Part One

I just got back from San Diego about two hours ago. On the way back up I got caught up with a sudden stoppage of traffic. Thinking that I was in for the long haul I slouched back in my seat and started to daydream a little about how nice it would be to be home already when suddenly this huge black pick-up in front of me swerves out of the way. Next thing I see is a smaller pickup fishtailing wildly out of control on the other side of the road. It had a trailer with a bunch of construction equipment in it, which was, at one point perpendicular, and another point side to side with the truck, the truck began to rear around to face the opposite direction it had been going, but I turned my attention back to the driving to see another pickup on the other side of the road, this one fully stopped, with a man halfway out the window, arm outraised in the air, not paying attention to what was going on right in front of him with the runaway truck and yelling, just yelling, I don't know what he was yelling with the window rolled up I couldn't hear, but he was yelling at someone on the other side of the road. I turned to see, as I'm slowly vearing out of the way of the out of control truck, to see a cop standing by his car with the lights already on. At first I wondered how he got there so fast but then I saw that there was a dusty old black pontiac wrapped around a telephone pole a few yards away and a long haired kid with the look of someone who had just caught the break of a lifetime standing by. I would have given anything to have that moment in my life caught on film.

Other than that my trip was mostly uneventful. My sister and I clash really bad, I have noticed. I think I understand a little bit better now why, but it still is hard for us to get along with one another. We seem to get along alright with all sorts of other people but never each other. She is so much like my dad sometimes its unreal. Well, my dad isn't like that as much anymore, but she is. What I mean is my dad was the type of guy who would get really pissed off at me for small mistakes and infractions and then when I really screwed up have no idea how to handle it and mostly just ignore it after telling me he didn't approve. Its hard to deal with someone like that, thats just how my sister is. I got berated many times for being somewhat clumsy in her small apartment with shit everywhere (I was there to help her move in, everything was everywhere the whole time) but then I screwed up something on her computer, something that was fixable and didn't cause any real damage, but pretty damn annoying to her and she just kind of shut down and couldn't even deal with me. Maybe its just a symptom of not being able to express herself that well, I think thats how my dad was, but he's been getting theropy for a while now and its really helped him to deal with me a lot more productively. My sister can't do that yet, but she is started school monday to become a Psychologist and will have to get a lot of theropy herself and so she should be able to deal with me in a few years. I realize I am not the easiest person to get along with sometimes, but I like to think that I am fairly transparent in my feelings towards people. If I don't like you you probably know it and if I do like you you probably know it and if I'm mad or happy or whatever you can tell. I don't verbalize it that well, but I try to make it clear, and I think I do a decent job at it for the most part, so one should at least be able to deal with me based on such critera as listed above. Maybe I'm not that great at getting these feelings across, but I do really try to make sure that I am getting these ideas across. I just try not to let shit build up and explode out of me. I think I used to do that, I also used to let a lot more crap get to me which I've been able to avoid for a little while now by simply dealing only with what is happening at the moment and never remembering the bad times. There have been times when JJ and I have gone at it a bit, nothing approaching violence or anything but just yelled at each other for a few minutes and then kind of got through the moment and in the end we came to some sort of agreement or we stopped caring about whatever it was we were arguing about. Later sometimes JJ will apologize or want to talk to me about the argument and what it meant or whatever, not in a bad way, thats just how he does things which works well for him, I think, but by the time he'll bring it up not only will I not be angry anymore I will have sometimes completely forgotten we even argued. That was a long way of illustrating how I have moved more into the moment of emotions and trying not to let them build up. That is something I don't think most people in my family can do, which is why I think I have so much trouble getting along with my sister and why I used to have trouble dealing with my dad. My mom is kind of bad about it but she seems to be forward moving more often than not, just more passionate in the heat of the moment about things. She can let things go sometimes, and not other times. So thats probably why I can only get along with her part of the time.

Sometimes I'll stop when I'm writing one of these long entries that deals a lot with my family because I think that it is rude to air personal business in a place that anyone could perhaps come across it, but then I figure, hell, my family is a big part of my life, I have a right to talk about it wherever the hell I want to talk about my life. So, that being said, I have a hard time getting along with anyone in my family. I told Mike tonight that I thought "That's it, no more family stuff for me!" when I was leaving my sisters and he asked "What? Like quitting or like you've put in all your time and you're all caught up?" And I said, "Both. Like I just paid off my credit card and now I'm cutting it up and throwing it away." Maybe not a perfect analysis, but I'm having a hell of a time dealing with my family anymore, and I'd like to be able to get along with them, but I think I need to be away from them for a while. We're all changing a lot in now, and in the last year or so, and there is just too much going on with them and I have no idea where I stand anymore and I've come to the conclusion that, at current, I am fucking incapable of dealing with these ideas with the people they pertain to so I am just going to go off to my own little world for a while and just try to figure out where I actually stand and bulk myself up, so to speak, so I am ready to deal with them when the time comes. Sometimes I want to join an order of Buddist and live in isolation and meditate and just fucking focus myself. I don't count myself Buddist or zen or anything, I just like the idea of nice, quiet, personal reflection. Every once in a while I will jump out of my head and try to picture how other people see me and I will see something that isn't quite what I was going for, but I don't know if I'm disappointed or not. It's a little weird, I just don't know where I stand. (by the way, this is not a cry for help to a religious person, this is just an honest interpretation of myself, if I want to get religious all of a sudden I will make it clear. I bring this up because I have said such statements in the pressence of religious people in the past (I don't think anyone here, but some people I used to work with jump to mind) and they instantly tried to convert me, and I said I didn't want to be converted and they said "i think you do." but I didn't/don't)

I'm not quite done with this diatribe, but I probably won't get back to it tonight so we can just call this part one.