Month: August 2005

a couple of days ago i was lounging at my friend jack’s new studio, where i noticed a sample photo book on his coffee table. it’s the photo book some people get done for whatever event…usually, like in this instance, a wedding. so i opened it up and was looking at the bride and groom. i had the impression the groom looked sort of familiar for some reason, but i brushed it aside. flipping the page, i was looking at the bride and bride’s maids. i looked at each of their faces. nothing. then i noticed one of them had tattoos. then i realized i recognized the tattoos. yup, it was tamara. she has lost an amazing amount of weight…skinny like her elbows and wrists and shoulders jut out of her skin. i didn’t even recognize her face or body. bizarre. then i realized the groom was one of the philosophy grad students tamara went to school at uofh with. flipping the page, i was looking at the groom and groom’s men. that’s when i noticed alistair isaac (the guy tamara had the affair with). he was the “best man” (ain’t that a misuse of terminology for him). sick curiousity got the best of me, so instead of putting the book down i looked through the rest of it. a couple of pics of tamara, a few pics of alistair, then there they were — the “happy” couple sitting together in a chair.
i would like to say seeing the pics really screwed me up emotionally, but the fact is my norm is being screwed up emotionally these days, so it really didn’t do too much. i mean…it’s sort of like being numb, completely physically exhausted, ears fuzzy but ringing, eyes blurred, watery, unfocused, and you’re trying to decide if it’s time to stop listening to that strong internal survival instinct and just let go.
i feel i’m at a precipice, on the edge of something big. something. or perhaps it’s an illusion and there is nothing out there, on the other side.
i think the early stages of the fire — the brilliant external display — have passed, and now it is internal, hidden, slowly consuming everything. either i will rise anew like a phoenix from the ashes…or i’ll just be dead.

selections from the uplifting music in my cd changer:
still i would forgive you if you let me
i’d be glad if we could try again
[…]
no matter what you do, i always will love you
and you will never know how it hurts to see you go
–johnny cash “thanks a lot”
(“i still miss someone” is too obvious)
there’s her rings, all her things,
and her clothes are in the closet
like she left them when she tore my world apart
–george jones “the grand tour”
(i already covered “he stopped loving her today”)
home for sale, not all that old
a family’s dream stands dark and cold.
scenic views that go for free
of all the love that used to be
–dwight yoakam “home for sale”
(chosen over “this drinkin’ will kill me”)
[insert almost any hank williams tune]
with your wedding ring in one hand
and a bottle in the other
i sit and wonder what i’m gonna do
–johnny paycheck “with your wedding ring in my hand”

i just downloaded and installed the google talk beta. you have to have a gmail account to register, but gmail is now open to everyone (instead of having to get an invitation by someone already using gmail). part of the gmail sign-up currently requires a mobile phone, which is kind of goofy but they have valid reasoning for doing it that way.
if anyone installs google talk, my gmail username is “leifeste”.

sorry about the title, i think i’ve been drinking. (i love how people use drinking as an excuse for their behaviour…as the drive-by truckers sang: “alcohol doesn’t make you do anything, it just lets you”…or something along those lines.) i left the house and drove my motorcycle down 59 at 100+ mph for a bit, then ended up turning around and heading to sam’s boat at the fountains. oddly, my mom, my brother, and my friend jesse all called me right about the time tamara was supposed to be showing up. i wasn’t in much of a mood to talk though. jesse had read my previous blog entry and offered to let me hang out with him (thanks jesse), but i didn’t really feel like interacting much. so to sam’s boat i went (chosenly randomly because i know they serve alcohol and they’re fairly close to my house). i ordered the red beans and rice and started drinking. all told, i had either five or six “southern gentlemen”, which is what i named the drink the bartender at catbird’s had created and didn’t have a name for. it’s kalhua, bourbon, and 7-up. it tastes sort of like a cream soda, and it’s good. one of the waitresses at sam’s boat was very attractive in the way i like…cute and sexy and healthy (i.e., not model attractive or super-skinny or such). after jack finished with tamara (who didn’t take all that much stuff, as i’d expected…although jack told tamara and me that he was going to come over and throw it all away because i shouldn’t have to deal with it) he called me and headed over to join me. he offered to talk to the waitress for me (i declined) and offered to give me a ride home (i also declined). (thanks jack.) i called my brother while i was there and talked to him for awhile. did i mention i had a fair bit to drink? i wasn’t bad driving home or anything. but here i am. so i guess it’s over, for whatever that’s worth. not much. i hid a drawing i did inside the box of tamara’s 1979 xmas ornament (the year she was born, so it’s the first). i hope she opens it on xmas day one year. i have a scan of the drawing. i’ll upload it and make a link later sometime. right now i’m kind of tired and just want to go to bed. it’d be nice if i still had a wife who loved me to go to bed with. thanks, tamara. thanks for everything.

it’s 8pm. tamara is supposed to be coming over at 9pm to pick up her stuff. as much as a part of me wants to be here — either to be defiant or to be sad or whatever might happen — i think it’s probably best if i leave. i’ve tried to clean the house some, although it’s haphazard and second-rate at best. i know why i care, but i know it really doesn’t matter. my life has been filled with a split between knowing things and accepting things for the last couple of years, generally with my emotional well-being finding itself the victim. i’m not sure how much longer that will go on. i really appreciate george jones’ “he stopped loving her today” (lyrics below) — a gut-wrenching heartbreaker of a song — but i’m not sure i really want to end things like that, as poetic as it may be. sh!t, cutting and pasting the lyrics made me start crying. maybe i’ll write again later tonight.

Continue reading “t minus one hour and counting”

i keep writing entries and then never saving them as drafts or anything. then inevitably my computer crashes or reboots (work…a pc) or i forget and close the window (mac…at home). and then the moment i was in when i wrote the entry is gone, the mood is gone, and the text is gone. it’s generally not much of a loss i guess, just more whiny, sad ramblings about the brokeness of my life and my inability to seem to really get past it all.
i was planning on trying to clean the house this weekend, since i don’t really want tamara to come over to pick up her stuff and see the house in a bad state and feel good about choosing to leave me. like it really matters, huh? *laugh* but still…. however, i ended up going to church with sue and their kids, then eating at their house with them and marty and christine. then brad called and he and kelly were going riding, so they came over. so i spent the rest of the day and night riding around. we went to an icehouse out on westheimer for a couple of hours (it’s actually the farm-to-market at that point, i guess) near mason road, then back to jack and sue’s for a few hours, then to catbird’s for a couple of hours (at westheimer and montrose).
after i got back home, jack came over to pick up the tiger install disk. i showed him where i’ve had tamara’s stuff set aside for the last (nearing) two years, since i guess he’s going to be the one coming over with tamara to observe/help her get her stuff on tuesday evening. he talked to me about all of that, about how i really just need to get everything related to tamara out of my life and move on, then also about what’s going on with tamara.
from everything i can tell, she’s pretty messed up. she’s basically become many of the things she used to dislike about other people. the problem is, i feel like it’s because she’s mentally ill, and i keep thinking maybe she’ll snap out of it or realize what’s going on and work at becoming normal and honorable again, and maybe be like the person i fell in love with and married. i guess that doesn’t seem too likely though. and even if she did, i guess it’d probably be too late for us anyway.
i just don’t know how to express how much it grieves my heart to hear about what kind of person she seems to have become. to hear about how it looks like she’s surrounded herself with people that hardly care about her, but that are her “friends” now. about how she’s most likely driving herself into a huge hole. even if there could never be anything between us again, it crushes me to hear that she is probably spiraling downward…either oblivious to her destruction or pushing it along in self-enforced ignorance.
the fact is, my marital vows to her, my ties to her, my love for her…they meant so much to me…and i’m really having a hard time turning them off and giving up. why is it the person that i love so much has inflicted so much pain on me and is very possibly destroying herself? G-d, please protect her and give her peace and guide her toward Your love. it seems so absurd for me to feel this way after everything she has put me through over the last couple of years, but i can’t help but cry when i think about her confused and screwed up and hurt and alone. why is this how things have to be? i loved her. i loved her and it doesn’t matter except to cause me pain.

i got a call from sue who said tamara was trying to set a date to pick up her stuff, and if we didn’t do it soon she was going to have to get her lawyer involved. wtf? she then quoted the decree (which i still haven’t seen) which said we would take care of it by august 31st. (so at least that was done as i’d thought it was going to be done, and not as tamara pitched it before.) uh…it is now august 19th. so what exactly could her lawyer do? remind me i’ve got a week and a half to take care of it? there’s absolutely nothing i’m doing wrong at this point. but tamara has to threaten me through a friend. what (if anything) is going on in her head?
anyway, i told sue i could do it sunday evening. she called tamara and then called me back and said tamara could do it next week sometime, but not sunday. hello? should i threaten to get my lawyer involved because she can’t do it the day i set, and in the decree i believe it said tamara would work with the schedule of me and my friends? that she’s not doing it soon enough?
no, i’ve tried my hardest to never stoop to the levels tamara has continued to employ ever since she decided i was worth cheating on and taking advantage of. besides, her posturing is nonsensical anyway, and i generally don’t like being combatively nonsensical…it’s not really my style.
let’s face it, she’s pretty much just bluntly lied to me and my/our friends about any number of things. before i knew about the affair, after it, about it, about our divorce, about money, and on and on. is it possible her friends and family actually support or condone or prompt her behaviour toward me?
isn’t it enough that she took a lot of money that she’d always claimed she didn’t want and was in no way hers? isn’t it enough that she screwed some guy behind my back while i was still married to her, financially supporting her, and trying to figure out how to deal with things? that she was scheming how and when to leave me that was convenient for her? isn’t it enough that she told me over and over she wanted to do things fairly, wanted things to be done “as amicably as possible”, and then did nothing to make things amicable at all? (i guess it would have been amicable if i would have done whatever she wanted and smiled about it.) what happened to the good, intelligent, fair-minded, rational tamara? supposedly she loved me. supposedly she made vows before G-d and me and the state and our friends. supposedly we were best friends. supposedly she wanted to have a child with me. where is all of that?
it’s this kind of incongruency that makes me think she’s mentally ill. how can one reconcile the person she was with me and the person that she is now? i just find it hard to believe she is now as evil and mean-spirited as her actions come off. yet i’ve been the object of the spite and hypocrisy of this “new” tamara over and over. it really breaks my heart to see her be like this, to have her treat me like this. maybe she feeds off the fact that the amount of money i thought was fair for her in our settlement was too low in her mind. (never mind that mutual friends felt it was fair, so it’s not like i just made up some number to be mean to her or something.) maybe she thinks my pain is all an act for sympathy or something. maybe she blames me for any number of things.
or maybe she doesn’t give me or what i’m going through because of her a second thought. which is probably more likely, because it sounds like she is probably completely self-absorbed and willing to do whatever to whoever to get access to the things she craves.
i keep getting hurt by her over and over, but it seems like it’s never enough to finally make me fully understand and accept that she is a different, worse person and i should feel satisfied i did everything in my power that i could and that i have to give up and move on because all i am to her now is a meal ticket that’s been used up and is now expired.

i scratched the lower pipe on my bike today. dang it. i guess that’s what i get for being impatient. i cut between the pole and gate at work like i normally do, but i was sort of in a hurry and took a right too fast and scraped it on the curb.

tamara backed down on picking up her stuff yesterday. i don’t know if it’s because she knew she was trying to force something that wasn’t actually in the divorce decree, if she misunderstood things and was just being understanding, or what. no matter. i really needed some time to try and pull things more together in the house.
unfortunately, that’s just going to give me more time to fall apart.
when i was driving up to the house today, i saw the element in the driveway and for just a split second i thought tamara was already at our house and would be waiting for me to get home to talk and eat and do something with our evening…like my mind had gone on autopilot with that thought like it used to do years ago. i haven’t had that mental experience in probably a year or more.
why the hell can’t i just let it go? our marriage got fscked up and she chose to have an affair and leave me. that’s it. there’s nothing i can do about it. she chose to push things beyond what i thought i could ever see being repairable, but i chose to try and work through it after she asked for reconciliation…i tried everything i could think of that was reasonable and then some, most of it multiple times, and i got nothing in return but pain and more heartbreak from her. she chose to keep seeing him, to keep having the affair. i didn’t know what i could do.
but it’s still there inside of me. i still wish it could be different. i still wish she could be the person i thought she once was. i want to believe that person really existed, and could still exist. even after the horrible, unfair things she’s done to me to prove how little she cares anymore. what is the purpose…what is the point of this fscking unrealistic hope that still lies buried deep within me?
it’s been near two years, i’ve been trying to move on, isn’t that enough? why do i still feel so much heartbreak? why do i still find myself thinking of the good things we had (because we had plenty of bad things i could be concentrating on instead), wishing we (i) could figure out some way to pull things back together? why can’t i accept that none of this matters to her, and if she doesn’t care then it doesn’t matter how much i care? instead, i just find myself wringing myself out mentally and emotionally, with no obvious value other than my own self-destruction.
at least i can thank G-d it happens less often than it used to, i suppose. i pray G-d can give me peace to deal with this, and hopefully to become a better person through it in the end. i need to feel this can end up having some kind of positive result on me, even if the events themselves were not positive.

a year or two ago i was standing at a metro rail stop when a small, folded, light yellow piece of paper caught my eye. i picked it up and opened it, and it was a credit card receipt for the silver palace chinese restaurant. the good part was it included the full credit card number, card type, expiration date, holder’s name, and his signature. i pocketed it and have kept it with me at work. i don’t even know if the account is still active or not, but it’s sort of like a mental security blanket i can keep for use in case of extreme circumstances. that expires 10/05.