Become a writer and be a penny-less vagabond!

I have been through a few stages in my life when I have been totally broke and scarping together just enough cash to buy a bar of soap or to get some toilet paper.  I have known times when I haven't any money for anything but mac and cheese without the milk for dinner.  I have been broke enough that I have learned to stomach Ramen noodles for days on end.  I have evaded landlords and waked or taken the bike to places because I don't have money for gas.  I have lived with out power for a week until the next paycheck comes in and I could pay the bill to get my power again.

These times were difficult, and they were certainly not pleasant.  I would love to say that they were character building, but even that I'm not so sure about.  I has taught me to be careful with my finances to avoid these situations.  I have come to appreciate the need to abstain from unnecessary expenses for frivolous items I desire.  I have done without again and again for the sake of avoiding the pitfall of becoming destitute again.

So why is it that I am at the very precipice of this again?  You see, I may be very disciplined with financial restraint, but I find that most people are not.  The biggest difference of my lessons I have learned is that no one came to bail me out.  When I was stuck, I had to fix it.  The funny thing about it all is that when I lived alone, I had no problem not only staying on top of my finances, but I always seemed to manage to have quite a surplus.

I have now been married twice. My first wife had parents who were successful with a business.  They would bail her out again and again, though they would hold it over her afterwards.  I can not describe the pure bliss of leaving that whole situation.  By the time I got out of that one, we had been living in a house that they owned.  I would rather not go into details about how that effected the marriage, but obviously you can draw your own ideas as the marriage ended in divorce.

Now I am married to a woman who has been treated as the special one all her life and given everything when she needed it and never had the opportunity to learn how to fix her own problems.  What was it that inspired me to enter into a long term relationship with this woman?  As they say, love makes us fools.  Regardless, things have been on the edge for a time, I suppose.  But now, it has come to the point where every penny is needed to keep from getting further into a hole that has opened up under our feet.

This is a place I despise to be in.  But I suppose I have chosen the paths that have lead me here.  I have chosen the profession of a writer, and I make almost no money from that.  I have a job, but seeing as I am not "skilled" in many fields, I do what I must.  Sadly that means that I am making barely any money there.  My wife does have some college background, but she claims to have chosen a field of study that does not actually help her to get any viable job.  Okay, I can live on peanuts.  I have my children, I have a lot of comforts that most of the world's population does without.  I can live paycheck to paycheck, so long as I can manage it.  Sadly, the need for a newer vehicle has broken the fragile thread that we were maintaining from paycheck to paycheck.

Well, this really is a gripe post this time... oh well.  I needed to vent a little.  If it helps you feel better about your life, then good.  Of course, you could always help out by buying one of my books.

been a month... what a month!

It's been a whole month and a couple of days since the last time I decided to write something in  this blog.  I suppose if this were a Catholic Confession, I would begin with, "Forgive me father for I have sinned.  It has been about 32 days since my last confession..."  But I'm not Catholic.  (well, not any more.  They tried to raise me that way, but I didn't quite conform.  Though, I'm told that once you are Catholic, you always are.  In that case, I'm recovering.)

I would love to type that I have been very busy working hard on a variety of things that I was to be working on, but that would be a fairly substantial lie.  In fact, I've done about nothing this past month in terms of working for anything of my own projects.  This has largely to do with being pulled in several directions, finding myself in a bout of depression and aggravation leading me to the bottle who has been ever vigilant over my free time.

The month started with a return to a childhood memory and a reconnecting with my grandfather who had influenced me in ways I am still realizing.  I also had a very profound conversation with myself on a very long walk that humbled me considerably in some terms.  Unfortunately, in the mess of life at the beginning of this month, my wife and I mostly skipped celebrating the Anniversary of out wedding.  I had planned to delay a small celebration of this event a week later when thing would have calmed down, but as it turned out, my grandfather fell over from a stroke only three days after saying good-bye to him.  He never came back to us and finally succumbed nearly a week later.

His passing marks a moment when one generation of my family has gone from me on that side of the family as my grandmother died over a year ago.  Understand that I realized when she passed that he would not be long as they had been together for 61 years.  When a couple is so entwined, it seems inevitable that they would not wait long to join their beloved who have gone before them.  Non-the-less, it was an event that I am slightly saddened about, and for very selfish reasons.  I had not really been in contact with my extended family for years, and it seems that I have reconnected just in time to say goodbye.

So, with retrospect and a certain level of desired numbness, I turned to the one thing that seems to always be there for me when the humans around me have failed to be there.  Bottle after bottle had been consumed, and sadly as I have a tight budget at this time, the bottles have been cheep.

Only a few days ago there was a service for Pop-pop.  This month has been a cold one for me, and I am eager to move on.  I'm sipping at my tea, thinking about what I should do now.  This blog is only once piece of my desire to get back to work.  I have loads of things to get done in the next couple of days.  For now, I'm hoping to just keep out of the bottle and enjoy the tea.  My soul has been weighted by frustration and anger, sadness and exhaustion; it's time to get up and move again.

That said, I'm going to finish this long ass blog and start rummaging through my unfinished works.