You Gotta Spend Some Time, Love..

This is a doosie. Buckle in.

For Thanksgiving this year, my family and I decided that the usual Arizona 85 degree Thanksgiving was not for us. We wanted to go home. There were a couple reasons, other than just the holiday, that we made the 585 mile trek across the desert, through L.A. and back to the warm embrace of a marine layer and a mild poo/manure stench. One reason being that we had not seen most of our extended family for a major holiday in about 5 years and it was time to get in some R-and-R and catch up with the Aunts/Uncles/Friends/Cousins who are taller than me now (jerks). Another being that my Grandfather, who was a World War II B-17 bomber Pilot in Africa for 4 years, is finally flirting with the 90's in age and we know that he is a precious commodity in short supply. With the sum of these things being greater than the cost we decided Thanksgiving this year would be done Los Osos style.

Anyone who knows me and reads this blog knows that I may tend to say things that are on my mind and that I feel what I feel. What I feel is put down here so that, even if no one reads this, I can. I can read this and remember the lessons that life teaches you and I can remember my joy, my pain, and I can identify for myself what mistakes I have made in my life and learn from them. I have not been blogging lately because I have been to afraid to make mistakes. I have been too afraid to live my life and live it with that passion that I once did. I was afraid to hurt myself again. I was too afraid to take a chance and be human. I had "turned myself off" to anything that I felt. So for 3 months I decided to become a human Popsicle (grape, in case you were wondering) and feel nothing for or from anyone. With that being said..

I arrived in Los Osos at 4:30am local time after a nearly 11 hour drive that included the first 30 miles taking 3 hours, me hallucinating from exhaustion and seeing UFO's, and my brother falling asleep about mile 200 when he was supposed to keep me awake. Thanks bro. Regardless we arrived in one piece and settled into my uncles RV to get some rest. I awoke about 5 hours later still being used to Arizona time and was unable to fall back asleep so I decided to just get up and grunt hello to my family as I headed to the bathroom. Morning greetings are merely a formality with my family if said person in not awake so for the most part, the family and relatives know to kind of leave me alone before my shower. As soon as I finished cleaning the road off me and waking up, the hugs were plentiful as were the smiles, jokes about my beard and breakfast. One thing to note, my family plus food equals an immediate bonding moment even if it is a muffin or bowl of cereal.

But it wasn't the food this time for me. It wasn't the hugs, the bonfires, the Horse-shoes games, or the football. It was the people. It was my Jolly-Green Giant cousins being almost men and having more maturity than I think I'll ever have. It was my grandmother who couldn't remember who I was, breaking my heart while shaking my hand saying "Nice to meet you". It was my Uncle, who resembles a bear this time of year (not unlike yours truly), making me feel like I could do something and be proud of it. He made me feel like I could do anything by just having me hang a dartboard and some lights in his garage. For 3 months, I had been living in my own world and in my own hole in the ground, just kind of waiting for someone to fill it up. I wasn't sure if I wanted a family of my own in this life. I wasn't sure if I wanted to get married and have kids because of all the hardship that can be. I mean, I actually smiled for pictures on this vacation, Big shit eating grins with food in my mouth and all. I cant remember that last time I did that. It took a 6'2" loud, hairy, Budweiser drinking, Bar-b-queing, hard working, shit pumping man (literally, look up Al's Pumping Service) to give me my pride back. It took me hanging lights in his garage so we could play darts that night to give me my sense of self-worth back, which is something I had lost along time ago. This Thanksgiving, it was more than a vacation or a get together for me. I was revitalized. I was given something that I had lost along time ago and this time I do not intend to handle it so lightly. I realized why we make the sacrifices for our family that we do and why moments like the multiple I had this weekend are so rare and so important. My family is part of who I am. I had lost who I was and they gave that back to me. I now realize why people start families and why so much pride is taken when we talk about our families. Its because they are us, and always will be us.

I'm not afraid anymore. I was afraid of making a mistake and making myself look bad or stupid or whatever and in the process I learned what it was like to live with regret. I learned what it feels like to live and think "what if" or "maybe" about people and things in my life and I hate that I let life do that to me. I have thought "what if" for 10 years and it felt like a long time until it was gone. Whats funny is that after 10 years emotions can change and most of the time they do. But those special ones, those almost untouchable ones for your kids or spouse or Uncle/Bear hybrid stay the same. I experienced both of those situations this weekend and I have no intention on waiting another 10 years to say something about the ones that have stayed the same.

What does the future hold for me? I don't know. Last weekend I could have probably thrown a guess out there that I thought would be right and it probably involved me being alone by choice. But now? After this weekend, I don't know. But I know who I want there, and I don't intend to let them just walk away like they did all those years ago.

Quick Update

Hey everyone =]

Happy thanksgiving and start to the holiday season. I had a great holiday with great friends and family. Learned some lessons about myself and my life that I had forgotten. Stay tuned because I'll be trying to post something this week in between moving and working.

<3

Are you willing..?

So this was rough. Rough to talk about or think about. I guess that I need to preface what I'm talking about but I'm lazy. Sorry. I posted on facebook a week or 2 ago that I had a revelation about relationships and now I'm going to look at people differently from now on because of it.

Ill say this first. Recently I have been exposed to a lot of older couples. Not senior citizens by any means but older couples. People who have been married and have seen almost every facet of each other, good and bad. I have noticed 2 very glaring differences in these couples. They are either more in love with each other than the day they were married, or barely talk to each other. So I, because this is what i do, started wondering why they were the way they were. Now clearly I'm no marriage councilor and I have no professional training on diagnosing said differences so take this with a grain of salt. Anyways, so later I'm at home and I hear a discussion happening between my Mom and Dad. My mom is shouting (over the 7 industrial fans blowing in the house) about something on the news that we were having a discussion on the night before. My step-father is a pretty well informed man, he reads the news paper and reads a collection of other printed materials so he was already informed of the latest developments of this event. My mother, still shouting, say "Aren't you going to change the channel?!" and my step father shakes his head and keeps chopping whatever it was he was making for dinner.

So here is where all this is going. I believe there comes a point in any relationship where either one or both parties subconsciously decide "Eff it". They make a decision to just not comply anymore. Sure they still go to work, they still come home every night (well most do) and they still sit in that chair they always sit in and watch that show they always watch. Somewhere in the psyche of this person who is rebelling against their spouse is this little voice that is telling them to keep pushing, don't do what he/she tells you or has been telling you all these years. What happened before this? What happened before that little voice was even a whisper? They complied. They submitted, if that's a better word. All those little things, "Honey, grab me a water bottle" "Honey, Turn off the TV real quick" "Honey, can you do _____ for me". They just submitted all the time and now they have decided to stop submitting. They decided to do what they want to do now, regardless of what else might be going on. In my opinion, this is only a natural human response after complying to your families needs for so long. One becomes selfish minded after so long and decides to do what they want. I'm not condoning the behavior but if I'm looking at the situation in a logical mind set, the dots connect for me.

On the flip side there are people/couples who never reach this point and are happy from day 1 till the end. I don't want you to think that these people are the extremely self centered, self concerned people that I'm making them out to be. Sooner or later we all think of our own happiness and evaluate weather it is up to our happiness standard, and if it is not, we do something about it. Personally I cant go like... more than a month with out seeing a movie because its something I love doing and it makes me happy. The person I'm describing simply has chosen to make them self happy by doing what they want to do now. It is, in my experience, usually small things first. Like not changing the channel just because they want you too. Or not taking the dog out because you are watching something interesting on TV and you simply don't want to get up. It becomes a problem when spouses realize whats going on and start bickering and so on but I'm not here to give my opinion on that.

What this is all boiling down to is how I applied it to my life. I am not currently in a relationship but a keen observer of them and how people act. The realization that this may be my future (the cataclysmic change of mind set from Family to me) has got me thinking about relationships differently all together. When I think about girls I am interested, I start to evaluate weather I would make the choice one day to just stop complying with what they want because I want something different. I start to wonder if I would turn into that self centered A-hole (more so than now lol) and if we would turn into that couple sitting at the same table not talking to each other. I'm sure they didn't intend for it to be that way when they got married but lots of things turn into what you never thought it would. I have to say on the flip side, that I have more respect than I can express for the Men/Women in lifetime relationships that never get sour and always persevere through the hard times. I cant say how many times I have desired what they have. They have the person that completes them. The Person that is the Yin to their Yang, the Butter to their waffle, the Seasoning salt to their French fries... sorry, I'm starving right now. My point is that they have found their other half, and I cant help but wonder, when I find my other half, will I take it for granted 20-30 years down the road? Or will I love and cherish them for their and my entire life?

I can assure you this, it will be my never ending goal to make sure that I am never sour.