ring cycle: Underworld

Jerry caught me coming around the corner at Ellen's and told me, after something of a hiatus, he was back to reading my blog.

He grimaced and said, "That stuff with the blood was killing me."

He'd kind of tuned out.

My visits to the plasma center proved to be too much for a lot of people, not that it mattered. I abandoned popularity here from the very beginning. Otherwise, I'd have prattled on about local politics and sports, which might have increased my numbers --if I'd had anything meaningful to say on the subject, but I'm mostly apolitical and have little to say about sports (other than roller derby, which I am learning to love, though I seriously doubt my new derby friends would like to be featured in posts here).

Anyway, Jerry loved the new stuff. Of course, he does. Plenty of people do. I don't even have to look at my stat counter. I can feel the eyes on the new posts. My fan base has always liked the personal destruction stories. They look forward to them. I make implosion fun. It's a gift.

We talked for a couple of minutes. Jerry told me how much he admired my coming apart at the hinges then laughingly said something about it eventually getting better. After six years of this blog, we both know that's not likely.

God, if that were to happen, what would I do with myself?

I have no idea.

Anyway, after a few friendly words about the blog, I said I had to get on back to the ranch. The folks at work would expect me to do something. Two steps past his table, the future former Mrs. Lynch called me over. She was having the pasta salad with a down under coffee thing from Ellen's at the table about eight feet away from Jerry.

I told her I'd just had lunch with an old friend and run into someone who read my blog. She told me the pasta salad was especially good.

Ring cycle: supernatural aid

A friend I hadn’t spoken to in months called me up out of the blue and said, “Hey, let’s grab some lunch.”

She didn’t know any of what was going on with me. Not everybody knows. Word about the split is moving out in a circular ripple. Like sitting on the edge of a pond, I’m watching the news travel and waiting to see if the ripple bounces off the edge and returns.

So far, nothing, but there may not be a return. Everyone tends to believe their happiness and well-being is more important to other people than it actually is. We are all stars in our own dramas, our own stories. The rest of the cast, the people we know, our friends, our family, are only recurring characters –supporting and bit players whose contracts are constantly up for renewal.

Plans were made for lunch. Conditions were decided: no seafood, no curry. It needed to be close by. I had a big story to write, an interview and photo shoot with a local band, and needed to get to my second job. She needed to get back to work in sixty minutes or less. I wanted a salad, but wanted to stay open to the possibility of dessert.

By process of elimination, a place was chosen.

Inside the Blossom Deli, the Catholic school kids were crowded in a rough approximation of a line, waiting to get back to school. Everybody was in uniform. Nobody had money in their hands. They weren’t in a particular hurry and blocked the front entrance like a half-assembled beaver dam.

I felt slightly and inexcusably annoyed. Dining out is a treat for me. I don’t do it that much and can really only afford a 10 dollar lunch about once or maybe twice a month. The rest of the time, I eat beans, soup or chili, occasionally a sweet potato, a couple of apples. I eat good but I eat cheap.

I envied them their privilege, a petty feeling. Everybody has to eat; even the children of the upper middle class.

While a bus boy cleared tables and tried to prepare for the crunch of the impending noon day lunch rush, the young hostess waved me forward.

“Two?” She asked.

Behind me stood a slender brunette: mid-20s, straight-hair and very pretty. She wore a short, green dress that clung enticingly to her modest curves. Obviously, she was meeting someone. Nobody dresses like that just for a day at the office --well, most people don't. I don't.

I smiled at the hostess as if to say, “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence,” but I shook my head.

“No, um, I’m meeting a friend. I need table for two, but she’s not here yet.”

The hostess nodded. The statuesque brunette maintained her pose by the door. Her date would be there soon enough. He better be, I thought.

The hostess grabbed two rumpled menus from the counter then led me to a table in the center of the dining room with a clear view of the front door.

“Perfect,” I said and pulled back a chair.

At the booth across me, my soon-to-be ex sat with her boyfriend. The two of them leaned across the table, holding hands and looking at each other meaningfully. Her eyes looked warm and filled with an almost desperate affection. I tried not to look at him, tried not to commit anything about him to memory. It was like gazing into a Kleig lamp.

I pushed the chair back.

“Fuck this,” I spat and fled, practically ran to the door.

The woman in green stepped aside to let me pass. I hope she got my table.

Outside, away from the front door, I drifted toward the corner. I stood and tried to shake it off. I felt cold, baffled, and talked to myself.

A couple of people stepped around me.

“Please don’t do this to me,” I said. “Don’t make me wait. Don’t let them come out. Don’t let them have seen me. Not like this. Not here. I’m not ready.”

Minutes rolled by at a grueling pace: one minute, five minutes, ten minutes. My friend was running late. It would still be another two minutes before her car finally pulled up.

“Get me out of here,” I begged her when she did. “Just get me somewhere else.”

Nobody ever came outside. I wasn’t followed. They hadn’t seen me. Standing there, five feet away, I’d been invisible.

Ring Cycle: Cancer Man crossover

“You don’t talk about your wife.” It was a funny thing for her to say, but Rebecca was right. I’d been driving her to cancer treatments for a couple of weeks. We’d covered her stripper daughter and her addictions and the vague possibility that the daughter might have a side job of a sort.

We’d talked a lot about her grand kids. They were slowly leaving her nest and getting on with their lives.

It sounded like she’d done a good job with them.

We even discussed FOX news, her grandson’s pornography collection and what she liked best. She liked Jesus, cleaning houses for a living and television shows involving witches and that girl from “Who’s The Boss?” We’d shared. She’d baked me cookies and a slab of Mexican cornbread. I’d bought her an apple fritter from the Donut Connection and she’d laughed when she’d returned from her treatment to find me napping behind the wheel.

“You do too much,” she’d said.

I shrugged. Stuff has got to get done.

“You don’t talk about your wife.”

And she was right. In conversation, I’d mentioned being married and having kids. I’d talked about the new house and getting ripped off on the used lawnmower I’d bought from a guy by the side of the road: that one should have been obvious. I’d said a lot of things, but I’d said nothing about my wife.

So, I told her.

“My wife and I are splitting up.”

I’d already broken the news to my sisters, told a friend, but otherwise hadn’t worked up the nerve to say anything to the people I worked with or to my parents. For a couple of weeks I’d been carrying it around; the inside of my chest feeling like it was made of mangled tin and leaking mercury.

I told her as much as I could tell her, explained that it was real, it was final. I felt like shit for mentioning it. She was sick (technically, though her treatment was more of follow-up to what had already been done through surgery). I was taking her back and forth to the hospital and she had a lot on her plate besides. How fucking selfish was that?

Rebecca was quiet for a minute then she said she’d pray for me.

“You’re a good man." She smiled. "I’ll pray for a good woman for you –one who can cook.”

I might have raved a little too much about the cornbread and the cookies. They were pretty amazing.

I told her she didn’t have to. I told her I was a long way from even in thinking in that direction. I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, let alone a wife. I wasn’t ready. I wasn't going to be ready for a long, long time.

“You’re young,” she said. “A young guy like you can’t be alone.”

I assured her it was possible and under the circumstances, pretty likely. I did not give her my reasons, but I think she knew them.

She laughed and told me she’d pray anyway and bake me some more cookies.

She made me a couple of dozen to share with whoever I wanted. It was one of the nicest things, I think, anybody had ever done for me.

The ring cycle: refusal

Right after we split, we decided to tell a few people. I told my family and one friend a week after we made the decision to separate. I told the people I work with about two and a half weeks after and subsequently have slowly brought it up with people who know me.

I also decided to stop posting status updates on Facebook. I don’t like Facebook, but damned if it’s not addictive. It is the crack cocaine of internet communication, especially when you feel alone. It feeds into your loneliness with instant gratification. Post something and people respond if they like you.

People, I’ve noticed, like funny. They also respond to tragedy (as long as it’s real tragedy and not that stupid shit people cut, paste and repost), but relentlessly grim, self-serving, moody non-sequiters are like jerking off on public transport. Nobody really wants to watch. Well, I don’t want to watch and I didn’t want to be that guy with his trousers around his ankles. So, I stopped --at least with the status updates. I stopped trying to tell everybody what I didn't know how to say.

Everybody has been great about it, so far. A few people offered lunch, dinner or booze. Hugs were few, which was good. I'm a little touchy right now. The number of people I’m comfortable with giving me a hug at the moment could be narrowed to the number of people who could comfortably fit in my car. Close contact with anyone outside of my immediate family or my children is largely uncomfortable. It's awkward and wooden. I get no comfort from it.

This, I expect, is temporary: a kind of shock. It’s something that will fade with time. Otherwise, dating will challenging.

Not that I’m actually thinking about dating, not really. Friends have already suggested they could match me up, but this seems highly unlikely and downright foolish.

I’m not on the prowl either.

After “The Clash in the Coalfields” roller derby scrimmage a couple of weeks back, I was invited to the after-party. They’d been nice to ask me to announce their bouts, which might have seemed like I was doing them a favor and not the other way around. I didn’t have any experience, barely knew the game in the abstract, let alone the actual rules.

I stumbled through the evening like a refugee from a house fire.

At the end of it, my videographer, Kathryn said, “You look totally stunned.”

I felt stunned. I felt exhausted and shell shocked. I also felt more at ease than I had in weeks. For the previous three and a half hours, there’d been nothing to think about except roller derby.

Mostly, I’d thought about how much I was fucking things up.

After it was all over, however, some of the tabled anxieties started creeping back up.

A couple of people asked me if I was going to the after-party. This was supposed to be the best part and what was not to like: A bar full of raucous, wild women in the mood for a few laughs? It sounded like just the thing to kick me out of my funk. Why the hell not?

“Yeah, sure,” I said and I went --for about thirty seconds.

I wasn't even really thinking of a hookup. I just wanted to feel like part of the crowd. I stepped through the door and realized I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea why I was even there. I only knew a few people; none of whom were there yet. I suddenly became very self-conscious of the fact that I'm awful company and even if I stumbled into actually "meeting someone" I had nothing to offer them.

Looking around the bar, I saw lots of smiling, younger men with good hair, decent tans and tight-fitting t-shirts. Every one of them was my superior in every way that counted. I felt outclassed, ugly and freakish: a bad-tempered mutant that should be chased off with fire.

It made no sense. My basic core confidence in who I am just crumbled. I was overwhelmed in a place called Buffalo Wild Wings? Really? Buffalo Wild Wings?

I shook my head. This was ridiculous. I didn’t feel like having a good time. I had nothing to celebrate and wanted nothing much except to find a nice, dark place to curl up in a fetal position and bawl.

So, that’s what I did. I went home, cried all the way and went to bed.

I’m still in the grieving process, not the mourning of the end of the marriage, but the end of a particular identity. I don’t know who I am yet, but I’m not the same guy anymore. I’m not even the guy I was before the marriage. I’m somebody else.

I think after something like a marriage ends you have to redefine who you are. You have to figure out what’s gone and what’s left. That’s not to say that this totally destroyed me. That’s bullshit, but being a husband and the head of a household has been at the core of who I was for almost ten years. It's colored my decisions and my opinions. It has driven my direction.

Now, the road signs have been removed. I don't have any idea where I'm going.

Ring Cycle: The call to adventure

Some notes about this new direction of the blog. It’s not really a new direction, but I will be avoiding writing about the future ex-Mrs. Lynch. She’s got her own thing to work through and really, this blog has really been mostly about me. No second guessing, no mudslinging and no cheap shots.

This will hopefully keep the lawyers away. Remember the lawyers? I remember the lawyers.

Also few details will be given about my marriage, what we’re discussing as far as the divorce, or our current domestic situation. This isn’t reality television, but it’s not a secret that we’re currently sharing the same house. You do that when you buy a house right before you split up, but it’s temporary.

The important take away is that so far we’re getting along very well as roommates. Space has a new importance, but the property isn’t divided up like in “War of the Roses.” Nobody is sleeping in the tool shed or their car. We still share the costs of running the place and take our turns with the kids while the other does their own thing. We parent both together and separately. I’m working more, but the move was expensive, winter is coming (God damn, where's Ned Stark when you need him?) and eventually I’ll be running a household on my own.

Arguably, I’d be working more anyway, but yes, the financial aspect of what I'm facing is pretty high up in my list of concerns: How the fuck am I going to pay for stuff?

So, really, not a lot has changed...except it really has.

While we're here, I want to head off this question: Since it sounds like we've achieved a degree of domestic tranquility and a functioning relationship, “Why bother with the divorce?”

The circumstance is what it is. The marriage has ended and while staying together for the sake of the kids, the sake of the house or the sake of Jesus sounds like the admirable thing to do, it really isn't so good for the sake of Bill and Jennifer --and it's not that great for the kids, plus the house is only a fucking house and really, Jesus wouldn't mind.

He never liked me anyway.

Finally, a warning: If I'm going to write about this, it's going to get unpleasant --maybe not plasma center unpleasant, but it's going to suck at points. It's going to be miserable and sad. That's what I'm about, but if I do this right, there will also be a couple of laughs. I'm about that, too.

The ring cycle

The end of my marriage came suddenly and without an apparent warning. Two weeks after we’d moved into our new home, the home we’d fought for months to get, my wife and I stood looking at each other in our new kitchen, both apologizing.

It was over.

The timing could have been better.

The gross details of what happened and how it happened will be omitted, but in the weeks following, I read a lot of books. I always read a lot of books and one of the things that caught my attention was an explanation that most marriages end because the relationship erodes over time. Neither party means for it to happen. It’s quiet, like tooth decay, and only becomes apparent when the outer enamel cracks open. After that, you have agony and extraction is really your only recourse.

I can say there weren’t a lot of accusations. There wasn’t much of a struggle once the nature of the situation was revealed. All we had was grief and the hope that we could both work beyond the pain and move on.

And this is where I am. This is why the blog posts have come to a slow halt. It’s been an eventful summer. My birthday was okay. I got a new house. I lost my wife.

Over the years, I’ve followed blogs that have touched on relationships that have failed. Some of them got pretty scary. Others wallowed in their grief or accused or condemned. A few tried to put on a brave face, but you could smell the bitterness over the saccharin.

I don’t want to do any of that.

I am, however, starting over and working through a process in the only way that makes sense to me. I don’t know what anything means right now. There is a lot to work though. I have new things to figure out and yes, I’ve been through this before, but it’s different this time.

Cancer Man: Last one standing 2

I could never seem to be on time for Rebecca. Living on the other side of the county, just getting her to her appointment only a little late was a real challenge. Every day, we had road construction, traffic delays and an endless string of red lights that gathered up, you could loop around and around a Christmas tree.

She was good about it. I apologized, explained and Rebecca just shrugged.

"It doesn't matter to me if I'm late," she said. "I've got nothing else to do today."

Of course, I did. I have two jobs, children, a new home, additional responsibilities and a crumbling personal life.

"You do too much," she told. "It's too much."

I nodded, but what of it? What was I supposed to not do?

There is no answer to that.

Every trip, whatever else we talked about (her daughter's drug use, that time the daughter got married out west for six months or that other time the same daughter was tricked into becoming a hooker out in Las Vegas), it always gravitated back toward religion. She took comfort in God. She had a personal relationship with Jesus.

I wouldn't say it was an entirely healthy relationship. Rebecca struggled. She'd raised a couple of kids and a couple of grandkids. Her first husband beat her. Her second husband tossed her out when she gave up her wild ways. She was lonesome. She prayed a lot. She turned to her Bible, to church and to the song and dance of television preachers.

Jesus, by the way, didn't write, didn't call and didn't send money.

This didn't upset her. It used to bug me, until I quit.

I did not mention my lack of faith and took a little bit of solace in her unflappable cheeriness. I looked forward to collecting her for her treatments and enjoyed our time together. It was good to listen to her tell me about growing up in a house with 14 children raised by one mother.

"We had biscuits and gravy every morning," she said. "We drank powdered milk and ate pinto beans every night."

The food was cheap. Anything else they got from their garden or from neighbors. Meat was a rare occurrence. A treat was a bologna sandwich with a dill pickle on the side and a glass of kool-aid.

Comparatively speaking, she had it made, living in a rented double-wide trailer. Beans and cornbread were comfort food, a touchstone to old memories of family, not a daily staple.

She told me about surviving, about getting over the loss of quitting one marriage and being discarded from another. She told me she'd managed to maintain a friendship with her second husband. They were good friends and spoke about every week on the phone. He was a good man, she said. He just wasn't who she needed to be with any more. They'd changed. He drank. She didn't. He wouldn't give it up and she wouldn't pick it back up.

She told me she really hadn't needed the marriage. She'd found purpose in her faith and as the mother to her daughter's children.

"You know, if I'd have thought about it," she said. "I guess I could have asked the lord to send me another man, but I don't guess I needed one. I've been all right without having a man around."

She wasn't bitter about it or resentful. There wasn't even a sense of regret.

I don't think it was always that way for her. I think it took time, but at the end of it, even facing cancer, she hadn't really needed a man around. She hadn't needed someone to be there to hold her, to listen to her or to love her. She'd found most of those things through her grandchildren and through her God.

Really, the only thing she'd needed that she might have gotten from a husband was someone to drive her to the hospital and sit with her for a little while. As that turned out, she hadn't even really needed that.