The musings of a madman...

  Man, it has been a wild couple of weeks here… Month before last, I bought a lottery ticket and it has been sitting under my keyboard unchecked since the day I took it out of my wallet. Week before last, I was cleaning my desk of extraneous receipts and old mail items and happened upon it.   “Lemme scan this shit” I thought as I opened the lottery app on my phone to do so. So… I called in sick for only the third time in 16 years working here.   One time Ava was sick and the second time I had been rushed to the hospital FROM MY DESK the previous day. I have retained a lawyer and an accountant for the tasks of protecting myself and making sure these ladies in my life are taken care of (trusts for the girls, etc…). Next Friday is my last day employed, like ever.   I worked a notice because I actually like my manager and she deserves at least my professionalism. I have begun arrangements to purchase the land of the home we will be living in, while also beginning the process o

       I have stopped writing two times in the last ten years. The first time was when I split from my ex wife the woman I married once.   I was going down THROUGH it.   I felt like shit and nothing I enjoyed was actually enjoyable.   My beautiful lawn went to shit, my house was a mess and my life was more of one.   All things coming down around me, the LAST thing on my mind was putting these fingers to the keys. The next time was after I changed departments in 2018 and was no longer spending 8 hours a day on a second computer that my employer was not monitoring my activity on.   Sprinkle in a week and a half hospital stop 7 weeks later and shit got real, like too real to be worried about my creative output.      Of late, as in over the past three months, my wife (no modifiers, I am actually married to this one) , has been pushing me to sit down and get my ass back to creative work. “Why aren’t you writing?”   she would ask.   I had an answer in 2018 when I apparently narrowly e

     Ian was my littlest buddy of all time… He was a 10-pound Grivet Monkey I convinced an exotics shop that shouldn’t have sold him to sell him to me. …  and he tried like hell to ruin my life.      Funny thing about monkeys, even little ones.  They are territorial little shits, even the little ones! I was basically not allowed to have company in my house when Ian’s cage was in a common area, or he would raise all grains of holy fucking hell until he was the center of attention.  Covering his cage didn’t help, and ignoring him with an exposed cage would serve it that he would ASSUREDLY fling shit in your direction.      I should have tried to train the little bastard to pitch for the Pirates, he had quite the arm!      Anyway…  As long as Ian was being played with and the center of attention, even outside of his cage, then he was all good.  One night I had a female supplicant to visit me.  Immediately upon walking in the house, she noticed Ian’s cage hanging in th

     See-through Sunday…  On a Monday. 8:20pm is when my fingers hit the keys on this one.  I have been awake since 6, and even that was on only about 6 hours of sleep, with reasoning for which I can only blame myself.  I have no work tomorrow and could crash out RIGHT now, but I also don’t want to wake up at 3am, so I am pushing through it.      I moved into this house in August 2009 and closed on it 12 weeks later.  This is my 9 th Christmas under this roof, my 6 th one as a father.  Somehow this one feels different.  I spent it with both my existing and incoming families.  I woke up and had to wait on the babies – one of whom is actually 19 – to wake up so we can start opening gifts.  We made said babies breakfast, a tradition in my family.  I am at the age where it is not about what is in the boxes, but for the reaction of everyone else in the room when they open theirs.  The magic of that littler one’s face when she woke up next after me and sees what Santa left her,