New Year's Resolutions are a good idea but a bad habit

 MAKING NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS ARE HABITUALLY BROKEN!

There, I said it.

We set goals often realistically unattainable motivated by our guilt such as:

• Lose X amount of body weight by Y amount of Time (usually a month) and result is Z (failure within set time period resulting in a X(Y+Z) equation where the scale initially went down by A and now increases by B. Who ever told you that you'd never use Algebra lied. 
• Go to the Gym (I don't even need to tell you how the depreciation of averages versus monthly contracts and membership bills accumulate on this sum! Maths, use 'em if you got them, but I will say that I like to call this the Rush/Gold's/National Gamble. They offer you a sweet deal on your first free visit and hum through that cancellation paperwork to see if you are gullible enough to sign up (Free Money!).
• Eat Healthier/Better. Cut those evil carbs. Avoid those Sugary Startches. Dodge those Fatty Fats. Give up all the goodness in Food and eat flat tasteless chicken with some yummy dried out veggies that are mostly green and SMILE while you endure such torture for you heart, kidney, liver, etc. You know how this ends in a pile of french fries and frosty cups with a Big Mac in one hand and a roll of cookie dough in the other surrounded by the detriment of your intentions.
• See your family more. Even if you hate them- I mean you "love" them because everyone keeps telling you that you have to love them but you really don't like them at all.

Anyway you get the point.

So in light of this revelation. I intend to set attainable realistic goals this year.

Sorry World Peace.

My 2022 Resolutions

1. Maker 7. Launch my 3D printing business with the goal of paying for filament stock and eventually a 3D scanned. Making it rich with this in not in my immediate plans.
2. SevenTech Sales. This is my eBay business. I had hoped it would become a storefront on Facebook but that failed. Alibris as well. So, my goal is to keep it going full steam as it is what is paying my bills right now.
3. Get back into writing my fiction and non-fiction. This is a matter of writing discipline that I have so far lacked being able to do with my focus constantly being pulled away by other concerns.
4. Continue to get healthier. I just passed a milestone with my legs (I had Stasis Ulcers and leakage). I have finally healed to 90% and hopefully will hit a 100% soon.
5. Making better Diet choices. I have lost weight again. This time feels more real as I have eliminated much of the foods that had contributed to weight gain, not so much by quitting them as no longer desiring them. I have all but given up soft drinks and the like. My tastes are for water and sparkling water (some minor flavoring). I might drink some coffee and tea but not daily.
6. Continue working with the Nutrionist (I have been doing this consistently for the last 5 months). Again its not so much about quitting certain foods as it is more about balancing my diet. It helps a lot that I no longer desire the fatty, starchy, salty, sugary foods I once did. It doesn't stop me from eating a donut or candy bar but I have little desire to consume them. I have gotten past grazing snacking and I have reached a point where I have to remind myself to eat instead of impatiently waiting for the next mealtime.
7. Getting Exercise. Gone are the dreams of weightlifting at a Gym. I hope my Neice's Husband will give me access to his gym when I am ready to make that my next step. Covid and quarantine wiped out all the progress I had made nevermind my leg problems contributing as well. I now must develop new disciplines to get moderate exercise.
8.  Socialize. Which still seems dangerous in this pandemic that just keeps going despite the willful ignorance of my fellow Americans. Going to work on this harder and try something like a Zoom friendship failing everything else.
   
9. Get more consistent sleep. It's important.
10. Learn to love my leaky old house. Home Ownership is a blast. everyone should do it!

And that's them.

I wish you all a Good Year in which you buy most of my goods and make me richer.

Merry Christmas to Everyone even if your not a Christian.

 Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas

(also make sure it is really yours, if it isn't return it to whomever you took it from, you know who you are, Someone is looking for their Christmas right now and wondering where it went, it was right there last night but now its missing)

May is be warm and bright. 

(unless you are in the desert, then maybe it could manage to snow just a tad, heck a cloud right now could be a Christmas miracle)

May your gift exchange be filled with thank yous, love yous and cheerful laughter

(instead of tears of shredded paper, cries of disappointment that they didn't get the keys to the Porsche that mysterious is parked outside which actually belongs to your cousin Frank who is waiting for a convenient moment to surprise you, he's going to give you at least another hour before he rings your doorbell.)

May your Dinner be cooked to perfection and well received.

(that way even the fire department can not see you again this Christmas... like last year and they will be relieved) 

But above all, remember that it is not the gifts, nor family, nor dinner that you labored for weeks and hours on end to deliver this moment of perfection. 

No it was all so we could keep the message as told by Shepherds in a field some 2000+ years ago that some "Angels" told them to rejoice in the middle of the night because a kid was born that would make the world a better place and not the commercially driven mess that it did become.

I mean. Peace on Earth and Goodwill to men...

(this is why no one invites me over for Christmas Dinner anymore.)

Love you all.

Especiallymy other friends who are celebrating a more sane version of this time of year (Yuletide and Kwannza and the Seinfeld thing to you too!)

Thoughts on a Monday in November of 2021

 My mother is dead. I struggle with it each day.
Some days, I even managed to see a way through the present crisis to find hope that I will be okay. Others I just stay in bed most of the day.

I knew that I was going to miss/mourn her more than anyone else in my life.
I know I will miss my brother more, should I outlive him.

I dream about her less and less. They're weird, waking dreams tied into my struggles with her house, my house, the repairs & renovations that I am making. Tomorrow, I have to find someone to repair the ductwork at an affordable rate. I know I will dream about that tonight.

I have never had medical problems until now. Over the last year and a half, I have had more issues, seemingly incurable at times than ever before in my life. I cope with them but I am not afraid of the situation. I fear diabetes more than anything. The rest I can live with.

I miss working out more than anything. I know now how to work out but still can't do want I want to do. I will return to weight training one day, but I know now that core building is more important than the other stuff.

I am tempted to try online dating again. I give up on that regularly, this time it will cost me. So, I am going to wait to see if the ductwork will be affordable. If it is, I am going to gamble on it, one more time.

Ironically for someone who loves food, I find myself less interested in eating than ever before. It might be age, it might be mourning my mother, but I have largely lost my sweet tooth. I suspect it will only be a matter of time before I left sweets and treats behind. I suspect I won't miss them either.

I am hoping that I am finding my ability to write again. I have largely stopped it. I am easily distracted by other things. So I find myself writing this here late at night, early on a Monday morning.

I have lost my faith.
I don't think I believe in God in the same way anymore. I don't know if I believe or ever believed that prayer works/ed. I stopped going to church. The pandemic played its part, mom's loss of faith affected it. I went back briefly before the medical problems started to play havoc with my sleep schedule and the depression and grief took away my desire for it.
I would like to believe in God and I still am going to live a Christian life, but Church is not really that relevant anymore.

I am going to call myself an Agnostic for the first time in my life.
I just don't know anymore.
Part of me wants to believe Mom is in Heaven
Part of me wants to believe My Sister is there with her
Part of me wants Mom's wish of reunion with her parents and family to be trrue.
Part of me thinks it's a nice story, because it doesn't give me any comfort.

It's what separates me from many Christians and other similar believers.
I am Christian (or was) because it's the right way to live. I never really cared about Heaven or Heavenly reward. Now, I no longer believe that Jesus is coming back. I mean I still want to believe in it, but I just don't anymore.

Nothingness no longer scares me. I feared death for most of my life because of that nothingness, but now I'd welcome the peace it would bring.

that's it for Monday morning.

She haunts my dreams

    This year has been so hard on so many people. I would not complain.
That being said.

My Mother haunts my dreams.

    Oddly, she is often non-vocal, merely content to wander through the dream her ghost has created in my mind leaving me to unravel the meaning of it all. By the time, I begin to unravel it all, I suddenly need to pee in the dream only to discover that the dream doesn't allow for actual peeing.

    This is my body trying to wake me up. This is normally hard enough, but I sleep with a BiPap ASV so it's like waking the dead. By the time, I surface, the original dream is a distant memory and I wake with a sense of loss, confusion, and the now desperate urge to go find open water.

The dream is almost always the same.

Mom is living in a new house (It's a recurring event since the divorce).

    I was seventeen, the divorce was underway. I was the last person to be told in our family unit. My mother used my brother and me against our father as a nuclear option. We all died that night, in different ways. Looking back, I hate her for what she believed that she must do, for her lack of understanding as my brother then me begged my father, who was a million miles away in South Africa from the new Condo in Knoxville, TN USA. But I also understand that Mom was facing the oblivion of being ALONE and having to raise me on her own.

She would move one more time after that, to Luttrell, to the house I now own.

In my dreams, she moves often, to yet another version of a house that is unstable or flawed. Dozens of dreams later, I find myself invited to my mother's townhouse where she now lives with her fiance who is half my age (as I find out) and what is more, my sister is now living with her new boyfriend across the hall from mom.

    Both of these women are dead.

Mom died in January. the date and time is burned into my brain

My sister died in June.

Mom was 89. My sister was 73. I am 52.

Thoughts on the Turning Aways in my life and the times

On the turning away, when our generation once looked away to distractions of our youths 

because it was easier to occupy our coming awareness with collective fantasies

than to face the budding awareness that change was indeed possible as the winds turned again in human history

whilst I perfected my D&D skills AIDS took quietly took away two of my favorite men

their lifestyles were blamed, then the sexuality then drugs then music, and then when the was nothing else to tell but the truth my father denied who or what my uncle even had been all his life, and my religion stripped away even his own soul in favor of pleasing my mother and his own mother as well.

And Freddy?

He died with cautious dignity as I stopped turning away from the reality that denial is the single hardest thing to overcome, AIDS was real, while everyone around me was fucking to their heart's content, I did not.

Now to see it today, happening all again, I see my family and friends refusing to face a reality that endangers the weak, the elderly, and our children. It has killed so many people many of whom had no clue what they did or didn't do and yet as surely as the TV evangelists who screamed at the cameras of old that this was God's punishment to the sinful

They are replaced by Media Moguls who scream the same from the anchor desks and microphones.

Ironically, I find myself at odds with why God would put up with such idiocy that I can almost accept that He really sent those plagues upon the sinful in the good old biblical days of myth.

I mean the Egyptians had it coming.

The Pharoah was fine of course, in his golden palace.

but the average working-class guy was screwed because yet another angry, vengeful deity had a point to prove according to this guy Moses.

I no longer believe in that god. I no longer wish such blind punishments upon the helpless masses with the electronic diety held firmly in their hands worshipped daily as they spend almost as much time staring at their own turning aways as I did in my youth

On loss and loneliness

 I lost my mother, Saturday night, January 16th, 2021.
She was on morphine and a little out of it. I sat with her as she took her last conscious breaths. I told her I loved her and forgave her. I asked her to forgive me and she looked at me with a sense of sadness and told me she loved me too and that she forgave me for all I had had to put her through. She went to sleep not long afterward. She never woke up after that. She lapsed into a coma and died Sunday evening. She was 89 years old.

I had spent most of my life with her. She was my best friend and often my enemy. She was my mother, therapist, and often my employer. She left me a broken shell of everything I assumed I had been. I found new life in her passing and her home became my own. I made all the right decisions. I mourned her passing in great gasps of agony. I often cried so hard that I had to stop what I was doing, driving, and just give in to the terrible sadness. I had lived alone since then. 

It feels like years now. It has been barely 5 months.

Tonight, July 12th, 2021. I tried to sleep and failed yet again. I cry now, not just for my mother but also for my sister, who followed her mother in death less than a month ago. I didn't know my sister as well as I should have but we shared a bond and a familiarity that I have not had with anyone else. this morning, 3:41am, I miss them both and listening to Pink Floyd, "The Turning Away."

I always knew that Mom's death would be the hardest thing I would ever have to deal with.

I have known pain and loss and loneliness.

What I knew before this was like a watercolor and now I am painting with oils. The watercolor is real unto itself, but it dries quickly and becomes a memory as fast. The oils take years to dry and the memory persists for a lifetime. I remember mom stopping, seemingly at random, and saying that day it had been 40 years since her mother had died. She had a memory for those details. Now I know that it was more than a memory of someone's passing, rather, it was a time to feel the pain of their loss.

My Christian friends speak of the happy reunion in heaven. My family too.
I envy their faith. I don't have it. It feels like a lie to me. It always has.

I want to believe that mom is there in the heaven that she so wanted to believe in. Friends and family are often quick to point this out to me, but they don't realize that is not the heaven I have ever believed in.

So, tonight (morning) I feel all the loss and the loneliness of not having anyone to tell this too.

If I had  a wish, I would meet a woman who would take away the loss and loneliness from me, even if just for a little bit so that I could sleep. Instead, I sit here in the dark typing this instead of finding that woman in my dreams instead.

I wrote this on Facebook but it's my blog now, Dammit.

 Okay here is my rant.

I am so tired of finding a youtuber who I like only to discover that they want to:

A. Criticize a documentary as if it is a feature film. Meaning that they equate it with a cult because the film is about minimalism. Ignore the filmmaker entirely so they can criticize the content. be critical of the cinematography because it feeds they diatribe about the way they feel about the subject matter and totally not explore how the film is being presented to get the art across. Goodbye Drew Gooden.

B. Talk about The Wall as if it was the best film ever made in the dullest presentation ever, Try to make a case for it but really want to criticize the Nostalgia Critic who made a parody/review of it several years ago. he's mad because Nostalgia Critic didn't bow down to the Art of the Film and worship at it's incredibility. Then I find out the youtuber used to work for the same production company as the Film Critic and got fired for various reasons and apparently blames the Nostalgia Critic (Doug Walker) for everything.

Goodbye Folding Ideas.

C. Idiots who criticize Cinema Sins for being to critical of every movie (even though the tagline of cinema sins is every movie has sins) and go on at length why CS is a garbage critic when I am not sure CS is really being a critic as much as a tongue in cheeky bastard about movies with logic gaps and such. This guy also hates Nostalgia Critic. 

Goodbye Whinny guy.

Things to note.

1. they are all guys (white guys)

2. I suspect they would not hjave any actual content without picking on their subject matter (although all of them did have some interesting videos since I did choose to subscribe to them for a reason I can no longer fathom).

3. I don't watch every video that Cinema Sins makes because I don't like when he nitpicks on my favorite movies.

and

4. Stanley Kubrick made 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. They are HIS films not the authors (which admittedly might not have been big fans) When I think of those movies, I don't think of the Author I think of Stanley Kubrick's vision. This goes for many other movies. including LOTR, Fight Club (whose Author loved it), Princess Bride, ETC.

rant over.