heartlessviking

Back from Thanksgiving with my friends, after Thanksgiving with the folks, and I’m lucky and I know it to have two groups of people happy to have me for Thanksgiving. Dad played Alice’s Resteraunt by Arlo Guthrie, he knows how to sooth me. I wanted to play this one for him, didn’t get around to it. Then of course ended up talking about heavy metal with my friends.

I’m just an old cowboy these days, in Oklahoma that’s an okay kind of thing to be. Toby Keith joined the choir invisible, so did a lot of the old boys, Cash, Orbison, I could go on. Served […]

this is going to be rumination on my personal journey of faith. I don’t want to convert anyone. Despite potential signs to the contrary, I don’t care how you feel about god, christ or the afterlife. This is a problem solving technique, because I am quite stuck.

I find it uniquely frustrating, given the country’s dive into Christian nationalism, that God seems to have grabbed my ankle at the same time. I was an agnostic for pity sake. I can’t even take the lords name in vain….. gee wiz. All the framework of faith is there, because I never discard a framework. You never know when […]

Just now, I was still pushing. It’s currently 7:30 PM local time, I started working at 10 AM , and I had the thought;

“Who precisely am I trying to impress, who am I doing this for? There’s no point in pushing this hard.”

So I wrapped it up, finished my task and filled up a water and now I’m writing out  my feelings about it because that is almost a reflex at this point. It’s hard not having a set schedule, after having one for so long. Maybe I needed to say that, just to admit it to myself.

I’m a workaholic. I like the feeling of […]

I think a lot about that book I read as a child, The Giver. The main character was special because he had capacity to See Beyond. I feel like that book was prophetic in the way it describes what it feels like trying to break out of society, trying to describe something that goes against what most people understand.

Anyway, I’m not going to start talking like Charles Manson or David Karesh. I’m no prophet. Just some guy with an idea I feel like trying. I felt really strong when the idea was right in front of me; the property was on the market, and enough […]

The city has moods, me and this city have gone round and round. I happen to know a few places where the city will drop things off for me to find when it wants me to find them, and today was a day I got that itch.

Sure enough there it was, a 200-300 dollar keyboard, for $20. Right next to it an $80 amp for $35 so I’m sold and I grab them both. The keyboard is name brand, a Yamaha. The sound is really good. All I had to get was a cord.

The thing about it is this is something I couldn’t get myself […]

not sure I believe, not sure it matters. Thursday afternoon my boss and her boss pulled me into an office and gave me my walking papers, I was shaking. I asked why a couple times and they couldn’t give me a reason. Seriously, it was just that I was still on probation, and they don’t have to give me a reason. It wasn’t disciplinary. Sign here, hand in your equipment, this had never happened to me like this.

Past two days I’ve been trying to live in this reality. I’m not suicidal about it, at all. Not even that mad. Other people are more mad than […]

I don’t know how I’m holding together at this point. As previously mentioned, I’m near as bleak as I’ve ever been. All signs point to that I should be flat on my back, unable to sit up. This entire thing, the work, the burnout, then this past week…… certainly no part of myself thought me strong enough to still be standing after all of this.

To be fair maybe I’m not, I haven’t been clear eyed sober in some time. Better days those where, when it was safe to trust anyone other than me. I don’t even trust me, it’s just I can set my watch […]

said doctor, aint there nothing I can take?

I said doctor, to relieve this belly ache?

I said doctor, aint there nothing I can take?

I said Doctor, to relieve this belly ache?

then he said; “Now let me get this straight, you put the lime in the coconut you drank them both up”

The sicker I get, the more I sing, I’m singing half the time I open my mouth not working. I’m not okay.

20 years of working my butt off, and this is the thanks I get, 66% of these jerks would rather have red hats than me. My current work won’t exist here if his plan goes […]

Okay, Tuesday is going to be stressful, potentially. That’s my initial lead into the day, is that everything is always a maybe.  We prep for the worst, then hope it doesn’t happen. Sometimes it doesn’t!

The worst would be me imploding at work. I don’t know if I could come back from that, as generous as the people around me are. I don’t want to find out because the shame would be more agony than whatever they did to me.

I’m on front desk duty this week, the frontline defense of our department. I deescalate and present bad news as not so bad on a regular day, […]

another of my attempts at poetry, we’ll see

The woman who lived was a singular soul

neither young or old, eternal and ephemeral at the same time

She walks in shadows I can no longer reach

She languishes in lonely and desolate places

Yet they leave no mark on her

She lives, but for how long?

The woman who lived, many roles has played, many ways I’ve seen.

She is not ordinary.

I loved her once, and then I learned to appreciate her another way, a familial love.

We only have the people that will show up. Not the people we want to show up, the people who actually do.

The woman who lived stands in […]

I’ll say one thing for these dark periods, I didn’t know I was as morally flexible as I apparently am, but I’d do almost anything to get out of this god forsaken crap bucket of a town.

I was stuck in traffic, just starting to come unglued when I had the thought; if you commit a federal felony in another state, they jail you there, meaning if I could come up with a severe enough felony I could be free of this crappy town. Yes, I am at the point that a federal prison anywhere but here sounds better than here.

I’m open to other things, equally […]

Oh city to which I was not born, and to which I never belonged

Oh city which never had place for me, always found new ways to charm and decieve me

Oh city, you are the city I both love and hate the most, and perhaps will always be

Oh city, which hates children so

Oh city, which hates the elderly so

Oh city, which hates the homeless so

Oh  city, who pities the rich, prosperous and Christian

I should have been your favorite, but I suppose I reminded you of what you despised.

Oh city, which provided for my mental health

Oh city, which once offered so much in terms of hope and […]

Two people I thought were dead, about two or three months ago, around the time I really came unglued. One online, the other my oldest friend……….. that is incredibly sad to me. That she’s my oldest friend, because ten years is small potatoes in the world of friendship. Thirteen years, and she’s one of the only people I’ve ever loved nearly unconditionally. All the friends older than her are either dead, out of state or pretending they never knew me these days.

Today at lunch I found out she was still alive, but barely, and it’s always barely. She has a heart defect, genetics are cruel. […]

I’ve thought before that part of my struggles in life might have to do with blood pressure. My dad has high blood pressure. I’ve been diagnosed with it, once. I’m on medication to control it. It happens to be also for sleep and ADHD.

Last night I took a shower, first time in a week which isn’t bad I have an office job. But the blood pressure drop after…. it lasted. It kept going until the next day, today. There was only so far I could get my blood pressure up today. It was like a speed limit. I know there was a beats per minute […]

Lately I’ve had this song stuck in my head, which is kind of impressive for me since I collect catchy songs;

I’ve been realizing I can’t spend my life reliving college. I have no idea where this song came from in my life since it came out before I was born in 1985. My parents didn’t particularly listen to Bruce Springsteen. My best guess is summer camp, we listened to a lot of cheesy Americana back then.

Anyway it sat half remembered in the back of my brain until last week. I was watching Bruce belt out one of my all time favorites Cadillac Ranch. He was […]

Jim Carrey is an interesting distorted reflection for me. Due to time of life and circumstance we’re very similar. The same was once true of Robin Williams. I thought he had gotten out. The end bit where Jim is depersonalizing, realizing that even Jim Carrey is a character he plays, that’s where I was awhile ago.

I didn’t realize his life started where it did, in homelessness and despair, and who he was is someone he became for survival.  A role he had to play, I can relate.

The transformation is what causes a lot of emotion in me. How who he was inside changed, he seems […]

So many years trying to put it into words. Even expressing that time is a form of admitting defeat. In this moment, I’m probably not so awful or monstrous at all to most eyes. Well Sweeney Todd didn’t look too threatening getting off that boat, did he? The monster before it demonstrates it’s ills is just another beast in the vast array that life provides. It would be charitable and foolish to believe those beasts friendly.

Yet I don’t even look like a beast, people admire and praise me. People call me kind and good. It’s sweet how willing they are to not look at the […]

This is only the second training I’ve ever done specifically dealing with suicide, but this one is by far much more wrong. The first one was sponsored by SAMSA and performed by a veteran psychologist for psychology majors, it was comprehensive and not bad.

This one was sponsored by some mental health organization I’ve never heard of, done by social workers for social workers. I didn’t have high expectations going in to be fair. It was “mental health first aid”, an almost ludicriously oversimplification of maybe people should bother to be literate in common mental disorders.

I could have taught this course, despite never seeing it until […]

It’s literally just now that I had excess energy, for the first time in days, which has been a mixed bag of a breakdown I can tell you what. Yes, breakdown, once again my week ended with me trying to quit and failing.

The difference between these and other times in my life that I’ve had breakdowns is that I am remarkably better resourced now than I was even 2 years ago. Which allowed me to build a plan… that’s all that is usually required to get through even the nastiest shit. Oh and this definitely qualifies as that.

I can’t harp on it much though,  counterproductive […]

I dance around it, complain about other things as if they are the main problem, but the real main problem between me and most of the species is that they don’t see the way I do.  It’s taken me years of working on myself to try and express this, and I still don’t know if I’ll succeed.

Other human beings have a sort of intuitive sense for conforming. They see and hear things differently because they didn’t have to push those two senses like I did. Not to say either approach is better, just that I’m frustrated that they can’t see mine.

I wish I could think […]