What world does this globe really represent?

I was just looking around at some of my boxes as the moving day looms closer. Sitting there in the corner was a distinguishable one that I’ve gotten to know well.

Once on vacation during my late 20s, I was walking through a nice shopping galleria with the woman I was dating at the time. There was a high-end knick knack shop that was going out of business. Selling zillion dollar pieces for a few cents and so on.

For no reason whatsoever, I’ve always liked globes. There was a high quality black one there that, of course, was marked down to a fraction of the cost. About 18 inches in diameter, so something that was easy to see but not cumbersome to display. And I’ve never been the oh-so cultured type to liven up my place with something like that. Yes, this purchase was a no-brainer.

After it got delivered, it waited patiently for me to find a stand for it.

About 15 years and four (soon to be five) moves later, it’s still with me. In that same box. Not only have I never bothered to get the stand for it, but I’ve never even taken it out to see it again since.

This symbolizes my existence.

Rarely finishing tasks that aren’t absolutely necessary. Rarely making the most out of my living enviroment. But most importantly, rarely taking pride in myself, my possessions, and the enjoyable things in life.

I’m even doing the same thing lately with the baseball cards that I’ve collected in the last year. Sometimes I look forward to looking back through certain sets. But as you can guess, that hasn’t happened once. Especially since I’m not done getting some of them put away the right way to begin with.

This may not seem like a huge deal on the surface, but habits like this feed my depression regularly. It all happens for a handful of reasons: lack of energy, lack of caring enough to find that energy, a lack of focus to even remember to enjoy myself enough.

But the main one at this stage in my life is this: all of my failures of recent years. When the huge things that went wrong are often at the forefront of my mind, then I can’t appreciate the important little things. They pale by comparison, so I just don’t care enough to try and harvest any positives at all from them.

This is one of the many building blocks of my most important psychological life improvement project going forward: learning to be ok with being happy. I imagine that would make it easier to shove the bad things aside long enough to appreciate the good.

So when I end up in my next destination after this move, one of the first things I need to do is find a stand for that globe. And then prominently display it somewhere that I can always see it. Stop for a moment and look it at least once a day. Both to enjoy it and as therapy to remind myself to make some of these necessary improvements in how my mind sees life.

Up until this point, it’s represented my bad habits. Maybe now, it can be a symbol of getting them fixed.

Save tonight

Save tonight, and fight the break of dawn.

A big hit song from 1997 about lovers who are about to be separated the following morning. But in my case, those lyrics fit virtually every day. It’s 6:15 AM here at the moment and happening as we speak

Yep, I think a lot about escapes and being away from humanity. And this makes for back-to-back entries about them. There is something so serene and relaxing about late night existence. Businesses are closed and most people are inside asleep (or quietly in the same boat as I am).

You can hear a single car pass by, the click of a stoplight changing, or the distant occasional bark of a dog. Sometimes the sound of an ambulance siren that’s much more ominous than when other noises are competing with it during the day. Look up into the limitless dark, and see the universe that reaches beyond anyone’s imagination and possibilities.

And, just as I mentioned the last time: when you’re depressed, stuck with your life, and not doing nearly enough to solve your issues….you don’t feel obliged to take care of business that can only be addressed during the workday. A brief respite from the gloom and antsyness that comes from often feeling down about yourself in that way.

But when the morning comes, all of the above goes away. And you feel some disappointment that you have to wait for the next sunset for your favorite time of day to come back.

The good thing is that since I’m a warm weather person, whenever I’m living in a seasonal climate, the warmth I cherish is a decent tradeoff for the longer days of that time of year. And vice versa. I would rather have nonstop give/take for the year than six months each of all the best or the worst. That wouldn’t be good for my state of mind.

Still though, regardless of the warmth, it’s not easy fighting every daybreak. And I hope to eventually not feel this way about life’s existence at some point.

The escape of the open road

I am now officially scheduled to get moved out of my apartment at the end of the month. After a visit home for about a week and a half, then it’ll be time to drive across the country and learn more about if I can still move back to my target city (in the current world of Covid getting worse again).

Assuming that the country doesn’t shut down more again before then. But I’m trying to stay optimistic.

I actually prefer the journey more than getting to the destination. Because as I’ve mentioned before here, staying at hotels while you travel alone is my favorite escape from life. Your troubles seem to cease being relevant for a short time, because you feel less obliged about fixing your life (when it’s not possible to do much about them from a distant hotel room).

The little things about getting to my hotel’s town for the night give me the small joys that life often doesn’t:

Seeing what options there are for dinner. Bringing some snacks, a small pint of milk, a 20 oz drink back to the room too. Turning on the TV and finding Jeopardy or a game later on (well, back when we had sports before the last four months eh). Seeing the different local channels that you never have before. Laying there in the dark and soaking it all in.

As it feels like the universe has stopped functioning around you for the next 12 or 18 hours. Just you and your temporary shelter off the beaten path.

It’s all a much-needed relaxing tonic.

Before the difficulties of returning back to the real world.

Success of the past

I miss that feeling.

Drove by the apartment building where I lived during my 20s during my first stint in the city here that I’ll be leaving soon, and one of those times flashed in my memory. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned any stories from my advantage gambling past here, so here is a quick one.

It was the first round of the 1997 NBA playoffs. Had been less than a year since I graduated college, so I was still getting my feet wet in the real world. Though as an avid sports fan my whole life, I felt a lot more seasoned than age 22 in that regard.

Normally a pro’s sports betting advantage comes from a more statistical approach that’s based on the current “market” of the betting lines. It’s usually way too difficult to predict what’s going to happen in sports, so that was not something I tried to do very often.

This was a rare exception to that rule.

The series between the Seattle Supersonics and Phoenix Suns was going to a deciding final game, and the underdog Suns had barely missed a chance to win the series at home in an exhausting overtime battle in the prior game. Seattle was a team that you beat by matching their high energy and competitive level (moreso than with precision on the court with your gameplan), and the Suns had given their all throughout the series so far….only to come up just short of finishing the Sonics off.

Now they had to travel back to Seattle and try to come up with one more big effort against a superior team, and there wasn’t going to be anything left in the tank, either physically or emotionally. I think even the Phoenix players knew it.

Seattle was favored by 9 points in that deciding game, and that seemed like a lot of points on the surface (given how competitive the series had been). But given everything described above, I knew the Suns would likely have a tough time staying anywhere close.

I found the best deals that I could on every Seattle way imaginable. To win the game, to win by more than 9, to win by as many as possible. Probably would’ve even taken their mascot to beat up the Suns’ mascot that day if I could’ve.

As the game came on that day and I watched the Sonics’ awesome player intros (bobbing my head to the music), you could feel what was going to happen. It’s now 23 years later, and to this day I’ve never felt as confident in my prediction of a basketball game as that one.

If you’d like to relive what I felt at that time, watch from about 4:10 to 6:10 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8XD_5kLR2U

Seattle won easily, 116-92. You can imagine my look and feeling of satisfaction afterward.

But that feeling had nothing to do with a gambling “high”; it was all about feeling that I had an edge. Not just in this aspect, but in life as well. Even though it was only one game, it felt representative of what I could accomplish as a whole.

And for the next 10 years, that turned out to be true. Before I lost my way ever since.

As you might guess, I spend too much time thinking about the past. Maybe it’s because I hope that at some point, that will spark me to relive it eventually.

One year

It was one year ago today that I started this blog.

The hope was to find more motivation and focus to tackle my issues. That hasn’t really happened. At least it doesn’t hurt as an outlet, though.

And during that time, I have acquired a reasonable amount of followers. Some have disappeared in recent months, as people either move on or get weary of seeing my continued frustrations being expressed! The blog would grow some if I let my creative writing abilities flow here, but that’s not usually my purpose for writing here (look back to these entries from my past baseball days for an example)

https://misteradomain.home.blog/2019/08/25/the-magic-of-sports/

https://misteradomain.home.blog/2020/02/20/baseball-good-ol-days-part-2-of-2/

I’m not going to get into new life details at the moment. Not much to update anyway since the waiting game to resume life might continue (given the latest COVID concerns).

So, for now I just wanted to thank everyone who has been a regular reader and left their “like”s. I know I haven’t written the kind of material here that really leads to any comments, so any acknowledgements that someone might be helped by reading about (or relate to) my struggles are appreciated.

No idea how long I will continue to blog, but regardless, I wish everyone the best for the next twelve months as well.

What do you dream about?

This time I’m talking about actual nighttime dreams (rather than life hopes). Sadly, mine are often as much of a struggle as my life itself. There are a handful that happen on a regular basis, and it’s not too tough to figure out why I have them:

Trying to control a car from a distance. So bizarre. It’s like I have a slight two-dimensional view of what I’m driving in before long, and am trying to guide the car remotely. Usually a bad crash in the making.

Reason: My fear of being in a horrible car wreck that’s mostly out of my control

Being back in school (high school or college) and not having assignments done. Leading to feeling like I’m not going to graduate and other issues. I probably have this one more often than any other, and strangely it’s the one without a very strong reason for it, because I never stressed about any of those things back then. I did leave grad school without getting my degree, but I’ve never cared about that either.

Reason: this is the only dream that I really have to speculate. The best answer I can come up is how I’m not comfortable with my lack of work ethic and tendency to procrastinate until the last minute to do tasks (and that even though I never got burned doing that in school, my concern about those habits being a big problem are manifesting this other way in my dreams)

Starting out at a dorm in college. This one is more recent and is happening more and more. I often know that I am actually in my mid 40s as I have this dream (and how weird it is to be back in a dorm), but that still doesn’t stop me from hoping that it will work out. Things don’t get too far before I wake up.

Reason: Hello midlife crisis and wanting to go back to the good years.

Checking a stock portfolio (on AOL, because that was the time period when I was usually trading securities instead of other financial instruments, right after I graduated from college.) Sometimes the stocks are doing well, and sometimes they aren’t. But I’m usually feeling good about the overall picture in this dream. Only to eventually wake up to my sad reality of the last dozen years: that there IS no portfolio anymore.

Reason: An obvious one. Longing for my past days of success in the market

And now, my trademark dream. Also the one that has haunted me for the longest:

Struggling to get somewhere or to escape someone who’s after me. This one is fairly frequent and it’s always on foot. The locations are places like malls or being in my hometown (these never seem to involve my many years living in big cities). Sometimes it’s like I’m a kid again, but often I’m an adult in these dreams. And I never get where I need to be before I wake up.

Reason: I’ve never found what I needed to have the right life, and am still struggling to.

Rings so, so true

Is this really the life you want?

I may not write about the world around me all the time, but I’m always just as aware of other people’s lives as my own. Occasionally I find myself envious of the few who genuinely have a worthwhile, fulfilling existence.

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of those people out there. It only appears that way. Can’t tell you how many supposedly ideal white-picket fence family lives are actually a miserable struggle beneath the surface. You just don’t see that side of them too often.

A perfect example of this was a 20 year high school reunion that I went to about six years ago. It wasn’t even anywhere near my own reunion, but I was the guest of an alum and it was where many of my best college friends grew up (so I fit in even easier than some people who’d gone there).

Once drinks began to flow, a former friend of my old friends introduced herself and started hanging around. It wasn’t long before she was showering me with compliments about how “at home” I seemed at their reunion, despite how it also became apparent that we were polar opposites (she was a married mother of three who teaches in a christian school; I am a perpetually single heathen). However, this didn’t keep her from starting to announce how much she “loved me”.

And as you might guess, those announcements became more frequent and more emphatic with every drink that came our way. As did her attaching herself to me.

Did it matter that her husband was AT the reunion with us? Apparently not. She paid virtually no attention to him all night. And one thing I’ve learned over the years is that losing alcohol-related inhibitions doesn’t just have to do with things like losing yourself in the moment and having sex (which we did not do given the circumstances, despite the obvious mutual attraction).

Losing those inhibitions also shows something far more innocent, but much more important: who you actually want to be around. Whether it’s who your true friends are, or who you truly desire. I’m not going get into further details as to why she wasn’t interested in her husband; suffice it to say that the story fits well beyond how she acted that evening.

So it was clear that her short time hanging out with me was an escape. An escape from someone she didn’t really want, and probably an escape from a life that she felt uncomfortably trapped in (despite how her family life appeared so ideal on the surface).

The night ended. Nothing more than flirtation happened. I went back home the next day. We remembered the bond that was there, though: two highly different people with vastly different lives. But who still connected and shared one vital thing in common that meant more than any of that:

The need to get away from the life we’d built for ourselves. Even for just one innocent night.

Deep struggles return, part 2

The last couple days have just been filled with catching my breath after the awful week that I just wrote about. You know what’s just as bad as once again losing too much of your wealth, pride, and future options?

How it makes you feel so down about life again.

Even though my prior upswing wasn’t really earned, it still helps a lot to just feel better about something going well again. You play more upbeat music. You look forward to the next day. You smile more.

And you have more hope.

Now, that’s stripped away again for the time being (at minimum). Things will be a lot more stressful and questionable in the upcoming months too. It won’t be easy to hold on, and I’m not sure if I will. Every day could be a ticking time bomb. You just don’t know which one it will be.

Until you’re busy hitting rock bottom again.

And back to the deep struggles…

Late last night, my demons finally won out again for the first time in awhile. I had a very big setback and ate a huge loss. As usual, the kind of thing that there was absolutely no excuse for.

The bad news is that a lot of the large recent post-inheritance gains are now gone, which basically functioned as an unexpected early boost to my new-life work capital and as a nice cushion for starting life over again soon . And the chances of making that back anytime soon are very slim.

The good news is that I can still follow through with those life-changing plans and work for myself again, although now that situation just got more tenuous. The money that I expected to use for that is still there.

Also….as difficult as this latest huge setback and failure is to take, there’s a factor that makes it easier to stomach: I shouldn’t have even had so much extra already to begin with, because most was made by just getting lucky in the very short term. If I’d given up a lot of hard work where I “earned” it doing things the right way, that would be different. But that wasn’t what was going on lately. My market trading has been off in recent days, and I simply got lucky for awhile doing other stupid shit to make up for it.

Obviously that doesn’t excuse what happened last night, but it’s still how my mind sees the overall picture. And at the moment, I need to stay as positive as possible to keep from completely falling apart and ruining my future again.

So, where does that leave things going forward? First are foremost, STOP the latest downhill avalanche here. Especially since my career freedom is likely still at stake. Find some solace in how I’ve acquired a valuable sports card collection (which I don’t plan on selling much of regardless, but still). Take that collection, my inheritance, and the small gains from it that are still left, and prepare to move later this summer. FORGET what just happened. Or at least keep it from affecting future decisions.

Life would be so much easier if I wasn’t a wreck…..