A year ago...

... we were heading into St. Paul, MN from South Dakota.

I had some decent mole at a taco joint, then I drank some of the finest rye whisky I've ever had with one of Joe's oldest friends.

This has been a time of great reflection for me.

Leaving Vancouver was the only thing we could have done under the circumstances.
I know this but that is what makes everything so damn hard.

I couldn't find a job for over a year. Living on EI in Vancouver sucks about as much as you think it might.

Joe could not find a job, period. He decided that he wanted a useful second degree. If I had been able to find a good paying job, I would have stayed in Vancouver, but I couldn't, so I left with him.

The whole thing just sucked.

So we're still broke. We're living in the least interesting city of over 200,000 residents, ever. And one of the most interesting is 5 minutes and an international border away. I never have any money to go and enjoy anything that goes on there, but I think about it a lot.

We are moving out of this shit-hole apartment, into a slightly cheaper and slightly further away, reasonably good-sized apartment. It's in a more interesting neighbourhood. There's stuff there I can walk to. No cafe nearby, but maybe that will change.

I'm going to start plotting something tomorrow that I hope is a good choice.

I am really, really tired of making choices based on desperation, and I hope this isn't one of them.

If I had my way...

I would be packed and moved by now.

Right now I'm rationing the moving tasks so I don't just spend every waking moment living surrounded by all my packed up stuff until May 31.

Good news though! I still pretty much have everything I arrived from Vancouver with and we've barely added anything.

I guess there are bonuses to being fucking broke all the time.

***

I started a Coursera class on English composition to see if I can stop being tedious and stupidly wordy.

I'll let my future words speak for whether or not it was worth the time and effort.

***

I'm trying to focus on doing things that will propel my life forward.

I have no idea if its working at this point.

I'm not contemplating suicide so much anymore, so I guess it's doing something.

***

I think part of my problem is that I was being a hypocrite on a couple of levels.

See, I know how to get shit done. I know how to kick shit into order.

I just wasn't doing it because I don't like doing shit that is only for me. I don't like doing shit that only seems to matter to me.

There seems no point in doing shit if I'm the only one who sees it and cares about the results.

So I stopped doing shit because it was only for me and only mattered to me.

But then I realized that that attitude probably shows up in the rest of my life and if I want people to take me seriously professionally, I have to talk AND walk what I do in my personal life.

Otherwise, I'm just another person on the planet who wants you to do as I say, not as I do.

So fuck that.

I'm going to do some shit that will make people take me seriously.

And for something...

... completely the same.

Still hate it here, but change is coming. We're moving to a more interesting neighbourhood on June 1.

Bigger apartment, for less, in a neighbourhood that has a grocery store I can walk to.

There's a public library and an art gallery that appears to have a cafe a block away.

It's closed on Mondays so I'll have to check it out for certain before we move.

There are also 4 bars within 4 blocks of my house.

***

I love my friend Erin and I don't care who knows it.

She literally sent me mail that will save my life.

***

I've decided that I am going to stick it out here in Windsor, whilst keeping my options open to leave.

I will spend an hour a week looking for jobs away from here and making contacts with people in other cities, but otherwise my focus is on trying to make this place livable and growing my business.

This place could have so much going for it if only it would start acting like a city and not a working-class suburb of a US city.

***

“

Suicidal feelings are not the same as giving up on life. Suicidal feelings often express a powerful and overwhelming need for a different life. Suicidal feelings can mean, in a desperate and unyielding way, a demand for something new. Listen to someone who is suicidal and you often hear a need for change so important, so indispensable, that they would rather die than go on living without the change. And when the person feels powerless to make that change happen, they become suicidal. Help comes when the person identifies the change they want and starts to believe it can actually happen. Whether it is overcoming an impossible family situation, making a career or study change, standing up to an oppressor, gaining relief from chronic physical pain, igniting creative inspiration, feeling less alone, or beginning to value their self worth, at the root of suicidal feelings is often powerlessness to change your life – not giving up on life itself.

-- Will Hall, Living with suicidal feelings

Multi-tasking

I thought I had made a decision last night, but now I think it goes against absolutely everything that I stand for professionally.

What I wanted to think of as "keeping my options open" is probably a little bit closer to "extreme multi-tasking, ensuring lack of focus on any one thing and either failing at or half-assing everything."

I'm either going to be here for another year and a bit, or I'm going to be absolutely somewhere else by July. I am going to focus on finding ways to make sure that Windsor does not kill me, or I am going to devote the bulk of my daily energies on getting the FUCK out of here.

My spouse is a wonderful human being who wants me to be happy.
He'll support whatever I need to do.

Now I just have to figure out what it is that I need to do.

In Memoriam

Charles Peterson

"Kurt Cobain, Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver, B.C., 1991"

When I heard the news on April 8, 1994 that Kurt Cobain had blown his fucking head off with a shotgun at his home in Seattle, I said I didn't care.

Told everyone that I wasn't a fan.

Made damn sure that EVERYONE knew that he didn't speak for *me* or anyone I knew in my generation.

But really, I was fucking mad.

I was 19, on my way to 20 years old. I was getting divorced. I was drinking too much. I was waking up next to people who's names I can't recall and who's faces I probably wouldn't be  able to identify in a lineup. I was doing a lot of things that desperate people do to kill pain.

If Kurt Cobain had nothing to live for, if he felt like this world had failed him, then what did I have to live for?

How could the man who wrote at least five songs that I love, who had money, someone who loved him, a small child, and friends who wanted nothing more than to create with him, just wake up one morning and decide that there was nothing left for him.

I don't have the passion anymore, and so remember, it's better to burn out then to fade away.

Peace, Love, Empathy.

The fact that *I* am still alive after this period of my life is surprising.

So, I just want to say this. I didn't mean what I said about Kurt Cobain in 1994. I understand the place he was coming from, and to a lesser extent I've lived there.

If I were an American citizen and resident, I would be dead now.

Sometimes I am angry I'm still alive.

 Fuck you all, this is the last song of the evening.

"I hope you are able to find new hope while living with this disease."

This is one of the things I just don't understand. This person is a stranger to me. She just happened upon my blog, and decided that I was a great candidate to give hope to other people neither of us know because I have self-identified as someone with MS.

You know what I have hope in?

Science.

I have hope that the collective fundraising groups are throwing more money at research and science than they are building websites to build hope.

Hope is a false profit.

Science, that's got the chance to really change things.

I don't believe that there's a "cure" for MS that doesn't include completely changing one's immune system. Fucking with DNA, wholesale stem cell transplants; that's where the hope is.

It's not on a website full of platitudes.

I'm still well enough that if they found a way to permanently halt the progression of my disease, I'd be okay. I could live for the next 50 like that. No problem. I think that that kind of cure isn't that far away. I suspect that we'll be there by the time I'm old enough for CPP.

It's the reversing of MS related damage... that's going to be where the money is.

Once they get there, the next thing is to prevent MS from happening in the first place.

My hope is in science, not in a bunch of people I don't know.