I have no mandate as I prefer the ladies..

I am finally starting a blog, it's 2004 right?

Why now? I need to get out of my brain a bit. It is damn crowded in my skullspace and all the good, bad and ugly is just all getting too jumbled up. If you are reading this then thanks, I plan to be also posting drawing, long-gestating thoughts and just whatever I need to release. I figure if I can start here with my brain, off-loading all that I am carrying inside, then maybe I can make sense of what is going on outside as well.

It's been a bit of a year for me. This time last year, I was working a full-time job in graphic design, living a full-on domestic lifestyle with a house, my wife, two children and a cat. I was about to get an iPhone and as an iNerd, that was a big happy deal.

Cut to a year later and things are quite different. I am separated, working sparingly in a new career, living in my Dad's basement away from my children and cat... Yes, I still have the iPhone though but it is a little less satisfying since they put a new one out.

2010/11 has been a shift of all of my norms. I see my sons a lot and I suppose at some point once I have the appropriate living arrangement I will claim my cat from my Ex?.. Frankly, I don't know what to call her. In my mind I still go to wife and that is still a lot more than just habit.

I went back to school to start a new career. I finished well and it has since been both satisfying and frustrating at the same time. I help people, that is cool but I have no stability, frequency or routine. That is aggravating when your entire life has been thrown into utter chaos and upheavel. I miss my old career yet the thought of it also stings and smolders. I lack a sense of what I am doing and what I want to do.

The hardest part of all that I have gone through though, is that I am surrounded and feel scrutinized, likely not on purpose but I do feel in this flip flop of loneliness and aimlessness while being judged and questioned as to why I haven't moved on. Love and support no matter how well intentioned, appreciated and still needed, still at times feels like being eyeballed through a peephole in the ceiling while you are taking a shower.

If I didn't have my sons and they weren't the best part of my life right now, I would of just left here and started over somewhere else. I could be "that new guy, the new with nervous smile, who never talks and seems really sad but since we don't know him who cares and why is staring at my boobs?" Anyways, I am already that here anyhow.

Escape is a luxury I don't have but my boys are also the best reason to stay.

So, what else then? When does the shitty end and and the shiny start? See, I want to be different, but I also want to be what and where I was, cuz, it was closer to LaFiesta and I love burritos. I miss so much  about who I was, even with the realization that I wasn't completely satisfied and happy in that state. So now I am trying to sort through the wreckage of this past year.

My instinct has been to just grab it all, stick it in some bags and carry it all until I know where I am going, like there is some destination where I can just drop all out of those sacks, set it out and there, everything's all better. I see that is ridiculous but as a creature of comfort and that is how I deal with it.

So, I guess, this is the floor so I suppose I am just going to start emptying some bags a bit at a time, making a trail, of my cobbled past. On the upside, I can look back and see where I have been, what's been there for so long and what I don't need anymore.

When I feel like got nothing, I know I have the Force and want to show it.

 

There is no secret to the simple truth that I am Star Wars geek. This love is almost rolled into my DNA (No, I will not make a midichlorians reference, that is my genetic equivalent of nose hair, to be trimmed and not seen even though it still a part of me for better or for worse.)  I hesitate to tell norms that I play D&D or that I want to be a Muppeteer or aspirations to try stand-up comedy but, I have no problem saying that I grew up ensconced in that simple and wonderful ancient and far away adventures and that they contributed to who I am today.

I still collect the toys, I still get tears when Yoda lifts the X-wing out of the swamp, I still think Carrie Fisher is hot in a bronze two piece (in the movie, she is an incredible woman still today but I find her sexiest quality today to be her wit, that said, I am glad Jenny is working for her.) This is part of me and of all my geeky qualities, this is the one I embrace the tightest, want to share with my boys most desperately and wish when I find in love again that would be understood and maybe even slightly reciprocated by another.

There is a point in your life when you know something will not change for you. I always thought that would be family, marriage, friends... But that is a been proven a false belief, oh yeah, beliefs, those are liquid too. It's not me being down on the people who have been part of my life, it's just that my relationships with people inevitably change. 

I am separated from my wife (she really wasn't a huge fan but didn't think less of me for it,) my boys like Star Wars but I believe that that is more them feeding off my love of it and friends, while I still have many that are lifelong, come in and out of your life for different reasons. Star Wars, still there, still affects me with its simplicity, makes sense in an increasingly tangled and confused world.

I would like to get a tattoo and I know what it is but for me to do something so permanent, I need to know it will be something I will always feel right about. I know that I want to get one for each of my sons, one for my Mom but what those tattoos will be are unclear. 

No, the only tattoo that I know I want for sure and where is Star Wars related. Star Wars is in me, its silly to love something that is really just an idea that is meant to be pretend, but, pretend is my safest place. My imagination was lit with the cardback of a Walrus Man figure from K-Mart and burns higher than Darth's funeral pyre today.

So now, the only internal struggle I have is, am I ready to have a slave Leia pin-up tattoo on my arm? Some argue that she was a stronger woman in Star Wars and that if I want to be representing her as she was in A New Hope. Sure, she was out to save her people, the ideals of the Alliance and to try and destroy the tyranny of the Empire. All admirable aspirations and goals but, she was also a cold fish and I think she used all of those causes to keep people at bay.

In Jedi, she was saving something that was much more personal, love. It was a messy, almost a selfish thing to do, after all, the responsibility of the universe was on her shoulders. To go off with and risking one of the last jedis in the universe, to rescue one man who most would of already written off, even by the actor who played him, showed a belief that I can identify with more than New Hope Leia. 

I know that it isn't the popular answer but, if I was in her position, I would of risked it all, for the person I love. Love is messy, difficult, and wrought with personal decisions at the expense of higher ideals. I know the Leia that did that made the decision to risk it all to get his love back. She is more human and I know that feeling. I have never had to strangle a giant slug to get that, but, I have made decisions in my life at the expense of other things for the sake of love. So, I am on the precipice of that decision.

...What, you thought I wanted an Ewok tattoo?