A Vacation in Goa

I finally got around to watching the movie "Outsourced" and it cleared up seven years in a bit less than two hours - It was a vacation in Goa, nothing more, nothing less......

When the Port Becomes the Storm

There is a certain singular danger in falling in love with a friend, particularly a good one. Friends and lovers provide love and support, and no one consort should hold all the keys to your  heart and provide all the shelter from your storms.
Having one person have so much access to you is comforting and natural,knowing where to run to in times of distress is invaluable. But it is wise to distribute some of that weight to other friends, other acquaintances. I have made mistakes in this area, and the result has not been good - not in the sense of personal pain it caused me, but in the unattractive defenses I have put up. Defenses I don't believe are part of my natural character, but in the end, the things I will be judged upon.
I think I made matters much worse by taking a very long time before I truly opened up to someone, let them in, put all my fences down. It was beautiful and it was painful, I knew peace and ecstasy, and I knew torment and pain. She became my confidant, and I talked to her about everything. She was the only person I had known that I could tell anything to, no matter how embarrassing, not worried that she would judge me. She was wonderful that way. Things were never perfect between us, neither of us was perfect, but we worked on it. Gradually, things began to erode, and we watched our relationship die over several years. When the time came to finally put it all down, I was lost. The person who I needed to run to for shelter was the storm that I was fleeing.
I didn't know how to deal with her. I was angry, and I was in love; I was hurt, and I continued to hurt; I needed her to be kind and soft with me, and I needed to make her understand how she had hurt me; I needed to have someone on my side, and I needed to be angry with her. It was not my best time.
Of course all this pushing made her more resolved to put distance between us understandably. I mistook that for callousness and I dug myself deeper in my self-pitying hole. Meanwhile, there were people all around who would have helped me, but I had no way of letting them in. I said things I didn't want to say, desperately trying to deal with my loss with the one person I had no business talking to. Eventually, I gave up, and did not contact her again.

She had developed a better support system than I, and had acquitted herself with more dignity than did I. I envy her for that. Before, I thought it was a measure of her lack of caring, lack of love. I know differently now. I am not sorry for the relationship, nor that it ended and she has gone to happier places. She may never believe I want the best for her, but I really do. I regret I didn't have the mechanisms to deal with things, and I will try to avoid the error in the future.

True Crime

The Internet isn't always a place of wonder. I have enjoyed the rapid access to all things trivial, the real time information, and the great networking and net-reconnecting potential. I watch obscure movies and old tv shows online, read newspapers from around the world, and listen to vintage radio shows. I love the fact I can ameliorate some nagging need to remember or learn a character actor's name, the capital of Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou - actually I knew this, my favorite capital :), or whether or not Ernest Borgnine is still alive - he is! Despite this wonderful potential, I sometimes learn things I almost wish I hadn't. Such was the case when I was reminiscing about my high school days, and I remembered an old friend, Tim B., probably the most positive, upbeat guy I had ever met. After sorting through a dozen Tim B's on the Internet, I realized the one entry I did not want to read contained the only information available on his life via the Information Super Highway. Or more precisely, his death.
I knew thirty something years ago that Tim had a different heritage than I or most of us in our small town. He was dark-skinned and I knew he was adopted. His adoptive father was the Methodist pastor in town, and his siblings had been adopted as well. It wasn't an issue, and perhaps I am just now realizing his uniqueness. As I read the newspaper article, I learned he had rediscovered his Native American roots, moved to Washington State, and had taken a teaching job at Northwest Indian College. He was an athelete and a poet. By all accounts, he was very popular and was as gregarious and genuine as he had been in high school when I had known him.
At some point, Tim had fallen in love, and was living with his partner and their two young boys. Things had soured though, and he had even become frightened of his children's mother. He often slept in his office, and told his friends that he feared for his life. It would be revealed after his death, that she had attempted to poison him and even tired to rig his truck to explode. Ultimately, while two months pregnant, she strapped their two sons in the car, returned to the house and walked into his bedroom with her mother on the cell phone and a handgun. With maternal urging, she shot Tim in the head as he slept. When apprehended, she would claim domestic abuse as her defense.
Tim's partner and her mother are in prison. The abuse charges were absurd and eventually recanted. Piecing the story together through Internet sites, I was reminded of the plethora of television crime shows scattered throughout the 1200 channels I now peruse. The story was almost too bizarre to be true. Lost in all of that was Tim, and his amazing love of life. How ironic in this Internet age where there is too much out there on too many of us, there are those whose lives are distilled into one story, one tragic fact. I have lost many friends over the years (Robin, Greg, Simon, Larry, Virgil, Bill, Tim),and they are now evanescent ghosts, disappearing as fast as aging links expire. The Internet isn't always a place of wonder.