Category Archives: Marriage

You Can Take the Girl Out of the Ghetto…..

Posted on by Standard 26
Not if you lose my truck, I don't!!

Not if you lose my truck, I don’t!!

There are days that I am just in the mood to write, and I’ll sit staring at my laptop, perusing different memories, looking for something that might be interesting. Sometimes I find one, sometimes I don’t.

Today is definitely not one of those days. Today, I know exactly what I want to write about, and yet, I’m over-run with a plethora of different angles that I can steer this story-ship towards. In a warped way, I’ve hit the jackpot, and I don’t know where to spend my first dollar. This day was the gift that just keeps on giving. :-)

My mom used to tell me it wasn’t polite to laugh at the misfortune that befalls others, and I agree with her 100%. But I do have to ask,  what if it’s funny?  I mean, what if you are genuinely sorrowful for the complication that has landed on someone’s life, and yet your warped gene pool gave you this dark sense of humor, and you just can not help giggling at the absurdity of the situation? I am trying to see this through the stern, adult eyes of a grown woman, but the writer in me is just going insane!

I pondered this little ethical dilemma all day long. Should I write about it, or not. Back and forth, back and forth….

Hey. What can I say. The story is awesome... and I’m only a mere human. Let it be noted that I did wrestle with the decision.

By the time I left work, though, I had stumbled upon a technical way to tell you the story without actually telling you  the story….Below is my letter to the Story Wrecking Company, who handles all towing of vehicles for the City of Tulsa. This isn’t even a fraction of the whole story, which, let’s face it, is going to be magnificent when its been played out. Seriously. Maybe I should wait for it all to play out, but I just can’t.

It’s making my brain bleed not getting to tell you all the whole thing yet!

Let’s think of this as a little appetizer.  :-) Enjoy!!

Why, yes. I did send it. I was grumpy from lack of sleep and the fact that Chef's newest squeeze LOST his truck.

Why, yes. I did send it. I was grumpy from lack of sleep and the fact that Chef’s newest squeeze LOST his truck.

All Talking Donkeys Aren’t Messengers From God

Posted on by Standard 10

Occasionally, I’ll look at the dashboard of this site, and one or more of the search terms will catch my eye. Mostly, even after the hellacious year I’ve had, the search terms that are the most likely to drive traffic here are “three boobs”, “motorcycle gangs”, and my personal favorite, “nipple shirts”.

Let’s face it.

Three Boobs and Nipple Shirts are subjects that aren’t really good foundations for a serious conversation about life. It’s just appalling to me that men wear shirts that showshrek and donkey their nipples. Ugh. I’d like that to stop immediately.

“Motorcycle Gangs” is more interesting, but again, I doubt I have much to contribute to that subject anymore.

Ahhh, but today, I found one in my little collection that made me stop and say “hmmm”. The term was this;

meth spiritual enhancement

So, to the person who typed in this awesome search term, this post is dedicated to you.

In my quest to understand what Chef was going through, I studied everything I could find about this creepy drug. What I found out could fill up volumes, but for this discussion, I’ll boil down some things I understand about the drug that I believe should be considered directly in connection with spiritual enhancement, or any kind of enhancement, for that matter….physical, academic, cultural, etc.

Bird Fact #1: Enhancements when you are high are only Huge Brain Farts when you sober up again.

To my understanding, the drug affects the pleasure center of your brain. This magnificent computer we carry around inside of our skulls works like a file cabinet, storing stop dudeand categorizing things constantly. If a memory makes you happy, it tends to store that memory close by for future quick reference. If some memory makes you sad, it gathers that clutter up, and safely keeps moving it back into the recesses of your brain, out of reach of accidently being hurt by it. It’s the same for things that give us pleasure. Those things that give us pleasure are  stored safely within reach in our pleasure centers of our brains.

That being said, I do wonder if people actually stop and really examine what we each have stored there. Meth is an excellent way to find out, except who really needs to know that badly? The bad side of this drug greatly outweighs the good, so no, I’m not saying you should try it even once so you know what really makes you happy. Figure it out..You’re smarter than that!!

Bird Fact #2: Don’t be an idiot and try this drug because you want to know what really makes you flush with happiness. You might not like the answer, and you can’t unlearn what you already know. Frankly, neither can anyone else who finds out either.

If singing show-tunes on top of your roof in your birthday suit for the entire world to see is something that you derive real pleasure from, chances are this drug will enhance that desire in you, and your filter which considers consequences of such an action will be bypassed. You’ll dance, sing and traumatize the neighbors to your heart’s content, and you’ll feel good about it…

“I finally get to be me!”  you’ll be assuring yourself.

wrong if it feels good

Wanna Bet?

And then,  your filter comes slowly back to life again as you sober up, and you find yourself  in jail for public nudity, dressed in a discarded moomoo that smells like someone died in it, holding an eviction notice in your hand. To make matters worse, your best friend not only recorded your spectacular plummet from respectability, but then uploaded your shameful experience onto YouTube, and the creepy perv down the street that no one makes eye-contact with, has baked you a cake with a shank in it. Suddenly, the problems you were trying to escape from in the first place don’t seem as bad as the ones you’ve just created during your “mental vacation”.

See how that works? If God, spirituality, religion, or some such thing is something you get pleasure from, you bet your booties, it’ll come up when you are high. I know, because when I used this drug, God was foremost in my thoughts and actions. And yet, even in my intoxicated state, while I felt like God appreciates all the publicity He can get, my conscience kicked in at the same time, imploring me to wait until I was sober before launching into whatever ridiculous thing I was poised to do for Him, like what I’d learned about Him while I was high. I’m pretty sure He’s grateful I didn’t try to “help” the cause during those moments.

It is my opinion that most people, especially men, tend to have sex in their pleasure centers, and women tend to have love in theirs. Meth is considered a sex enhancement drug, but it didn’t work that way for me at all. Because of my complicated relationship with sex, it didn’t actually take up residence in the pleasure center of my brain; but love did. As long as Chef made me feel like he loved me…high or not…I was on board with the sex thing. But if he didn’t, he was on his own. Meth is a very selfish drug. Right there, you can almost see why this crappy drug ruins marriages. One person wants to feel loved; the other wants pure, animal sex. And for most people, there is the ability to love someone without having sex with them, and to have sex with someone you don’t love.

Hence, breakdowns occur.

Bird Fact #3: I’d always be very careful about anything that you “learn” on meth, or any drug. Without that consequence filter, we are susceptible to accepting lies, and turning them into truths in our own minds, which invariably leads to being slapped on the side of the head with our “Oh-Crap!-What-Have-I-Done” brain-gag reflex instead.

Can you learn spiritual truths when you’re high? Sure. You can probably learn anything on dope if it’s important enough to you.

Once upon a time, God made a donkey talk but just because you see the Donkey from Shrek  jabbering at you while you’re high, it doesn’t mean you actually a) saw a donkey physically speaking to you or b) that you’re a character on the next Shrek, or that c) all donkeys secretly know how to talk and are laughing silently at us clueless humans, or even that d)  God had something special to tell you from this lively donkey. It just means you burned your brain a tad too much, and you’ve hallucinated a fake donkey singing a Tina Turner song  to you.

My advice: Render that little nugget of experience to the mental trash can it probably deserves to be in.

If it was so important that God get a message to you that He’d use a donkey  or even more unbelievable, a Tina Turner song, He’d have probably waited until you were sober and there could be no question it was a miracle of God instead a miracle of Dope.

We all look for reasons to excuse something we’re doing that we know we are wrong to do, by finding something positive enough to justify it to others, and mainly ourselves. I’ve found that the “I’m spiritually awakened” excuse is pretty common amongst those of us that tend to like to have a little chemical uplifting from time to time, and frankly, it’s a pathetic one.

Here’s life choices in a nutshell — you don’t owe anyone a reason or excuse for what you do or want to do; but by the same token, you’re the one stuck with the consequences, so don’t be surprised when you’re eating a bucket-full of guilt, shame, and general self-loathing. Own your crap, pay your dues, learn from it, and start a blog or something. Most importantly, forgive yourself and move on.  Don’t waste a whole lot of time on coming up with an acceptable reason or excuse that people will buy. Nobody really cares about that but you anyways.

I’ll leave you guys with one more observation that I’m pretty sure everyone can identify with.

learnBy a show of hands, how many of us know at least one old hippie-wanna-be who’s burned out his/her brain so much, we roll our eyes when they head down Enlightenment Lane?

Yeah. That’s what I thought… :-)

Don’t be that person. Find your enlightenment and spirituality with a full set of brain cells working. That way, you’ll be prepared to defend your opinions and views, and not have people rolling their eyes as you walk away, telling their little children to stay away from you because you think you’re Shrek or something. I’m just saying…

Hope all the mothers had a wonderful Mother’s Day! Especially you, Diane! I love you!

– Bird

PS: I want to wish DJ, my son, a Happy Birthday! You’re my favorite son, little man! I love you!

Know Your Role

Posted on by Standard 12

Tonight, I’m kind of going through something tough, and I’m going to ramble a moment about the reasons I’m not going to dish the latest A-Marriage-Going-Down-In-

Right?

Right?

Flames dirt on my public blog.

I tend to get at least one or two thank-you’s from time to time for being so open and honest in my posts about what I’m doing, or saying or thinking during a various crappy situations. When I write about the latest turn of events in the sinking Titanic that is my marriage, I do tell a lot and I present it as honestly as I can, as I understood things to have happened.

That being said, there are parts of all of this drama that I don’t talk too much about, if at all. It isn’t that I want to spin a different tale or make myself or Chef look a different way, or that I’m just too embarrassed to share how things really went down. Believe you me, I’m not really sure I can be any more embarrassed than I already have been on here.

(If you guys weren’t around for the wisdom and tact that only vodka and a broken heart can give, you missed out on some truly memorable – and temporary– posts!! You snooze, you lose!)

No, the reason I can’t share everything is because some things that happen in my life aren’t only my story to tell. How much of what someone else’s story should I feel free to hold up for the world to see and sit in judgment of; especially if, in my story, they are the villain causing me all the trouble?

I’ve always seen my life as a series of different, yet related, stories; all linked together by the star of each one…me. And to me, everyone else’s lives are stories starring them. People in our lives have supporting parts, and they are important, but in the end, when we look back, we are the common thread in our own lives. We are the star in our shows, and hopefully, we were the good guy. And if we weren’t, we’d like to believe that at least our motives were understandable, if not honestly good ones. I know that I myself cringe when I look back and find that I was just a rotten creep in someone’s story, with no excuse other than I was a selfish snot. I try not to be in that role too much.

I truly loved Chef once upon a time, and even now, despite everything, I feel a certain responsibility to tell his part of my story with care. When Chef is remembering this particularly tragic story later down the road, he will still be the contract-bound star of his own story, and the whole sordid affair will probably look much different through his eyes than it did through mine.

Even if he is the villain in this particular drama, he isn’t guilty of always being my nemesis. I have volumes of stories where he is the hero, and only one in which he was my enemy. How he understands all of it will, in my opinion, shade his interpretation of his role in his own book. Messed up on drugs, he won’t, and doesn’t, care a lick. But sober, this particular chapter of our lives is going to hurt him tremendously.  And that will decide how he classifies himself – the good guy everyone roots for or the bad guy everyone roots against. This is super important to most people, if not all of us. It’s tricky territory you’re getting in to when you have enough power that you can actually shade someone else’s own perception of himself. Given the set of circumstances we’ve been dealing with – memory altering drugs, big, angry emotions floating about everywhere, questionable motives on all the major character’s parts, and my own penchant for writing on a public blog – it isn’t all that unreasonable to believe that I could possibly influence this man’s opinion of himself, and I don’t take that kind of responsibility lightly.

If we have learned anything from movies and television these days, it’s that it’s all in the way you tell the story. Any mafia movie like The Godfather or television series like The Sopranos is a prime example of what a villain/star looks like, and it isn’t much of stretch to apply that same method to our own lives. Ironically, it was Chef who taught me this clever little saying back when we first started out together – my perception is my reality. What I write on this blog about the capsizing and slow descent of my relationship in to the murky waters of divorce is just that – a story told from my perception, and of course, I’m still the star of my own little life.

There are things I’ve said and done in my own Book of Bird that I was very distinctly, and shamefully, the villain. I’m also the kind of person that thinks that if I admit my faults to the world, I’ve taken a weapon away from my enemies that they can use against me later. That, coupled with my belief that only Jesus has the right to judge me, has pretty much shielded me from allowing someone else’s opinion of me as the ultimate truth about what kind of person I am. I’m finding out, though, that I may be in the minority of people who think this way, and I’m positive Chef isn’t in line with that thinking. I have this optimistic approach to people that makes me think that they can relate with me on these bonehead levels and will show me some mercy. He just thinks I’m a bonehead for admitting to the entire world I’m prone to being a bonehead. I love differing perceptions. I really, really do.

From the beginning of the chapter of my story that details the excruciating pain involved with breaking marital bonds that have been in place for so long  until now, I’ve told a lot of stuff that if taken just from this blog alone, would give a lopsided view of Chef and who he is as a whole person, and that, to me, is almost as bad as telling a bald-faced lie. Chef, if taken as a whole book and not just this one chapter, would be classified as a really good man who lost control of a situation and ended up the bad guy in one chapter of a couple of people’s books.

The sum total of most people is never completely good or completely bad. I’m guessing that even our worst criminals had one or two qualities that were shockingly good, or clever, or even endearing. The human character is complicated, and complex…it’s a tapestry of a lot of different things, and as such, a good person can do bad things, and a bad person can do good things. And this, to me, invalidates anyone from being labeled a good or bad person at all. The key is that we’re all fallen creatures, and given the reins of our own lives instead of handing them to our Creator, we all end up in bad situations that mostly all started out with an understandable, and maybe even a good, reason.

To me, Chef, like a lot of people, didn’t want to grow old. He had things that he wanted to have done, places he wanted to visit, and goals that had slipped away from him. Time had passed by so quickly it seemed. He tried to change how he felt with something that he unintentionally lost control of, and the change in his brain caused him to act without considering consequences. He hurt everyone he loved, and has lost everything he worked so hard to get in the first place.

Say what you want, but as probably the one person on earth who truly understands this man, he’s paid for all of this in spades already, even if he doesn’t quite realize it yet, and if he does get well again, he’ll be harder on himself than anyone on earth could ever be.

I hope that my readers understand that sometimes I’ve written from solely my perception and my hurt, but I never wish to set anyone, especially Chef, up for ridicule, judgment, or condemnation. I still harbor a hope that Chef’s story will have a happy ending. And sometimes, the world just doesn’t need to be privy to every single thing a person has done wrong in a situation.

–  Bird

Failures Make The Best Stories Later

Posted on by Standard 10

good friendsI was talking to my friend Scott the other day, and I mentioned how I had read every single advice column known to mankind about infidelity, divorce, separation, etc., and pretty much broke every cardinal rule there was in my quest to recover from the damage my ex did to me. I can laugh about it now, but I can see where most of this sage counseling would have made things a little easier on me. Problem is, I’m rarely in control of any of my emotions when I’m hurt. I figured I’d share my mishaps with my friends here so all the women out there who know what they should do, but still do the very worst things anyways will have some company.

There’s tons of sites, but I’m not going to quote from just one. Instead, I’ll pick out the ones that really, really were glaringly  correct, and I equally glaringly blew them off anyways. :-)

INFIDELITY ADVICE FROM THE EXPERTS

1. Practice indifference. Cheaters are usually flaming narcissists. The cruelest thing you can do to a cheater is pay no attention to them.psycho

And this is what Bird did: I completely agree that this would have been my best course of action. Instead, I wrote him emails, letters, blog posts, text messages, and slapped him with a PO order. I waited by the phone for him to call. I dropped everything and came running any time he crooked his finger. All said, the guy has a library of correspondence from me that he admits he never read.

2. Let them live with the natural consequences of their crappiness. Cheaters are really good at not taking responsibility. They pin the blame on you.

And this is what Bird did: Because I felt fate and consequence would take entirely too long, I moved the timelines I could control up a notch. I tanked a million dollar lawsuit we’d been a hair’s breath away from winning, because of one snide comment from Chef about pretending he loved me to get the money. One comment. One. :-) I turned off every utility that was in my name, and scheduled them to be off on the same day. I sent texts messages to his new girlfriend about embarrassing secrets he had. I called them both every mean name in the book. There’s more, but I think you get the jist. I was pissed.

3.  Succeed. Go be awesome. You’ll enjoy that in its own right, but I promise you, it will get back to the cheater.

And this is what Bird did: I didn’t totally fail on this one, but it’s all relative if you think about it. Chef lost pretty much everything because of an addiction, so he didn’t set the bar to succeed all that high. Yes, my rent is paid, but I also live in the ghetto. He is unemployed, and I have a job, but it’s the same job I had before. I think where I really succeeded is that I learned to laugh again quicker, and he is still struggling to just get up each day.

4. Expand your world, make new friends and try new things.

And this is what Bird did: Especially at the beginning of the separation, I withdrew from anyone and anything. I hated that I seemed to not be able to think about infidelty fail 911anything or anyone but myself and how much this all had hurt me. I drank like a fish, mixing ambien with it at times, wrote mean posts, sobered up, pulled them down again, and cried, cried, cried. I could hear my anger in every word I said, and it made me feel even worse. Finally, after Bekkie put her foot down about booze, I began to address the emotions, live through them, and as they were tackled, I got the sense that things just might calm down. Still, it took a really long time for me bother with new friends or new hobbies. My world was really, really lonely.

5. Keep being the individual you were before you got in the relationship. When you give up aspects of yourself, you stop being the person your partner fell in love with.

And this is what Bird did: When you get married in your early twenties, and stay that way until your mid-forties, my guess is this advice isn’t all that good. In true form, I reverted back to a dork teen-ager that had been dumped by her first boyfriend. :-) Shall we call that a point for me? I’m still learning who I am, and that has been one of the few things about this whole crappy chapter of my life that I’m really enjoying. I’m a work in progress, but at least I’m progressing.

6. Don’t talk about relationship problems with other potential love interests. Common sense, right?

And this is what Bird did: And still does — talks to The Guy about Chef a lot. But I’m actively trying not to bring things up all the time. Or at least wait for him to ask before bringing it up. What can I say? I’m traumatized.

7. Don’t use contact with other people to make your partner jealous. This is a form of manipulation. Even if gets your partner’s attention, he or she will resent you for it and think less of you.house for sale

And this is what Bird did: Rubbed his nose in all of them. Maybe he thinks less of me for it, but I don’t really care. 

8. Don’t cast insults at your ex or his affair partner. You are the victim, and as such, you maintain more dignity than either of them will ever have if you remain composed.

And this is what Bird did: I did not remain composed in any shape, form, or fashion; nor can I say I was in the least bit dignified. Once, I physically hit both of them in their/my living-room. I perceived smugness from them both, and reacted accordingly… I muddied the waters with my reactions, and when it was all said and done, I regretted almost everything I said and did all along the way.

These are just a tiny scattering of the many, many wisdoms I couldn’t seem to follow. So, to my fellow sisters on their own journeys through hell, my only advice would be

Me & T - Ninja Warriors battling for the love of a man who cheated on us both. We're both winnners..even if you can't really tell. :-)

Me & T – Ninja Warriors battling for the love of a man who cheated on us both. We’re both winners..even if you can’t really tell. :-)

to not be all that hard on yourself even if you fail. If all of this didn’t hurt so badly, we could have all followed these truths with no problem. But when something strikes us to the very core of everything we’d built our worlds around, a bit of psychotic, extreme behavior is to be expected….and later, those are the episodes that make the best stories. :-)

– Bird

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