January 2015

Daniel Danger http://tinymediaempire.tumblr.com/

I will now stop pretending I know a damn thing about love.

I don’t.

All I have is hindsight, bad habits and the retarded heart of a martyr.

The latest installment? Knocked up pimped out and thrown to the wolves, twice in a row. The first for 2 years, the second lasted a few months. Good god please let me be getting smarter, or luckier, or throw off this whatever this is, feels like a curse.

I just PollyAnna’ed the second guy only using me for 2 months instead of years.
Still cost me $7000, each.

I just totally grossed myself out.

I got treated badly at a job. Criminally badly.

Boyfriend at the time worked with me. He had this ‘policy of non-involvement’, kinda like the Catholic Church during the Holocaust. Truth be told, he was a coward. I was quite literally abused. He claimed to love me alone in the dark, but just stood by and watched. He then knocked me up and I got fired. He almost testified AGAINST me in court. After I carried him for over a year whilst he couldn’t keep a job. After I moved us TWICE to make him happy. Let me go off and strip everyday so he could keep himself in whiskey, beer and buy a Tonka truck.

There is a word for that. 3rd ugliest in the English language.
1. Pedophile
2. Rapist
3. Pimp Daddy Extraordinaire

I came home from a vacation in Florida to dead houseplants, a sick dog, a trashed house and he had quit yet another job.
What would you do?
Get out.

He stopped fucking me 8 months prior, truth be told, I was not overly interested. I was exhausted from treading water for the both of us, the Carpathia never came. In the post break up honesty he said (and I quote) “I figured you were just cheating on me.” Which, in one sweeping sentence validated leaving him forever.
Two things,
you let this go on for 8 months and you didn’t stick up for yourself or try to fix it or confront me? I have never seen such weakness. The second? He didn’t know me. He never listened to a word I said or he extrapolated that what I had been through didn’t alter me to my core.

Grossed out, again.

Saint Anthony used to say “the rest of the world is always trying to fight us, just be on my side”. Except the cheating (which I also did, so hush) fucker was right about most things. I am now the age he was when we were in the thick of it and I am catching up at lightning speed.

That young un’ I dated? I was his sugar mama too. I could not possibly wrap my head around the idea that he would stay if I didn’t give him stuff. The more I gave the more he stayed away.

My two best girls are always harping at me to ‘stop being so nice’. I DO try to look after everyone. St. Anthony says the same. He was going to testify FOR me in court as long as I swore not to spend the money on another loser. That was his condition. He wouldn’t even let me buy him breakfast as a thank you.

I was talking to another ex when I was with young un’. He said “ask this guy if he would take a punch for you, ask yourself if he would, if the answer is no”, leave. The answer was no, I stayed. I loaned him my truck and he took his new girlfriend to Niagara Falls in it. Then broke it and me while I woke up in a pool of blood, alone.

My movie love I go on and on about? Fucker slept with my t-shirt for 3 years before we slept together, then he promptly moved to another city with another woman. We sorta got it together again years later and he wants me to come shack up for a week (at my expense) and “we’ll see how it goes”. This is my ideal romance? This is the love of my life?

I bailed my rapist out of jail, 3 weeks prior to the rape.

I invite all women to bring me their men, if my instinct is to protect him or he lets me buy him dinner…throw it back, he’s no good.

This is my gift?

There is the meme floating around says “throw me to the wolves, I’ll return leading the pack”.

NAY, NAY FUCKING NAY, stop throwing me places, stop abandoning me, stop thinking I got this. I will fight my way out, but why make me fight alone in the first place? To further prove I am better off alone? Good job. Point noted. Go away.
I have come to the realization that even when I was in a ‘relationship’ they were canoes and I was the only one paddling or bailing, I would have been better off alone, without the weight. All the things I accomplished are thereby mine, all the times I capsized, mine too.

I pick partners badly, but not lightly and I give it everything I have. I am worth something, I believe in chivalry and I’ve earned it. I’m a good woman.

I am currently questioning everything, except my ability to survive all things alone.

I deserve better.

Ten months ago I had lunch with my girl. She had a new Monster and he gave her a Kindle.

I had my own Monster.

“He looks like hurt”, she curled her lip and went back to her toy.

“I know but I am doing it anyways”.

I left with a bad taste in my mouth, it wasn’t the coffee.

Hearts want, we abide.

Wait.
How was her shit more viable or less fucked up than mine? I’m 40 he was 24. Hers lives in another province with his wife.
I had exactly as much of a chance of finding a time machine and making mine into a grown up as she had for him to leave his wife.

My philosophy, I found mine like this, if I had decided to love him, I’d love him as is. I don’t put conditions on people. I came by this the hard way.

I supported her because I found her like this.

When you enter into someone else’s relationship you are thieving, taking apart joy that belongs to the original two. Also a philosophy I came by the hard way.

She and I were new friends, my ex-husband made sure we never met. She was now living my old life playing the part of the interloper. A familiar role for her, as she had history with my ex-husband while he and I were falling apart and drifting back together. She was part of his harem.
I forgave, yet another thing I do.

Shocker, her married guy stayed married. Mine dumped me for a 20 something.

I looked to her for love or a “hey, you tried”.

She said “I should get paid for my psychic predictions of the future”. Fuck you sister.

I put aside my educated ideas about ‘the other woman’, I helped her pack and move. I wanted her to be happy.

When it fell apart, she summoned and army of fishwives from the internet to attack this man. This man she knew to be married and moved for anyways. I sent her a gentle message saying ‘are you sure you want to do this’, she said yes.

Then she attacked his wife. Sent her all the sneaky night time selfies with him in her bed. I can’t abide. That was the most thorough and vast unfriending I have participated in since hubby and I split. This time, I didn’t want any of them. Did I miss the memo where we all went back to high school?
I have to thank her to a degree, watching her flail helped me. My disgust with her behaviour was really me looking in a mirror. I didn’t like what I saw, so I changed it.

I am not perfect and my horse is not high. I have never been able to justify quitting something without first trying it.  Truth be told, my scarlet letter is a tattoo, and like most of the tattoos I got in my old life, it is a reminder of who I used to be and of somewhere I chose not to visit ever again.

REM “The One I Love”

I try not to deal in absolutes.

Good, bad, right, wrong, normal, weird.

Those ideas feel like cages, with no room for intention or humanity.

We are all just star dusted meat puppets with varying levels of awareness. Wandering around hoping to bump into someone that says ‘me too’at the right moments or any moment.
Wanting to love and be loved and stealing little moments of peace where we can find them.

This is why people go to church, it’s a shortcut to ‘me too’ and peace and love. Me? No, I don’t find satisfaction there, I can’t bow down to false idols, I find these things myself. My urges are mine, I don’t need an imaginary God to tell me that some of them are right or wrong.
I prefer to float. Every person and situation either feels light or heavy. I gravitate to the light and shed the weight.

The man I like asked me ‘why’. I stumbled through an answer laced with giddiness from breathing him in and a bit of Jameson’s. I write, talking…talking is hard for me. I managed to get out that like him because he is gorgeous, smart, honest, strong and I love listening to him talk as much as I love kissing him which is a lot. My mouth felt clumsy, there were holes in what I said.

I mumbled into his shoulder that he and this just feels light, lighter than I am used to. I want the overwhelm. it just feels good. I’ll pretend he didn’t hear me. He already knows I am weird but I harbor this delusion that I can hand it out in metered doses. But he knows.

How do you put into words that I saw him, weighed and measured Everything he is. Because he showed me and I finally had the option to make an educated decision. He doesn’t lie, even when it’s the easy, natural thing to do.

What I came up with is that I want him. I was thorough when I looked for him. He is my choice. There is no room for argument here, this decision is mine.

I spent a year pretty much* alone just to make sure I could be alone. Figuring out who I am and why I do what I do.

I dated a 24 year old for a couple months this summer.

I didn’t mean to date him, I am fucking 40.

We sat in a bar, drafted rules. Within a week he broke every one, I let him.

I met his friends, he told his mom about me, he was here, a lot, doing things that weren’t just fucking me.

My ego was pleased. All the other parts of me just sat back and gave into the experiment. No point arguing with Ego when she gets on a roll.

And then he was gone.

Not a good clean gone either. A messy, raggedy gone. Occasional messages and pop bys, it dragged out longer than it existed in the first place.

Maddening.

If I had a map or a script and handed it to this new one, it could not have gone any more the same.
He was here, it was good and then he was gone.

With literal similarities. I left Sunday Again. No net.
I said the door was open and he stopped walking through it.
Second verse same as the first.

I got stubborn and decided to be me, do things my way and somebody would like it. I started to doubt.

What the ever loving fuck?

Except it’s not the same.

I didn’t balk or pout (okay I balked and pouted a little, quietly, in my own house).
Instead I shed an even bigger net, the net to end all nets, dove down deeper into me and looked for other things I could let go of.

It’s one thing to say ‘I don’t blame others for the actions of one’. It’s another to throw all out reference points and similarities and empty that filing cabinet to make room for new experiences. There is comfort in the familiar even if it’s shitty.

It’s an act of lunacy to say ‘technically you are fucking this up, except I am not going to let you.’

I didn’t get any resolution or vindication from the young ‘un. I don’t want it.

What is the point of hollow words from some hollow boy? I got something so much better, a shining example of a man that had absolutely no integrity, no bravery, not an ounce of truth in him, all wrapped up in skinny jeans and bad shoes.

And then this glorious juxtaposition from the universe. “We are going to show you bad and then immediately show you good, so you can see it, clearly. Keep doing what you are doing, and it will work itself out. You are not wrong.”

This new one, that did all of the exact same things in the exact same order has more integrity than I knew one human body could contain, more strength and grace than I have ever witnessed in a single person.  Honesty and honor are simply what he is made out of. Someone who came by these things through work and experience, not because he read the words in some book and decided to be like that. Someone who just is brave.

I got to practice on the unworthy, push my limits and figure out what I can handle and then I pushed it some more. I KNOW what it feels like to settle and make excuses for someone. Then in waltzes the new one, this collection of traits I haven’t dared dream exist in one place since I was a little girl, before the world got at me and made me feel like I deserved less. I don’t.

Everything I have done, seen and been through up until now makes sense.