I was told earlier this evening (after I had been encouraged to babble a bit about my life, sharing some of the pieces of my memory forth both good and bad), "For what you've been through, you are remarkably well adjusted."

This was from the mother of one of my friends who always manages to ask some very insightful and meaty questions on those rare occasions that I am invited over for a social dinner. She has a lifetime of experience and the vocational history to have an opinion with weight behind it.

And after she made that rather surprising statement (it was pretty much a non sequitar at the time she said it) I managed to blink and thank her for saying that. We proceeded to make jokes about everyone being having issues and so forth.
I think my contribution of that was bringing forth the shared memory of when John Astin guest starred on the TV Show Night Court as a reoccuring character who provided Judge Harry with a connection to his deceased mother. This particular memory is about when everytime the conversation about Astin's characters history, there would inevitably be a point where John Astin would get this extremely big grin on his face and say, "I'm feeling much better now"
(accents are where my memory place them... No guarantees of accuracy. It has been proven that I do occasionally misremember minor details. Or more likely that's the way I wanted to hear it then *grin*)

So I'm an extremely well adjusted product of my disfunctions. *grin* Good to keep that in mind and hopefully I will start to believe it more. Because was I tempted to compare the extremely brief (though still convoluted... whoda thunk?) overview of some of my father issues (I can run, walk, and crawl nearly the whole length of that subscription) to the icecubes in one of the scotch glasses on the titanic being the amount of the tip of the iceberg.

At some point and I can't at this moment remember if it was before or after the other quotable quote she mentioned that I need to start writing some of my stories down (Not all of my stories are deep and heavy *grin* I got some light and fluffy moments too). This was shocking to me at the time, because yes it is on my mind that I would like to be able to share a lot of these moments in amber with anyone who would be interested, after all that is part of why I started this blog. So that there would be some snapshots of me and my thoughts.

But part of my hang up has been that to think about and re-experience some of these moments mean coming back to some topics and places that are not comfortable to talk about. I am aware of my mortality despite some startling evidence at times to the contrary *wry grin*.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

I share what I can and would love to share more. I have a Great Work being crafted inside me and one day it will be ready. But I have to let go of my attachment to that also or it will never get too tangled to be spun out easily.

It's really late and even I recognize that I'm getting a bit obfuscated.

It was also nice to be told how passionate I was when I was talking about massage and different modalities. Its really hard to hide when you love something. Though I probably would have been more introverted about it if she hadn't have jostled me a bit with some of the conversation leading up to it that encouraged me to start opening myself up more.

Thank you.

Now off to contemplate my navel for a bit *cheeky grin*

We'll see how this goes.

I will try and give a brief capsule and then tie this back into a blog I was working on... its gotta be around two months ago now.

I have spent a significant portion of my free time this summer hanging out with a nine year old while his mother was working (I have days off during the week). A huge amount of the mental and emotional investment in this has some very bittersweet fruit. A conversation for another time, but suffice it to say for now that I have a lot more material for processing some of my issues *grin*. {Thanks dad... *wry smile*}

So now that he is gone back to his father, I have a whole lot more free time to spend getting introspective. I'm going to have to break the cycle really soon, I just can't quite feel or visualize yet how that will end up materializing.

I've been working on this message awhile and even had a section of it composed and prepared (and links to wedding photos) a couple months ago, but there is so much meat to this message if I can get it all down I've had to come back and forth a couple times... Especially with some of the emotional weight to some of the subject matter.

While I was working on it so many months ago, I had managed to create a time and space that I could focus on what I wanted to write about but then had another one of the visitor from Porlock moments. No matter what I did , I could not find a polite way of extricating myself to get back to my writing and by the time I did the vestiges of my muse had taken her fickle self from me.

So I'm getting back to some of my basics again, working on listening and being able to follow my own rhythym and seeing where the labyrinthe leads me to next.

So here I will insert the previously recorded babbling and then I will continue on with the rest of the thread.

{---- Insert previous drafted post here ----}




The only vote I received for a specific choice of what I should write next from the choices I presented earlier was a vote for a blog the topic of marriage (with the initial focal point being my niece's wedding obviously) so here goes a series of rambles on said topic.

A couple weeks ago despite trials and tribulations I managed to make my way back to Alabama in order to attend my step-niece's wedding. The mother of the bride asked me to run her video camera during the ceremony. She especially wanted a shot of the groom's face as he saw Jessica for the first time in her dress. I was a little disappointed since I wanted to be manning my new digital camera that I bought a number of months back since its a very good camera, but I agreed to be a videographer and handed off my camera to my mother for a while during the ceremony itself. (And I have to take a moment to tease my mom for a bit since somehow she managed to get a bunch of blurry photos on a camera that normally has excellent autofocus and the lense that I got for it has an active gyro doohicky that eliminates most if not all of the shaking from being hand held.)

BTW, before I forget... Here are some of the photos from the wedding.

After the actual ceremony was over I regained control of my camera and proceeded to full my memory card with almost 700 pictures over the course of the evening. I spent a good amount of time standing near the professional photographer taking most of the same set up shots of the wedding party as she did, as well as taking a large number of crowd and random shots throughout the reception. After the seeing the DVD filled with pictures that I burned and sent back to Alabama, the bride's mother made the comment to me over the phone that she actually wondered why they needed the professional photographer. *grin*
Which reminded me of one point where I'm snapping merrily away and I heard the photographer say something about wishing that she had changed out her lenses for one of the shots but that it took too long to do so. I looked over and asked her what type of camera she was using. She told me what type of camera she had and I managed to restrain myself from opening my mouth and inserting my foot.
The reason why I almost stepped in my own mouth is because this lady was using the exact same type of camera as I was except that hers was analog and mine was digital. Other than the convenience of being digital and the fact that I didn't have to be loading it with film constantly the importance of this revelation is the fact that her lenses and mine are changed the same way, as a matter of fact we could have swapped lenses since they are effectively the same camera in that respect. So I know just how little effort it is to change lenses on these cameras, especially with as much time as there was between setups as there was constantly a "wrangling" of people getting them into position and such, which the photographer didn't orchestrate herself but left to an assistant. Hell the only reason I didn't swap out lenses is because the only other lense I currently have is the basic one that came with the camera and the new one I have has a much broader range of zoom capability as well as that nifty anti-shake feature. I may eventually pick up some more lenses but that is me starting to sidetrack *grin*.
To be fair, even though I myself even wondered before and during the wedding event why my sister bothered with a professional photographer when I knew I had a really good camera and at least a beginning sense of how to take photos, I really don't have a large amount of experience at this time and I would not have been able to organize and handle the set up shots and etc. Though I felt that she should have been able to be more versatile and done more with what she had, I do acknowledge that I wouldn't have arranged half of the shots as well as her assistant, so I just piggy backed on their work and took more and better shots *grin*. I remember one point where the photographer was lamenting the fact that there were some buoys in the river in the background of the shot and I was mentally thinking to myself, 'It's gonna be so easy to photoshop that out of these digital shots.'

What I didn't realize until well into the event was that my step sister pulled off several miracles. Take what is under normal circumstances is a highly emotionally charged event, throw together a large number of potentially explosive family dramas and shake it all together and what do you get? No explosions. Zoanna invited everybody to the wedding. Let me see how I can explain that so that the whole enormity of that comes across. How about the picture I took of Jessica with her FIVE Grandmothers?!? Let's see you have the biological mother of the mother of the bride... The step mother of the mother of the bride (that's my mom, Btw). The biological mother of the biological father of the bride. The step mother of the biological father of the bride. And the mother of the stepfather of the bride.

Don't you just love the post nuclear family unit?

Despite the emotional strain and stress, Zoanna, the mother of the bride invited, as my mother put it, "All the exes". There was enough potential drama and trauma and explosive combinations packed into this one event to potentially cause some severe damage or at least enrich the pockets of many a pyschotic-atrist. A good number of people who would find it extremely difficult to be civil managed to behave themselves just fine.

At one point I walked over to where my camera bag was to check on something and some guy was like, "Hey Patrick, do you recognize me?"

I stood there blinking for a moment while I tried to kickstart my memory cells and had to honestly respond, "I know I know you but I couldn't tell you who you are to save my life..."

He said something to the effect of, "I used to be your brother in law."

Honest to the Divine the only thing that went through my mind and out through my teeth was, "But I don't remember spending any time with my wife's brother." *shrug*

I think its probably appropriate that I didn't get full recollection of who this was until much later after I had already taken my leave and went back to taking photos. If I had remembered all the details of who the biological father of the bride was and all of the details of why he is considered persona non grata, combined with some of the strangeness in my life lately, I could have been tempted to have been the one to cause trouble.

So basically there I was doing a very good job of having an F. Scott Fitzgerald moment except instead of looking in through a window I was looking through the shutter of a camera. Even more so an involved part of the life around me than the person looking through the window but still as separated from it as Gatsby was in the midst of it.

How did I get to be so good at being disconnected from my life? Where did it start and how did I get here? I can look at the event and even being as thorough I as consciously can about it point out a multitide of factors that helped shape that state.

The easiest one is that my whole presence at the event was a bit of a synchronicity. Up until almost the day before the wedding it was looking like I was going to be unable to attend due to number of external enforced barriers in my life right now. But thankfully a hole opened up through the briar patch and I was able to make my presence. Which my mother was ever so thankful for, a number of relatives of my step father were there and she feels that she wouldn't have dealt with the situation nearly as well without me there. Which of course surprised me since as I mentioned when she told me, I spent most of my time very butterfly like... wandering around taking photos and not really staying in any one spot for very long, certainly not any kind of foundation of support as I would see it during her highly emotionally charged trips down memory lane.

Another fairly straightforward source of disjoint is of course the fact that I was at this highly romantically charged event alone. It was not just the bride and groom that were very much in love, there were a goodly number of significant looks and touches passing between couples amongst the guests. I spent a little bit of time reflecting on my life and the social dynamics (or lack thereof) that led me to yet another one of the wonderful moments that I would so dearly have loved to share with someone that I could also myself to be emotionally intimate with. I could almost hear the bittersweet music playing faintly in the back of my mind... As a matter of fact I think I did keep a couple songs playing in the back of my mind, but I can't recall what they were at the moment. I'm probably better off that way, I don't need that much help being maudlin *wry grin*.

There are two other major threads as I see them that spiral back into past events that I of course thought about at one point or another. Each one dealing with one of my birth parents and how they intersected at one time or another with the subject of marriage and how it affected me.

{---- End previous draft ----}

I may have to rework this particular paragraph because I don't remember how I ended the previous draft at the time I wrote it or I could just say to hell with it and keep typing until I catch up with my thoughts and emotions.

There are three primary cusps I want to share where the topic of marriage is concerned and part of the emotional turmoil is the fact that directly or indirectly all three are very strongly influenced by someone who will probably not read these words and because of some parts of my nature I will also be aware of some of those who may be reading these words trying to find some meaning that applies to them.

I am a very difficult barometer to read. Apply at your own risk *grin*

Let's start with the some of the earliest of my interesting moments where the topic of marriage is concerned. Setting the Wayback machine for *sigh* over thirty years ago now. I can't remember specifically which front porch it was but my mother called me over to where she was sitting on it, I had to be four.

You know those moments, we all do, when the world gets slightly more real and more intense, your conscious mind does not necessarily know what is going on, but you feel the weight of the world upon you as so much focus is on the events that will follow that the energy level alone is enough to cause panic or an anxiety moment on its own.

My mother indicated to me that she wished to have a serious talk with me. And before I thought about writing those words down I could have quoted you word for word what she said, but at this moment I can only describe the overall essence of the conversation *wry smile* (I wonder if that is part of a defense mechanism?)

She wanted to talk to me about the fact that this guy that she had been seeing (*sigh* such a euphamism, we were already living with him and his children at this point...) wanted to marry her. She was very concerned with my thoughts and feelings on the issue. Its very clear to me that the whole scope of the future lay upon how I respond in this moment.

Through my mind ran so many things, a positive concerto of thoughts and emotions. I did not like this guy, for many reasons, some of them the easy and obvious... I mean after all this person is not my father and my young mind does not understand why all of my mothers and my belongings where there on my grandparents lawn that one day we showed up at my grandparents. (understanding of the complexities of my biological parents divorce did not come clear until my mid twenties when I went seeking that information, but that is another long blog for another time... also with several loose threads that end up so many other places). The young boy does not want to share his mother, etc.

I look into my mother's eyes with the full adult understanding of what the effects of my words will be. With my opinion screaming and clawing at my mind to be released.

I took a breath and held it for a beat.

And released.

I looked again into my mother's eyes and spake thus, "This is not about what I want... This is about what you want. You do what you need to do and don't worry about me. I will be okay no matter what happens."

I wasn't feeling like I was taking a test. It was simply the right thing to do. I swallowed down all the negativity that had built up in my mouth and moved forward.

I didn't think there was anything unusual about being the ringbearer at my mother's second wedding.

- - -

Brief almost random babble from another wedding that I was a ringbearer for. Couldn't tell you whose wedding it was at the moment. But I remember spending the entire day before playing with another child about my age. I remember that they bedded this child down in the "boys" room (Grandparents had a tiny three bedroom house on the farm, my grandparents room, the "boys" room, and the "girls" room. When you are aware of how many kids they had and how small the house was then you can begin to understand the phrase underpriveleged.) I also remember not understanding why they wouldn't let me share the bunk bed with this child but finally accepting it and wishing the other kid "Good Night and don't let the bed bugs bite"

A little while later the child's parents had to come to the room. Evidently by repeating what to me was a very common phrase had made this poor child afraid to go to sleep thinking that there were bugs in the bed going to bite.

The mystery of why I wasn't allowed to have the other bunk bed that I was used to sleeping in was solved the next day when I was surprised to see my new friend in a dress. She was the flower girl. Well I guess short hair and tom boyishness are effective at making someone gender neutral at the age of six *wry grin*. But after that there was a wall in place, I don't think I put it in place since I was used to playing with all of my female cousins. But I probably could have since my initial perceptions had been tossed askew and I may no longer have known how to act and react. She didn't change. My perception did. Unless it was the little boy looking at her and going, "You're a girl?" My... That sucks no matter how I look at it. Though it is kinda amusing.

- - -

Swinging back towards the second of the three pillars of this posting, let's take a look at a marriage that almost was.

Let's see how many of the pertinent details I can remember... I believe it was when I was about ten, I'm fairly certain it was after we moved to alabama when my mother and step-father's plant closed in Michigan and they were offered the opportunity to move and continue employment at one of Chrysler's other plants near Huntsville, Alabama.

Out of a whole slew of changes and permutations this added to my life, one of the things that happened was that I went from spending one weekend a month with my biological father to spending three weeks in the summer with him.

(We will save the trauma of transferring to a classroom where the students were being taught lessons that I had mastered the year before. Oh powers and presences, I remember arguing with my new fourth grade teacher about the results of a problem I had worked for her... She had me figure out the average life expectancy by taking all of the ages of the people in the obituary column of the paper and averaging them. Since there were a number of infant deaths reported my number was a very low answer. The teacher only looked at my answer and declared I was wrong. This was extremely aggravating since I know my math was correct and the teacher wouldn't bother looking at the parameters of the problem to see the cause wasn't the math like she declared. Grr. If anyone who ever reads this has a child or will have a child in the alabama public school system, I have only one thing to say. Private Schooling. You'll thank me later.)

But anyways, So I'm visiting with my father one summer and he has been seeing the same lady for awhile now and he mentions at one point that he wants to share a secret with me. He informs me of his intentions to ask the young lady to marry him.

Long story short about a week or so later shortly before I go back to alabama, the young child that I was lets slip the "good" news to the young lady's mother who was watching me that day.

Oh my... the fireworks.

Its only relatively recently that I've come to understand that my father probably never forgave me for that indiscretion.

That particular moment and all of the fallout around it was probably what brought me to seriously examine the deeper nature of a lot of the interactions between myself and my father.

Outwardly the world moved on, He still dated the lady but never again would there be any signs that the relationship would ever get more serious (despite several more years of dating and joining us on "family" outings). But I think the fault lines between my father grew wider from that. My father felt that I had betrayed his trust and severely damaged his quest for love (Its only my adult mind that understands that if what I did caused such a calamity then it was doomed to begin with... Just another example of being a simple catalyst.) and from that moment on I was definitely withdrawn from my father and would start the process of withdrawing further as I started to take a more mature and honest evaluation of some of the parameters of our interaction (a novel for another day, but an important seed to plant).

... there's a lot more I want to say about that, but it would definitely take a life of its own and take over the rest of this post. ...

*starts humming a ditty filled with obscene language (if you really want to know it ask me, it'll be awhile before I post that tune and the story that goes with it)*

Which all of that unspoken mess has a strong effect on the final tier of this post.

Several months and Seven years ago now, I sent out invitations to my wedding ceremony. I included my father on the list to receive an invitation even though the last several... umm interactions with him previous to that had been very cold and barbed (yet another opportunity for elaboration another time).

So was I entirely surprised when I received an email to the RSVP email address that simply read "I do not attend the weddings of strangers."

Disappointed. Still hurt by it.

Surprised. Not in the slightest.


My failure in that situation and another one of those moments where my inability to communicate well with my now ex-wife was over this message from my father.

I had without a shadow of a doubt from the moment I read the message assumed that my father was referring to me as the stranger.

What I didn't realize until almost 5 years later was that my ex-wife thought he was referring to her.

I merely shrugged at the time and mentally added it the list of things that he had done to me, or calculated actions meant to affect me to further drive a wedge between us... instead of talking to my fiancee and explaining what was going on between my father and I. Even if I could have fully understood it at the time... or ever.

So we left that moment with my yet again withdrawn emotionally and my ex-wife thinking that she may be to blame for some of the dynamics between my father and I.

And to play Devil's Advocate, we could say that he was referring to her and not me. But considering my attempts to "reconcile" and at least communicate with my father for the several years leading up to that moment were strongly rebuffed, then no. No objective evaluation could see that as more than what he may have decided to tell himself was the reason in order to make himself feel better.

If he had wanted anything to do with me, if he had wanted any of the healing I could have offered him... The last words I heard from him when I was asking him to meet me for dinner when I was driving to Michigan so that we could meet on neutral ground and just talk... those words would not have been, "Let's just say I'm busy this weekend"




and if any of you wish to devil's advocate that one. That conversation opened with an almost accusatory tone quizzing of why I called him.

I was hitting my stride. I was calm. I was ready to heal. No matter what I would have to face.

He was stuck in his own fear, not mine.

Since Dragoncon is so fresh on my mind, I won't be able to work on any of the partial blogs that I have sitting around until I manage to at least get a few things set out as a framework for future contemplation. (Click link for pictures)

A number of times this weekend I heard several different people speaking variations of the phrase "What happens at Dragoncon stays at Dragoncon."

Which brings at least two questions to mind?

Is the corruption of an advertising campaign for Las Vegas that hints at "Safe Anonymous Debauchery" really a valid plan to keep any vices secret? Or is it just a way to keep from being embarassed when you do things that under relatively normal circumstances most people would be surprised that you did... whatever it was.

For example *grin*

Let's state a Hypothetical situation that in no way bears anything more resemblance to actual events than a semi accurate retelling of a possible quantum view of a memory (*grin* did I twist that enough to protect the quilty? er I mean the name altered innocents...)

Let's just postulate a situation where someone was a lazy bastard, or just otherwise really wrapped up in numerous dramas and hadn't gotten around to reserving his own room for the event like he had done the previous year and was now planning on sharing room space with people that I, er he *clears throat* had only really begun to hang out with since the last Dragoncon.

None of the possible room configurations were entirely optimal (and technically I ended up paying for staying in a room that I didn't stay in), so all of this helped add to my decision to embrace my inner insomniac and to stay up as late as I possibly could as well as sleeping as little as I could.

So there were three times that I got some sleep (four if you count an hour and a half nap I took on saturday afternoon). There was two hours saturday morning where I meditated and dozed in a chair in the room from 6:30 to 8:30. There was the 6 hours of sleep the next morning when I made it back to the room at nine am and slid into a freshly vacated bed after watching HR Puffinstuff for the very first time (while more than slightly tipsy no less... great fun... A talking flute and witchiepoo... It all made sense after the kamikaze)

Have I mentioned yet that I spent a considerable bulk of each evening in the Drum Circle? Depending on the ebb and flow of the particular moment you have anywhere between a half a dozen to over 40 drummers all joining in and sharing their rythym space while lovely women (and a few not so lovely guys) dance in the middle of the circle. (Usually the numbers are an inverse proportion to the time... Around midnight the crowd is huge and the energy is extremely vibrant. Closer to dawn the numbers are much smaller but still very deep in terms of intensity.

But back to the whole sleeping thing. The last night I decided that I needed to make sure I got enough sleep to be able to properly function while packing up the room and preparing to vacate within the parameters that were in place both temporal and logistic. So there I was (about 6 am again) getting in bed with another guy who had just gotten back from walking someone five blocks to the hospital (not my story so I'm not going into that gossip) while I was keeping an eye on his girlfriend who had gotten hammered again and didn't want him to know that. She was in the other bed with a lady whose husband is currently in Iraq.

We make the obligatory jokes about the other person rolling over in the middle of the night and crawl into bed. He makes a number of comments about how he is used maintaining only a small portion of the bed due to an ex-wife who was a "bed hog". I wasn't worried since I knew that I wouldn't be moving overly much if at all while I slept any nervousness or concerns that he had were purely his own issues coming out. I closed my eyes and stretched out my breathing.

Four hours later I'm drifting along nicely still in the exact same position that I went out in. I'm walking back towards full consciousness in and around the occasional restlessness of my bed partner and my awareness that it is fast approaching the time that I had wanted to be moving and go to the dealer's and exhibtion halls for any last day of the con sell it cheap so we don't have to pack it up sales, when i'm looking at the ceiling through slitted eyes and weighing how comfortable the doze I'm in is versus the knowing that I really shoudl be starting my day when suddenly this hand lands on my lower abdomen.

I don't move or physically react.

I wait only half a beat before speaking in a normal tone of voice, "I'm flattered but you're not my type."

The hand moved back to the owner's side of the bed and a moment later there was a macho joking, "What happens at Dragoncon stays at Dragoncon!"

Sorry Chris (name altered) but nothing sacred is secret *grin*

Now for the deep psycho anal ticks (damn those blood suckers!)

Now I can strongly postulate that such an action was no more than the action was initiated from someone's brain cells misfiring on faulty information from the less than conscious world, but where I get twisted up is when I look at it alongside some of the other "what happens at ... stays at ..." moments from the weekend.

So on the postulation that his subconscious mind was thinking that I was his girlfriend, how do I reconcile that with his girlfriend's claims that he has been insufficient in his displays of affection for quite a long time (there were a couple of people involved in that conversation and when they all added up the lengths of their "dry spell" together {including the lady whose husband has been in Iraq for wee little bit} it did not begin to approach the length of hers for the title).

And this person's (hopefully) unconscious hand is the most direct and clear offer for intimate companionship I got all weekend? *evilgrin*

Come to think of it I left the drum circle for a significant portion of the first official night and ended up in another group discussion of relationship difficulties and challenges. What a tempo for the weekend.

Maybe I should just work out how to describe a sunrise for those who have never seen one instead. Probably much more rewarding in the long run *grin*.

Will try to have some pictures up in the next day or two.


... Not all those who wander are lost.