the concept of bitterness, contempt, and retaliating and lashing out for no other reason than to make another person feel bad about themselves because the “hater” didn’t get what they had aspired to acquire. 

I was driving and wondering what made people go out of their way to intentionally hurt other people, and it made me think of three separate, deliberate occasions where someone went out of their way to make me feel like shit, bring me down, or else just shit all over my life.  And all of the sudden it came to me.  REJECTION.      

Apparently being rejected brings out the worst in people.  I’ve had people hate on me for several other reasons, but rejection seems to be the primary, most voracious and malicious, not to mention incapacitating form of hate I have ever experienced.  Perhaps my three examples can shed some light to others who are going through something similar.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps it can make some people aware as to how they treat others, or how others treat them.  Honestly, I have no fucking clue, but can we seriously just stop this vicious circle of shitting on other people just because things didn’t work out as planned?  Um, yeah, that’s called life, and we sort of just need to stick together and deal with it, and not trying to maliciously dick with other people because feelings weren’t mutually reciprocated or whatever would be a great help, and a giant leap in the right direction.  Just saying…

The first incident needn’t hardly be mentioned.  To any follower of my posts will know that I am speaking of Sedouche.  Sedouche was the ridiculous dude I carpooled with when I was still working at the nuke plant.  He wanted an intimate relationship.  I did not.  When I told him I was sleeping with someone else and did not want or desire him, he retaliated by writing a voraciously erroneous and incriminating letter to security to get my ass fired.  Far out.  Thanks buddy.  Do you actually own balls?  Doesn’t matter.  He succeeded.  And why?  Because he couldn’t handle rejection and didn’t want to deal with the humiliation of other people knowing what actually happened between us as apposed to reality, which was absolutely nothing because I did not want him. 

 

Be careful what you wish for, however.  His lies may have gotten my security access pulled, but they also made him somewhat of a pariah, and he may very well have propelled me into a line of work that I much prefer and could even go further with.  I have no doubt he just wanted me gone so he wouldn’t have to deal with the humiliation he would have to face once the truth got out, but he also wanted to hurt me in the only way he knew he could.  Work.  The only thing I care about aside from my dog.  That fucker may as well have taken a machete to my throat, because taking away my livelihood and ability to pay my bills was like sawing an arm off, and he knew it.  Retaliation.  Rejection.  I get it.  But why?  Why hate yourself and someone else so much that you would go out of your way to ruin their life?  That is a form of hatred so beyond my mental capacity.  Like I said; I have hated on people before, but I would never hate someone so much I would go out of my way to try and ruin their life and take away their ability to pay their bills and function.  That takes a special type of crazy that I simply cannot grasp or support.  If someone wants to fight, I’ll fight.  You wanna scrap i’ll fuckin’ scrap!  But to hit below the belt, lie, and take away someone’s livelihood?  To have such a low opinion of yourself that you lash out and, in trying to pretend that you care so little actually end up showing how much you truly do care because you went to so much trouble just to cause another being strife?  To be so miserable? I can’t even begin to try to understand how in hating someone so much you would care that much about them to hurt them, or to even give them a second thought at all. That shit is fucked on a level I can’t even begin to fathom!  I mean just, wow.  I have never hated someone that much.  I guess I should be flattered, in a way, but it’s really more disturbing than anything else.  And to think, this psychopath works at a nuclear power plant, as a functioning, “safe” radiation protection technician.

My second example is somewhat recent.  It involves a landscaping buddy of mine that I had met through the temp agency.  He and I “seemed” to get along on a lot of levels.  We had worked together for a while, he knew my convoluted history, and just seemed like a really cool, mellow dude that I could be friends with.  I knew that he wanted more out of our friendship than I was mentally and physically able to provide at the time, seeing as I had just recently broken up with the Rapist, someone I was truly in love with, and I wasn’t ready to just replace him and move on to my next “victim”.  I didn’t want to be with anyone else.  I just wanted to be alone to sort through my mental bullshit, ALONE, and to just be me for a while, not think about boyfriends, lovers, or intimate relationships of any sort.  I am not the sort of person who needs to constantly be with another person.  I am perfectly content to be alone, and in fact prefer it, the only thing lacking for me in NOT being in a relationship is the fact that I am not getting laid, something that is actually quite significant and important to me, but whatever.  I can do without getting laid for a while.  I am no stranger to masturbation.  Sometimes fucking yourself is better than fucking another person anyway, depending on their skill level and your ability to tolerate another human being at the time. 

Long story short, I really liked Landscaper guy, but I wasn’t sure to what degree.  I knew I didn’t want to get physical with him, but I truly enjoyed having a beer or two with him at the end of the day, and our textual banter and random, general conversations throughout the day.  We saw each other a couple of days a week, after work, to shoot the shit and drink beer.  I took him to Turkey Flats with me one day to teach him how to fire off a 12 gauge, as he had never shot one before, and though I knew he wanted more than just friendship with me, friendship was as far as I was willing to take it.  Might things have progressed one day?  I don’t know.  All I knew was that I wasn’t ready for anything more than friendship with him at the time, and I was very open and honest with him about how I felt.  I had no trouble expressing to him that, although I was glad I had cut ties with the Rapist, I was still obviously in love with him, and not willing to enter into a new sexual, physical, or intimate relationship in any way.  He said he understood, and I thought he did, but I guess he didn’t. 

At about two AM, on the morning of my birthday, he texted me that he thought he was in love with me.  I wrote it off as him being drunk and never really addressed what was said, because I thought once he sobered up he would realize that was probably not true, and he was just heavily under the influence.  I mean, how can you love someone you don’t even really know?  We continued to text back and forth for a couple of days after that, about work, mostly, and then three days later, after sending me a list of songs he liked that I didn’t respond to, because work was really picking up for me and I was just busy, out of the blue mother fucking sky he sends me this text that was completely unprovoked and well, just weird.  This is the text he sent:

“So yeah.  What I’ve found out about you is you’re kind of a snob.  I don’t get down like that, dude.  I appreciate who u r and your strength but I don’t typically surround myself with the likes of you.  I’m punk rock.  I’ve always been that way.  I stand up for reality and those that appreciate it.  I’m not a sellout.  I don’t judge ppl.  I live my life cuz I’m a felon like the rest of em.  I don’t drive a fancy car and I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT WHAT MY PARENTS THINK OF ME.  Just sayin.  I refuse to give in to the wine industry.  I have worked for those ppl before and know they r suckers of our land.  Good luck to u bro.”  

Hmmmmmmmmm.  So, I’m a sellout because I choose to take a job in an industry I have always been passionate about?  I’m a sucker because I do try to keep a healthy relationship with my parents, even if I don’t often agree with their religion and politics?  I judge people?  I mean, maybe sometimes I do get down on haters, or people who try to put other people down, or people who are just straight shady, back stabbing, and insincere, but I feel like I’m one of the most understanding and least judgmental people that I know, and not just because it isn’t my place to judge, but also because I just really don’t give a shit about other people’s lives or what they do because it’s none of my fucking business and what is right for one person may be completely different than what is right for another.  Yeah, I’ll call someone out for being a cunt or a douche, but does that constitute me being judgmental, or just stating an opinion about something I don’t necessarily agree with or a “feeling” I have, as apposed to a lawful “sentence” of what I think is right or wrong?  Almost all of my friends who are experiencing a mental and possibly uncouth dilemma more often than not come to me first to confide, because they know the last thing I would ever do is judge them.  It is simply not my place.  I’m not Jesus, after all…

My last example is about the Rapist, so I will keep it brief, because why waste my time?  Once he found out I had blocked his number and email, he, being the coward that he is, and too scared of Marge to look her in the eye, let alone speak to her, began calling up a mutual friend of Marge and I in South Carolina.  I’ll call her “the Regulator”, because I forget what pseudonym Marge has given her, and I think The Regulator fits, because she is bad ass, she can make a mean vodka tonic, and that sweet southern miss can fucking regulate!  Anyway, he went from texting and calling her, at first asking why, then if I was seeing someone else (his typical question, because he never trusted me and was always, ALWAYS insecure about himself, especially when it came it to me), to getting straight up irate and saying things like “well FUCK her then!” 

The Regulator didn’t tell these things to me until after a few weeks, she would just keep checking up on me to make sure I was staying strong and sticking to my convictions.  After she felt confident that I was somewhat out of the woods with him, and would continue to stay away, she sent me some of his texts, and told me what she thought about him.  Her words about him and his character were not kind ones, but I do believe they were sincere, accurate depictions of his personality.  I just don’t know why I didn’t see it before.  I had the love blinders on.  Perhaps I had seen it, did know it, but chose to look past it because I just loved spending time with him so much.  I really can’t say. 

On top of his insecurities, which had always been glaringly obvious to me, she said she thought he had control issues, anger issues, and that he was a die hard manipulator, all the most obvious weapons of choice that a man who was insecure in himself would arm himself with.  His arsenal consisted of finding a person’s weak spot and picking at it like a vulture pecking at the bones of a helpless, withering animal about to croak in the desert.  And what better way to feel better about yourself than by putting other people down and trying to make them feel bad about themselves?  It’s so high school I can hardly believe the man I was in love with was actually 39. 

 

In any case, I guess my point, in this last scenario, is when she told me he kept yelling “well fuck her then!” all I could think in my mind was; “No.  There is no fuck ME. There’s only fuck YOU.”  I kept thinking there couldn’t possibly exist a “fuck ME” scenario in our entire history because I hadn’t done anything wrong, but on top of all of that, I didn’t even feel enough animosity or hatred toward the guy to even want it to be a fuck YOU scenario.  I wasn’t mad, I was just done, and there was nothing wrong with me being done, because I had explained to him several times what I needed in order to stay in the relationship and he chose to blatantly and unapologetically ignore what I needed, so I left.  It didn’t matter to me that he tried to skirt around the fact that I blocked him in several ways, and that VIA USPS a letter did make it’s way to me, but what I couldn’t understand in it (and no, I did not respond to it) is that he said he “knew I hated him” in it.  No.  That was false.  I didn’t hate him.  I had no reason to hate him nor do I hate him now. What the fuck is wrong with people?!  Just because things end doesn’t mean there needs to be hate.  Live, learn, love, lose, but most importantly, when things are over, keep your head up, move forward gracefully, meet new people, have new experiences, become a better version of yourself, but don’t hate!  Dwelling in misery is toxic.

 

  So you see, there cannot possibly be a FUCK ME in that scenario, because unless the man was a completely inept fucking retard, the only way he could expect any other possible outcome from not giving me what I expressed several times that I wanted and needed in order to stay, was to just not care.  That is what I got out of it, in the end, and that is why I left.  True, it was sort of jacked of me to just straight up block his number and email address, but I was just so tired of it by the end.  I didn’t want to have to listen to his empty words anymore.  So I blocked, I left, and I forgot, but I never hated, and I never said “fuck you!” I didn’t feel that way about him.  I still don’t feel that way about him.  Sometimes, some shit just doesn’t work out, and that’s ok, but please, for the love of anything holy, like bacon and whiskey, can we stop hating on people just because things didn’t work out?  There’s enough negativity going around in this world already.  I think we could all use a little more peace.  Let’s save the “fuck YOU’s” for the people who really deserve them, because believe me, there are a TON of those mother fuckers walking around, and I would rather say fuck you to them than to any ex I have ever had, or even all of them combined.  Not worth my time.  Not worth my hate!  Hate takes effort, after all…

Ok, time to switch gears real quick, because I started this post over two weeks ago, and a lot has happened, but we started getting in way more fruit and as my hours at work have multiplied, so have my hours at home to write diminished.  I suppose within a few degrees one way or the other, everything is pretty much the same, however, the Exhibitionist has recently re-contacted me, and now that I am single, I didn’t have any good reason to turn him away, nor did I ever really want to in the past, it was just that I was in a committed relationship with the Rapist in the recent past and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize it by communicating with the Exhibitionist.  He contacted me a few times while the Rapist and I were still together, but was very respectful of my wishes and when I would tell him to fuck off, he would disappear for a few months, only to shoot me a random text, a few months later, to see if the fishing was any better.  My response was always the same, and he always respected my desire to not be tempted. 

  

I have written about the Exhibitionist before, but just to recap, he and I have always sort of had a thing for each other, which began about twelve years ago, before I went to school in France, but I was in a relationship and so nothing happened.  When I returned from France, a year later, the mutual attraction and chemistry was still cloyingly palpable, but he was in a relationship, and shortly thereafter I got into a serious relationship with the Exhibitionist’s best friend, my now ex-husband, Martichyst.  The Exhibitionist was supposed to be best man at our wedding, shortly before the day of our wedding he declined to attend and we never really heard from him or of him since then.

Well, now that I am single, the Exhibitionist is single, and he decided to hit me up again, just a couple of days ago, I really couldn’t turn him down, though as usual, and me being my typical standoffish, asshole self, I was none too friendly straight out the gate either.  He texted me this, out of the blue, after months of not speaking:  “Still too cool…”

I asked him what he meant.  He said I never texted him.  I told him we had nothing to talk about, and that I was working a lot of hours, but this time, I managed to drop that I was single as well, after my rudeness didn’t even phase him and he continued to text me.  I’m not really sure why.  Perhaps 12 years of sexual tension and the fact that I’m going on three plus months of not getting laid might have piqued my curiosity. 

Mmmmmmmmmmmm!  The man looks good!  He has always had a ruggedly sexy face, although now that I think about it, it probably only looks rugged because he is sporting a beard as of late, because when he is clean shaven, he looks smooth and sexy, almost pretty, but a naughty, “dirty” pretty, with gorgeous eyes, nice cheek bones, and a stellar mouth!  Did I mention that he is covered in tats, loves food, wine, and is studying to be a chef?  Oh yeah, and he works out a lot and is into rock climbing.  Let me just take a moment to mop my seat dry with a napkin!

     Anyway, to make a long story short, after much banter, we started talking about getting together, to see if the chemistry will still be there in person (mind you, its been almost a decade since we’ve seen each other in the flesh) the next time he comes into town, which may be within a week or two.  I’m pretty sure the chemistry will still be there, based on our candid conversations, and as if shit like this would actually phase me, because I usually keep my guard up, surrounded by a mote, archers with flaming arrows, and my own, personal, fire-breathing dragon, he did send me two texts that struck me a little, if I can believe in their sincerity, and even if not, it never does anyone any harm to be flattered every once in a while, even if the flattery is bullshit.  He texted me this:

“U have always been my “got away” girl.”

And then (nail meet coffin, when we were discussing why, after all these years of desiring one another, we had never hooked up, and the primary answer was me marrying my ex):

  “I had to watch you marry a guy I knew couldn’t satisfy you.” 

Well, if that’s truly the way he felt, no wonder he didn’t show up to the wedding, and no wonder he disappeared from our lives after that, until he contacted me via facebook, after he heard about my divorce. 

Well, peeps, I’m calling it quits.  I’m tired as hell!  Loving work, loving my freedom, independence, and being single again, even though I don’t really have the time to enjoy and embrace it.  The Rob Zombie and Social Distortion concert recaps will have to wait for another day, though the mosh pit at Social D in Pozo did eat my hat, one glove, left me with a stained shirt, a hell of a good time, great workout, awesome laughs, offending WAY too many dudes who I just had to call out as pussies and grab by the shirt collars and yank their asses into the heat, fights oddly avoided, and may or may not have fractured my left forearm and foot. But now, I’m cold, my body aches, I get no sleep, and half the time I question my own sanity.  So cheers to the lovers, indifference to the haters, and a nice fat middle finger to the assholes in front of me on the freeway who don’t know how to drive!  

 

Cheers everyone!  Have a great fucking week!   

Also, this chair!: