2023 was a year of change for me. Well, to be honest, 2024 and 25 were too, but for different reasons.

anyhow, the forementioned ’23 changed my life. i lost, as you know, both of my parents that year. february and november. the former i was so involved that i almost lost myself, and in fact, i probably did lose some of ‘me’ as it were. i know that i lost my mom. my little mommy. she was my champion for most of my life. yes, there were times when her marital instincts took over, as they should have, but she was, for the greatest part of my life, always in my corner.

anyhow, the end of the year saw my father leave my life. a different scenario to be fair, as my idiot brother, he of the forgery and fraud, took my father away from me. i am sure that he thought he was doing the right thing, he and his equally moronic wife, but at the end of the day, this was all about him being the ‘big man’ and taking up the mantle of ‘caregiver’ and ‘guardian’. yeah, ok. legends in your own minds.

at any rate, back to the narrative, and full disclosure, i just reorganised my little pantry, sort of, and now i’m sitting here, iTunes sort of blasting Def Leppard with the Royal Symphony and a partial glass of ice cold white wine at hand, and writing to you.

i harken back to a M*A*S*H episode where Sidney was taking refuge at the camp and journaling his thoughts to Sigmund. well, if you don’t mind, you can be my Sigmund for today. well, in hindsight, i suppose you have all along, haven’t you. whether it is Sigmund, or Carl, or i don’t even know who else i would write to. i’m not that smart to be honest, to have someone to listen to my cranial meanderings whilst prone on the horsehair couch.

i’ve never had a mentor, nor, do i recollect me ever being anyone’s mentor. i envy those of you who have had, or have had done. i truly do. to think that you are imparting your knowledge, your experiences, your successes and failures to someone who can learn from them, is really quite cool. or to be on the receiving end equally amazing.

at any rate, i am here, in ’26 and wondering where the last 3 years went.

23… two parents gone. a trust and that it entails to deal with, and well, a change of geography. and that is what prompted this missive. the geographical change.

why you ask? well, i was taking the bottle of wine off of my little Juliet balcony, and looking out for a moment on the partial view of what is not ‘my’ city, but the city that i now call home, i said to myself that while things have been up and down, and down more, the move was a good one.

did i make mistakes? christ, yes. myriad mistakes. but, one choice, i will never regret. not ever. well, two.

ok, three.

two sons, both of which i don’t see, or even hear from or of anymore, but never could i bring myself to regret the choice to bring either of them into this world.

and the other? well, you all know what that is.

anyhow, 23 and 24 were good. 25? not so much. 25 was self inflicted. i do that at times, as we all do i suppose, but i take things in, and they stay with me. they do not fester, they stay. they are buried, but in the shallowest of graves, able to come to the surface with the calmest of breezes.

23. the year of doing what i do, without a thought to who i was or what i was doing other than i needed to look after my father, and make sure that his life was the best that it could be. i want to think that i didn’t fail him, but in my mind, well, i did. i’m sorry Dad. but you know that.

my mind these days rife with thoughts of the past, the present, and the future, always the future.

there are pieces of my life that i wish that i could take back, or write off, but you know what? we are, whether we want to admit it or not, made up of everything that we have done, seen, been party to and everyone we have come into contact with, be that brief or lengthy.

would i change things if i could? well, that’s the 64k question isn’t it?

do you change one thing, and hope everything else stays the same, or do you change that one thing knowing that something really fucking good might never happen.

i am who i am. fault laden sure, but deep down i think that i’m a pretty good guy. yes, i know there are some of you out there who will say well no, you aren’t, but i want to think that they are in the minority.

i would love to have been around during the times of writing love letters to your beloved. not emails, or tweets, or whatever social media bullshit you subscribe to, but i mean, actually pen to paper letters of love, longing, hope and connection.

sitting in my fathers office one day, with him, late in the evening as it happened, i looked up on the bookshelf and took down a leather case. i thought it was a day timer, you know, those things that we buy wanting to use, but never do? only in this instance, it was full of letters. from my mom to my dad.

i read some of them to him. we both felt the presence of my mom with us at that time. (she had passed away by that time).

that case is sitting on the top shelf of my bookshelf right behind me, and it will always be with me.

love letters. written.

anyhow, while 23 was hard, and 24 started tough, got better, ended meh, and 25 for the most part has been a shitshow, the one constant has been my enduring belief that i will get through this. i have to, you know?

and, funny as this is going to sound, it isn’t for me.

as always, i hope you and yours are safe and not in any areas of conflict, and

as always,

i bid you,

peace.

write a lot more than i do now. myriad reasons i suppose, however one of them is that i am actually busy. well, busy-ish and the impetus to write isn’t as prevalent of late. also, i don’t read the news. once that idiot to the south of me got elected, i cancelled all my subscriptions to news feeds. no more NYT, no more CNN, no more AP, BBC, nothing.

why you ask?

simple. every day it is the same thing. lunacy. bullying behaviour. posturing and sabre rattling. and quite frankly i just don’t need that noise in my life, as i have enough external clatter to keep me occupied to have that nonsense filling my already overflowing airwaves.

cold here today, -28 real feel, with a winter storm watch in effect for the next while, so inside i am, and inside i shall stay. youtube fireplace with some soft jazz music on the tv, and here i sit, marshalling my thoughts just to clear out some of the detritus that has accumulated over the last while.

conflicted of late. i keep asking myself why i am continuing down a certain path, and why that path cannot just become a dead end. dead ends i can deal with, turn around, and find another outlet, but paths that continue on with no real coherent thought to the direction that it is taking you is something that yes, i have done before, but now, in the fall? approaching winter of my years, i need to have something a little more defined.

however, well, just however.

this world that i am in, professionally, isn’t an easy one, and one that i really didn’t want to be in at this stage of the game. but, here i am, and my goals haven’t changed, only become more delineated, and more strategic.

johnny depp said something, a quote from someone else the other day i saw, in an old interview… ‘money doesn’t change people, it reveals who they are’. that is so true, and so germane to the world that i am now.

everyone wants to be paid for doing literally nothing because they see a large sum of life changing money on the table that they think they are entitled to a share of. not how it works, and not something that i will allow to happen.

however, i believe that my approach to how i do things is fair, and once things are settled, i can then leave this path that i am on, and forge another, more sensible one to last out my time on this crazy lump of dirt.

changing your wiring though, in the later stages of your life, isn’t easy. whether you believe in the preordained or the adaptive you can choose how you live your life scenarios, your wiring is your wiring. just like your memory. nothing leaves. you just make it harder to get at.

well, my wiring is such that as hard as i try, and perhaps that is the key issue, that i am trying too hard, i seem to not relapse per se, but slide back into that familiar rut if you will of what i think is needed, whether that is correct or not.

take my personal life, the stagnant mess that it is.

on one hand, the path that i can envision is beckoning should things alter in such a way to allow the journey of a 1000 miles first step, and on the other, well, a journey indeed, but a solitary, but maybe more rewarding one.

words and actions.

i do know that the former journey aforementioned would be a wonderful one. this i know, and this i hold onto. and i think that the latter journey might be exciting, but it could also turn out to be one of heartache and sadness. well, if i was wired that way i suppose it would, or could be.

the snow is actually going up outside my window. i live in a high rise near other high rises so the tunnel causes this effect. snow going up. kind of neat actually.

have i mentioned that i dislike weekends? well, i do. freaking hate them. and then the week starts and everyone is back on the urgency train. why not just stay on it, but keep the pace and the emotion level and not have all this up and down all the time? pisses me off to no end. but, i suspect i am in the grossly tiny minority on this thought so i will leave it for the nonce.

i looked at a few places the other day with my dear friend and real estate agent. one of them was, well, just one of them, but the other two present a quandary. no gym vs a gym. cosy vs high ceilings. exclusive vs not as much, but still some. and the list of comparisons goes on.

were i to choose, no, were i to be able to pull the trigger right now, i know which one i think i would take, but i harken back to the aforementioned path. would that companion make the same choice, and would it be a mutually agreed upon choice? who’s to say Bob, who is to say.

i want to think that i know, actually, i probably do know, but hey, men are easy, women? not so much. and yes, it is a woman…

anyhow, a discussion for another day to be sure.

making some bread today, so my flat is filled with the smells of that. quite nice to be honest, homey if one can apply homey to the monk like life that i lead. not so austere as a monks cell i grant you, however, solitary as a monk you can safely go all in on.

people that sign agreements, to pay for services rendered, and then say, oh sorry, i can’t pay you, piss me off. and that is the end of that. if i continue to write, it might get unravelled and then who knows where this post might go, or even end.

anyways, i am going to get up and move about for a while, so will leave you to your day(s).

as always, i hope that you and yours are safe, and not in any areas of conflict, and

as always, i bid you,

peace

well, i’m a guy, so thinking isn’t part of our dna, however, i do often wonder if i wasn’t born at the wrong time, or perhaps i’m just really not meant to be part of this era.

i see things differently than others do, or rather, others see things that i don’t? no, that’s not correct, as i do see life with a different set of eyes than those around me.

not sure where this is going to be honest, but i was just reading a bio piece about a NHL goalie, Glenn Hall, who passed away at the age of 94. the sense of this man, arguably famous for many on-ice heroics, but to me, the goalie who was in net when Bobby Orr scored that famous goal to secure the Stanley Cup for the Bruins.

he was humble, with a sense of humour, and from a time when there was decency and honour in the world. not like today where everyone is out for themselves, and wanting others to be the ones to fix things, or pay for things, or make the world better, just so they have a nicer environment to exist in.

would i have been better off to be born 10 or 20 or even 100 years earlier? not sure. i think that even though i ponder life in let’s say, Victorian times, my presence in this world came at the time it was supposed to.

why? not sure. maybe just to be the one who looked out for his elderly and ailing parents when i did, or to be the one to bring two sons (whom i don’t see, and most likely never will again) into the world.

or, well, i just don’t know the or.

to say that i am struggling is a vast understatement, and yet, the consciousness of this struggle, the front and center of it, isn’t there. my brain, for better or worse, is wired in such a way that it deals with what it deals with, and any extraneous influences, like ‘i’m really struggling here’ aren’t part of the program.

yes, i know, i’m odd, and most likely have issues. LOL.

been cold and shitty of late, snow storms, etc… but hey, this is the great white north, so… but, today, while pretty cold out, it’s sunny, which is nice..

struggling of late.. seems to be a recurring theme with me, but it is true. my work life is stagnant, and my personal life, well, let’s just say either the train is still in the station for repairs, or it has left the tracks somewhere and it’s going to take a year to get it cleaned up. you choose.

comes down to this;

in my work life, i am dealing with layers for the most part, and everyone wants to get paid, but no one wants to work. and, everyone it seems wants me to do the work, yet, not get paid… there seems to be a slight disconnect between those two thoughts… LOL

and in my personal life.. well, as always, it comes down to, well, you can’t pay my bills, so i can’t commit to you or us. self valuation taking a hit on that one, to say the least.

Sully Erna – Avalon on now for reference. If you’ve not listened to this, you should. Great album. He of Godsmack lineage.

I think one of the things, that is wrong with me, and yes, there are more than one, trust me on this point, but I think that perhaps I feel too deeply. There are times when I wish my IQ was a few points higher so that my EQ was diminished. Meaning that I could still interact, but the romantic, caring, empathetic sides of me were in smaller percentages. Why?

Well, here’s the thing. I care. Yes, I do. I know, it seems like I don’t at times, but I do, and my memory and my brain and the intricacies of both have been well documented on here, don’t allow for me to bury things easily. No, it’s not that I harbour ill will, or hold grudges, not unless I specifically need to, but to say to someone that you love them, or that you miss them, or what have you, and not get it back. Well, it sucks. And the reason why it’s not coming back is that you, meaning me, can’t take care of them in the lifestyle that they want.

And yes, I am fully aware of the fact that I have been guilty of not returning affectionate phrases or declarations of love/caring in the past, still am to be honest.

But that is neither here nor there. What is here, and what is present in my existence is the simple fact that I am struggling with a side of me that wants a life, a home, and the other side that just wants to say the hell with it, and move on. What to do yanni, what to do?

I know what a therapist would say. At least I think I do. Trouble is the acceptance of that resolution. However, the desire, if you want to phrase it as such, is diminishing with every passing day. I think it is anyhow.

People say that I am interesting. People say a lot of things… LOL
Anyhow, I don’t see it. I just don’t. I see me. As I believe everyone does when they consider themselves unless of course they are ego laden like some people that I could mention. 47 being the chief amongst them.

Anyhow, I really don’t see me as others do. Yes, I know, I joke about how good I look, or what have you, but deep down, I am me. A guy who has lived a life of ups and downs (more than I can count, and been down so long it’s staring to look like up to me), lefts and rights, and more mistakes than I am able to remember. No, sorry, that’s not true. I remember them all. There is no such thing as forgetting. We just layer our memories to make them harder to access. The trouble with me (a long list I assure you) is that I can access them. And if I cannot, my brain finds them anyhow, and brings them up, usually at 3am when I am wide awake.

Looking back on this life, this amazing and really pretty varied life, I wonder at times, if one of the times that I was shot. Yes, shot. Well, I was wearing a vest, so nothing in me, but it still freaking hurt, and trust me it’s not like the movies. You don’t get right back up.

Anyhow, one of the times, I wonder if it shouldn’t have been the end of me. But then, I think of my two sons. No, they aren’t present in my life, but they are in this life, and bringing joy (I hope) to those around them. I think of my parents in the last years of their lives. Would they have been taken care of by my asshole brother and his wife? No. This I can categorically and without fear of being wrong, state that they would not have. Not to the level that I cared for them. Or tried to at any rate.

I have done some good I think. Yes, I have hurt people. This I know and will take that to my grave. But, I have been hurt too. At least I think I have.

Anyhow, music and me today. Tom Waits on the list, which is cool. I am going back to listening to albums again, and not pre-ordained playlists. Need to change the narrative and this is a change, albeit a small one, but hey, each journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Yes, I still love her, but my love is, at least I hope it is, unconditional. Not sure that it can be said of the other party.

Until I see you again, and inflict my brain upon you, I hope that you and yours are all healthy and happy and not in any areas of conflict.

And, as always, I bid you…

Peace.