Near Death

Who would have known that I would have a freak accident of such caliber, a near death experience. It was May, I had just gotten ready to head out to work. I was barely exiting the house when I reached over the dial of my 2015 Ram 1500 and attempted to set it to parking so I could get out and close the gate. Without looking I exited the vehicle and felt the door push me from behind. I failed to make sure that the truck was indeed in park and now I was facing a dilemma. I could have gotten out of the way but didn’t. I, like a dumbass, decided to turn around and jump inside in an attempt to stop it. A rush of adrenaline and an array of bad decisions put me in such dire predicament.

The truck is a bit high, and has no running boards, so when I jumped in I missed my footing and my right foot fell beneath the brake and got stuck there. I reached out and grabbed the door. There I was, falling down as I lost my hold of the door and landed on the ground. I caught a glimpse of the tire headed towards my groin, or at least that’s what I thought it was. I twisted to my right in a vague attempt to avoid it, but it caught my left leg and ran me over. I felt a sharp pain shoot from the bottom of my foot as the tire tore my boot off and punctured the skin with a rock.

I grunted from the pain and lay on the ground for a minute or two. I thought, what if I just lay here for a while as I call for help. It was at that moment that I remembered that my phone was inside the truck, and I had to drag myself at least forty feet before coming to the truck. With every hop, I felt my foot pulse harder and harder. I jumped into the truck, still running, shifted it into drive, and parked it. I got my phone and made my way i to the house so I could call the Safety Manager and inform him of my freak accident. Everything after that was like a foggy dream.

Rodent

Scenery

Into the Void: The Final Chapter

I used to cheat myself
So many times, so many times
But now everything is as easy
As easy as any white lie.

No more looking behind
No more on which to rely
Everything’s as smooth..
As smooth as white wine.

Ain’t gonna lie
The past kept me up all night
Just thinking… just thinking
Of what made us think we were fine.

Hold up, hold up rain…
Ease back, stay back
It’s time for bluer skies
It’s time for cooler nights.

And the moon will be my sunrise.

Seems the depressive era is done for. Now the change comes in full sprint.

Into the Void Chapter 5

Just the other day I drank a few too many and went into a little depressive rant inside my head about everything that had transpired throughout my life. Even after taking ownership of everything I had ever done or said, for some reason I didn’t feel better at all. It’s was those god damn memories of my past loves; they just won’t let me be free. Plus, I remembered how I infused my mind with a hateful emotion for each and every transgression.

A while back I had come across some articles about psychology that redacted about how we can create our own fears and emotion induced memories. This was something related to the Pavlov’s Conditioning Theory. In a way, you can even create fake memories about imaginary stuff that never happened, as long as you believed them to be true. I forgot who came up with that idea, but I do remember that the study concluded that people could create instant fake memories if given enough fake stimuli to support it. This might not make any sense now as how it relates to my past, but it will eventually.

Getting to the meaty part of the situation, I must say that when life went bad, I kind of did tell myself that I would never do certain things of such likes. I am talking simple stuff like never truly opening up to anyone, being antisocial and other mentals like that. I was thinking at the time that maybe such a way of thought would be a good thing, but little did I know that it would eventually create bigger problems for me. It’s not natural for people to be too safeguarded; by doing so you limit yourself on experiencing the possible greatness of friendships, the joy of loving, and the pain of being hurt. Out of all the things I learned, what I truly realized is that even though I already knew what my problems were, the answer arrived later in my life, which was about knowing that winning and losing are not exclusive of each other. I came across this idea while listening to one of Alan Watts’s lectures.

The idea went over and over in my head until it made sense. In order for someone to win another person has to lose. No one can be winning all the time; something is usually lost in this game of life. Another thing, and this has been the talk of literature for a really long time; it’s the notion that in order for someone to know they are happy they had to have experienced some sort of pain. Anyway, going back to my initial story, it seems that I got too carried away and somehow kept making the same mistakes. I must admit that at one point in time I actually felt like I was going insane. I kept doing the same things without making any changes, and the results were always the same.

I kept choosing the same kind of women, whom in time would end up just breaking my heart. I am not trying to be a martyr here, so no sympathy is needed for me. I’m not gonna go on and say that I was totally the victim all the time. In retrospect, I realize that I repeated the same mistakes, and that’s probably one of the things that created my situation. At times I can catch myself before I go into these weird depressive episodes, but I can’t prevent them from hitting me all the time. When that happens, all these memories flood my eyes and I am forever trapped in my past. I know what I must do, yet it seems so difficult to execute the changes needed to change my life. If I’m the master of my life, why is it so hard to control it? Is trying to control it the problem? It might be.

Two weeks ago my friend invited me to talk and have a few beers at her house. We reminisced about fond memories, of how we met and became friends afterwards. Even she seems to be in the same predicament as me. Once the chat of the fond memories the bad ones came in, and then the present and talks about depression. As she led me to know, she’s going through a depression cycle she can’t seem to fully shake out of. I wasn’t trying to be mean, but she said some things that triggered me and I told her the truth that I saw. It was sort of a mental awakening, letting her know that she needed to snap out of it and change the way she saw herself. You see, I noticed a pattern in the things she was telling me, and I immediately knew she was doing the same things as me.

She is very into the occult, clairvoyance and all that kind of supernatural stuff. I am not going to lie, I like that stuff as well. I find it very intriguing; it’s just like watching a horror or supernatural movie. It keeps my imagination going for hours on end. But even so I know that getting too hooked up on that stuff is not good, and I’m not saying because people think it’s all a lie or make belief; I’m saying this because I feel that if someone overdoes something he/she risks losing their mind. And I say this because at times I have felt that I was in a fantasy where I had no control of anything, and everything was a mere illusion like the Matrix. There is even a theory about us living in a simulation… could be true or it could just be what it is, a theory.

Man, I tend to lose myself with these wild ideas. My friend said that when she was young she had visited a witch who read her future. According to her, she remembered that she clearly told her that if she left her native country and moved to the US, she would experience a lot of hardships. When we were having out conversation she told me that and her eyes got watery. I could see that she truly believed that and placed all her anger at that very thing. I told her that it was impossible for such a thing to even be true.

How can you blame something that happened in the past about a future that never truly happened? It just didn’t make sense and I told her that. I told her that she needed to stop making excuses and make the best of what she has now, and to make better choices and improvements on how she handles herself. The later part was due to her telling me that she had gotten terminated from her employment because the ladies at the office didn’t like her since the very beginning of her even getting hired there.

Maybe the problem is you. Did you ever think about that? I told her that, and it even made me feel bad because I didn’t want to piss her off or make her feel bad. But she didn’t react badly towards it; it almost seemed as if she had never seen it from that perspective. After a while of being fired from many jobs and blaming it on others, we tends to realize that the problem might be ourselves. I’ve known this because I tend to be very self-conscious about how I behave at work. It is possible that she might just have really bad luck, but the probability of that being true is relatively small. That and her telling me that she had a really bad upbringing, which might be totally true, but saying that it was because she was born white with green eyes… yeah GTFOH! What really threw me off was her saying that she remembered everything vividly since she was two. I told her that it would be really impossible since it’s already been proven that at such young age your memory is still under development. And even if it had the slightest possibility of being true, to remember with such vividness is really hard to pull off. I called bullshit on that.

That was when I once again came upon what I already knew, the difference being that I was calling someone out on it. Just like her I used to think that I had a really bad childhood. And now I question which of those memories are true and which ones are totally fabricated. It’s hard to say… So the best thing I could do was just accept the past and let it stay where it belongs, in the past.

Into the Void Chapter 4: Pt. 2

At the beginning of being unemployed, time seemed to slow down way too much, but now everything seems to have been speeding up drastically. I usually get good sleep, but lately I’ve been sleeping more than ever. Just the other day I slept for thirteen hours. I would have slept more but my head was already boppin’. I guess your brain can only handle so much. What sucks about this new change of time is that even though we get that extra hour of sunshine, the day gets darker quicker and my mind tends to do the same. I find myself unable to function correctly once the sun goes down—and living so far away from civilization, due to the lack of tv channels and internet access, I can’t find anything to do.
It’s not bad living out there, outside of the city. Most of the time out here, you get a really good night’s sleep because there isn’t much noise taking place. I started to hate the neighbor ever since he added a fog light to the electrical post. Ever since then I haven’t been able to enjoy my star gazing like I used to. One of the beauties of living away from civilization is no having that much light pollution. I used to lie on the ground and just look up at the stars for hours while I listened to music.

Times have changed, now a day everything seems to be so complicated. Just having friendships now a day seems to require some sort of training or certification, just to get the point across. Communication has become more difficult to use now that there is an overabundance of social apps and other types that are supposed to facilitate how people communication. Maybe I am too old school, even though I am borderline almost a millennial. They call us the Gen-Exers; something like that.

There have been times that I’ve asked myself if I might have been the problem. What if I have lost touch with reality and I lost my way of how communication goes? What now? I doubt that is the case, but just in case I have taken some actions towards improving it. I started to connect with old friends and even changed the way I acted with my family. Now that my parents are older, I have to enjoy the rest of their time here on earth before they decide they have had enough and depart. It’s the small little things that improve our quality of life. I really think this is the case.

I haven’t been as depressed as before—but still get that feeling of gloom once in a while. It even made me think that I might be bipolar. I joke about that, I know I am not, but that just feels weird. Having an overly active mind does not help at all. Most of the time my mind is just thinking and thinking so much that I don’t enjoy the little things. I started to take better care of myself by eating healthy and meditating… been getting so much energy now. I guess I will have to find a way to burn that energy off. What if I wrote a journal?

Now that I’ve been meditating more and becoming more self-aware, I have been having some really wild dreams. Just yesterday I dreamt that I was a cyborg fighting evil runaway battle bots. Also, just last week I dreamt that as I was cleaning my room, dusting it off and re-arranging the furniture, the world was experiencing catastrophe. I heard loud booms in the distance. I went outside and saw the city consumed by a hellish red fire that rose all the way to the clouds. I could see meteors falling from the sky, generating massive explosions. Pretty wild huh?

Into the Void Chapter 4: Pt. 1

Recently I’ve been on a downward spiral ever since I got laid off my last job. Even though I am receiving unemployment benefits I feel like I am losing my mind. I went from working seventy two hours a week to working none. I’ve tried to make the best of it, tried using my free time to teach myself how to code and get back to writing, but it has been extremely difficult. For some unknown reason I blank out when about to write, even though my mind is raging with so many ideas and thoughts.

I started trying to make EDM track using Ableton Live and a keyboard that I bought at Guitar Center. At first it was like meditating, but even that became a nuisance with time. I would lie on the floor and mess with plugins and all kinds of things. I made a few tracks using samples that I had bought years ago. But as time would tell I stopped doing all that completely. When I stopped doing all of that I started watching lectures from Carl Jung and Alan Watts. I would put on my studio headset and just let them rip… always listening to what kind of message would come through. But even that with time fell apart.

I kept going back to the past, kept reliving old memories of when I used to be happy with a loved one. Unfortunately before I went to work in the oil fields, I made the attempt to rekindle what I once had with my last ex. They say they are exes for a reason, but I have known this woman for almost fifteen years, and we’ve been through ups and downs and times where neither one of us was ready for a commitment. So I told her that I was getting old and that I didn’t want to keep looking around, I knew I wanted to be with her and I didn’t mind that she had two kids already from other men. That didn’t bother me at all, as a matter of fact that would have been great because I have no children of my own and probably can’t have any.

She agreed and while I was away everything looked promising. I got stuck out there working three weeks straight and little by little I started noticing certain behavioral patterns. I never told her anything about them, but I noticed that she would only text when at work and when she got home she would completely shut off. That struck a chord; I wasn’t going to assume anything but I wasn’t going to not think of it. My mind immediately told me that was a sign that she was either seeing someone else or she had someone else. Later time would reveal the latter. I’m guessing she had gotten back with her baby’s daddy in an attempt to reconcile differences and the fact that they had a kid together. That really broke me inside for a long time. It took me months before I simply accepted the fact that it was over and her putting me in a third party situation was an all-time low. Not only that but she had the audacity to put him on the phone and create an unnecessary situational conflict.

Time passed on by and I worked as hard as  I could, out there in the cold loading hydrochloric acid into tankers and all other kinds of hard labor. Pay was good, and the hours were excellent. Once I accepted my reality the idea of her began to slowly fade. It wasn’t until a year later, I’m assuming her little charade didn’t go as planned, and she decided to contact me once again. This time she posted something on my Facebook profile. Like a sucker I replied and accepted her offer to have lunch on two occasions. Can’t really beat an old horse, because I immediately remember how she played me and I cut her out. She told me that she just wanted to say hi and other non-sense. You might think it was trivial of me of how I acted, but I told her that I was dead to her. She should accept that things would never EVER be the same.

And up to date I haven’t been the same. Those old ass memories just brought more pain than feelings of happiness. Life has a tricky way of trying to piss you off. And now I found myself being unable to do anything as if my life had come to a complete stop. I mustered enough will to get out of the house more, to go visit friends and family. And that has been really comforting. The only thing bothering me now is trying to get a job that pays well and will allow me to realize my sub-dreams. I have these small goals that I want to accomplish, and the only way I can is to get back on the horse and make that moolah. The only thing that sucks about my small city is that pay is not that great. Maybe I should go back to the oilfield, even though it slowed down a lot lately. Or maybe… guess I’ll just have to take it a day at a time and find what makes me tick.

Into the Void Chapter 3 Pt. 2

Just the other day I was talking to a friend of mine and told her that I wanted to be like the person I used to be when I was twenty one years old. At that point in my life I felt I was on top of the world. I was going to college and was working full  time as a Detention Officer. For me eighteen dollars an hour was like winning the lotto, for I had not made that kind of money before. And so, just like a fool I let that get to my head, but not immediately. It took many years for me to really feel the change; however, those years before I think I changed were awesome. The feeling of being able to work and still go to school was liberating. Yeah I didn’t have a 4.0 average like the rest of my friends who just stayed home and only did school.

I was able to buy my own stuff, had my own ride, and most importantly I did what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Nothing would stop, my life had become a roller coaster of spontaneity and I freaking loved that. Even now that life has taken its toll on me and perhaps has even shaped me to a point that I am no longer my true self, I am still the master of doing whatever I want and whenever I feel like it. A lot of people, philosophers and what not, always say that you should live your life at the edge of the seat. I guess it’s better to live than to regret not living. However, my father who was a big influence in my life thought otherwise. He was so keen to holding dear to his beliefs of looking to the future. I must say that there has to be a healthy balance for one thing could destroy the other.

It always irked me when my father would give me unsolicited advice. I’m not saying that I am a bad son, or that he was bad at giving advice, I just think that his way of giving it might have not been the best. I don’t have any kids so I can’t truly say how I would do it… but I speculate that I would ease into it like I have when talking to my nieces. I’ve learned to make people feel comfortable when talking about touchy subjects, and can ease advice as if seemingly an idea of the person who I am talking to. I learned this my later years when working for a boss that was younger than me, someone who truly earns the title of a micro-manager.

So now this healthy mix I’ve come to find about is being able to live at the moment while saving for the future. And I’m not just talking about saving money for the future, but saving yourself from troubles that might appear in the future. This is what I tend to call being proactive as in preventing things from happening. I know that you can’t foresee everything that might come at you, but in the least you can manage to lessen the consequences or damage it might incur.

Going back to those years of when I was twenty one and felt like I was on top of the world I found myself to be at my happiest. I know that happiness is subjective and not a continuous state of mind, but rather an exclusive idea that comes and goes with time. At that time I wasn’t much of a party goer or a drinker; I was just a bit happy go lucky. I was a bit naïve and gullible, I easily fell to the temptations of peer pressure and self-destructive attitudes for the time being. I can’t truly blame my peers because nobody twisted my hand or put a gun to my head, but they did have some influence over me to the point that I didn’t want to be that boring dude.

Working as a Detention Officer is no easy task and eventually that world will influence you. As the years passed I become a different person. I was easily annoyed, pissed off, or just simply more of an asshole. Walking along with criminal minds from all walks of life creates a sense of self that not many people can relate to. It is just something that not everyone can do or deal with. Not only that, but many of my co-workers had mental issues that they often attempted to fix by self-medicating. And that medication was delicious beer.

In retrospect I can see how the lack of envisioning for a future and total self-abandonment because I was living so much in the moment that changed who I used to be. The way I thought, the way I saw myself and how I reacted to this world was different than when I was a young innocent man still full of dreams. Now, now I am not going to exaggerate anymore. It wasn’t totally that bad, but my dream wasn’t to go into law enforcement. As a matter of fact I didn’t even want to be a Detention Officer. It was my brother that got me into it. He kept insisting that I should apply and work with him. At first I stated at a part-timer working the weekends aka. The Weekend Warrior. But man, those checks looked so good that I decided to go full time head first into the abyss of pain and suffering.

I had a falling out later in life as I kept making the same mistakes and almost ruined my law enforcement career. And even though I didn’t ruin it, it’s kind of just broken down but now I was getting my Masters and worked full time as well. This time though, I learned so many skills and even had a 4.0 at one point. I eventually dropped it to a 3.4 because I started goofing off and partying too much. I was working as an armed guard and was making more than before. My life as a detention officer was over as it was something that I did not want to repeat. But some things don’t change, or the change is no minute that you repeat making the same mistakes over and over till life comes at you like a ton of bricks and just messes everything you had planned out.

I lost that job and ended with the opportunity to become a Criminal Justice Instructor, a position that seemed tempting and possibly very rewarding, but for some unknown dumb reason I decided to pass on it. Oh boy, did I suffer from that. I ended up working two minimum wage jobs for two years till I moved back into corrections. This time it was Community Corrections. And I was pretty good at it. I still didn’t like the feeling of being incarcerated myself with these people whom I try not to judge. I try to keep my judgment to myself because I don’t know what others are going through, and because of that I tend not to give unsolicited advice.

I eventually got bored and decided to do something different. I decided to get out of my comfort zone and just do something so wild that it might be rewarding. And because of this decision I ended up working in the oilfields. At first it wasn’t that bad since working in law enforcement usually comes with long hours and mental stress. I was used to working sixteen hour shifts that working the oilfields was not that bad. It wasn’t until the third week that I started feeling the difference. Holy moly was it freaking rough! In those three first weeks I put in a total of three hundred and thirty nine hours. When I was giving a few days off I came back to my hometown to visit. All my friends said I had aged so much. I looked in the mirror, boy were they right. My face looked like it had aged ten years and my head was now riddled with white.

I did learn much though, it was an experience of a lifetime which is scheduled to be written about for another time.

She’s Back

It’s been fifteen years since we first met, yet my memory of her has never faded. Some details of how we came to be have in fact been distorted, but everything else is still in tact. She still looks as beautiful as the first day I lay my toxic manly gaze over her. I do remember that day, the whole situation was a big ordeal for me. In my late teens I had only wished for someone like her to come into my life and just simply turn it upside down in a good way. But it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties when that became a real possibility.

And there she was, ringing the door bell to my house. I went outside and greeted her. I invited her in and took of her coat. We chatted a bit and it was an instant love at first sight. Things would never be the same after that. I mean, yeah I might be more mature now, but back then love was pure and innocent. They don’t make they like they used to. Even though these new ones are a bit fast and readily available to destroy the world, that one, a vintage quality to her, was like none I have ever seen.

And now she is back into my life. How? I have no idea. I had already lost hope that she would ever find her way back into my life. Yet here we are, talking about her and what she meant for me during those younger years. I am happy and bamboozled that it has come to this.

I present to you my true first love:
Alienware Aurora 7500
Alienware Area 51 Predator Chassis
Running the following specs:
Asus motherboard
AMD Athlon (not sure) need to recheck that
Nvidia FX 5200 Video Card
Creative Sound Blaster Audio Card
8 gigs of RAM
1 Seagate 250 GB
(missing another one which was used in RAID)
2 DVD WRWs (one is broken)
1 Diskette Drive
1 Multi format Disk Drive

My gaming laptop looks like a trailer park tablet next to this bad girl.
PC is running Win XP Pro (HD is about to give up)

Into the Void Chapter 3 Pt. 1

I could argue as much as I want that being bullied for so long made me one as well, hence the “when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” but I would be lying. I am not going to blame my brother because even though he was one of the main reasons I ended up beating up my friends, it was ultimately my decision to do it.

I don’t truly recall how old I was when this happened; I just know that for a fact my brother has always been eight years older than me. For some unknown reason, my brother loved to fight a lot and on many occasions liked to watch me fight. I guess it was fun; well technically it is as we, not everyone though, like to watch contact sports. But it being a sport is a totally different beast. I can’t say I was forced, but somehow it kind of was since he was bigger and meaner than me. So I tried to keep the peace with him and would do what he would ask me to.

I remember coming back from school with my friends. We were like a block away from getting home when my brother suddenly popped up out of nowhere. I didn’t see where he came from at all. He instigated my friends whom just ignored him. And that made him get angrier. He ended up telling me to beat up my friend and I looked around and shrugged. I didn’t want to fight him, but something happened. It almost felt as if my friend said that I couldn’t and in the end we ended up throwing blows. We went back and forth tugging on each other trying to get punches in. Mind you, we were barely in elementary so our fighting skill was trash. He ended up with a bloody nose and I with a broken friendship. After that we never really talked.

This kept going on for a really long time until my brother finally got bored and let me be. But the damage had been already done and I had lost many good friends throughout that ordeal. Once I moved from that school I had lost contact with all of my friends. It wasn’t until I was going to college that an old friend of mine recognized me. We were taking a class together and caught up on a lot of things. But it wasn’t the same. We never got back to being friends or we tried of hanging around of that sort. I guess it was just giving into the nostalgia of looking back into what was once our pasts. We were still pretty young; I think I was nineteen or twenty years when we caught up. I wonder if he still had grudges of what had transpired. Even the whole moving away was seemed as a mistake I had made even though I had no say in that regard.

Now as an adult I often think about how dynamic that area I grew up in my early years was. It was one of the rich parts of the city, Sunset Heights, yet there were so many small areas of extreme poverty right next to it. Those shitty apartments I grew up are still there, all decrepit and trash ridden. And oddly enough around them are the nice condos and the fancy homes. I would often cut through some fancy apartments and go south towards a park I used to enjoy spending time at. Once you went a little bit more into the south you would start to notice the change in the types of houses. You could see the difference in economic status just by watching the awful weed filled front porches. Even the pavement was deteriorated. But that area was fun as hell. I had a lot of other friends that lived around there. I even still remember the corner store where I used to buy chocolates for two quarters. My favorite was the Nestle Alpine White with Almond bars.

I few days ago I ended up going back there just to visit as I waited for my friend to finish with some errands she had to take care of. The streets are the same and most of the houses seem a litter bit better off than before. I saw a few duplexes that I had never seen before. The park seemed a lot smaller, but had at least been renovated. I even passed up by that famous house that was right up the alley from where I lived. That house was famous for being the entrance to long tunnels used for smuggling people which ran into the city square.

It felt a little bit odd being back there again, reminiscing about the good old days when life wasn’t as hard as it is now. Or maybe it was just simpler since being a child is about one of the simplest forms of life. Having few worries, yet dealing with difficult life situations whose effects deeply scar our hearts and minds.