Stripper funerals, indecisive vowels and feral cows

My pre-teen aged niece posted something on facebook about missing someone so much she wanted to write “I miss you” on a rock and throw it at their face., so they would know
how much it hurts. It made me laugh, and then it made me think of you. There’s
nothing to be done now, I’m damn good at closing a door and putting a dresser
behind it. I know it was unfair, me leaving the way I did. I know I owed you
more, you deserved more. More proof, if anyone needed it, that I don’t always make
the best decisions at 4 am. There wasn’t even a bottle of Jack Daniels in the
room, at least not an open one.
What I managed to do was talk myself out of this situation, this (potential) relationship by isolating the faults in myself that convinced me that whatever a good person (in this case,
you) might bring to my life, my inadequacy is going to screw the pooch, as they
say. So I start bailing, back pedaling, just plain running away. It seems I’m
hung up on wasted time. I don’t’ have to look too far back into my past to see where that originated. I’m sort of stunned by the urgency of it within me though.
If I’m honest with myself (and why else would I be writing at this hour if not to be
honest) this one really sucks. It’s just not that often I find people, any
people, but especially men that I connect with on multiple levels. I’m ashamed
to say, it was just too much for me. After all the crap I gave you about
refusing to look at the end before we even got started, I exited, stage left,
because I could see the heartbreak that was in store for me. I woke up that
morning, not because you called, but full of a sense of dread, full of just how
bad it was going to be when your calls weren’t what woke me.

I tortured myself for a couple of hours, thinking and writing, trying to tell myself that
the ride would be worth the fall, that I’d take the 10 minutes, 10 weeks,
whatever, of happy, but I couldn’t get my head there, my heart was already at
humpty-dumpty post fall. And I had no faith in the king’s men.

Not too long ago, I wrote myself a little love letter, and it was all full of hope and
happy things. Where that bitch went, I don’t know, but she seems to have packed
and left for the coast. She better come back sunburned thorugh, because there
sure isn’t any sunshine here.

Mindlessness Matters

This time of year, everything slows down, including, sadly, my dog training. Between the heat, lack of rain, and the fire ants overrunning my tracking fields, my priorities change, there is no beating the summer in late July/August in North Carolina. So Mojo and I do short spurts of obedience with the reward being a floatie toy tossed into the pond, lather, rinse, repeat.

My goal becomes keeping him fit, happy, and keeping both of us sane.
This entire year, I’ve been struggling with insomnia. Headed into the 8th month of the year, with little improvement, despite over the counter remedies, prescription remedies ‘have a glass f wine before you go to bed’, work out before you go to bed, turn off the TV ½ hour before you go to bed, etc., and still no change, I’m resigned to getting comfortable being uncomfortably tired most of the time.

This morning, up far too early (again) I did something I’ve been doing a few times a week for the last 4 years. I got up, and went out to sit on the deck stairs with my first cup of coffee, and play a game of 2-ball fetch with Mojo. Not too long ago I read a discussion thread about how useless this game is. The speakers described the game as “mindless” and the human participant as no better than “a ball machine”. I remember feeling a little bad about doing it when I read the discussion. It’s one of the things I do all summer for sure, but honestly all the time for him. As I watched Mojo light up with joy when I came out the back door with two balls this morning, I decided (again and finally) that I really don’t care what those people think of this game. Dog training pros they might be, and many more may agree., but I know that 2 dozen tosses of a ball before 5 am on a day predicted to hit 100 degrees is Mojo’s equivalent to me sitting down and watching Survivor. It IS mindless. So what of it? I ask a lot of him. I ask him to track well, be quick and correct in obedience, be strong and convincing, and very under control in bite work. I ask him not to bite the neighbors, or my old dog, and overall, Mojo complies. Not always joyfully (okay, rarely joyfully), but he complies.

When I started running I used to go between 4 and 5 am. I started running in July of 2005, I told myself it was because of the heat, really, I just wanted the cover of darkness. Running is hard, and if I needed to stop and suck wind, I wanted as few witnesses as possible. Somewhere along the way I got over that. Maybe just as the running got harder, and I had to focus on it more, I stopped realizing anyone else existed during those “I’m sucking wind” moments. Entirely possible, running hurts.

Whatever the truth, when I watch Mojo racing across the lawn in the pre-dawn hours during our ‘mindless game’ what comes to mind is what his breeder told me when I pushed her about the fact that I hadn’t signed a contract. She said she wasn’t worried about it because she knew I would take care of him. That, in the end is what matters. Of course he needs a job, and mental stimulation, and he has that. But he also needs a bowl of popcorn and a sofa to cheer on idiots left in a jungle with a bag of rice 2 months.

This all may seem simplistic, and maybe it is. I’m not really sure what else someone who hasn’t slept more than 5 hours at a time for the last 8 months is capable of. I just know that the events of the last 8 months of made me re-evaluate a whole host of things in my life., not just dog training bits, some much more personal and hard to hear.

I’m not dumb enough to think I have it all figured out, I've made that mistake too often, but I do know that Mojo is out back, laying in his baby pool, drinking some of the same water, happy. That, coupled with leaning into being okay with the decisions I am making these days, get me a whole lot closer to happy as well.

Some things don't deserve a title

Today, while working in my living room, on a project that’s been plaguing me since April of last year; I had to refer to a document written by a company I worked for about 12 years ago. There on page 2 was the name of a woman I once thought of as my nemesis because she, She had HIM.

I was fresh out of college at that job, still living in my tiny college apartment, and by tiny I mean by comparison, an efficiency would have been palatial. The whole space – max, was probably 10’ x 12’ BUT it was on a horse farm, and it was cheap, and my dog was welcome there.

He was the very good friend of my assigned mentor. They used to smoke Marlboro reds on the front steps of the building, cracking jokes, telling hunting stories, talking to everyone and sometimes about them, as they came in the laboratory doors. They were always together, so I got to know him. He made me laugh a lot, and one day he paid me the most amazing compliment I had every received up to that point in my life. I was speechless and instantly, totally and utterly infatuated.

I used to hang out at the company softball games just to be near him, to listen to his accent, his laugh. I used to imagine him watching me as I walked over to the security area to use the bathroom. I was never sure if he did, but I hoped.

It’s weird, because I remember those things, but I can’t tell you how it happened the first time. The first time we crossed the line, the first time we made plans to see each other outside of work or work-social environments. But we did. And we ended up together, and it was amazing, and fun, and dizzying, and so, unbelievably wrong.

I know it lasted quite awhile, because I moved into my condo while we were still seeing each other. I was crazy, crazy, crazy, mad, wild, sick for him.

I remember one day, being with him in the late afternoon, talking in my bedroom, and he was just sitting there, on the edge of my bed, smoking.

And just like that, I knew.
As clearly as if he had taped a banner to my bedroom wall.
He was going to leave her. And their kid.
For me.

I walked him out to his truck that day. Said goodbye, waved to him in the mirror, and then sat on the steps in front of my building and sobbed.

I called in sick for the next two days, didn’t answer the phone, didn’t answer my door.

I ended it the very next time I saw him. I told him the biggest lie I could think of.

The truth was I couldn’t be that girl. The one he left for, and oh I wanted to be. So badly. I wanted to be wanted that much. I wanted to be enough for him to give up so much.

He quit his job about a week later, said he couldn’t see me every day. That it was too hard. I quietly hoped he’d leave her for an embarrassingly long time after. I hoped he’d be there one day, at my door, in my parking lot, somewhere, someday.

I saw him one more time, just one of those things – in the parking lot at the fair. He ran back to his truck to get something and ran into me in the parking lot. He came over to me and told me he still drove by my place, hoping to catch me outside, not to talk to me - just to see me walking the dog or getting the mail. He made me cry, just a little. I don’t remember saying anything. I remember feeling raw and angry. I knew I had done the right thing, finally, but I also knew that at that moment, I was wishing I hadn’t. Or that he hadn’t.

Staring at that document today, her name was still his name. I remembered all of this in the time it took to read the paragraph of results I was looking for, then, I looked them up. Same addresses, same phone numbers.
He never made it back to Kentucky.

I still don’t know, after all these years, why I did it, or why I ran from it just when it became clear I was going to get what I thought I wanted. I don’t know if he told her, or she found out, or if she knew all along.

I don’t know why I needed such a grand, dramatic, heart-rending gesture to feel like I was ‘enough’ and I definitely don't know how long it will take me to feel like saying I’m sorry is ‘enough’.