9/11/2012

I wrote a blog post on 9/11 of last year. I think what I said in that post still pretty much sums up my feelings about 9/11. I’m still continually disgusted at how politicians try to politicize 9/11. The truth is, It’s just another day now. For 11 years we’ve commemorated 9/11, but I think it’s time for us to collectively move on as a nation. The resulting fallout from 9/11 is some of the most frightening things I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’ve seen our liberties eroded, our young soldiers killed, foreign civilians killed, foreign leaders overturned and executed, and our country tip towards the brink of fascism without even knowing it. 

9/11 has often been compared to Pearl Harbor. It’s not quite the same, but even so, we commemorate Pearl Harbor quietly these days. The pain of that attack has subsided. World War II was fought and ended. We fought and toppled fascist governments, discovered unthinkable crimes, and tried and convicted those responsible. What happened after 9/11 was a little different. We entered a war, but not with the foreign power who attacked us, because there was no foreign power that attacked us. It was a ragtag band of religious zealots living in the deserts of Afghanistan. The government of Afghanistan refused to cooperate with us, and we entered into the nation’s single longest war (that isn’t really a war because it was never declared by congress) with that government. We almost immediately lost sight of the criminal who murdered 3000 of our citizens, and turned our attention to another despot who hadn’t really done anything to us. That conflict cost us dearly. but no matter how dearly it cost us, it cost the citizens of Iraq much more dearly. We are not popular in that part of the world, and there is a reason for that. And no, it is not “because they hate our freedoms”. But recently we’ve found the criminal who murdered our citizens, and he was killed in the event. I will not entertain conspiracy theories about that event either.

9/11 will forever remain for me the epitome of what religious extremism can lead to. Unfortunately, it can get far worse. The crusades were a religious war, and they were fought with middle ages technology. Imagine if the crusades were fought today. That is the future we must avoid. Religious zealots are constantly trying to control our government, and the moderately religious are encouraging them to do so. This is the danger of even moderate religion, as Sam Harris points out. If we fall to fascist powers and become a religious state, the world as we know it will be in danger.

It is time to return to the ideals that made America great in the first place. Our freedoms and liberties must be restored from erosion of the last 11 years. Our adherence to the separation of church and state must be absolute. The balance of powers must be restored. And we must once again strive to be an example to the rest of the world as we once were, not the bully that the rest of the world is afraid of that we are now.

The last year has been very eventful for me. Around this time last year I had just started dating the first girl I had dated since I met my ex wife. Since then I’ve had quite the emotional rollercoaster. My divorce has been finalized. My children finally know that there are alternatives to extreme religion, and they’ve returned to public school. I’m alone, but I’m free of my ex wife to as much of a degree as possible. My house has been foreclosed on and soon to be repossessed. My apartment is overrun with cats whom I’m desperately trying to find homes for. I’ve returned to the job I had 11 years ago, as much as that job still exists, and I was with and lost a woman I’ve been secretly in love with for over a decade, and whom I consider to be my perfect mate. Sorry, fairy tale endings don’t happen in real life. It’s amazing how much can happen in just a year. I haven’t even covered everything that’s happened in my life, I’m sure yours has been just as eventful.

A year is a long time. When 9/11/2013 rolls around, it would be nice if we didn’t have to once again call for the freedoms we’ve lost to be restored again. 

Sure, Let Me Debase Myself And Lie Down In This Puddle So You Can Walk Over Me My Dear.

This is going to be another post about my relationship issues. If you don’t like those kind of posts, feel free to go somewhere else. You know what, fuck you. This is my fucking blog, and I’ll blog whatever the fuck I want.

So basically I had a really shitty day today. I found out that not only had the short sale on my house fallen through, but that today was auction day. In other words, I found out exactly too late to do anything about it. Even if I could have done anything about it. So I am no longer a home owner. In fairness, I hadn’t lived there in two years anyway. The worst part about it is the major hit my credit rating is going to take. Foreclosures stay on for ten years, not seven. My ex wife fucked me pretty good on this one. She did it intentionally, I’m sure, but the best part of the whole thing is where she says it’s my fault. No, I’m not kidding. She refused to find any kind of work whatsoever, or to support herself or her children in any way whatsoever, stopped paying the mortgage, and made sure the house went to foreclosure. And it’s my fault. You seriously can’t make this shit up.

Add to that the fact that she wants to move out of district so that she can move somewhere she can afford to. The unbelievable injustice of the fact that a father who wanted his children and was perfectly capable of supporting them and could have easily kept them in the good school district in which they live lost them to a mother who refuses to support herself or her children in any way shape or form and cannot afford to keep them in the school district, but wants to move them to a poorer school district. Somehow she has been determined to be the better parent. Again, you can’t make this shit up. If somebody put this in a book it would be deemed implausible. But yet, it happened.

And just for good measure, I found out my copay for my therapist is so high that I can’t afford it. So not only am I dealing with a ridiculous divorce, an insane financial situation as a result, and a difficult breakup with my ex girlfriend, but I can’t even afford therapy anymore. At times like this I start to wonder if there is a god, because if there is, she hates me. It seems implausible that all of this could happen to one, basically good person. Yet, it did.

So moving on, my ex girlfriend and I are occasionally talking again. Yesterday she had some crap happen, so being the good friend that I am, I stopped what I was doing and made time to listen. Because that’s what I do. It actually wasn’t all that convenient for me to do so, but I did anyway. And not just because some part of me still hopes that I can salvage a relationship out of this. I would do this for pretty much any friend.

Then today all of this happens, and I need someone to talk to. Guess how many people were available for me? Yep. Nobody. Not even my therapist, because… well… fuck you republicans and your fucked up privatized health care. This system only works for the wealthy. Fuck you. And if you’re not wealthy and support these fuckers, fuck you too. You’re fucking me as well as yourself, and that makes you a fucking moron. Fuck you.

So I’m thinking tonight, because, well, the only person I have to talk to is myself. So if you say I’m crazy for talking to myself, fuck you. You weren’t here for me either, fuck wad. And I realize something: that was my whole relationship with her. She would get frequent headaches, I would rush over there and give her a long backrub. Number of backrubs received: 0. Even my ex wife had a better record than that. Every time she had something going on, I would patiently sit there and listen to her. When I felt the need to unload about  something, I got some variation of “shit or get off the pot”. If I got irritated about that, her feelings got hurt.

And then I think “Exactly what about this relationship am I missing?” It was a little one sided. Actually it was a lot one sided. Yet, I still miss her and would probably go back if I could. Fucking why? What about this woman am I missing? Why am I so drawn to her? These are questions I can’t answer. My only guess is that there was more to it than that for me. She was at least an intellectual equal, and probably an intellectual superior. She had her own career and life. She was independent and strong. She made a difference in peoples lives. She was good at what she does. And something about her is magic. Her voice, her mannerisms, everything. I can’t explain it. Basically it’s not a good relationship for me. I know this intellectually. My heart will catch up eventually, I just have to be strong for now. That’s the real trick though. I’m not strong.

Anyway, just random thoughts. I had nobody to share this with, so of course it goes out to the world  on my blog. I suppose it’s all part of learning to be alone. Being alone sucks ass, by the way.

The Question I Never Got A Chance To Ask.

I was despondent for days, weeks, months. I was alternately angry, dejected, and confused. I believed every lie you told me wholeheartedly. I trusted you and gave you my heart unconditionally and without reserve, and you tossed it aside like a dirty rag without looking back. And up until about 20 minutes ago, at the slightest word, the merest mention that you would want to start again, to spend even the smallest amount of time with me, I would have gladly thrown my pride to the wind and followed you around like a stupid puppy. Because I’m just that fucking pathetic.

But I’m not stupid. I won’t vie with your other ex for your attention. He wins. Congratulate him for me. I no longer want to see you. I no longer want to hear your voice lie to me. I no longer want to know about the trivial interactions between you and your cats. Why, you wonder, the sudden change? I’ll tell you. Because fuck you.

You took the kids WHERE???

I’m going to a picnic at Darrel Ray’s this afternoon. I find it kind of cool that I actually know the author of The God Virus. If you’re a member of the KC atheist community, you’ll realize that it’s not all that big of a deal, he knows all of us. But still…

I’m taking my kids too. Part of me.hopes the ex finds out. I can already see her doing a Rumplestiltskin type angry dance similar to when I embarrassed her lawyer during the trial.

Why yes, as a matter of fact. If you didn’t already know,  I am an asshole. To those who’ve earned it.

Oooh, I HATE that guy…

I’ve been reading a book called Quiet about the introverted/extroverted personality types. My ex girlfriend had recently read it and described it to me, and the topic interested me. Anybody who gets to know me intimately knows I’m an introvert, but it’s not always obvious to everybody. I’m certainly not the “Hi how ya doin lemme kiss your baby” type of extrovert, but I try to not be too soft spoken at work. Maybe it’s more obvious than I think. When I told my ex girlfriend that I was an introvert, her response was “Duh!”.

What’s most interesting though, is that I’m getting a better handle on exactly what kind of introvert I am. It’s not all good news. The most recent chapter revealed to me that I’m the kind of introvert who adjusts to social situations based on cues. I get my ideas about how to behave and interact with others based on cues I receive from them. In other words, I’m a different person to each person I interact with. Kind of like that salt monster from the early Star Trek episode. Put me in a room with too many people and I don’t know who the fuck to be. This is one of the reasons I have this blog and my twitter account, it’s about the only time I really get to be the real me, however pathetic that might be.

I found myself in orchestra rehearsal the other night being the extrovert. Socializing with this person, then with that person. To be honest, I hate socializing. I’m not half bad at it when I have to be though. I can be quite animated and entertaining when the situation calls for it.

I have to wonder if this is a factor in my string of failed relationships. It’s certainly something to bring up with the therapist. This personality type can be viewed by others as deceptive and deceitful. I really don’t see myself that way, but I have to wonder if that’s how my personality type comes off. It’s really more about trying to fit in and not do social faux pas. A basic fear of rejection. An extreme fear of rejection. And I take it hard when I am rejected, like my recent break up. This could be a factor in why I stayed in a marriage that was obviously broken for almost the entire duration for far longer than I should have. Long enough to have two kids, and for those kids to grow up to be big enough to be damaged by the ensuing brutal divorce.

I’ve noticed a trend recently: people don’t seek me out. Let me try to explain that more. If I don’t try to start some kind of interaction with my friends, the interaction tends to not happen. It reminds me a little of the game The Sims. In the game, if you don’t constantly call up your friends, the relationship atrophies and they stop being your friend. However, in the game if you don’t call your friends for a while, they’ll call you and say “what the fuck, dude?” In real life that second part doesn’t seem to happen with me. The relationship still atrophies, but it seems like if I’m the only one interested in preventing that. If I don’t call for a while, nobody calls me.

This worries me a little. Is there something in my personality that repulses people? Is it this quirk of adjusting my personality to each person? Does this drive people off? Am I really that guy? The guy nobody really wants to hang out with but is willing to put up with so that they don’t come off as a jerk? Introspection never goes well for me. I keep coming up with this kind of crap.

I would really like to know, though, why this seems to be the case. There seems to be some basic flaw in my personality that makes people like me ok but not really want to be around me more than they have to. I don’t know what it is yet, or how to fix it. I need to fix it though, or I’ll never have a successful relationship. I don’t count my ex as a successful relationship. She was wasn’t in it for any kind of interest in me, she was in it because she could live off of me without having to have a life of her own. She still does. Thank you, state of Kansas.

Anyway, no great revelations in this post, just questions that I don’t have answers for yet. Maybe I’ll have some in the weeks to come.

It’s Wabbit Season!

I started therapy yesterday.

Let’s face it, I’m fucknuts. I was watching Looney Toons with my kids earlier, and we watched Rabbit Fire. That’s the one where Daffy and Bugs go back and forth with the “rabbit season” “duck season” bit. It’s hilarious, and I’m reminded of the time during an improv group when I basically did that scene by myself. There was one guy who ended up playing Elmer Fudd, and my spastic self played both Daffy and Bugs. He was a bit shy, and didn’t seem to know what the fuck to make of me. I think I scared him a little, but the end result is it was fucking hilarious. I was awesome.

Was.

I remember the guy who did that. The guy I was back then. 17 years of bad marriage will fuck you up, and that guy is gone now, and I can’t get him back. I know, I would be a different person now even if I hadn’t married the batshit crazy church lady, but I think there would be more of that guy left.

I’ve thoroughly trashed three relationships since the end of my marriage. Well, in fairness to myself I had a little help trashing them, but still… I can’t seem to pull off a successful relationship. Maybe I’m not dating the right people, but I was absolutely sure the last one was right. I’m still having trouble reconciling it a month later. I should be past it by now, one would think. But I have a fuckload of baggage, and I think I didn’t realize just how much until yesterday.

The therapist seemed to catch on immediately just how much the cult fucked me up. This is something that I don’t think anybody else ever has understood about me. These people did more damage in the couple of years they had me than my wife did in 17. I’m still dealing with it in many ways. On the other hand, had it not been for the cult I might have never examined my own belief systems, and realized that the whole thing is bullshit. I suppose I should thank them for that. But fuck if I will.

Most people seem to blow the whole cult experience off as trivial, except for one or two other people I know who went through the same thing. It’s not like we talk about it though. Former cult members don’t have conventions. We don’t chat on facebook about it. “Hey, remember that time that the one kid crashed his car because he was so tired from sleep deprivation and almost died? Yeah, good times!” There are exactly 0 people that I’ve been able to talk to about this over the last decade. My ex didn’t go through the exit conversion the same way I did. In fact, I’m not sure she ever went through it at all. She’s been looking for a replacement for the cult for the last decade, and I’m pretty sure she finally found one.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is I think this is going to be good for me in the long term. I may not be able to save my last relationship, but maybe I can make the next one not crash so badly. I’ve already realized about myself that my dating experience pretty much consists of my teenage years, a couple of years in my 20s, and the last year. I haven’t had a lot of time to figure this shit out. My marriage was pretty much fucking awful for most of it, so I don’t have a lot of experience in how a good relationship works. I do know that I really wanted the last one to. But first I have to straighten out some shit in my head.

I may not be that guy from 20 years ago anymore, but maybe I can be someone else just as good.

Atheism+: What the F*** is it???

During one of my frequent twitter rants that I’ve come to be known for, I ran across a tag that kept coming up in the tweets of others that I follow: AtheismPlus. I was intrigued. I started asking around, doing searches, and eventually ran across a blog post by Richard Carrier with seems to have started the whole movement. I believe it was this one: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/2207/. Feel free to read it for yourself. It’s ok, I’ll wait.

Did you read it? It’s ok, I’ll wait, I don’t mind, you should go read it first. It’s not the last blog post link I’m going to send you to. Go ahead.

Ok, I’ll take your word for it. So my take on it was: Hm, sounds like they’re taking Humanism and rebranding it as AtheismPlus. But there’s more to it than that. The whole idea seems to be about taking these people and saying we don’t want these other people so we’re going to have a new movement that’s just the people who believe what we like.

Don’t get me wrong, the beliefs they espouse are good ones, and I could easily join the AtheismPlus movement without cognitive dissonance. Richard Carrier is also a writer and speaker that I greatly respect. I saw him at Skepticon IV last year, and really liked his talks. But what bothered me is this: this is exactly what happened to religion. I don’t mean Hindus vs. Muslims vs. Christians vs. Mormons, but Lutherans vs. Baptists vs. Methodists vs. [about 600 other denominations here]. I don’t think this is going to work out the way they want it to. If the atheist movement goes down this path of splintering into smaller and smaller groups, the atheist movement as we know it will falter and die. We are more effective now than we have ever been because we are united, and the religious can no longer ignore us. If we become a bunch of small denominations of atheism, they can ignore us again.

Not to mention the fact that when you add a belief system to atheism, you take one of the more ridiculous arguments of the theists, that atheism is just another religion, and make it suddenly true. I kinda have a problem with that. Humanism starts out with the precept that it’s a belief system, and atheism is one of the ideas that it is based on, but it doesn’t try to rebrand atheism. It’s something else entirely. I consider myself to be a humanist, even though I’m not very involved with them.

So, basically I said all this shit, and a shitstorm came back at me. One side coopted me as an ally, another side told me I just didn’t get it. I managed to avoid some of the hatefulness that seems to be going around out there, but it still freaked me the fuck out.

Many well known personas whom I normally respect in the atheism movement seem to be into this and promoting it. A handful of others seem to be opposing it. Apparently I’m supposed to hate Thunderf00t now. Fuck that.

A brilliant, well thought out blog post by someone I consider a twitter friend is here on the subject: http://evolutionchild.com/2012/08/25/a-take-me-to-your-leader/

You didn’t read that, go back and read it now. It’s one of the best posts on the topic I’ve seen yet, and largely sums up how I feel as well. I’ll wait.

I was a little freaked out by all of this, and I don’t like where it’s going, but it seems to be happening all the same. So here’s my final say on the matter. Please don’t come to me with any more AtheismPlus crap after this.

I quit.

I want out of the atheism movement all together. I am not going to pick “sides”. I am not going to pick a denomination of atheism. That’s bullshit. I was on my own before I found the atheism movement, and I can be on my own again. Atheism was already rather disorganized before this and now I apparently have to pick a new denomination. Fuck no. I’m the Cowboy. That’s what I am, and that’s all I need to be. I’m an atheist, I’m a liberal (well, not exactly but just roll with me here a minute), I’m a musician, I’m a lover, I’m a writer, I’m a geek. I’ll watch you guys from a distance and see where things go before I decide if I want back in.