

Dedication

For Alexis

For sharing all of my good times

and holding my hand as I walked through the dark times.

Thank you for being a beautiful soul.

I love you.

Table of Contents

1 | God's Kick in the Ass..... 6

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2 | Across a Heartland.....8

3 | The Big Empty.....10

4 | The First Domino Falls.....12

5 | The Second Domino Falls.....14

6 | The Power of the Crystals.....15

7 | The Mood Changes.....18

8 | Excess Baggage.....21

9 | Claw marks and Tears.....24

10 | The Fort.....25

11 | Budget Nutrition.....27

12 | Until We Meet Again.....29

13 | Second Thoughts.....30

14 | Scrap Metal.....31

15 | #Daddysgirl.....32

16 | Making Sense of the World.....34

17 | The Last Leg.....35

18 | The Bitch.....37

19 | I'm Lost.....39

20 | The Station.....40

21 | Ticks and Itch Weed.....41

22 | My Office at McDonald's.....43

23 | Monster Jam.....44

24 | The Long Arm of the Cubicle....46.

25 | There has to be more.....50

26 | Wouldn't You Like to be a Pepper too?.....51

27 | The Two Week Countdown.....53

28 | The Vampires.....54

29 | Everything is a Dollar.....57

30 | Red Beans and Rice.....58

31 | Peace on Credit Island.....59

32 | Imposition.....61

33 | The Sixth Day.....62

34 | Too Many Girls.....63

35 | Narcissism.....64

36 | Sugar Pimps.....65

37 | Sad to Say.....67

38 | Fire Roasted Green Chile.....68

39 | The Remnants of Eggs Benedict /Trip Back to Middle School.....70

40 | The Death Toll.....71

41 | Life and Death of a Salesman.....73

42 | I Remembered the Camera.....75

43 | Freewill Eternalism.....77

44 | A Passing, Yet Life Long Thought.....79

45 | Fortunate Son.....80

46 | Chicken Fat.....82

47 | Black Water.....83

48 | Happy Hours.....84

49 | The Sad Sickness.....85

50 | Things could have been Different.....86

51 | Payday.....88

52 | A Simple Plate.....89

53 | Blades of Grass.....90

54 | The Lost Art of Being Human.....90

55 | Better You than Me.....91

56 | The Blank Canvas.....92

57 | Two Corys.....94

58 | A Sign of Intelligent Life.....96

59 | The Professional.....97

60 | A Thousand Lives.....98

61 | The Grand Delusion.....99

62 | Same State, Different Worlds.....100

63 | Retirement Planning.....101

64 | Reversal of Fortune.....102

65 | All or Nothing.....103

66 | Sports Talk.....104

67 | The Lunk Alarm.....105

68 | What's the Difference?.....106

69 | Dog Sense.....108

70 | Writing Scripts.....109

71 | Balance.....110

72 | A Gyro Omelet.....111

73 | Twenty Two Holes.....112

74 | A Big Enough Ocean.....112

75 | Colorado Vacation.....114

76 | The Last Trigger Date.....115

77 | Almost a Whore.....116

78 | Eating Disorder.....118

79 | To Tell the Truth.....119

80 | A Day of Art.....121

81 | A Night of Art.....122

82 | Saving the Planet.....123

83 | A Slower Pace.....123

84 | Locality.....124

85 | The Novena.....125

86 | How Old is your Soul?.....128

87 | Childhood Delusions.....130

88 | The Dream State.....132

89 | The Pale Horse.....133

90 | I've Looked Into the Eyes of the Pale Horse.....134

91 | What is the Perfect Age?.....136

92 | A Legacy.....138

93 | Natural Wood.....140

94 | The Obstacle of the Rocky Mountains.....140

95 | Five Stars.....143

96 | Seven Years.....143

97 | All Shades of Grey.....144

98 | The Troubleshooter.....145

99 | Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places.....146

100 | No Fear.....147

101 | Just Look out the Window.....148

102 | Seasons in the Sun.....148

103 | Grandparents.....151

104 | Unlocking the Universe.....153

105 | We are Columbine.....155

106 | Comedy is Tragedy.....156

107 | Que Sera Sera.....156

108 | The Reward in Life.....158

109 | The Last Happiness.....159

110 | Do I know you?.....160

111 | A Vicious Cycle.....161

112 | We Meet Again.....162

113 | All the World is a Stage.....163

114 | Standing in the Rain, Talking to Myself.....165

115 | One last Kick in the Ass.....166

116 | Time to go..... 168

God's Kick in the Ass

I woke up that morning and just stared at the ceiling. I looked out the window and saw the drizzle and fog. Feelings of dread and angst permeated every fiber of my being. I kept looking at the clock wondering how long I could delay the inevitable. After a cup of coffee and a long shower I was ready to do what I had to do.

I never wanted to set foot in that hospital again. As I drove there my heart was racing and seemed to beat more intensely with every mile. There were a couple of times in that five mile trip that I thought I was going to have to pull over and compose myself or vomit.

I don't know if it was a subconscious thing, but when I got to the hospital's parking lot I used the same parking spot I used on the day my wife Julie had died. The parking lot was empty, and the space was about as far from door as you could get. I didn't mind a little rain and the walk would give me time to smoke a cigarette. My knees and legs were weak and shaking as I reached for the handle of the door that I had pulled open so many times before when Julie spent here last three days there.

As I walked through the threshold I thought I was going to hyperventilate. I fucking hated that place. I couldn't believe I was there again. It was like a bad dream. I walked past the cafeteria and headed towards the elevator in a familiar style. The only good thing about being in the hospital is that if I was going to have a heart attack, it's the best place to be.

Instinctively I pushed the third floor button on the elevator before remembering that Jeanie was on a higher up floor. As the elevator started ascending, I felt that maybe I was having a panic attack. The elevator stopped on the third floor, the doors opened. Nobody got on, I didn't get off, and the doors closed again. Strangely, after that I just instantly got my composure back. I had to be strong.

I walked into the room and Jeanie was alone. She didn't look too bad, maybe a little pale. The first thing I noticed was the bag of chemo drugs dripping into her. The type of chemo she was doing was intense. She had to have those drugs pumping in her veins 24/7 for a week. I felt bad that this was the way her treatment went. My wife had always been on an open treatment ward as she did her chemotherapy. That always struck me has great way to do it, if only for the reason that it lets you know that you aren't the only person dealing with cancer.

Jeanie was the mother of my daughter Alexis' best friend Amanda. Alexis and Amanda had been inseparable since the third grade. Jeanie was like a second mom to Alexis, and since Amanda's dad lived in Seattle, I felt like a second father to her.

Jeanie was surprised that I came to see her. I was honest and told her that it was no easy task for me. She understood. Since I had already learned all of the jargon of cancer, we started talking about her treatment, the options and what the suspected outcomes may be. She had been diagnosed with Leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant. The medical staff was running tests to see if her brother would be a compatible match.

There was something that Jeanie said that really struck a chord with me. She told me that she thought her diagnosis was God's way of kicking her in the ass and letting her know that there was something else she needed to do with her life. I told her that I understood that.

As I drove home from the hospital it occurred to me, that God had already kicked me in the ass by snatching Julie out of my life. In some type of epiphany driving down Alameda Parkway overlooking the Denver metro area, I knew that my life had to change. I just didn't know what that meant.

I had a childhood friend who went through numerous terrible tragedies over the course of his life would say to his son, "Look around, because your whole life can change in an instant". I don't disagree with the sentiment, his kid just seemed a little young for that harsh reality at the time.

As soon as I walked through the door of my townhome after returning from the hospital, I started going through Julie's stuff. A chore I had been putting off for way too long. God was kicking me in the ass and I needed to get going. I was already late.

If you subscribe to the stages of grieving, I knew that I had already been through the "depression" stage, now it was time to start working on "acceptance".

Across a Heartland

It was almost three weeks to the day after I had visited Jeanie in the hospital and there I was speeding up Interstate 76 toward the Nebraska border in a Lexus coupe with 200K miles on it. My destination was going to be Davenport, Iowa for reasons that I will get to later.

I kept looking back at Lucy. That beautiful little dog was sleeping soundly on a blanket in the backseat amid the luggage. She had had diarrhea the past couple of days, and had been very skittish. It was my entirely my fault. I had put the dog that Julie loved so much through a lot in the past week. I had never really wanted a dog, I was more of a cat person, but Lucy would the last real connection I had to Julie.

The drive through northeastern Colorado and across Nebraska really gives a person time to think. There isn't a whole lot to look at, and your mind gets a chance to wander while you're driving eighty miles an hour. I just kept asking out loud, "Cory, what the fuck are you doing?"

I had the emptiest feeling when I drove across the Colorado border into Nebraska. I had no idea when I would be seeing my home state again. Almost everybody that I knew , including my daughter, was now in a different state, and I was in a state where I didn't know a single living soul. I instantaneously felt alone like I had never felt so deeply before.

I had been stopping at nearly every rest area I came across so Lucy could take a walk, and I would try to get her to drink some water. She hadn't been eating or drinking much. She was just nervous about what was happening to her. That would make her a mirror image of her owner. It made sense, I was nervous about what was happening to me.

The drive was also filled with memories of Julie. We had driven the route several times when we went back to Des Moines to see her family. It was somewhere along that route that we heard "All Summer Long" by Kid Rock for the first time. As I drove towards my new home, I just keeping hearing the line, "man, I'd love to see that girl again".

Lucy and I both needed a break from the road. It had been an exhausting day on so many levels. I pulled off the interstate in Kearney, which is about halfway between Denver and Davenport. I found a Motel 6, grabbed an 18 pack of Busch Light and ordered a Domino's Pizza. Lucy was hungry enough to scarf down a can of Alpo. We were both asleep fairly early.

Tomorrow was going to be a big day. A new chapter in our lives would officially begin. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. I kept thinking about all of the events that had led me to that little motel room listening to the traffic on Interstate 80 on a drizzly May night.

The Big Empty

In the immediate months following Julie's death, there was much to keep my mind occupied. She died in October, so the holidays were just around the corner to give me things to think about other than my grief. Then just before Christmas was when I started writing my fist book, "At the End of the Dance". It was a half-hearted effort at first, but after the New Year rolled around, I figured that I owed it to Julie's memory to get serious about finishing that book.

My vison in life was myopic. The book was the only thing that mattered. I quit going to the bar, and for a while quit drinking altogether. There were days where I woke up at five in the morning, sat at the computer to write, and the next thing I knew it was after midnight. It was like the day only existed for me on paper. For almost three months, the only time I left my room was when I went to work or went to the gym.

I wasn't aware of what the universe was doing around me. The book was all I ate, breathed, and slept. I lost twenty pounds during this time and didn't even realize it until people started making comments and I weighed myself.

I finished the book about midafternoon one day in early April. I decided that the whole affair called for a celebration. I went out and bought and eighteen pack of Bud Light and called my guy to get $80 worth of pot. I was so proud of myself. I had accomplished the goal of writing a book that I had set for myself thirty years earlier. My closet was stuffed with unfinished manuscripts from over the years. I had delusions of all the success that would be coming my way. My mind was racing about how to get the book published. I had so many things to consider.

The next day I went to work, and afterwards made my first appearance at the bar in months. It felt good to be back. I missed the conversation with the regulars there, and of course I bragged about my accomplishments. I had went two months without drinking, and finished writing a book to boot.

When I got home from the bar, I walked into the house and immediately felt something that I had never noticed before. I didn't know what it was. Everything seemed normal, but there was a strong feeling of emptiness. Both of the dogs, King and Lucy, were there. Alexis was watching TV up in her room. There was just an eerie stillness.

Julie had been dead almost six months. I couldn't understand why I was just now noticing that feeling of nothingness. I could hear the silence. The air felt stagnant. The only smell was that of cigarette smoke. All of my worldly possessions surrounded me, yet I felt like I was in an empty room. There seemed to be an echo.

The feeling of emptiness in the house just seemed to steadily grow. I was starting to feel it physically. My mind was in a constant sense of urgency, and my muscles felt never ending pressure, my skin tingled. A sense of panic started to grip me. I didn't know what was going on.

The First Domino Falls

Julie and I had always maintained separate finances, and each handled certain bills without the other's knowledge. After she died, she left me enough in savings to maintain the household for a few months. I was only working part time and receiving unemployment checks. The jobs in the banking industry at the time were scarce or very low paying.

It was April and I had run out of the money that I had found in Julie's bank accounts. My unemployment checks were gone because John Boehner and Congress had allowed those benefits expire on December 31st, 2013. My part time jobs didn't pay shit, and the state of Colorado was garnishing my checks anyway. The rent was due.

I am not lying when I say that my plan for getting the rent paid was to sell the book that I had just written. I naively thought that the first agent that I solicited would jump at the chance to represent me and they would already have connections in the publishing industry and I would immediately get a check that would solve every problem that I was having. To all of my fellow authors out there, I can literally hear you laughing. I guess instead of calling myself naïve, I can be more accurate and label myself an arrogant, elitist prick.

I had always thought that my final insurance policy for finances would be to pawn Julie's wedding ring if and when things got dire. The situation was beyond dire. I paid almost $2,800 for the ring, so I assumed I would be able to get half that much. I took it to three places that I had researched online. The first place I took it to down on Broadway wasn't even slightly interested. The second option was one of those places with some guy waiving a sign out front that said "we buy gold". The guy told me that he would give me $198 for it, because all he was going to do was melt it down. My rent was $1300 so that wasn't going to cut it.

I finally went to a pawn shop, and after a little negotiating I was able to get $360 for it. That would leave me about a $1000 short of making the rent. I knew that I would never be able to redeem the ring, but I was happy that at least it wasn't going to be melted down. The pawn shop would be able to sell it to someone who would appreciate it. Julie's memory should not be going into a melting pot.

Still, the bottom line was that I was not going to have a place to live. I was already two months past due on the gas and electricity bill so that would be getting turned off before too long. I was pretty much fucked. I had no clue what to do.

That evening as I was considering my options, my phone rang. It was my cousin Mike from Iowa. He could tell that something was wrong, so I told him about my dilemma. Mike was in the Teamsters Union and had just taken a job building a fertilizer plant in Burlington, Iowa which was about two hours south of his home in Davenport. He rented a place near the job so he wouldn't have to commute.

Mike said I could come take care of his house, and all I would have to do is mow the lawn. I didn't make a whole lot of his comment at the time. Iowa was simply not a destination I had planned for my life.

The Second Domino Falls

That same night I got a call from Alexis. She told that I needed to call Nate, who was Jeannie's husband. He was having a hard time with his wife's Leukemia diagnosis.

I had never spoken to him before. All I knew was that he had recently married Jeannie and had a couple of kids of his own. I figured that if I could help somebody whose spouse was diagnosed with cancer, it was the least that I could do.

I called Nate and we talked for a couple of hours. I told him my story about what I experienced as Julie went through chemotherapy and the rest of treatment. I told him some of the things that he could expect and tried to reassure him, although I didn't know if I was the right person to be doing that.

Nate asked me if I would go see Jeannie in the hospital. I was kind of leery about doing that, after all my wife had just died of cancer. I wasn't sure if I would be the most positive presence. I also knew that Jeannie was in the same hospital where Julie had died, and the thought of going back into that place scared the shit out of me.

The Power of the Crystals

After seeing Jeanie in the hospital, I could picture her face and hear her voice as she said the phrase, "God's kick in the ass". It dawned on me that God had kicked me in the ass about a year earlier, but I was just too stupid or drunk to realize it. I needed to get going; I was way behind schedule for my next destination. I didn't know what the next destination was, but I was late. The first thing to do was something that I had been neglecting for way too long. I had to clean out Julie's room.

I took everything out of the living room and set up every table that I had in there. I figured the best way to get rid of Julie's stuff was to have an estate sale. I started carrying things out of her room in the basement and tried to group similar items on separate tables. I took all of the books off of the shelves downstairs and put everything back together on the floor above.

I didn't like to touch Julie's stuff, I had been conditioned into feeling that way. She hated to have the most minute of her possessions to be messed with. If I was cleaning the house, I would have to have her move her purse because she absolutely detested me touching it. Now I was handling things that were almost sacred to her. I struggle with my beliefs about the afterlife, but if she knew what was happening to her things, I should expect earthquakes, floods, famine, pestilence, and possibly a new ice age.

It was her collection of crystals that worried me. To me, they were a simply a box of rocks, to Julie they were a source of infinite power. She really believed in them, and from what I gather, she had most of her life. I never counted how many she actually had but there were quite a few. She kept most of them wrapped together, but on the nightstand was a little pyramid. When I went to grab it, the top came off of it. It was like a little jewelry box that Julie had been keeping six crystals in. It looked like they were in some type of pattern. There was a chill that went through my body when I opened that pyramid. I felt a little ting of fear in the back of my mind.

I don't think I had ever noticed that pyramid when Julie was alive. I'm guessing it may have been something she acquired after she was diagnosed with cancer. I have no idea what the significance of crystals in a pyramid are, but I sensed that it meant something deep and profound to Julie.

I set the pyramid with the crystals aside from everything else that would be in the estate sale. A little voice in my head told me that I needed to keep that pyramid and those crystals close to me until I died.

It had already been one of the most surreal and stressful days of my life. I felt like I had been awake for days but it was only early afternoon. Going to see Jeanie in the hospital room earlier that morning just seemed to zap me out of reality. I was a ghost. I cleaned out Julie's room, which was just heart wrenching at times. I doubt my blood pressure could have been measured. My skin was buzzing.

While cleaning off a book shelf in my wife's room I came across an old Meatus wine bottle. That bottle was where I kept the marijuana seeds that I cleaned out of the bags I bought when I was a kid in Pueblo and on through my high school years. I had been moving it around with me wherever I went. I know that it went to San Diego and back with me when I was younger. I can't think of a reason why I kept it, I just did.

I took a break from the emotionally exhausting day and went to the bar for a couple of hours. When I got home, the neighbor told me he had just harvested a plant he had been growing and wondered if I wanted to smoke some. I said sure and told him about the seeds in the Meatus bottle.

I invited him in, but told him to hold on so I could do something with the dogs. Before I could get them into the backyard the neighbor just walked into the house without knocking or ringing the doorbell. Alexis' dog, King, a pit bull, was living with us. In most cases he was the sweetest dog you would ever want to be around, but he didn't take kindly to strangers just walking into the house. It could have been a lot worse because the pit bull only bit the neighbor once on his hand.

I looked at the wound and it was very minor, but almost instantly you could tell that neighbor saw dollar signs in his eyes. He said that he thought his hand was broken. I knew that it was all bullshit. In the next day or two, the neighbor confronted Alexis in the parking lot about her "dangerous" dog. We both knew that this was not going to end well.

That incident was just another reason to get out of that house. Alexis took King to her boyfriend's house. It was the last time I ever got to see that gentle, loving dog.

That night I called my cousin Mike and asked if he was serious about having me housesit for him while he was away working. He said that he was. In the coming days, I let my friends and family know that I would soon be moving to Davenport, Iowa and I wasn't sure when I would be back. They all said they supported me, but I could tell by the looks in their eyes that they were really worried about me.

The Mood Changes

I briefly touched on the subject somewhat in my first book, but I believe the townhome that we lived in Lakewood was haunted. From the time that we moved in, there were noises, things would move and often there was the feeling that somebody was there with you when everybody else was gone. On several occasions, it sounded like there were footsteps going up the stairs, but nobody was there.

A couple of months after we moved in, Alexis got so scared by the sounds she heard in the middle of the night, she left and went to sleep at a friend's house. Other than that, I don't remember ever feeling threatened by whatever was there with us. I thought it was kind of cool. Julie tried to pretend nothing was going on but she knew, she just wouldn't admit it. Alexis got used to it, and it only bothered the dogs occasionally. I almost had a paranormal investigation team come out one time, but Julie nixed the idea when she found out they would have to spend the night. We just happened to be sharing some space and time with an entity from somewhere else.

For three years it seemed like we had a mutual living arrangement with whatever this presence was, but that all seemed to change when I started moving Julie's stuff around. Almost immediately after I started getting her possessions upstairs for a potential estate sale, there wasn't a "friendly ghost" feeling to the place anymore. The dwelling seemed to adopt a buzzing tension and stifling pressure. Something ominous had moved into that place, with an audible silence almost like white noise.

I kept thinking about my wife and her crystals. She was very superstitious of them. Maybe when I started fucking with them that day, it brought a different energy to the presence in the house. It appeared that our mutual living arrangement wasn't going to be working anymore.

I will concede that I may have been having some sort of an emotional breakdown. I had pretty much stopped eating and I was barely sleeping. I would just lay awake at night and smoke cigarettes, almost a pack between dusk and dawn. There were times when I felt the spirit angrily pressing on my chest. Make no mistake, even if I was I having some type of breakdown, I wasn't imagining what was happening. I could tell that this thing no longer wanted us in that house.

The conflict within those walls seemed to intensify with each passing day. It got to the point where as soon as I pulled into our designated parking spot I could feel the pressure in my temples. I would sit in the car for a few minutes because I did not want to walk through that door. I didn't want to feel it. I tried to ignore it as much as I could by trying to get busy as soon as I walked in. I'd play with dogs and get them taken care of, cook some dinner, and do whatever needed to be done around the house. As long as I was busy I wasn't paying attention to what was happening around me.

When I had nothing left to do, especially on nights when Alexis was gone, the house would fuck with me with a vengeance. I would be constantly checking the clock in the dark, counting down the minutes until I could be out of that house again. I didn't care where I was going, work, the grocery store, the bar, anywhere. I didn't have the money to go to a hotel. It was becoming pretty evident that I was going to have to get out of that place soon or lose my fucking mind.

I was completely consumed by that house. I felt like it was violating my soul. I needed to get out of there, and I was feeling like I needed to get out of Colorado sooner than later. To be able to concentrate on anything else was completely out of the question. I was in a fog. One day I stopped at a convenience store to put gas in the car. I walked in gave the clerk five dollars. As I was driving down the road a few miles later I looked at the gas gauge and realized that I had forgot to put the gas in the car. I thought about turning around, but didn't know if I had enough in the tank to make it back. There was another station just ahead. Again, I went in and gave the clerk a five, but this time I made sure I put the gas in the car.

One day while I was driving my boss called me and asked me if I had worked the King Sooper's in Littleton. I had been merchandising books and magazines part time for almost a year. For a few minutes I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about. I told her yes, and then I told her no. I had no idea whether I had worked it or not. I had the overwhelming urge to cry. I gave her some bullshit story about having a sick relative in Iowa and that I would probably be traveling out there soon. She told me to take Thursday off, and on Friday I went in and did what I had to do.

That would be the last day that I ever worked for The News Group. I emailed my boss on Monday and told her that I would not be going back to work. I had too many preparations to make before the move. She angrily emailed me back that what I was doing to her was a "low blow" because she was already working sixty hours a week and her Lupus was acting up. I sent one final email to her sincerely apologizing for the predicament I had left her in and pointed out that I had been with company over a year and anyplace else would have offered vacation by then. I wanted to tell her that if the company paid better, she would be able to attract employees so that she wouldn't have to work so much but I didn't.

I felt bad about doing that to her. I always liked her, and she was good to me. I was just doing what I had to, call it self-preservation. My survival instincts were on red alert.

Excess Baggage

Sometime in my life, I became familiar with the quote: "Material goods are excess baggage on the journey of life." I thought the quote was from Buddha, but I can't confirm it. I tried to Google the source of those words to give proper credit, but it kept coming up with no results found.

I kept repeating that quote to myself on a late April day. It's a helluva thing to do, throw your entire life into a dumpster. I mean everything. There were photos of my childhood being tossed. The sheets off of my bed where I used to lay next to my wife would soon be gone. Of the books that Julie cherished so much, I donated what I could and threw away the rest. I had tears in my eyes as I threw away the book that she was reading when she first moved into my house. It was going into the dumpster. It had too.

In some ways what I was doing was very childish. I was disposing of things because I didn't want other human beings having possession of what I felt needed to be destroyed. I was behind on the rent, and was at the stage where I could be evicted at any time. I was three months behind on the gas and electric bill, so the lights could be off any day. Before all of this happened, I sold what I could. I pawned Julie's wedding ring, and sold some of her clothes to a lady from an estate auction company. I sold the TV, a barbeque and a golf caddy on Craig's List. It was astonishing to find out how little everything that you have ever accumulated over life is worth. It had hardly seemed worth the trouble.

With everything of value gone, and the few sentimental artifacts stored away in my mom's basement, I bought a box of contractor sized garbage bags and got to work. The timing was impeccable, the homeowner's association had put a community dumpster in the middle of the complex. I have no clue how many trips I made to it, but I'm sure it was close to triple digits.

Some of the shit that was going into the dumpster was easy to get rid of, in fact I couldn't believe I had carried it around for that long. There was a lot of things I parted with on a heavy heart. There were old pictures of Alexis, and much of the paintings I had did and hung on my walls would end up in a landfill. When I threw away my high school yearbooks, it seemed like part of my childhood went with them. My dad had been a photographer when he was alive. Now I was throwing away negatives of pictures he took, so in some ways it felt like I was throwing his life away along with my own. I hated doing that.

I donated as much as I could to charity, if something I could do without would help somebody else, I was all for it. There were scraps of paper, or "notes to myself" that I had been carrying around for years that I destroyed simply because I didn't want other people to see them. Most of the household stuff I had never liked in the first place so it was easy to toss that crap.

There were items that I saved. I had boxes of mementos that I knew Alexis would want someday. We got those boxes into her grandpa's basement. I have an old wooden chest of Julie's stuff that also went into my mom's basement. There are some pictures of Alexis down there, as well as some of my favorite pieces of art. I think there might be some personal documents down there as well. To tell you the truth, I don't remember everything that is in my mom's basement. I just know that the few material possessions I have left that are extremely important to me are in a safe place.

After everything that I wanted was out of the townhome, I let Alexis and her friends raid the place for anything they may want or need. I'm glad one her friends took all of my camping gear and fishing equipment. I had so much fun with that stuff, I'm happy somebody else will too. They scavenged the place pretty good, there were a lot of household items that any twenty-something year old kid just getting out on their own would need.

When everything was either in the dumpster, or safely in storage and Alexis and her friends had taken what they wanted, I decided to leave everything else for the landlord to deal with. I felt bad about doing that, only because she had been good to us since we had been renting from her. I took solace in knowing I left her some valuable stuff and between that and the security deposit we gave her, she would be able to sell the possessions of mine that I had abandoned, and be able to recover the rent that I stiffed her on.

Here is the email that I sent to her:

This email will serve as formal notice that I, Cory Cason, have vacated the property known as 10597 W. Dartmouth Ave. The unit is secure. The key is taped is to the back side of the central air unit on the back porch.

This email will be testament that I waive the right to the $800 security deposit.

This email will also be testament that I waive the right to any and all possessions left in the home. The owner, Amanda, has the right to do with them as she sees fit. She has the right to sell, donate, or dispose of them at her discretion.

This email should be considered a notice of voluntary eviction.

Cory Cason

Claw marks and Tears

I couldn't believe I was doing it. If you read my first book, you know that Mary the cat was instrumental in Julie and I getting together in the first place. Mary came into Julie's life on a Christmas morning a year or two before we met. Julie woke up to the sound of meowing, but couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It took a while, but Julie found the cat trapped underneath the wooden slats of a deck. She had to remove a couple of two by fours to get to Mary. Julie considered that cat to be a Christmas present from God. That was the only thing that she got that year.

Mary and I had a love/hate relationship. Is there any other type of relationship to have with a cat? She had become even more reclusive since Julie had died. She was pretty much living in a cabinet above the refrigerator coming out only to eat. She hated the dogs.

She wasn't going to be able to go to Iowa with me. I would have preferred to take her to a no-kill shelter, but they told me that that they had no room. I had to take her to the Jefferson County Animal Shelter. I was crying and my arms looked like hamburger after getting her into the kennel. I worried so much about her. I pray that she found a good home. I try not to think about what might have happened. I just like to think that there was somebody out there right now that is giving her a good home. She could be a loving cat and would make a great pet for the right person.

The Fort

My friend of twenty years, A .J., knew that the house was making me crazy, or that I was having a nervous breakdown and that I needed to get out of there until I left for Iowa. He had been offering to let me stay with him for a few days, and when I finally couldn't take it anymore he took half a day off to help me move in with him until I my departure. I was grateful; all I really needed from him was to help me get both of my cars over to his house.

The sense of relief that I felt to be out of the townhome that Julie and I shared was overwhelming, like somebody had been standing on my chest for a month and had finally stepped off. A.J. had two dogs, Gabby and Jack, that didn't get along with other dogs very well so I was going to have to leave Lucy at the old house until the very last minute. Alexis was still in the process of moving out of there so she would be able to take care of Lucy.

I had quit my job, so there wasn't a whole lot for me to do the week I spent at A.J.'s. He didn't have the internet so I had to go up the street to a Starbuck's to look for a job in Davenport and make other preparations for the move. I would take care of his dogs while he was at work. That caused me some tension because Jack was a very old poodle mix of some kind. Gabby was a type of spaniel and wasn't a problem, but every time I walked through the door I prayed that Jack was still alive. He could barely move. If Jack had been my dog, I would have thought it to be more humane to put him down, but there was no way that A.J. would ever entertain that thought.

When I finally brought Lucy over, things got complicated. Because of A.J.'s dogs disdain for other dogs, Lucy had to spend most her time locked in the bedroom. If that wasn't bad enough, A.J. also required that we had to make a "fort" outside the door, which consisted of four chairs strategically placed so that the dogs couldn't even sniff each other under the door crack. I felt so bad for Lucy. Not to mention what a pain in the ass it was to take a piss in the middle of the night.

Despite all the hoops we had to jump through with the dogs, I will always be grateful to A.J. for letting me stay there. It was the first step in regaining some piece of my mind.

Budget Nutrition

For the most part, I was always fat as a child. This might have come from the fact that my dad was always obese. I can still remember everything being cooked in bacon grease when I was a kid. He would have a high fat breakfast of bacon and eggs or maybe some corned beef hash and top it all off with an éclair. His diet and the fact that he was a heavy smoker might have contributed to him dying of heart attack at the age of 42. I was sneaking his cigarettes when I was six or seven years old. It looked like I was destined to follow in his footsteps.

I think I was around 19 or 20 and I weighed about 250 pounds. I knew this had to change, not so much that I was worried about my health, but because I wanted to get laid and even though I was fat, I was not attracted to fat girls. I quit eating junk food, and switched from Pepsi to Diet Pepsi. I was soon down to 165 pounds. I started to go to the gym, and consuming the right foods.

From that point on, eating healthy became the norm for my life. I rarely ate fast food, and when I went out to eat I always perused the menu for the healthiest option. While Julie and I were married, we ate healthy for the most part. There were certainly occasions when we indulged in food that a health food fanatic would never consume.

I don't know how long it had been since I had had either bologna or a hot dog. I knew what went into them and that was something I would never put into my body. Mind you, I was drinking like a fish and smoking a pack and half of Marlboro Lights, but processed meat was out of the question.

After Julie got sick, her appetite just changed. She had been at the store one day and bought bologna and processed cheese slices and put it all onto white bread. I didn't say anything, but it was strange for me to see it in the refrigerator. She was dying of cancer. If that's what she wanted, that's what she wanted.

I am a midnight snacker, and when I wake up in the middle of the night I usually want something sweet. Peanut butter is the first choice, and then ice cream, but chocolate will do in a pinch. One night, those three weren't an option and the cupboards were pretty much bare. Against my better judgement I made a bologna and cheese sandwich. It calmed my rumbling stomach and I was able to go back to bed and sleep through the night.

Let's fast forward to the week that I stayed at A.J.'s. I was down to my last $50, and knew that I had to buy beer and cigarettes, not to mention what an afternoon at the bar was going to cost. I didn't want to spend too much on food. I walked around King Sooper's looking for something cheap to eat, and I have never been a big fan of ramen.

I saw that generic bologna was around a $1.50, a loaf of bread was about the same price and some mustard was only a few pennies more. For less than $5 I would be able to eat for a few days and I would still have money left for beer and cigarettes.

Until We Meet Again

It was the day before I was to drive to Iowa and I had to go around and say the obligatory "goodbyes" to family and friends. The first stop was to go see my mom. We just had a couple of cups of coffee and talked about the plans for my move. It didn't get emotional until I was walking out the door. My mom started crying a little bit, which made me tear up. As I drove away from her house, I worried that I may never see her again. She had had some recent health scares, and even though she takes pretty good care of herself, she was 78 years old. Anything can happen at that age. Hell, after the year that I had just had, anything can happen to anybody at any age.

The next stop was my sister's house. She had just become a grandmother for the first time. Since she was babysitting the new addition to her family, we didn't get to talk a whole lot. There wasn't much emotion when I walked out the door. Although we had been close most of our lives, we had went through a period of estrangement as we aged.

The final stop of the farewell tour was at my regular bar, The Draft. Alexis was going to meet me there. Most of the regulars in the place wished me well and told me that they thought I was doing the right thing. It was Ed that I was going to miss the most. I always enjoyed drinking with him. We usually sat away from everybody else and just talked on our own. He hugged me as I walked out the door.

Alexis walked to the car with me so that we could have a private little goodbye. That was without a doubt one of the most emotional things I have ever done. For over two decades, the greatest pleasure of my life had been spending time with my daughter, and now I had no idea when I was going to see her again. She was supportive of what I was doing and I thought my moving away would be good for her too. Since Julie died, my daughter and I formed what was becoming a codependent relationship. In the back of my mind, I guessed that we needed some apart time for us to grow in our lives.

The last thing she did was set my phone's wallpaper to a picture of us when we were in San Diego.

Still, I couldn't believe I was leaving her behind.

Second Thoughts

I kept thinking about saying goodbye to family and friends, there were some that were extremely supportive of me. They knew what I had been through the previous year and thought the change of scenery would do me good. There was also a few of my inner circle that looked at me like I had lost my fucking mind.

It was the faces of the latter group that really stuck with me the night before I left. I stared to have second thoughts. Maybe I had lost my fucking mind! "What the fuck am I doing?" It might be easier just to check into a mental institution.

With the exception of my stint in San Diego, Colorado was the only home that I had known. That's were almost every single soul I knew was. Still, I knew I had to get out of there. The place was getting emotionally unhealthy for me. California would have been my first choice, but there was no way I would be able to have afforded it. Also, I wouldn't have been able to take Lucy with me. Having divested myself of almost all of my worldly possessions, Lucy would be the last tangible connection to my old life.

I was also skeptical about the state of Iowa. I had been going out there on near yearly basis since I was a teenager so I knew what I was getting into. I had this feeling that I was going to be a fish out of water there. I had sworn years earlier that if I moved again the direction would be in the quadrant of south and west. I was heading north and east. It just seemed like I had got caught in some blip in the universe.

Before I went to sleep on my last night in Colorado I accepted the fact that Davenport, Iowa was the destination that I needed to be in. Whether I wanted to be there or not, something was telling me that is where I needed to be.

I would be able to live essentially rent free. I wouldn't know anybody, so I would probably have very little to do except work on this book. Even though I would never have imagined moving to Iowa, there was some twisted logic that made it seem right.

Scrap Metal

Before I could head for Iowa I had a transportation problem that needed to be solved. I owned two cars but I was pretty sure that there was no fucking way either of them was going to make it to Iowa. Julie had been driving a 1995 Ford Escort she had paid $800 for. She drove it for three years and had only put minimal money into it.

I had been driving a 1987 Honda Accord that had been pretty well maintained, but it smoked quite a bit when you first started it up. I paid $1200 for it and drove it for a year and a half without having to pay for any kind of repair. Both of the cars had well over 200,000 miles on them.

My plan was to sell both cars and buy a third one that would get me to Iowa. It wasn't a good plan. I tried to sell the cars on Craig's List, but trying to deal with all of the morons who responded to the ads became such a pain in the ass I ended up selling both of them to scrap metal dealers for $300 apiece. It wasn't optimal, but it was convenient and preserved a little strand of sanity for me.

When I told my mother about my dilemma, she offered to buy me a car so that Lucy would be able to come with me. I looked around, but for the money (mom was offering up to $5000), I had no idea what type of vehicle I would be getting. A.J., told me that his ex-wife's husband had 1993 Lexus for sale. He would cut me a deal for $2500 cash.

I was certainly hesitant because it had 205,000 miles on it. It looked good, and ran well when I took it for a test drive. The seller's name was Hal, and I had known him for a few years. He always seemed like a good guy, so when he looked me in the eyes and told me he wouldn't have any reservations about driving it to Iowa himself, I decided to roll the dice. At least if I ended up getting ripped off, I would know who to go looking for.

#Daddysgirl

I got back to A.J.'s that night after saying my goodbyes to everyone and saw that Alexis had posted the following on Facebook:

Alexis Cason

May 8 near  Lakewood, CO · Edited

Today I had to say 'see you later' to my Dad.  
My best friend, my rock, my SUPER HERO.  
He's been my best friend since before I knew how to walk, or talk, or even smile.  
He's leaving Colorado en route to wherever pleases him.  
Not knowing when I'll see him next has broken my heart.  
But truly, all I want is for him to find peace and comfort in his new home and surroundings.  
I'll think of you in every choice, and every laugh.  
You taught me how to love & laugh Cory Cason.  
I already miss you.  

#daddysgirl #always #and #forever

I sobbed uncontrollably.

That last night, A.J. and I sat around drinking beer and watching the first round of the NFL Draft. A.J. is a really good guy, but I was going to worry about him. The relationship he was in was kind of fucking with him emotionally. In some ways, it seems to have made him delusional. His life has become based on words instead of reality. He can know that something is a lie, but as long as he doesn't say it out loud it will remain a truth.

Making Sense of the World

Immediately after seeing Jeanie in the hospital, my only thought was to get near the ocean. I could buy a bus ticket to the coast and then figure out the rest of my life when I got there.

That seemed like the perfect escape route for me, but I can't say that my brain was acting in my best interest at that time. With the little bit of money that I had, I would more than likely be sleeping under the pier in less than a month. That would have been a fun adventure when I was younger, but that is not something that a man with nearly a half century under his belt relishes.

My goal always has been, and probably will always be to live on a beach of the Pacific Ocean. There is something about watching the waves roll that allows the world to make more sense to me. I just feel more attached to the Universe. I feel a true sense of peace when I am looking at the Pacific Ocean. It maybe something in my DNA, or perhaps the DNA of all of humanity

I had a feeling that I would form sense of kinship with the Mississippi River while I was living in Davenport, right up the hill from the "Big Muddy". There aren't any big waves, but there would be something soothing to the soul to watch the chocolate brown water flow its way down to the Gulf of Mexico, but I doubted it would compare to the tranquility I feel when I am near the Pacific Ocean. I honestly believe that it is a physical and mental necessity for me to be near the ocean. All of space and time seems to come together as the powerful surf breaks on the beach.

Although the ultimate destination for my life is west, I decided it was more practical to head east for time being. I would be at least living near the water. I'll be seeing the big waves soon enough, one way or the other.

The Last Leg

I woke up in that Motel 6 room in Kearney, Nebraska completely disoriented. It started off with a maid barging into my room at 6:30 scaring the hell out of me. She apologized profusely thinking that I had checked out. I finally calmed down and snoozed off again only to have the exact same maid do the same fucking thing at 7:30.

To add to the anxiety was a little voice in my head telling me I should be driving west. I was heading east when every cell in my body was telling me I should be going in the opposite direction. I wanted to be driving to Ocean Beach in San Diego which is a spiritual place for me, but the seclusion of Costa Rica also sounded very appealing.

I didn't feel like myself at all that day. I felt like a man trapped in some type of limbo state. I was going to a new home, at least temporarily. I was aiming my car towards the cornfields of Iowa.

Adding to my disorientation was the fact that I didn't know what time it was. I knew that the time zone between Mountain and Central time was somewhere near Kearney, but I had no idea whether I had crossed it or not. I was also a little stressed about my car, it was running good and nothing happened but I just kept looking at all those miles on the odometer.

My cousin Mike called and told me that we were going to go to a barbeque at his parent's house then hit the bars once I got into town. I asked him what time it was, and when he told me it turned out that it was hour later than I thought it was. I told him I would try to be there by five, but Lucy was going to need her walks.

As I drove through Des Moines, I couldn't help but feel melancholy as I passed the exits that Julie and I took when we were visiting her parents. It reminded me of all of the times that we had driven there. Some of the memories were good, some weren't. Either way, I spent the rest of the drive thinking about Julie. There was part of me that was blaming her for the predicament that I was putting myself into.

The Bitch

After being cooped up in the bedroom at A.J.'s for week, Lucy was just not herself. She wasn't the friendly, happy dog that she had always been since she was a puppy. She had diarrhea when I took her for walks, and she was shedding her fur excessively. She wasn't eating and was barely even drinking water. I was worried what the move was doing to her. I had moments where I wondered if she was going to survive the move and questioned whether she would have been better off in a rescue shelter.

Once we got to Davenport, she seemed to calm down quite a bit. For the first time in her young life, she would actually have a backyard to play in. My cousin Mike really has a way with dogs, he might a whisperer or something, and Lucy took to him right away. I was completely ignored when he was around.

I thought of Lucy as my last real connection to Julie, and she loved Lucy so much that I felt obligated to my wife's memory to take care of the dog. That said, I was always more of a cat person, and Lucy makes it pretty evident that she prefers women to men. Despite our differences, Lucy and I formed a bond. I think that we both know that all we would have is each other while we were living in our adopted state.

I'm Lost

My sense of direction was pretty screwed up when I got to Davenport. I didn't know east from west or north from south. This is the only spot between Minnesota and Louisiana where the Mississippi River runs east and west. I never had that kind of problem in Colorado, nor should anybody else. If you are in Denver, the Rocky Mountains are always on the west. I grew up in Pueblo, which is south of Denver so those two directions came pretty easy, and the other two were simple deduction.

Distance came as somewhat of a surprise to me once I got to the Quad Cities, which are made up of Davenport and Bettendorf on the Iowa side and Rock Island and Moline on the Illinois side, but only in a semantical way. When locals use the phrase "far across town" I automatically think in terms of driving across the Denver Metro area. On good days that drive would take you about an hour. Driving from Davenport to either of the towns in Illinois are going to take you twenty minutes tops, you could walk across the Quad Cities faster that you could drive across Denver. That's an exaggeration, but I'm trying to make a point. There are about six major thoroughfares in Davenport, and there are at least that many in any given suburb of the Mile High City.

Another relative term is "rush hour". In Davenport, that means there are five cars in front of you at a stop light, in Denver in means that you could make better time by getting out of the car and walking to your destination.

It didn't take too long for me to learn the way around my new town. The Quad Cities probably take up about what would be one tenth the size of the Metro Denver. Once you get the main roads figured out, everything else comes easily. A week or two with Mapquest and I pretty much had the place down.

The Station

Once I got to Iowa, my dreams at night became strange. They were like none others that I have had in my life. I can't put my finger on it, but they are different from the dreams I have had before. They seem more real. Sometimes when I wake up, I question whether it was a dream at all. It was more of a sense that I was actually somewhere else.

A common dream is that I am in airport-like place and usually what happen are just simple conversations. I will tell you more about these dreams throughout the pages of this book. Although I say "airport", that is not entirely accurate. It seems to be in the middle of a valley, which reminds me of a location that I have been to in a remote area of Wyoming. I don't recall any planes taking off or landing in my dreams. Maybe I should describe it as some type of station because there is a feeling that people are going there from somewhere else while other people are leaving for a different destination.

Another type of dream that I have in Iowa that I did not have in Colorado are other people's dreams. I'm not even in them. For lack of a better description, it is as though I am sitting at a computer. I will go to Google, look up a name and I can see other people's dreams as a detached, impartial spectator.

The whole experience has led me to think that all of humanities dreams are all related and interactive.

Ticks and Itch Weed

One weekend Mike came home from the job in Burlington and decided that he wanted to go fishing. I still wasn't working at that point so I told him that Lucy and I would ride along with him. His secret fishing spot was about an hour north of Davenport. It was a nice drive to the parking lot and then about a mile hike through the woods to get to the remote little section of stream.

Lucy really enjoyed being able to just roam free in the wilderness. She had never done anything like that before. It had actually been a couple of years since I had done anything like that myself. The previous summer Julie's cancer treatment had kept us from taking our annual fishing trip.

After Mike had caught his limit of fish, we decided to take the longer more scenic route home. The highway followed the Mississippi River. Much of the area we drove through was flooded from the spring runoff. I was kicking myself for not having my camera with me. I don't know why I don't just keep it with me at all times.

The only bad part of the day was that the woods were filled with itch weed and ticks. I certainly got into the itch weed and some other thorny bushes, but I was free of ticks. The same could not be said for Lucy. The next morning I spotted one attached to her eyelid. It took me a while to get that thing off of her. I combed her down well, but the little bastards kept showing up over the next couple of weeks. The way that you find the ticks is that they fill up with blood and you can feel them when you pet her.

My Office at McDonald's

Even before I got to Iowa, my top priority was to find a job there. I had been sending out resumes before I even left Denver. I checked with previous employers to see if they had openings in the Quad Cities area. I kept an eye on Craigslist and Indeed.

My first stop on the Monday morning after I arrived in town was at the Iowa job service office. I was happy that I could access their jobs database remotely, because I never wanted to step into that place again. I must have gone there on "Open House for Stupid People Day". I was amazed at some of the random conversations going on around me, and wondered how most of the people in there got dressed in the morning without somebody showing them how.

I said I could access that jobsite remotely but that didn't mean I could access it from home. My cousin Mike had never been on the internet at that point, so there was certainly no reason why he would have WiFi.

The golden arches came to my rescue. For a $1.59 coffee, I could sit in McDonald's all morning. I would search out all of the job sites, send out my resume if something seemed desirable, and then plan out what temp agencies I would drive to for the remainder of the day.

I couldn't afford to be picky. I applied to jobs that I was truly qualified for, took chances on jobs that were above my skill level or when I lacked experience for the advertised position. I also applied for jobs that would just be back breaking labor. I just needed to get some cash flowing in.

Monster Jam

There was not a whole lot of money in my pocket. I was going to be okay for a while, but the process of finding a decent steady job can take a little bit of time. I was going to need some quick cash gigs to hold me over until that first steady pay check came in. As I searched for employment on all of the usual sites, I also looked on Craig's List under the "gigs" section, I replied to an ad for vendors at "Monster Jam". The ad said that they would respond with further information.

I answered the ad with the assumption that "Monster Jam" was a concert, and that it would probably consist of the remnants of the hair bands of the eighties. I was thinking that I would be seeing the likes of Ratt, Faster Pussycat, Quiet Riot, etc. I guessed that I would be selling beer and get to look at women in their forties who still teased their hair as big as they could get it. In hindsight, I have no clue why I ever pictured that scenario.

It turns out that "Monster Jam" was a monster truck rally at the I-Wireless Events Center across the river in Moline, IL. I wasn't going to be seeing Quiet Riot, I was going to get to watch the Gravedigger Truck. Instead of selling beer, I was either going to be selling sno cones or cotton candy. The customers were going to be sticky little kids instead of big haired ladies.

Whether you bought the cotton candy or the sno cones, you were going to be shelling out $15. If you chose the sno cone, you got the typical crushed ice with colored syrup but it was served in a plastic commemorative cup featuring your favorite monster truck. If you opted for the cotton candy, you got a stuck with a bag of fluffy sugar in it, but it was topped off with a painted piece of foam rubber that was supposed to be a Gravedigger Truck hat.

When the guys that posted the ad told us that we would be selling that crap for $15, I literally laughed out loud and considered walking out. My cell phone bill was going to be due in a week, so I decided to stick it out. For every item that I sold, I would get one dollar. We had to give them our cell phones and car keys as insurance that we would come back with the money.

I worked a Saturday night, and part of a Sunday afternoon and made a grand total of $34. It was a complete fucking joke, but believe it or not that was almost the exact amount I needed to get the phone bill paid.

Whatever it takes.

The Long Arm of the Cubicle

I reluctantly accepted a job with a company called Group O. I knew that it was a glorified phone sales job, but I needed cash and that was the first company that offered me a permanent position.

On the same day I went for a drug test to get hired by Group O I had a job interview with the Dr. Pepper/Snapple Group. The drug test had to be done before two p.m. and the interview was at 1:30. My plan was to go piss in a cup sometime after noon then head right to the interview. That plan went to shit when the drug testing place was closed for lunch so either I was going to miss the interview or the two p.m. deadline for the drug test.

I decided that I would rather get the soda company job rather than the phone sales gig. I forgot the Mapquest directions to Dr. Pepper's office and got lost for a while so that made me late for the interview. I was so pissed off at myself for possibly getting screwed out of a job for both companies. The interview went well and they told me they would contact me before the end of the week. It was 2:30 when I got to the drug testing place. I wasn't worried about the results because I hadn't smoked pot in over a month. The Group O human resources lady waived the deadline since it was only a half hour late.

I didn't hear from Dr. Pepper by Friday so I reported to Group O for training on the following Monday. I went through orientation and went over the benefits package. I wasn't sure what to make of the company, but if what they were saying was true then there might be some money to made there.

That Tuesday I woke up and the power was out. I had to take a shower in the dark so that I could get to my first official day of training. In the training room, I was assigned to sit next to some guy named Dustin. He was one of those guys that just talks to hear himself talk, beyond obnoxious.

The training was going to be 8 – 4:30, but they told me later that the hours of the job would be 10:30 – 7. That sucked. That schedule was going to fuck up my ability to get a part time job. It was going to screw up my gym schedule and cut into my beer drinking time. I was going to hate that job.

The next day of training was when they told us what we would be selling was home phone service. Let me reiterate that, not cell phones, land line home phones. What the fuck? I hadn't had a home phone in over a decade. They also refused to talk about the bonus structure until later in training. That was two big red flags I was seeing from my new employer.

When I was driving home after work, I noticed that there was a voice mail message from a Dr. Pepper recruiter. It was after hours so I checked my email hoping there would be an offer there, but there wasn't.

The next day, the recruiter and I played phone tag all day until we started texting. He texted me that he wanted to offer me a job in Cedar Rapids, and I texted back that I would have to decline because that was just too far to drive.

On the Friday of my first week of training, they finally explained the commission structure that was going allow us to make big money. I could hear the insincerity and bullshit in the lady's voice. When I pointed out that her math didn't make any sense, she got quite annoyed. That was fine, because I was pretty annoyed myself. They had lied to me. I asked her point blank if anybody had ever maxed out thier commission structure. She was at least honest enough to say that nobody had ever even come close.

They let us go for lunch and I considered just not returning to work and going back to the temp agencies in the next week to see if there were any other jobs out there. After much self-debate, I decided that I would finish the day, then take the weekend to think about what my next course of action would be.

Just before end of the day I got text from the recruiter from Dr. Pepper. He said that he had made a mistake and had meant to offer me a job in Davenport. I immediately accepted. I used the weekend to craft the following email to the trainer at Group O.

Hi Rico,

This is Cory Cason. I just wanted to let you know my reason for not be coming in today. After the recruiting process, and Patty's presentation about the commission structure, I have serious doubts about the integrity of going to work for Group O.

To make a long story short, I feel like I was completely lied to throughout the recruiting process.

The following is a direct quote about the sales job from Group O's own website:

"Hourly base pay that can earn you the equivalent of $22,000, plus commissions that can push potential earnings to $32,000 or greater".

Granted, I wasn't a math major but I can use a calculator. At $10.75 per hour, this works out to $22,360 per year. So that part of the job description is correct.

However, during Patty's presentation on Friday she related that the biggest commission check that has ever been paid out to a salesperson is $200.

So let's assume a sales rep gets a $200 commission check every month (she stated that most get $16), that would equate to an extra $2,400 per year. My math has it at, $22,360 + $2,440 = $24,760. Please explain to me where that $32,000 number comes from.

While I will do not dispute that from what I have read that Group O is a good company to work for, I feel that the recruiting process might be a little less than honest.

I do have proprietary information from Group O that I will happily return once I get a check.

In closing, by all accounts Group O is a nice place to work for, but honesty is something I need from an employer.

With just a little honesty up front, none of our time or resources would have been wasted.

Best wishes for your future,

Cory Cason

I ended up getting a check for $370.91 for the week I trained at Group O.

There has to be more

In the previous chapter I mentioned that during training at Group O, I had to sit next to a loud obnoxious guy, Dustin, that lived to laugh at his own jokes. He was unattractive, obese, and had horrible personal hygiene. He was generally lacking in any kind of intellect. He took annoying to a whole new level.

As I expressed skepticism about the company and what the trainers were telling us to my new tablemate, he looked upon me as though I were a heretic. This guy thought he had landed the dream job that would carry him through life. For $10.75 an hour this guy was going to try to sell people home phones. He was so excited to do that. He was planning on what he was going to do with his commissions check.

I kind of felt sorry for him, even though I couldn't stand the guy. It made me pity all of the people like him. It seems to me that they are living their lives by waiting to die. They have no dreams or aspirations. They are perfectly happy just being fat, lazy and stupid. They do nothing to better themselves. Some even wear that fact as a badge of honor.

I guess you could make the argument that there is some Zen philosophy to that type of existence but I'm not sure I would buy that argument. There has to be more to life than that.

Wouldn't You Like to be a Pepper too?

It was exactly one month to the day after arriving in Davenport that I reported for work with Dr. Pepper. It was going to be the first full time job I had since being laid off from the mortgage servicing industry two years earlier. Since then I had been working part time and collecting unemployment. It turned out to be an ideal scenario considering Julie's illness.

I liked the independence of merchandising which is why I accepted the job at Dr. Pepper. I was going to be putting the companies myriad of products on the shelf so that the consuming public could get fat. It was going to be a stable job, because we all know how much America loves it sugar water.

When I got laid off from the banking industry I swore that I was never going to sit in a cubicle again. I had just barely escaped that fate at Group O, when Dr. Pepper made me an offer. It was the most physical job that I had held in decades. During my college years, I worked on a landscaping crew but even that wasn't as hard as pulling around huge pallets of soda. Those fuckers are heavy. It took some getting used to after all of the years sitting at a desk in front of a computer.

After a week of training, I was assigned a dedicated route, which meant I would always have the same stores as a opposed to a floater who went to all of the stores to cover for the dedicated route guys days off. My days would begin at a Walmart on Elmore Avenue at six in the morning. I would be there for three to four hours before driving to Fareway, which is a small little throwback grocery chain that still believes in closing on Sundays. That store only took maybe an hour to service. The final stop of the day was at HyVee, which wasn't as big as Walmart but could still be as much of pain in the ass.

The work was hard, and the pay sucked, but I liked working for Dr. Pepper. The best part was that as long as you did your job, management wouldn't fuck with you. I could go weeks at a time without seeing my boss. The biggest downfall to the position could be the salesman whose job it was to order stock for the merchandiser. The sales guys were paid on commission, so they ordered as much as they could whether the store needed it or not.

The salesman at my Walmart store was easy to work for. He was a younger guy whose orders pretty much went to the shelf, without have too much overstock in the back room. The guy that did my orders at the other two stores had been in the business for 35 years, and firmly believed that pop was the greatest invention man had ever seen. He knew how to play the sales game. He was motivated by money. Even if the product lingered in the back room forever, he still got paid.

It wasn't the ideal job for me, but the benefits were pretty good even though I hardly took advantage of them. It sucked not having a set schedule, and weekends and holidays were just part of the gig. We were usually short staffed, so overtime was pretty much expected. I had even volunteered to work six day work weeks until the physical demands of the job just became too exhausting.

I would be lying if I said I didn't have an ulterior motive for accepting the job with Dr. Pepper. It was an international company. When I moved to Iowa, I knew that my stay there would only be temporary. Once I got firmly entrenched with the corporation, I could probably find a way to get back to Colorado, or the west coast, if that is what I so desired. The soda company offered me options. Given my current status in life, that was something I needed. Hell, if I was a good enough employee then theoretically I could work anywhere in the world.

The Two Week Countdown

I think I had right around $1200 when I got into my car and started driving towards Iowa. It was ten one hundred dollar bills, a few straggling denominations, and enough on my debit card to get a motel room along the way. That was all I was going to have until I got a job.

I tried to be as conservative as I could with my money, which was a pretty foreign concept to me. I was actively searching for a job almost eight hours a day and I knew that something would eventually come through, but finding a decent job can be a slow process. I kept my money between the pages of Stephen King's book "On Writing" in the bottom drawer of my dresser. There are many expenses that go along with a move. Every time I had to pull a hundred dollar bill out of the book I got a little stressed knowing that my funds were going south.

By the time that I got down to my last hundred dollar bill, I had accepted a job offer but I wasn't going to get paid for two weeks. I had never been more frugal with money than I was with that hundred dollar bill. My expenses were divided by the dollar store and Walmart, mentally adding up every penny to make sure I was going to have enough when I got to the checkout stand.

Of course, even if I was eating bologna made out of God knows what and potato chips that were often past their expiration date, I always made sure I had enough for beer and cigarettes. I was willing to give up going to the bar and buying lottery tickets, but a man still needs his buzz and a smoke.

The Vampires

I had started the job at Dr. Pepper, but it was going to be a week before I got paid. I surveyed the food that was in the cabinet, and surmised that it would probably be able to last me. I mentally added up how many beers and cigarettes it would take me to get through the week, and it looked like I would be able to make it if I cut my intake by one third. I'm sure some readers will ask, "Why not cut the beer and cigarettes out altogether?" I'll just laugh, and not even dignify the question with a response.

There was only one expense that I was not going to be able to cover, and it was a pretty critical one. My job with Dr. Pepper would require me to go to multiple stores per day to do my job. That meant that I needed to have gas in my car. At the time gas was over three dollars per gallon. I was going to need a cash infusion until pay day.

When I first got into town, I noticed a sign in a window down on Brady Street near the river that advertised $250 for donating your plasma. The first thing I noticed was that the "$250" part of the sign had an asterisk next to it. I figured I might as well file it away in the back of my mind, but I was going to do whatever I needed to avoid taking such a drastic step. I fucking hate needles.

I looked at my gas gauge, thought about my options, and pictured a needle going into my arm. The hatred of needles aside, I needed cash. That $250 they were advertising would get me through the week and then some. I was nervous as I drove down there after work.

When I got there I had to do all of the bullshit that I assumed I would have to do. I watched a video about plasma donation: what it is, why it's done, who is eligible, etc.

After that was the paperwork with all of the typical questions about drug use, sexual scenarios and preferences, tattoos and piercings, basically anything that might affect ones blood. After the paperwork was finished, they gave me a half-assed physical where they pricked your finger to see if you had "good" blood.

Soon after I had jumped through all of the hoops, I was sitting in a chair having the blood sucked right of me. It was only then that I actually got to look around and pay attention to the surroundings that I was in. It made me ashamed of myself. I felt like such a scumbag being there. I could give a flying fuck how my plasma might help somebody. I was simply being a whore, it was all about the money. Judging by the people that were sitting in the chairs around me, I guarantee you that most of them had the same attitude. There wasn't a whole lot benevolence going around the place.

After about an hour, the container of brownish/yellow fluid that had been extracted from me was full. The technician disconnected me, taped the needle hole up, then punched something into his hand held device. He told me that I was free to go, and $50 had been added to the prepaid debit card they gave me during my registration. Needless to say, I wasn't real happy. As I asked the technician about the amount, I remembered the mother fucking asterisk. The payment schedule was $50, the first five times you donated, then $20 each subsequent time.

I ended up sitting in that chair two more times to get me through until payday.

Everything is a Dollar

There are many ways that I have been humbled by the events of the past couple of years. I know it sounds snobbish, but I always figured that going to the dollar store was beneath me. I realize now how absolutely fucking stupid that sounds. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of poor people that shop at the dollar store, but so do a lot of rich people which could be part of the reason that they may be rich.

On my second day in town, I took a drive just to get a feel of the place. I needed to learn the city. I noticed that there was a store called DollarTree just a few blocks from where I was living. Since I almost had no money, I decided to check it out. The store's slogan was "everything for one dollar", unlike Dollar General where everything isn't a dollar.

The one thing that surprised me was that DollarTree had a food section. I could get everything I needed for bologna sandwiches or red beans and rice. I could eat for a week on less than $20. It was a small lesson on a journey of learning to be financially responsible which I had never been before.

I have mended my ways. Even with a little money in my pocket, I still hit the dollar store every week or so.

Financially, I have lived a life of denial. I have lived on credit, and shuffling money around. It's all catching up to me. It might have helped if I had never got into the credit industry. I know how to play the game too well. I have often thought about writing a book letting others know that they never have to pay another bill in their lifetime if they don't want to.

I started doing something I had never done before, and that would be saving money. I had an envelope in my bottom drawer that I put cash into. It started getting fat. I was proud of myself.

Red Beans and Rice

I was definitely sick of bologna sandwiches, but still needed something cheap to eat, but far healthier. As I walked the aisles of the dollar store, I saw some bags or red beans next to bags of rice. After a night of pre-soaking, I would throw the beans into a crockpot; add a little seasoned salt, celery, onion and let it cook for a few hours. Later in the afternoon I would throw in the brown rice and some Cajun sausage and cook for a couple of more hours. For less than $10, I had enough food to eat for three days.

When I finally got to the point where I could afford to eat my old diet and get into the gym, I still kept red beans and rice in the rotation. It's easy to cook, and the leftovers are convenient, and it's a hell of a lot more healthy than bologna and cheese sandwiches.

Peace on Credit Island

About a week after I started working for Dr. Pepper I was scheduled to have my new employee orientation. My boss told me that I needed to be at the warehouse at nine a.m. When I got there, the secretary told me that she was on a conference call and couldn't do my paperwork until ten.

It didn't make sense to drive clear across town, work for 15 minutes and drive back, so I decided that I would just screw around for an hour. A couple of miles from the warehouse is park called Credit Island surrounded by the Mississippi River. I had wanted to go there since I got in town, but it had been closed due to flooding.

The island was now open, and it just happened to be a beautiful day. I parked my car and started walking around smoking cigarettes and sipping from my coffee mug. I walked out on a bridge and watched a guy fish from his boat for a while. On the other side of the bridge was a little trail that followed the banks of the river.

As I walked through the dense foliage, it occurred to me that that was the first moment of real peace I had had in months. I didn't have a single thing to worry about. I had a job, a place to live, the bills were paid, Alexis was doing okay, and Lucy had a yard to play in. For that fleeting moment, I could just enjoy where I was and what I was doing without thinking about anything else.

You guessed it, just like the fishing trip I didn't have my camera.

Imposition

For the most part I felt welcome at my cousin's house. Mike was more than gracious, but there was one time I did fear that I was I was imposing on him. He didn't come back from Burlington often, but he would be home for the Fourth of July weekend.

When I get got home from work, Mike was in the back yard cutting weeds. I could tell that he was pissed off about something. He didn't really say a whole lot. Maybe he didn't like the way I had mowed the lawn. He mentioned something about the house reeking because of something in the trash. We had had plans to go bar hopping when he got into town, but we ended up doing yard work and cleaning the house for a while.

I had borrowed some money from my cousin and once I gave him the $130 I owed him, he seemed to lighten up a little. We finally went drinking at Stoeger's and The Gardens and ended up having a great time. He stayed out drinking, and I came home ordered a pizza and crashed.

When Mike comes home for the weekend, I sometimes worry if I am welcome here. That feeling is more about me than it his him. As I said earlier, Mike has been very cool about the situation. The whole thing made me think more about my long range options. Davenport, Iowa was not my destiny. I'm not sure what my destiny is, but it wasn't there.

I thought about how I could get off the sidelines and make that happen.

The Sixth Day

It had been my plan that after I got a decent day job, I would look for a part time job to add some cash. It was going to be difficult while I working at Dr. Pepper because I didn't have a set schedule and there were days that required extra hours. Just a few days after I finished training my boss sent out a mass text asking if anybody would volunteer to work six days a week and I said I would. Instead of a part time job, I figured getting overtime on my regular job would be even better.

When I volunteered, I hadn't fully realized the physical nature of merchandising pop. For an old man who had spent most of his working life sitting in a cubicle, pulling around pallets of pop all day is a whole different ballgame. They can weigh upwards of half a ton, and if you don't get a good pallet jack, you are in for a long day.

After a month of working six days straight, I tapped out. I was so sore. By the time I got home, all the energy I had allowed me to write a chapter in this book, eat, and then head for the air mattress. When the alarm went off at 4:30 in the morning, I got up and started the whole process over again.

It just got to be too much for a guy was only a year away from turning fifty.

Too Many Girls

I had been in Iowa about a week, and I was pretty much settled in. After I left Colorado, Alexis had moved into a townhome in Lakewood with Amanda and three other girls. I felt guilty about leaving her like that. She had a shitty job, and her car was failing, but I was at least comforted to know that she had a place to live.

Whenever Alexis actually calls me, it usually means that something is wrong. Normally she communicates by text. She told me that her landlord had confronted her to say that only three people were permitted to live in the dwelling per the lease agreement. One girl was already planning on moving out and since Alexis was the last one to move in, she would be the other one that would need to leave. She was so disappointed. The landlord gave her two weeks to get out.

She ended up getting a reprieve. The landlord called a couple of days later and told her he would give her a month to get out. It was nice of him, but she was still going to have to make a lot of changes in her life. Her only options were to get her own place or move in with her grandpa.

The whole situation killed me. I wanted to be there to help her.

Narcissism

If it is true that patience is a virtue, then I will declare right now that I am not a virtuous person. I can get up on my high horse, and espouse Zen teachings that I am at one with the universe. Ah, what bullshit, one of the great delusions of my life. Truth be told, when I want something, I wanted it yesterday, not tomorrow, not this morning, right fucking now.

The day that I decided I was moving out of Colorado, I wanted to get in the car and drive immediately. I didn't want to have to worry about getting all of my shit out of the house. I didn't want waste time selling my cars. I didn't want to have to say goodbye. I didn't want to be concerned about how Alexis was going to make it on her own. I didn't want to have to think about any of that. I just wanted to be driving across Nebraska (I know) in the next few hours.

Every now and then the universe just flicks me on the forehead and lets me know that I don't make all the rules. As much as I like to think that the world revolves around me, it doesn't. There is not a single one of you readers that gives a flying fuck what my schedule or timeline is. Each of you has your own life to lead. I get that. Kinda. Okay, I say that I get it, but I don't. If the rest of my inhabitants of this universe would just keep one single focus: "What does Cory want?" Things would go a lot smoother.

I believe I must have just been born with extreme narcissistic tendencies. Had I been an early astronomer, I would have thought that everything revolved around the earth. The Sun, the Moon, the stars were put up in the sky for the sheer benefit of entertaining this ever so humble planet. It would have been crushing for me to find out that the Sun was actual center of the solar system.

I know that I sound like a dick, but does it not seem reasonable to think that your personal world does not revolve around you. It seems like a paradox, do you not need to be a little bit selfish, to be selfless? Your life revolves around you. My life revolves around me. If your life and my life somehow don't get aligned, my life should take precedence. I know that for a lot of you readers, this defies any type of common sense, but that is simply the reality of my existence.

Sugar Pimps

One of the underworlds of this society is found in the backrooms of grocery stores everywhere. It is the world of product merchandising. It starts in the wee hours of the morning where a core group of us gather, each representing his/her employer, with the mission statement of supplying the general public with nutritional crap for the sole purpose of making a handsome profit for those who sign our paychecks.

For the most part, and there are a few exceptions, a merchandiser's job is to stock the shelves with a product that essentially does a disservice to the human body. Let's face facts, fruit and vegetables aren't flying out of the produce department so fast that they need their own merchandisers.

What is flying off the shelves so rapidly is all the crap you shouldn't be eating in the first place, potato chips, pop, cookies, crackers, energy drinks, snack cakes, essentially all processed, fatty, sugary foods that American civilization has become addicted too.

I was probably merchandising one of the unhealthiest products there is, soda pop. I haven't been a pop drinker since I was in my teens, so I never really paid attention to the nutritional panel on a can of pop. Some of the flavors of pop that I stocked have over 200 calories per can. That equates to one tenth of the daily calories the typical adult should consume in an entire day. And people wonder why the American obesity rate is where it is at today.

I hope I am not coming off as judgmental as I write this because that is the furthest thing from the truth. I believe that all humans sole quest on this planet should be to make this existence as pleasurable as it can be. Virtually everything in this world is some type of tradeoff. Consuming a pop is slowly becoming the equivalent of smoking a cigarette. If the pleasure derived from instant gratification outweighs the long term consequences, then so be it.

I have no right to be riding a high horse. There are merchandisers whose sole focus is beer, and the God knows I have been one of their most loyal customers over the course of my life, purchasing an 18 or 30 pack almost every single night. There are a lot of calories in beer. I often go without eating a lunch, because I know that I will be consuming probably 1500 calories later in the day.

Now let me cut myself off at the knees, let's not forget that I smoke well over a pack of Marlboro's almost every single day. Consciously, I know that this one of the stupidest things a soul could do. I watched Julie die because of the effects of cigarette smoke. This is my trade off. I love a cigarette with that first cup of coffee in the morning just as much as I love one with that last beer of the evening.

I guess every soul must determine of their own accord what the price of pleasure will be.

Sad to Say
One of the stark realizations I came to after my arrival in the Midwest is that racism is alive and well in this country and as sad is it to say, it doesn't appear to be going anywhere soon. Within a month of being in the Quad Cities I had heard the N-word more times than I had in the previous decade. It wasn't just whispered in a joke, it was right out in the open. Every time I heard the word I looked around to see the reaction of whoever else was around. Everybody just seemed to go about their business completely unfazed. I never got used to it.

The whole issue did make me come to the conclusion that I have my own deep prejudices. I really do despise ignorant people. I'm assuming racists feel better about themselves because no matter how fucking stupid they are, they rationalize that they are better than somebody who has a different color of skin.

I owe a big thank you to my parents. I was never taught to hate other people for such trivial reasons, and make no mistake about it, racism is a learned behavior. No baby is ever born with the instinct to hate.

I wish I had a great enough mind, or was a better writer that I could be able to propose some answer to this scourge of society, but I can't. I don't have the energy to argue with idiots or do battle with something that has been ingrained into human nature for hundreds of years.

I do have a glimmer of hope that future generations may be able to eradicate this problem. Through technology, the world is more connected than it ever has been. It could be possible that one day we will all come to have a better understanding of one another.

I have never been to the Deep South, but if racism is so rampant in this geographical area, I can't even what it must be like there just based on stories that I have heard.

Oh wait! Does that last paragraph mean that I have a bias against the southern states?

Shame on me.

Fire Roasted Green Chile

By far one of the most frustrating things about living in Iowa is the complete lack of good Mexican food. It has been my limited experience that what is considered to be "good" Mexican food in the Quad Cities is the equivalent of canned tamales in Colorado. I love Mexican food more than any other kind, but it sure looked like I wouldn't be having it as long as I was living there.

To add insult to injury, I can't even cook myself a good Mexican meal because I can't find the right ingredients anywhere. When I left Denver, I knew that I would not be able to get fresh, fire roasted green chile like I got every fall in Colorado, but I figured I would be able to improvise. I could not have been more wrong. The standard grocery stores here HyVee, Fareway or Walmart don't even carry canned green chile let alone the subtle ingredients I use when I make a pot of my favorite food.

One morning I was having breakfast at a little dive diner down on Third street when I looked out the window and noticed there was a little mercado on the corner. I strolled over when I was done and figured that place would be my last chance to get what I needed to start cooking a Mexican feast. Surely they would have everything that I needed.

There was a young girl working at the register, and an older guy working at the meat counter. I asked them if they had green chile, preferably frozen, but I would settle for canned. They had no idea what I was talking about. As I tried to explain it to her, she just shook her head "no" with a blank look in her eyes.

I walked out of that place shaking my head in disbelief. I wanted to scream, "How can you be of Mexican heritage and not know what the fuck green chile is?" I am still amazed by the incident. My only guess was that maybe green chile was more of a southwest cuisine thing.

The Remnants of Eggs Benedict and a Trip Back to Middle School

I went to Pitts Middle School in Pueblo, Colorado for my sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. The days of going to that school seems like it was lifetimes ago. Fortunately, right I after I started working for Dr. Pepper, I got to relive one of my most embarassing moments of being a Pitts Pony.

The story actually starts the day before I recalled my middle school memory. There was place in downtown Davenport called Tommy's that supposedly had the best breakfast in town and I had wanted to try it. I went in and had the eggs benedict. Not only it was as delicious as I had heard, it was ridiculously cheap too.

The next morning I was at Walmart slinging pop onto the shelf next to a kid who worked for Pepsi named Josh. Josh was a goofy dude in his early twenties whose life revolved around sugar and video games.

Out of nowhere I farted. I didn't even feel it coming. It fucking stunk. It smelled like the eggs benedict that I had almost 24 hours earlier. Josh asked if it was me. I owned it.

For the next ten minutes Josh would either warn people not to walk down the aisle, or if they did, he made that that they knew that it was me who had passed the gas, and not him. I would apologize, endure the embarrassment, and go about my job. Josh finally lost interest as the odor subsided.

When the same thing happened to me in middle school, I don't remember it smelling that bad. Maybe instead of Canadian bacon on those eggs benedict, they had used dead skunk meat.

I didn't really give a fuck what Josh thought. He is literally one of the most socially unskilled people I have ever met. He lacks even the most basic communication skills. If you are not talking about Pepsi products or video games, you simply cannot have a conversation with the guy.

It finally occurred to me that he is part of the first generation that has grown up with the internet their entire lives. Kids his age have grown up in the isolation of a virtual world. They don't know how to have true human interaction. I have no doubt that the kid could probably be articulate in an internet chatroom, but he had no clue how to act in a face to face conversation. I was dumbfounded when he told me that he was taking the day off of work to attend the online wedding of two video game characters.

I don't mean that as a condemnation of an entire generation of people. Every person's upbringing is different. I know plenty of people his age or younger that are far wiser than I ever was at their age, but it is pretty evident that Josh's foundation of knowledge has come to him through some type of video screen.

The Death Toll

I am not a person who is easily offended. When it comes to my sense of humor I have a motto that almost nothing is sacred. I will laugh at things that most people would consider morbid. So, on those rare instances that I do find myself offended it really pisses me off.

One such occasion was during that week that I worked at Group O. I was driving across the Rock River on Interstate 74 in Illinois when I saw one of those signs letting you know how many people had been killed in car accidents across the state throughout the year. I know those signs are everywhere in this country and that they are meant to be a public service reminder to wear a seat belt and drive carefully. I get that it is a noble intention.

Maybe I was just having a bad day, but when I looked up that sign I just got infuriated. I think that it trivializes the memory of those that have died. Once a singular human being, they immediately become part of a collective number being projected in light bulbs. The number makes the generalization that all of these deaths could have been prevented with a seat belt. That may be have been the case for some of those people, but I'm sure a great many that make up those light bulbs did have their seat belts on.

Death is now simply a statistic. It doesn't matter if you die of cancer, in a car accident, or any other manner of death. The decedent is stripped of what their humanity was. They just become part of a number that represents how they should not have lived their lives.

I get so tired of being told that longevity should be the goal of life, instead of living a life that will bring you the greatest amount of joy. If you want to smoke cigarettes, drink like a fish or not wear a seat belt it should not be met with a discussion about your mortality. I don't go to the doctor for checkups, and don't plan to do so anytime soon. It's my life, and I'm not hurting anybody else.

Of course the lame ass argument is the cost to society of what is deemed "destructive" behavior. Well, in the case of personal freedom, fuck the cost to society. That is the price you pay. The government of the state of Iowa doesn't agree with my stance though. I just paid a $127 fine for not wearing a seat belt. Like the song goes, "I fought the law, and the law won".

Life and Death of a Salesman

Most the sales guys that work in the Davenport branch of Dr. Pepper have been doing it for years. One guy in particular, Kenny, has been pushing soda for 35 years. I think that he is what Arthur Miller had in mind when he wrote about Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman". I look at Kenny and all I can see is a tragic character.

Kenny is always selling. I don't mean that in the way that he is always selling Dr. Pepper products, I mean that Kenny is always trying to sell himself. His priorities in life are all about meeting quotas and getting the biggest commission check that he can get. On a personal level, Kenny is a great guy, but even in a casual conversation he is always trying to sell his opinion or point of view.

I have no doubt that Kenny has made a lot of money in his life, but I wonder if he ever asks himself about his other accomplishments. Ultimately he has spent his time on this planet making people fat. I'm not sure why selling sugar is any more respectable than pushing heroin. He refuses to admit that the pop industry is basically where the tobacco industry was thirty years earlier.

I picked up the whole job of merchandising for Dr. Pepper pretty quickly. It doesn't exactly involve splitting the atom; you're putting pop on the shelf. Kenny orders way too much product. If one of the stores has a sale, Kenny knows how to take advantage of it. His backrooms are always a mess. I spent almost as much time moving stuff around in the backroom as I do putting product on the shelf. It can be overwhelming and frustrating at times.

When I first started, my goal was to work all three stores perfectly. I learned before too long that that just wasn't possible if you wanted to maintain some semblance of a forty hour work week. It took having a very heated argument with Kenny over his ordering one day before we learned to respect one another.

I Remembered the Camera

On Father's Day, I rode down with my Uncle Denny and Aunt Joyce to see Mike in Burlington. I had not ventured out of the Quad Cities since I got there, so it was nice to take a little road trip. Despite its undeserved reputation, Iowa can produce some nice scenery.

The four of us went to brunch at place called Big Muddy's right on the banks of the Mississippi River. The food was okay, but the view from the balcony that we sat on was very nice. It felt good to have my camera with me. I love the feeling of creativity that a camera gives me and I ended up getting a few nice shots. I have never liked taking snapshots of people. I just like to mentally frame what seems to be a great shot regardless of the subject and see what the end result will be.

After brunch, we all went to the casino. Denny, Mike and I watched the end of the NASCAR race while Joyce went and played the penny slot machines. Eventually Mike and I started playing the one armed bandits as well. I hit a $60 jackpot. That was going to be enough to keep me from having to sell plasma again. Denny didn't join us in gambling. He once told me, "The next lottery ticket I buy will be the first, which is why I still have my money." I wish I had a little bit more of my uncle's attitude inside of me.

We had driven south on the Iowa side of the river, and decided to go north on the Illinois side. At some point we passed a sign that said "Alexis 7". The sign was referring to the town of Alexis, IL which was seven miles to the east. It made me think of my daughter and how I was not spending the holiday with her. I really wished at that moment that she was only seven miles away from me.

Freewill Eternalism

That picture above is me. I'm guessing that my dad took it around my third or fourth birthday. It looks like I had a pretty nice tan, we were always waterskiing, or just being outdoors when I was a kid. Not only did my dad take the picture, I'm sure he developed the film, and printed the negative onto paper. There is no doubt in my mind that my mom made that cake, she was always a really good cook. The sheer fact that it sits on plate is evidence enough that it wasn't purchased at a store.

When I look at that picture, there is a sense of amazement that that was me. I know that it is, because even forty five years later I can see that same look on my face that I see in a mirror's reflection to this day.

Yet, I don't feel like the kid in that photo. I wish I did. There has just been so much that has happened to me since that photo was taken, and the man that I man now sitting here typing out these words on a keyboard has a hard time identifying with that child.

One day as I was sitting on my cousin's porch , smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, I asked myself how it was that I ended up here in my life. How the fuck did I end up here in Davenport, Iowa? If you would have told me even less than a year ago that this is where I would be as I wrote this, I would have laughed in your face.

It was on that day on my cousin's porch, a smoke in one hand and Busch Light in the other that I realized my philosophical theory of "Freewill Eternalism". The doctrine of "freewill" states that humans are free to make their own decisions without regard to social, moral, or political restraints, while "eternalism" dictates that time is just another dimension. The future already exists, and all points in time are equally real.

The child in the picture above, and the man sitting here writing this are both equally here. We are living two of the infinite possible existences for this singular soul, yet we are still one in the same. My memories are his visions of the future.

It is so easy for both myself, and you the reader to make the assumption that if Julie had not died, then I would not be where I am. Although I will not debate that that is true, there are so many other decisions I have made since I was a child with that birthday cake in front of me that have led me to where I am in this present form.

Most notably, is my relationship with the almighty dollar. I blow them as fast as they come in. And when I say "blow them", I mean that sincerely. For the most part, I have always had the skills to make decent money, but I have always loved to have a good time too. My bank account might have next to nothing in it, but my memory bank is overflowing.

So when I ask myself, "How did I end up here?"

The Universe answers, "This is where you're supposed to be!"

Let's call it "fate".

A Passing, Yet Life Long Thought

Ever since I was little kid, there was a thought in the back of my head that I would die by suicide unless I met some other sudden type of death that caught up with me first. It wasn't that I was depressed or anything like that, it was just a feeling that I was born with.

After a lifetime of thought, I have come to the conclusion that it is because I am some kind of control freak. It could also be that I have always been curious about the afterlife. Death represents the last great adventure for me; it truly is the final frontier. It is a door to another plane of existence. I have had this theory that for some humans, the mind dies before the body does.

In the months after I finished my first book and I had to deal with the empty house that was overwhelming me, suicide became a real option. I was thinking about it constantly. I had no clue what to do with my life once Julie was gone. At that point, I wasn't thinking of death as an adventure, it was because life became so tense that I couldn't stand it. In hindsight, it was good thing that I had had to sell my gun during a rough financial stretch about a year earlier.

Ultimately, the reason I decided that I would get through that period is that I could think of no scenario where it would not have been Alexis who found my body. I simply could not do that to her. I love her too much to ever traumatize her like that. She is a great person who will eventually do great things in this world. I don't think that she would be able to accomplish them if she had to carry the baggage and scars of her father's suicide.

I'm not saying that suicide is not an option in the future for the same reasons I stated in the first paragraph. It's just that it is not an option right now.

Fortunate Son

I am guilty of not always thinking about what a fortunate person I am. It's a horrible trait that I try to overcome, but I have periods where I tend to focus on the negative too much.

In the big picture there is nothing to be negative about. I have an unbelievable daughter with whom I have a very close relationship. I am so proud of the woman that she has become. She has such a good heart. I don't know if I would have made it this far without her. On a few occasions where I just felt like giving up in life, she kept me going.

I am fortunate to have a great family. A mother and father who adopted me and always made me feel wanted. My mom has always been a rock. My two dads, Don and Wallace who are long gone shaped who I am today. My sister Carol who I had so many good times with. My mom's husband Earl, my brother in law Rich, my nieces Ashley, Jordyn and Rachelle. My grandarents, all three sets. The Casons, the Hills and all their last names, The Hatfields, especially Mike who is graciously letting me live in his house as I write this book. I can't think of a family member, immediate or distant, with whom I have had a bad relationship with. I think that might be kind of unusual in this world. There are of course some odd family members, but there has never been tension between us.

I will just list all of the great friends who have been part of my life, Kim, Dan, Mike, Gene, Eddy, Tim, Todd, Chris, AJ, Ed, Jarred, Dean, Larry, Jose, Kirk, Damon, Stephanie, Cat, Virginia and all of the other casual friends from bars and work that are too numerous to mention.

I have been fortunate in love as well. Although the relationship with my first wife Gretchen is strained now, there was a time in my life when I loved her very much. There were numerous other women like Christie, Emily, and so many that I can't even remember their names. Of course I was fortunate to have Julie in my life. She really taught me what it was to love and be loved. I miss her so much.

I am fortunate to have my health, my sense of humor, and all of the attributes that have made me who I am today. I am fortunate that I am rediscovering my faith. I still have questions, but there is comfort in it.

Right now, I am fortunate to have my dog Lucy. She is my sole companion at the moment. I mean that only in the physical sense. All the people that I have written about in this entry are with me all of the time.

Chicken Fat

I like hockey, but I'm not as excited about it as a lot of people of are. However the Stanley Cup Finals Series started right after I settled into my new home and it was phenomenal. I watched all of the games.

It was funny that they were playing the song "Chicken Fat" before a commercial break. I thought that song was completely obscure. It really took me back to my childhood. I think of "Chicken Fat" as the original, aerobics tape. It's basically a song to do calisthenics to. My dad had it in his record collection, it was the size of a 45 rpm, but you played it at the 33 speed.

I don't know how my dad came to have that song in his collection, but I suspect it was because his brother, my Uncle Paul, was an elementary school gym teacher who used to use it in his class. I also had a music teacher in fifth grade that played it to our class. Her name was Mrs. Spencer, but we always called her "Wolf Eyes". To this day, I'm not sure why a music teacher had us doing calisthenics.

Black Water

One of the first people I met in Iowa was Mike's friend Daryl. He is an older guy that works for the service department at a General Motors dealership. He lives alone in a nice house with a pool in the backyard. He can be a little quirky in that he will only drive Buicks and he will only drink Heineken beer and has collections of both. It would appear that he is rather on the anal side, but all in all he is pretty nice guy.

Daryl has boat that he keeps docked on the Mississippi River. I don't get the impression that he takes out of the slip much. He just likes to go down there after work to sit on the vessel, drink beer, smoke cigarettes and gaze across the water. I accompanied him to do this one evening. It was nice to just watch the sunset and catch a little buzz.

.

Daryl called it his therapy, I know why.

We were joined that night by a kid named Justin who was going to spend the summer living on a boat in the next slip over with his girlfriend. That was something I would have loved to have done when I was younger. He was a really nice guy, but I kind of felt sorry for him. He was only 26 and had four kids. I'm not sure how many mothers were involved. Any way you slice it that poor kid will be broke for the rest of his life. He had a minimum wage job so it was likely that his kids were going to end up on government assistance. His immediate goal was to save up money to get life jackets for his kids when they visited him on the boat.

I just wanted to tell him that condoms would have been so much cheaper.

Happy Hours

From 2000 – 2005, I had a job where I worked from home, and had a territory that included most of Colorado, Wyoming, and part of Utah. It was a great job, but I didn't get have a whole lot of human interaction. That is when I started hitting happy hour at my regular bar on a daily basis.

I tried to find a good bar once I got to the Quad Cities. There were a couple of places like Rivals and The Stadium Club that were pretty cool, but the people who drank there were pretty much idiots. The regular customers at a bar can make or break the place for me.

I never did find a happy hour bar. If the mood strikes, I'll stop into a place. Most of the time, I just went home to drink.

I did finally find the bartender that I wanted serving me. I like to have a beautiful woman pour my beers. She was the bartender at The Stadium Club. Her name is Kelly and she was beautiful. She reminded me of my favorite bartender Charlee back at The Draft in Littleton.

It wasn't so much that the two beauties resembled each other. Charlee was short with bleach blonde hair, and Kelly is tall with what I would describe is auburn hair. I'm not really good at making hair color determinations.

At the end of the day, they both have spectacular legs. Charlee's are short and muscular while Kelly's are long and lean. Either way, it's nice to have something to look at while you are having a beer.

I doubted that I would ever have the same relationship with Kelly that I had with Charlee. Charlee was somebody that I considered to be my friend first, and my bartender after that. It was Julie that introduced me to her. I didn't like her in the beginning, but I came to love her. We both dealt with a lot over our friendship.

The Sad Sickness

My boss' name at Dr. Pepper is Tracy. We pretty much hit it off right away. We are the same age with a similar history and we both chain smoke cigarettes. From what I have witnessed, he is fair with all of his underlings. If you just simply did your job correctly, he would leave you alone. Like anybody else in middle management, he is only as much of a dick as the manager above him.

He will never be what I consider to be one of my more intellectual bosses, and like many other people in the Midwest he refuses to embrace technology. He has no idea how much easier his job would be if he just used email. From what I gather he has spent most of his life as a blue collar guy that finally put in enough time with one company that he got promoted to supervisor.

I feel bad for him. His aura emanates an infinite sadness that I noticed right away. I would come to find out later that his daughter was killed in a car accident. She was in her early twenties, roughly the same age as my daughter. The story goes that her mother refused to stop her from driving when she was drunk. It was a single car accident and she was the only occupant, so there were no other innocent lives lost or harmed.

It's obvious that the event has hardened him and made him bitter. He has some strange views on society and civilization and is not afraid to express his racist views. His disdain for liberals is borderline psychotic. About the only time that you ever see him smile is when he talking about the Chicago Cubs.

I choose to cut him some slack only because I can't imagine what it must be like to bury a child and I hope that I never do. I've been to far too many funerals over the course of life, but I don't think I could survive having to go to one for my child.

Things could have been Different

I think that there is something about dealing with the death of somebody you love that makes you think about the regrets of your life. There are certain days when I just completely think about the short comings that I feel. In all honesty, the more hung over that I am, the more I think about what I would have done differently.

I regret not being a better son. I regret not being a better husband. I regret not handling money and finances better than I have. I won't call it a regret, but I know that I could have been a better father.

So let's put that last paragraph into a chronological order. I wish I would have been a better son. There was a Christmas when I was young that my mom and dad bought me a do it yourself Soap Box Derby kit. My dad kept asking me when I wanted to build it, but it just never happened. I can't really remember why the time never came, I just recollect thinking that it was something that I would be embarrassed to do with him. He died before I could figure it out.

I have been married twice and I certainly have misgivings about how I was as a husband to both of my wives. When I married Gretchen, we were just both very young, I was in my early twenties and she was just 18. We really did love each other, but in such an immature way. For the most part it was a sexual thing. Gretchen was a really good fuck, but there wasn't a whole lot there beyond that. She did give me a great daughter, so the regret can't go too deep. We were just not meant to be. I guess my regret would be not trying harder to keep our marriage together for the sake of Alexis, but I have my doubts that that would have been the right thing to do.

The regrets about my marriage to Julie go much deeper. If I had known how it was going to end, there are so many things that I would have done differently. I truly loved her. I believe that she was my soul mate. I don't know if I have written too much about her, or I haven't written enough. I already completed one book about our time on this planet together.

I guess the majority of my regrets would be alcohol consumption during the time that we were together. We had some bad times when we were drunk, as I have detailed in "At the End of the Dance". My biggest regret is not stopping drinking like she did after she was diagnosed with cancer. I don't feel like I was fully there for her in an emotional sense.

My regrets on being a father could be best described as a "grey area". My daughter Alexis and I have a great relationship, but I could have done better had I not been so wrapped in partying for my most of her childhood. The regret there might go back to the part I wrote about Gretchen. I regret that Alexis didn't have a regular family.

Payday

For the first time in almost two months, I could say, "Today is payday". In fact, I got to say it twice. I got my first paycheck from Dr. Pepper, and I got my check from Group O for that week I worked there. It had been a long time since I had felt excited about a paycheck. It certainly wasn't because of the size of the check. It was because it was that first step in regaining control of my life.

With a paycheck under my belt, I could actually start to think about some plans for the future. That may not sound like much, but it was the first time in over a year that I had been able to think about the topic. I needed to pay off some debt. I needed to start a savings account to finance my next move. I made not only a shopping list, but a wish list as well. The first things to go on it were a printer, microwave, mattress and cable/internet.

The future is wide open.

A Simple Plate

I also had some other plans for my first paycheck as well. There was no way I was going to be able to do everything I had written down the first week so I would have to prioritize. In the past few months, if I was eating at all, I was not eating healthy. I was eating based solely on what food cost, rather than if it was healthy of even something that I desired.

I had always tried to eat healthy when possible. I love fresh vegetables, and lean forms of protein like fish or chicken. For carbohydrates, ideally I like brown rice or sweet potatoes. The only time I have a sweet tooth is right before I go to bed, and more than likely I can satisfy that with a couple of tablespoons of peanut butter. At various points in my life, I have been extremely hardcore about my diet, but ultimately it seemed like too much work. Every now and then I need a huge bowl of ice cream, or nice basket of deep fried of fish and chips.

It is a whole different thing to go grocery shopping when the point is just to keep a belly full for the fewest dollars possible. A bag of chips or a box of cookies from the dollar store will keep you from starving to death. A package of baloney and a loaf of bread will cost you a couple of dollars and feed you for a few days. The problem for me is that eating this type of shit deprives me of energy and doesn't do any wonders for my digestive tract.

So with the first paycheck, I was off to stock up on some healthy food. I could hardly wait for simple, healthy meal. I was just going to go with a seasoned hamburger patty, wild rice, and some fresh spinach with a little ranch dressing drizzled over it. It was delicious. The next day I felt so much better.

Blades of Grass

When I first talked to Mike about moving into his house, he told me that he wouldn't charge me rent and that all I had to do was pay the utilities and mow the lawn. That seemed reasonable to me, but I had to think about how long it had been since I cut grass. I figured it had to have been at least 15 years. I took care of my mom's lawn after Wallace had died.

Every place that I had ever lived after moving out of my parent's house was either a condo or townhome. When I was purchasing a place to live, I had purposely sought out those types of dwellings because I didn't want to have to do any landscaping or have to shovel snow. I had no qualms about paying a homeowners association to handle of that kind of shit for me.

After mowing Mike's lawn a few times, I realized that it was actually something I liked doing. There was a sense of accomplishment to it. When I was done, I used to like to sit on the porch with a beer and enjoy the smell of the fresh cut grass.

The Lost Art of Being Human

I was extremely lonely living in the Quad Cities. You might think that I am only stating the obvious, my wife is dead and my closest friends and family are all almost a thousand miles away, but I think it is much more than that. I think that you the reader have a sense of loneliness that you may or may not be aware of. It just seems like humanity is losing its ability to be human.

I think that technology is stripping away our ability to have "human experiences" at a very rapid rate. When you think about it, a simple conversation, which is the essence of communication, is becoming a lost art form. In the present, the majority of interactions are done by some type of electronic device.

Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky and I will be one of those old guys that wants to talk about good old days, but it seems to me that something so meager as eye contact has disappeared. We can't even look up from our phones long enough to see each other's pupils. Sure, we'll look at somebody's eyes if it is posted as a photo or video on Facebook, but I feel like it just isn't happening in a public setting.

Better You than Me

One of my great friends, Alex, who is roughly my age recently became a father for the second time. He has a daughter who is just a few years younger than mine. When he first told me that his wife was pregnant, I can't say that I was excited for him. I just couldn't fathom the idea of having a baby when I am right at the dawn of fifty. I of course congratulated him, but told him that it was better him than me.

Don't get me wrong, I have loved every second of being Alexis' father, but let's face facts, being a parent is a hard job. To do it right takes a lot of work and sacrifice. It was easy to do when I was younger, I just can't imagine doing it now. I guess I have become more selfish with age. I don't know if that is good thing or not.

Anyway, one night while I was talking to Al about our upcoming fantasy football draft, I asked him how it was having a newborn in the house. He told me that he was really enjoying it. He said something to effect that he thought it was better the second time around at his age. He told me that he wanted to text me a video.

As I watched the video of his adorable child, it was like I could see the soul of that tiny creature. I thought about all it was going to see and experience over the course of its life. All of the pleasure and pain that it would eventually feel. I thought about what the world does to a person. I thought about how nobody gets out of this place alive.

I came away from the video understanding why Al thought the second time around was better. Still, like I said, better him than me.

The Blank Canvas

I'm guessing that many humans search for a meaning to their lives, but I think there are more people that just wake up every morning, do what they do every day, then go to sleep. They never think about anything else. The idea of creativity will never cross their minds.

I've always felt that creativity is the key to life. Each and every one of us are born with a blank canvas in life, and I pay attention to what people chose to do with the canvases of their life.

It is the ones that leave their canvases blank that trouble me. Why is that some people chose that path? Are they too paralyzed by fear that may not get the approval of the universe that they simply do nothing? Is it that the populace is too dumb, or is that they are too lazy?

I just can't repeat the process of living the same day over and over, and living a life where it is exactly the same one day after the other.

It takes getting older to fully appreciate the idea that every person's life is like a blank canvas just waiting to be painted. Every human being has complete autonomy to do whatever they see fit with their canvas. They are free to choose any medium available to decorate their canvas, paint, pencil, oil pastels or anything else they want. They can use the most brilliant of colors if they wish, or they can simply make it black and white. The universe allows, and encourages every living soul to do whatever they want with that canvas.

There is only one thing that is forbidden, and that is doing nothing with the canvas. The canvas must not be disregarded, for that canvas is your soul. Sadly, there are far too many beings out there who allow their canvas to be decorated by outside forces. Some people just chose not to live by their own design. If you don't paint your own canvas, the universe will paint it for you. It will still be your own soul, but the picture will be directed by another.

Two Corys

As I was throwing the rest of my life into the dumpster, I noticed a zippered, canvas case. I recognized it, but couldn't remember what was in it. When I unzipped it, I saw the untitled leather bound book and opened the front cover. It was a blank journal that had been given to me for Christmas in 2002. Inside the cover, my neighbors at the time wrote, "Cory, follow your dreams. We love you! Virginia & Cat".

I don't know why I decided to keep that, when there were far more intensely personal items going into the trash. The first entry was written on January 19, 2003 while I was in Mazatlan, Mexico soaking up some sun in the middle of winter. The final entry was when I was doing the same thing, but only in Cabo San Lucas during January of 2005.

I guess I decided to keep it because that case hadn't been opened since the last entry was written. It also occurred to me that the last I wrote in it was over seven years earlier. All of the cells of my body had regenerated since then, so I figured that was an entirely different Cory that had written that journal. I was curious as to what the Cory of seven years earlier was like.

One afternoon I sat on the porch and read my old words. I smoked cigarette after cigarette and drank beer after beer as I read what it was like to be me almost a decade earlier. Not all that surprisingly, I found that I was in a similar state of mind to the one I was in as I read. I was fighting my way out of a very dark depression. The depression now was more about finances than it was then. I was not only drinking heavily then, I was using a lot of other substances as well. I was putting myself into oblivion every single night. It wasn't hard to figure out why I didn't remember a whole lot about that period of life until I read those pages.

Although I do remember spending a month going through outpatient counseling for substance abuse, chiefly alcohol, I don't think much about it anymore. Apparently, there were 45 consecutive days in the first couple of months of 2004 that I used absolutely no substance whatsoever, including tobacco. I was also going through some type of spiritual crisis at the time and was doing a lot of praying, trying to get closer to God.

Another thing that I noticed was a similarity between the two Cory's was how incredibly lonely old Cory was. There were entries in that old journal about praying for a soulmate. I wanted to be in a loving relationship. It made me sad to know that in the decade since that had been written, both Cory's had been in a loving relationship with their soulmate. And just like that, those women were gone.

A Sign of Intelligent Life

The strange thing about being a merchandiser is that I barely know any of my fellow Dr. Pepper employees, but I know a lot of the guys that work for Coke and Pepsi. One of the those guys became a good friend of my mine. His name is Jay and he is about half my age and is one of the more intelligent, thoughtful guys that I have come across in life.

He invited me over to his house one day. We got high and just hung out in his living room and had a great conversation. He started coming over to my cousin's house and do the same thing here, get high, drink some beers and have deep conversations that would last for hours and hours. Talking to him always took me back to my twenties, he reminded me so much of myself when I was that age. He was also quite different from most of the twenty-somethings that lived in the Quad Cities.

When I was over at his house, he showed me his psychedelic mushroom growing operation. It was pretty cool. He took me through the entire process. It starts with spores that he bought off the internet. Without getting to technical, he puts them into jars, leaves them in the dark for a while, then uses a syringe to inject them onto a lava rock in an aquarium to grow. He then dries them before eating them. The entire process from putting them into jars until getting high takes about a month.

I asked him why he did it. I assumed it was because he tripped on mushrooms before and really liked the feeling so he started growing them. I thought it was amazing when he told me that he had Googled raising his consciousness and he thought mushrooms would help him do that.

The Professional

After I finished my first book, "At the End of the Dance", I sent it to some of my friends and family to get their feedback. For the most part the response was positive but they pointed out that there were many typos and grammatical errors that needed to be fixed. This fact delayed me from fully promoting the book. It was listed on Amazon.com but I didn't do a whole lot to let people know that it was out there.

As I was going through that dark period of my life where most of my worldly possessions were going into the dumpster before I headed to Iowa I pretty much neglected the final editing of the book.

After I got to Davenport, found a job, and attempted to adjust to my new life, I figured that it was time to finish editing the book and getting some attention for it. One day I sat in the kitchen and read it aloud to myself. That made it easier for me catch and correct the errors that had previously escaped me.

Amazon has a program where if I listed it with them exclusively for 90 days I could make it free to readers for a week. With the editing finally completed, I was ready to promote the book. I used Facebook and Twitter to let people know that they could get the book free. There were 45 copies that were downloaded across the globe. I also sold three copies. I know that it wasn't much, but I could officially call myself a "professional author".

A Thousand Lives

Julie changed the way that I looked at dreaming. Prior to meeting her, I didn't really think about dreams, they were just visions of your subconscious that happened to appear while you were sleeping. Mostly I just slightly remembered that I had had a dream, let alone what it was about.

On the mornings that our schedules would allow us to sleep in together, I could count on Julie telling me about her dreams the night before. I knew that Julie sporadically kept a dream journal. I never found it when I went through her stuff after she died. I was so disappointed, I really wanted to read them. Julie had some bizarre dreams.

It seemed like Julie remembered every little detail of her dreams, and most of them were beyond strange. There were times in the middle of the night where she would just sit up straight and be out of breath, it was like she had just come up from being underwater. She would be extremely stressed about how vivid her dreams were.

There were times when I half-teased her that she should consider mental health counseling after she recounted one her dreams. Like I said, I was only half kidding. I think that it some ways Julie's dreams tormented her.

Some mornings were worse than others. Even though I had been next to her the entire night, in what seemed to be a peaceful sleep, Julie would wake up exhausted. She was always saying, "It felt like I lived a thousand lives in one night."

When I think about it now, I honestly believe that she just might have. She didn't believe that dreams were just mirrors of the subconscious. Julie often said that she thought she left this world sometimes when she dreamt.

Julie's happiest days were when she couldn't remember her dream from the night before.

The Grand Delusion

It turns out that one of the biggest delusions I had about moving to Iowa was that I would somehow be closer to Julie's spirit. After all, it is where she was born and raised, and most of her ashes were up with her mom near Des Moines. I fully expected to be overwhelmed by Julie's presence once I crossed over the state line.

I have no idea why I thought that. Not only did that not happen, it felt like it was the complete opposite. I couldn't feel her at all. The memories were there but the soul wasn't. As hard as I tried, Julie felt even further away. For a couple of weeks, I was disappointed in that fact. I wanted to have that connection with her again. In time it occurred to me that maybe the reason I wasn't feeling my love's presence was that she was giving me the space that I needed to start to heal from her passing.

Of course I could take this chapter full circle. My Julie is right her next me actively helping me heal and figure out what the hell it is I should do with the rest of my life. I guess that is an answer that will be revealed to me at a later date.

Same State, Different Worlds

I often think about how close I am to the bulk of Julie's remains. When she was dying, I told her mom that Julie wanted to be cremated and I thought that the bulk ashes should be scattered in Iowa somewhere. I just wanted a little bit of the ashes so that I could scatter them in a few of our favorite places.

After the cremation, the ashes were put into one big urn, and three smaller urns. I got one of the small ones as did Julie's daughter and father. The big urn is with her mom who lives in Johnston, a little over two hours west of Quad Cities.

As much as I would love to have that big urn right now and spread it throughout the state, I know that will never happen. It is very probable that I will never see or talk to Julie's family again. I didn't find out until we were making arrangements that Julie's mom had no intentions to scatter the ashes. She is planning on putting the urn into her casket when she dies so that they can be buried together. Julie never spoke of her final wishes, but I know that is an option she never would have considered. In fact, she would have hated it.

Retirement Planning

When the paychecks from Dr. Pepper started rolling in weekly, and I saw how little it was, I decided that I needed to do some investing. I needed a way to grow those paychecks. I have a retirement to think about. As I thought about all the options, I decided that the gambling boats down on the Mississippi River made the most sense.

The first boat I went on was called The Rhythm City Casino. It's kind of a dirty little place that even as a smoker I thought it reeked of smoke. My intention was that I was going to play poker. I know that slots are sucker bets. There was no poker room, so I was going to be a sucker for a couple of hours. Beers were only a dollar, so losing a few dollars seemed justified. I did okay on video poker, but the penny slots ate it up. Penny slots have to have the most deceptive name ever. In gambling, not losing my ass is considered a success.

The other boat on the Iowa side of the river is the Isle of the Capri. They did have a poker room. I was doing pretty well at Texas Hold'em. Then the storm hit. A new dealer cooled me down, I was starting to get buzzed and chasing hands that I shouldn't have, and finally there was some old guy, a big stack player that started bullying the table.

All in all, I lost $60 at the table, another $20 on video poker, and had to pay $25 for a cab ride home. I don't consider the money spent on beer as part of the cost because that money would have been spent anyway. One thing I did learn at the poker table was not to go play Texas Hold'em if I started drinking before I even get to the casino.

Considering my luck at gambling, I might as well go back to a traditional retirement plan that I've had most of my life which is to not live long enough to have to worry about it.

Reversal of Fortune

I wasn't done at the river boats. I had an extra paycheck in mid-July, and it was time to have some fun. With a few extra dollars in my pocket, I decided that I was going to go break the casino. Before going gambling , I had to go drop off some paperwork down at the Dr. Pepper warehouse. It irritated me that I had to actually drive there, but the company refused to do it by email.

My irritation subsided after the task was complete; I was rolling down River Drive looking at the Big Muddy on a beautiful summer day. The whole moment was spoiled by the sound of siren. To make a long story short, fifteen minutes later I was holding a $127 traffic citation for not wearing a seat belt.

Extremely pissed at having my civil rights violated, I vowed not to let it ruin my day and headed on towards the casino. I bought a hundred dollars' worth of chips at the Texas Hold'em table. Three hands after I sit down, I go all in on a can't miss hand. It missed.

As I drove home I was in a rage, and the only person responsible for that anger was looking at me in the rearview mirror, if you exclude the dick head cop and crooked poker dealer. That's a $227 turn around in less than two hours. That's half a week's wages. I need to accept the fact that I am just not lucky.

All or Nothing

I guess that maybe it is part of the human condition to want to be rich. If it is not part of being human, it is very much a part of the American condition. Being rich it is thought, is the way to have all of your problems solved. Deep inside we all know that is bullshit, but it is a perception that dies hard.

For the vast majority of us, the strategy for getting rich is to buy lottery tickets. I'm just as guilty as everybody else. I know that it will never happen. In most cases the proceeds from a lottery ticket in any given state goes to a noble cause. Let's just call it my charity.

I would estimate that on 90% of the lottery tickets I have ever bought I have not even matched one single number. After I got to the Quad Cities, I heard about a lottery game shared by Minnesota and Iowa called "All or Nothing". The advertisement stated that you could win $100,000 by matching all the numbers drawn, but you could also win the jackpot by matching none of the numbers drawn. That sounded like the perfect game for me.

The way the game works, is that there are 24 possible numbers, and twelve are drawn. If you don't get either of the extremes for the jackpot, there are varying payouts in between depending on how many numbers you do or don't get. There are two drawings each day, one at noon and one around 9 p.m.

I played the game religiously, both drawings, for about a month. I really believed that I would win by getting no numbers right. I guess it was just kind a loser mentality. By the time I gave up, I think I had spent $60 to win maybe $10.

I switched to scratch tickets in an effort to win my fortune. I did even worse. I spent probably over $100 on them in a month and a half. I won a grand total of $5. If I ever do get rich, it sure as hell won't be from gambling.

Like I said earlier, I console myself that the money goes to a good cause. I guess my favorite part of playing the lottery, is that there are a few moments when you are allowed to dream anything you want.

Sports Talk

Over the course of my wife's diagnosis and eventual passing, there were little molecules of my soul that just got lost along the way. Every now and then I find one of those little molecules and I just smile because it is something that that can bring a little "normalcy" back into my life. To somebody else, these things will seem beyond inconsequential, but so what.

Most of the time I was driving to and from work in Denver I listened to sports talk radio. I marked the passage of time by whose show was on the air. Just before Julie got sick, I bought an ugly Honda Accord that had no radio. I planned on buying one, but just never got around to doing it. I had to drive around the metro area listening to only the thoughts in my head.

As soon as I got to Davenport in the Lexus, I tried to find a good radio station. The A.M. dial is all religious or conservative political programming. On F.M. it was all classic rock or country stations. I checked Jim Rome's website, he wasn't on a station within 200 miles of here. I finally saw a billboard for an ESPN radio station on F.M., and soon found a Fox Sports station on A.M. and that's pretty much what would I listen too. It kept me from getting homesick.

The Lunk Alarm

I've been a gym rat for the better part of my life. With age I have learned that a monthly gym membership is less than a psychiatrist's bill. Working out is just a form of relaxing for me. Once I got to my temporary home, finding a gym was second in priority only to getting a job.

The second day into town, I spotted a Planet Fitness gym. "No fucking way will I join a pussy gym like Planet Fitness," I thought to myself. Of course after looking around at the alternatives, I ended up eating those words.

I just hate the vibe of that place. Granted, it caters to the person who is probably a beginner to intermediate in the gym. The company goes out of its way to make a member feel included. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, they just seem to go overboard about it.

They have a thing called the lunk alarm. The company has a definition of what they call a lunk, but it seems to me that they are referring to people who have worked their asses off in the gym. Planet Fitness is just worried about what they have christened "gymtimidation". That is not allowed in the "judgment free zone".

The gym sucks, but it was nice to get back in there that first day and get a brief workout in. It may not sound like much, but it was another sign that I was getting back to being myself.

What's the Difference?

There was time in my life when I considered myself to be a very political person, but I have pretty much given up on it. It has become such a fucking joke of a process. I didn't vote in the last two major elections, and have no plans to do so in the future. That decision is twofold, I don't think my vote counts and I think the system is broken. I think the policies of the country are more likely to be set in the boardrooms on Wall Street than they are in Washington D.C.

Another reason I don't vote is because there are no choices. Let's face facts, there isn't really a difference between Republicans and Democrats except for the bullshit that spews from their mouths. Both sides can say what will appeal to their constituents, but when it comes right down to it politicians are going to vote on the side of whoever is putting money into their pockets. Politics have no longer been become about getting things accomplished. The whole process has turned into one long reelection cycle. Once a candidate wins one election, it becomes all about raising enough cash to win the next one.

That said, I do still kind of pay attention to the media's coverage of politics if only for my own amusement. The juxtaposing between liberals and conservatives is laughable. People seem to no longer realize that reasonable people can disagree. You either have to agree with one side on all of their issues or you are branded as a traitor.

The politics in Iowa are very puzzling to me though. In talking with most people you would get the feeling it is a very conservative state, yet there is very strong labor union presence here which tends to be a liberal talking point. This is not something I ever experienced in Colorado.

I guess that might be the reason that Iowa is one of the first states for presidential caucuses every four years. Nobody knows what the fuck these people are thinking. Oh and during an election in the Quad Cities you get to see commercials for both the Iowa and Illinois races. It really is excruciating.

Dog Sense

Ever since we got Lucy as puppy, she has howled at sirens. We used to live by a major fire station in the southwest Denver Metro area, so we got to hear her howling quite often. Her howl has the low pitch of an old hound dog, which is the opposite of her bark which can be in an irritatingly higher pitch. Julie used to think that the sirens hurt Lucy's ears, but that never made sense to me.

I realize that howling at sirens can be a fairly common trait for dogs, but Lucy seems really disturbed by the sounds. Since I have been living alone with her I have been paying closer attention when she howls. It doesn't matter if it's a fire truck, an ambulance or a police car, Lucy seems to know that somebody in close proximity to us is in some type of distress. I have no clue how a dog would ever learn this. Maybe it was when the ambulance took Julie to the hospital, and she never came home again. I can just see it in Lucy's eyes.

Lucy has always been protective of the humans in her life, but somehow I think her howling at sirens is her way of being protective of all people.

Writing Scripts

Although I am a willing participant of it too, I am growing more and more troubled by the lack of true human interaction that happens in modern life. By "true human interaction" I mean that the process is not aided by any type of technology. You can make the argument that technology has made the world more connected. That might be true, but when I look at everybody staring at their phones it strikes me that we're far more isolated.

Technology isn't the only that that is isolating us. Doctors are doing their fair share. The amount of pills that people are taking in this day and age is just ridiculous. I understand that in many cases, probably most, that medicine is helping a soul's existence. I also think that there are too many instances the soul can be harmed by medication, specifically antidepressants and pain killers. I know that some people truly need something to correct their faulty brain signals and others live in constant physical pain for some reason everyday of their lives.

I think the reason most prescriptions are written is because of laziness and/or stupidity of those writing them. They fail to see the root cause of any problem and won't admit it. The cynic in me also sees that there is a whole lot of money being made by writing a prescription. The patient sure in the hell doesn't mind.

Balance

I am a big believer in the balance of the universe. You can call it "Karma", or define it any way that you want. I truly believe that for all of the good that you get in this world, its equal to all of the bad that will come your way. Some people are more aware of this than others. There are some people, a few truly blessed ones, which will only notice the good. Sadly, there is a larger population that will tend to only focus on the bad.

To fully appreciate the balance of something as infinite as the universe, I think a person needs to find balance in their singular life. The older I get I notice that one of the biggest challenges a human faces is that they have either too much life, or they don't have enough.

The sadder of the two options is obviously those who don't have enough life. It's like they are just waiting to die, an undiagnosed cancer eating away at them from the inside. These people are easy to spot as they are usually in front of some type of screen. More than likely, it is the face of their phone, or a computer or television where there are sitcoms to be watched or video games to be played. Those who suffer from a lack of life are almost always seeking some type of external stimulus.

It seems to me that having too much life could be very distressing as well. There is a stimulus within this type's mind that forces them to feel life so intensely that they don't know really how to live it. They never slow themselves down long enough to appreciate what is actually happening around them. The people who have too much life can be found almost everywhere, from the board rooms of Wall Street to the panhandlers of San Francisco, and basically every corner of the globe.

I will listen to the arguments that either of these conditions can be positive or negative depending on the observer's point of you. You will not be able to convince me that the happiest people are the ones who find the right balance.

A Gyro Omelet

Just as there are little moments that make me smile and bring normalcy back to my life, there are equally little things that will bring a tear to my eye and make me realize how much I miss Julie.

There is place called Hickory Grove Restaurant that makes the best gyro omelet. I went by myself one morning to get one and I sat at the counter to eat. I looked up the bar by the kitchen and noticed a bottle of Bailey's Ice Cream. I thought about all of the days that Julie and I would go out to breakfast when we had the same days off. We always had the bartender throw Bailey's into our coffee.

After the tear I smiled and thought about how Julie could never just order off the menu. She always had to have some kind of substitution or in some cases have the server or cook make something that wasn't even on the menu.

It were those little quirks I loved so much about her.

Twenty Two Holes

I found another little piece of my old self when I went golfing with my Uncle Denny one July afternoon. I don't remember the name of the place, but it was the only time I ever played a twenty two hole golf course. My uncle and I just figured we would just to buy a few more beers to get through the additional four holes.

The first thing I noticed was the effect of the altitude on the ball. Being native of Colorado, I kind of always thought the whole altitude thing was just kind of a myth. I was wrong. It was like I had to learn golf all over again. I had no idea what club to hit from what distance. I was still having fun though.

About half way through, I started to realize how it came to be a 22 hole golf course. I imagine that the original plan for the place was to have manicured lynx style course carved out of a corn field. The first seven holes were fairly well designed, and somewhat of a challenge. The hole right before the turn started the trend of the up one way, down the other fare way. The holes lost any semblance of imagination.

Then suddenly on the 19th hole it looks like you are on a different course. The holes were very challenging. The problem became that they realized what hard work it was to make a challenging course and decided to call it wrap after the 22nd hole.

It was such a fun day. It was nice to play some golf while knocking the beers back on a comfortable 78 degree day. It made me miss being me.

A Big Enough Ocean

Several years ago I had the inspiration to write a children's book. I titled it "A Big Enough Ocean". It tells the interwoven stories of Quinn and Dante, a champion surfer sharing his love of the waves with his son, and Merrick and Adara, a father shark teaching his daughter to hunt and the necessary skills of survival in the sea. My intent was to tell a story of all living things synchronizing with the harmony of the ocean.

I tried a few times to find an illustrator to collaborate with, but the project never materialized. Eventually, the book just got lost in the documents on my laptop. I actually forgot about it altogether. It wasn't until after I finished writing "At the End of the Dance", that I remembered it. I made a mental note to myself to revisit it.

Once I got settled into Davenport and had some time on my hands, I decided to review it. It certainly wasn't as good as I remembered it being, in fact it flat out sucked. It's no wonder that I couldn't get an illustrator to work with me. I spent a couple of weeks doing some editing and a lot of rewriting until I got it into a piece that I am fairly proud of.

I'm going to take another stab at getting it out there. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it, but I'm not going to let it get it lost again.

Colorado Vacation

Before I moved east, I knew that I was going to have to get a job, and that would probably mean I was going to have to piss in a cup in the not too distant future. I really had no choice except to quit smoking pot, and that sucked.

In Davenport I didn't have a connection or money for that matter, so passing a drug test wasn't going to be an issue. I got tested before I got the job at Group O. I passed, but I knew almost immediately that I hated that job, so I continued to refrain from weed as I was still looking for something else.

They tested me for Dr. Pepper, and I of course passed. Once I knew that I would be able to stand slinging pop onto the shelf, I wanted to get higher than shit.

I started working in the aisle next to another soda guy. I knew right away that he smoked, because I could tell he was extra cautious. I had to remind myself that pot wasn't legal in Iowa.

He finally got comfortable enough with me that he said he would get me some smoke. The first stuff he got for me was absolute crap. He thought that it was pretty good, to me I hadn't had shit that bad since I was in middle school. It was like low grade Mexican weed.

Still, after almost two months without smoking, it was nice to hit the pipe a little bit, turn on some music and just relax. Even though the weed was weak, and I was barely high, it felt like another piece of me was coming back into my life. I enjoyed that little moment so much. It was a small step in the process of getting back to being "Cory" again.

I finally told the soda guy that as much as I appreciated him getting the weed for me, I made it clear that I was willing to pay for the really good stuff from Colorado or California. After a week or so, the guy came through for me. The stuff might have been a little pricey for the quantity, but beggars can't be choosers.

With a little subtlety, I was able to come across a glass pipe. I was back in business.

The Last Trigger Date

I figured that October 20, 2014 would be my last trigger date. That would be the one year anniversary of Julie's death. I had made it through holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries that made me sad as I lived through them. I wasn't foolish enough to think that I wouldn't get sad on those dates in future years, but I did figure that the first time would be the hardest.

I had to work on that day so I didn't have to dwell on the experience that I had lived through exactly a year earlier. Throughout the day I would occasionally look at the time and think about what was going on in that hospital room in 2013. Sometimes those thoughts would make a tear well up in my eye and other times they would make me smile.

By the time 5:02 rolled around I was off work and had already had several beers. I had no choice but to relive those last two minutes of my wife's life. Watching Julie's vital signs descend until she took her last breath is something that I will never forget.

I sobbed uncontrollably for about a half an hour. It actually felt good and very cleansing. I miss Julie so much. I miss the life that we had together.

Almost a Whore

As part of my goal to get back out west, I decided it might be necessary to get back into the mortgage field. Dr. Pepper wasn't paying enough and my book wasn't exactly climbing the bestseller list. I redid my resume and cover letter attempting to explain my absence from the industry. I sent out some resumes to jobs that I was interested in, but also posted it on a website.

I received an email from a credit union in Davenport that was interested in me for one of their open positions. The job's title was "collector". Although it seemed like a step back career wise, I told them that I would interview with them.

The interview went very well. The gentleman that would be my boss and I hit it off right away. We had pretty much shared the same career path. We told old stories about how the credit industry had changed. They asked me what my salary demands were, and I gave them a number. I knew that if they could afford me, I would be offered the job.

Sure enough, two days later I got an offer contingent on my passing a background check. I accepted the offer and told them that they would find no criminal history, but warned them that my credit had suffered a few dings after having been laid off a couple of years earlier and the subsequent cancer treatment for Julie. The human resources lady kind of laughed and said she didn't think that would be a problem.

Almost instantly after hanging up the phone, there were pangs of doubt about whether I was doing the right thing. I asked myself what my motivation was for accepting the job. It goes without saying the offer was more money than I was making at Dr. Pepper, and it should come as no surprise that I was tired lugging around pallets of pop. I was conflicted. I had sworn to myself two years earlier that I would never sit in a cubicle again.

When I did not hear from the credit union right away I figured there was some kind of problem. They called me the day before Thanksgiving to tell me that they would not be able to hire me due to my poor credit history. I was initially disappointed because I was at a point with Dr. Pepper where I wanted to tell them to "fuck off". I was so ready to scream "I quit" and walk right out of wherever it was that I was working.

It only took a couple of hours for my disappointment to wane. Deep in my soul, I knew that the universe was looking out for me. It had bigger plans for my life. I would have ended up hating that job. It would have made me feel like a whore. Sure I would have a little more spending money, but I know firsthand how much it sucks to sit in a cubicle tied to phone demanding that people pay their bills.

I know that if I pay attention to the opportunities that the universe sends my way it will ultimately show me a path to success and happiness.

Eating Disorder

One random morning as I was throwing Dr. Pepper on the shelf at Walmart I couldn't help but stop and watch as an extremely obese young woman rode by on her electric shopping cart. She literally had rolls of fat hanging off the cart just inches from dragging on the floor. After she passed from sight, I watched as two obese young boys rode by on their own electric shopping carts right behind her.

I had to drop what I was doing and follow them. I had to make sure that my eyes were not playing tricks on me. They weren't. I just felt so bad for the three of them. Over the course of my life, I have known several severe drug addicts and alcoholics. I could feel myself looking at that young family the way I used to look at my addict friends and think to myself, "Somebody has to do something!"

The rate of obesity in the Midwest was a shock to this Colorado guy. My home state usually ranks as one of the fittest in the union, so you don't really understand the true meaning of the so-called "Obesity Epidemic". I want to make it clear that I am not talking about people that are overweight, I'm talking about people that are morbidly obese.

Again, I'm not being judgmental. I grew up as a fat kid, and there have also been periods of my adult life where I carried around more pounds than I cared to. A bad diet and a lack of exercise caught up with me. Eventually I figured it out, started eating right and getting back into the gym. Maybe this chapter is just me blowing my own horn, because I'm in one of the best shapes of my life. That was one of the advantages of slinging soda pop for a living.

I don't think about it as much when I see middle aged people that are obese. I chalk that one up to being their choice. It does bother me when I see some body that is younger in that condition. There was a kid, maybe early 20's, that swept the parking lot at Walmart as I pull up in the morning. I wouldn't be surprised if he weighed between 450-500 pounds. I could hear him wheezing from a few parking places away. I just feel sorry for him. He's going to be dead before he gets a chance to really experience life.

When I passed by that young family on their electric shopping carts I couldn't help but notice what was in their basket. There was a shit ton of industrial corndogs, probably dozen or more boxes in there. There were also several two liter bottles of Dr, Pepper. My boss would be so proud.

To Tell the Truth

When I was a kid, my mom used to watch soap operas in the afternoon. I don't remember all of the ones that she watched, but I know "General Hospital" was one of them. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention, and only saw them during the summer or when I stayed home sick from school, but I do remember that most of the story lines revolved around characters that were trying to maintain some type of secret. Believe it or not, those ridiculous shows were the foundation for much of my opinions on honesty.

On those occasions that I would actually sit on the couch and watch her stories with my mom, I would be asking what was going on. She would invariably tell be about a plot line that involved one person lying to another.

On more than a few occasions, I would ask my mom, "Why don't they just tell the truth?"

I know now that that would not have made for dramatic television, but even at that early age I knew that it was far less work to tell the truth and face the consequences than it was to continually perpetuate a lie. I guess that I am an inherently lazy person because maintaining dishonesty just takes too much fucking work.

I will not be so pious to say that I have never lied, but I refuse to put too much energy into making a lie seem like the truth. Call it a character flaw, but I would rather tell a person the truth and hurt their feelings than lie to them.

I guess I will never be on the writing staff for a soap opera. Come to think of it, are there even still soap operas on television?

A Day of Art

Ever since I found that moment of peace on Credit Island right after I got to town, I wanted to go there with my camera. I got some really nice shots there, and decided to drive around looking for other cool locations. I stopped at other places along the river. There were many times when I was driving down to the Dr. Pepper warehouse, I passed the Davenport City Cemetery and had been curious about it.

I took many pictures there hoping to catch a ghostly presence like on those paranormal reality shows. I did capture some orbs but it could have just been the lighting.

I considered it to be the first artistic day I had had in almost two years.

A Night of Art

I wrote the following in the middle of the night:

It's almost midnight

The moon is behind the clouds

It's an ever changing scene

As I lay on the mattress

And watch it all through

The screen

The clouds make faces

That I want to get up

And sketch

Sometimes art is meant

To be lived and not captured

Thank you Great Spirit

For showing that to me

And coming to that realization

As I write these words

Saving the Planet

If there was a trait that I wish I could change, it would be that I cared more about the environment and participated in recycling. I guess I'm too much of a pessimist about the planet, I think the damage has been done. Of the hundreds of thousands of cans of beer that I have drank over the course of my life almost all of the empty cans went into the trash and eventually into a landfill. I know that I could have been paid for all of that aluminum but it seemed like so much trouble and frankly I didn't need the money at that point.

I now recycle. The reason is that in Iowa they charge you a deposit on your bottles and cans. So every time I buy a thirty pack of Busch Light they add an extra $1.50 on top of the price of the beer. After you drink the beer, you have to put the can back into its original package and take them to the grocery store to get the deposit back.

Recycling really is a pain in the ass, but after I save up enough empty cans it equals a free 18 pack.

A Slower Pace

I guess that there is something that can be said for the slower pace of life in Iowa. There definitely are not as many uptight people as there are in other places that I have been. Logic would assume that this is why people are generally friendlier in the Midwest. It may be that the mentality of the farming life has wormed its way into the cities. I think that there are literally people here that would be content to watch the corn grow.

One thing that can be extremely annoying about that relaxed pace is that it tends to spill over into the speed at which people walk. Again, I will concede that it might be nice that people are in no hurry, but it really sucks for those of us that know exactly what we want and where we are going. I really don't even like being in a Walmart, but the experience is even more dreadful when I can't get out of the hellhole because the person in front of me is walking at a snail's pace.

Maybe if I live here long enough I will eventually adopt this trait, but I doubt it.

Locality

I have not followed the local news since I got to the Quad Cities. I'm not sure if that was a conscious decision or not. I have never read the local newspaper or Googled its website. I have seen local news a few times but that is only because I didn't turn the TV off after Dr. Phil was over.

I think part of the reason is that I don't really feel like I am part of this community and I know that this is just a temporary stop on my journey of life and I really don't know how long I will be here. I know that there is some greater reason for me being here that I have not fully realized yet.

The strange thing is that I follow the news in Colorado on a daily basis. It makes me feel like I am there. I have virtually all of the news outlets there on my "favorites" list. An even stranger thing is that I follow the news of San Diego closer than I do that of Davenport.

Another part of it is, I don't think "news" is news anymore. I was a journalism major in college, and what I read today just seems like information manipulation and opinion. I was just so much more focused on getting this book written that I just don't have time for the bullshit.

The Novena

I grew up in a staunch Catholic household. My mother was, and still is, about as devout as one can be. She adopted me through a Catholic charities foundation. She pledged that I would be schooled in Catholic schools. I was in mass every Sunday, and attended catechism at least one night a week. Some years it was on Mondays, other years it was on Tuesdays. If it was one of those years that the classes fell on Tuesday I would be pissed off because that meant that I was missing an episode of "Happy Days". I tried to bargain with my mother, promising to stare at a copy of DaVinci's "The Last Supper" that hung on our dining room wall during the commercials when Fonzi was turning on the jukebox with his fist or jumping trash cans on his motorcycle.

Even better was when we went to mass on Saturday evening, or the really early service on the Sabbath. That would mean that I would be able to watch wrestling on Sunday morning. I preferred Sunday morning wrestling to Saturday morning cartoons.

As I got into my formative years, I pretty much lost my use for religion. It just didn't make sense to me. The Bible just struck me as being a ridiculous story, and not very well written for that matter. Out of respect for my mother, I continued to go to church on Christmas and Easter. Eventually, I quit doing even that because the politics of the Vatican became absurd.

It was at some point in college that I became acquainted with Zen philosophy. It just made sense to me. I never really became a true student of Zen, and I misguidedly assumed that it meant I really was an atheist.

Still, there were dark periods of my life where I hit my knees and prayed to the God that my mom had forced me to believe in during my childhood. I felt guilty about doing that. I was telling myself that I was getting closer to God, and I would be a changed man going forward, but in the back of mind it was like I was trying to con God. When times were good, I wasn't reaching out to him and thanking him for all of the blessings that he had bestowed on me, yet when times were bad, there I was begging for his help. It was a ludicrous relationship.

To be even more hypocritical, there have been three or four times in my life when I have played the "St. Jude Novena" card. That is a very drastic step to take in the Catholic faith. Saint Jude is the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes. Those three or four times I mentioned previously, I felt that I met Saint Jude's criteria to a tee. On those occasions, not only was I at the end of my rope in life, I was ready to put that rope around my neck and end it.

Here is the Novena to St. Jude:

May the sacred heart of Jesus be adored, glorified, loved, and preserved throughout the world, now and forever.

Sacred heart of Jesus pray for us.

St. Jude, worker of miracles pray for us.

St. Jude, helper of the hopeless, pray for us.

If Saint Jude answers your prayers, which in my experience, he will, then you must promise to publish the prayer so that others may be helped. Whether you are believer or not, it works.

The self- identification of "Atheist" might be more of a rejection of organized religion, than it is a personal belief. The entire time that Julie was going through cancer, I never once prayed for Julie's recovery, and as far as I know, neither did she. We just accepted the fact that that was the way things were meant to be. If I asked her about it she refused to even discuss the matter. Even as she lie on her deathbed, the nurses asked her if she would like to speak to a chaplain. She was adamant that that wasn't what she wanted. She was going to die that same way that she had lived.

In the moments after Julie took her last breath, my mom asked my permission for her and Julie's family to pray over the body. I told her that would be okay, but left the room as they did that, after all, they were the religious ones, not me.

That said, before I left Colorado it was me that was on my knees playing the "St. Jude Novena" card. Nine times a day for nine days, I recited that prayer. And yet again, the good saint answered my prayers. I prayed to get out of that haunted house and make it safely to Davenport, Iowa where I felt that I would be safe and there would be a new beginning for me.

I think the whole thing come down to semantics. I believe in the power of the of the universe. I believe that all things that have happened or will happen are currently happening on an alternative plane of existence. You can call it God, Allah, The Great Spirit, or The Universe, at the end of the day, I think it is all one in the same.

How old is your Soul?

I am a believer in the concept of old souls and new souls. I will give you my definition of what that idea means, and it may not conform with another definition, so sue me. Simply put, I think old souls are completely aware of all the parallel universes that exist in what some physicists refer to as the "Multiverse". An old soul can see how the simplest decision can have far reaching consequences, not just on this plane of existence but other planes as well.

A new soul understands only its immediate present. They have little regard for the past, and only a vague concept of the future. If you look at the history of the of this planet, you can see that it is new souls that make up more than three quarters of the population. It's just simple math.

I've adopted most of my spiritual thoughts from the book "Jonathan Livingston Seagull". For those of you that haven't read it, the basic story is that Jonathan, a seagull, spent his entire life challenging himself in the art of flight, while the rest of the flock hung around a pier waiting for scraps of fish to tide them over until they did the same thing the very next day.

Jonathan learned in one lifetime what it took other seagulls thousands of lifetimes to learn. He was an old soul.

In my near half century of life I have come to believe that within this universe that there are billions and billions planes of existence all intermingling with each other at any given moment. I think that there are planes where the majority of souls all gather together, and there are other planes that are only inhabited by a single soul. It makes sense to me that some planes are not inhabited at all. They serve only as experiences that souls cross through. They are meant to be companions to other parallel planes.

In my mind, this would explain such phenomena as ghosts, aliens, visions, E.S.P. just to name a few. I think it is possible for old souls to maneuver through these planes very easily. It is all about being self-aware.

Childhood Delusions

There was a time in my life where I was card carrying member of the KISS Army! I'm sure you will be surprised to find out that it was my pre and early teens. From the time that saw the band on the Paul Lynne Halloween Special I was a dedicated fan. "Rock and Roll Over" was the first album that I owned. There were posters of KISS on almost every inch of wall space in my room.

Although not a fervent as I once was, I continued to like them and listen to their music after they took their makeup off. I went to the reunion concert of the original four members when they put their makeup back on.

It wasn't until I read Gene Simmons' book as an adult that I realized what thoroughly unlikeable piece of shit he is. I came away from the book thinking he simply has no redeeming value other than his ability to make money. He is very good at that, but his ability to actually be a human being sucks. I would almost feel sorry him if he wasn't such an asshole.

He seems to be rather delusional as well. It was hilarious how in his book he just completely ripped on Ace and Peter's musical skills. Gene, as a bassist nobody is going to confuse you with John Entwistle or Bill Wyman any time soon.

KISS might have been my favorite band, but I liked almost anything that had a really heavy guitar. The second concert that I ever saw was Ted Nugent, the Scorpions and Def Leppard, right after their first album came out.

Nugent was the headliner and he knew how to put on a good show. He came onto the stage swinging on a rope and wearing a loin cloth. Then he left his audience in complete awe as they pondered the insightful lyrics of such songs as "Wango Tango" and the timeless "Wang, Dang Sweet Poontang."

As I got older I realized that Nugent's lyrics were even deeper than his political ideology. His vitriolic bullshit really knows how to divide people. There is no grey area with the "Motor City Madman". You either love him or hate him.

I think Nugent is even a bigger douchebag than Simmons, but its close. Of course, it all depends who was in the news the most recently. That is because the only times these has beens ever make the news anymore is when they say something so over the stop stupid that they break the internet, so they are in the news quite frequently.

I can't believe that either of those fuckers got any of my money.

The Dream State

Once Julie had been gone over a year, there were times when it seemed like our relationship was a lifetime ago. At other times it seems like it wasn't part of this life at all. Many days I don't feel as though I am in the same space and time as the Cory that was married to her.

Julie and I experienced a most passionate six years together. When I use the word "passionate", I don't mean just in the physical sense. We were just intense together. We fought each other with the same fervor that we fucked with.

Her death was such a surreal experience, almost like a dream. Was I just one of Julie's dreams? Maybe death is just somebody waking from a dream, and the rest of us are left here to dwell in the remnants of another entitie's subconscious.

It could be that Julie was just one of my dreams. I woke up one morning and forgot to bring her with me.

Of course it could be that we were just two carbon based life forms and she simply died of cancer. But I doubt it.

The Pale Horse

I am not sure why I am writing about a news article that I read over the summer. I don't know if this will even make it into the book. Come editing time, this section will be near the top of the list to be cut. I spent so much time thinking about it, that I had to write something.

It was a very affecting story about a woman who fought a hard fight against Breast Cancer. For four years she went through the hell that is chemotherapy, but she came out of it. She won. She was diagnosed as being free from the disease.

To celebrate the dawn of a new shot at life, she wanted to make one of her dreams into a reality. All of her life, she had wanted to ride a horse down her favorite stretch of beach in South Wales. As she was living out her dream, she fell from the horse. Despite the fact that the woman had a helmet on, and received immediate first aid from her riding companion as well as a passing jogger, the woman died from head injuries on the spot.

I thought about the story a lot, because I didn't know if it was a happy story, or a sad story. Although I waver back and forth, I think that for the most part it is a happy one. My argument would be that she died on her favorite beach doing something that she had always wanted to do. Despite the circumstances, that's a pretty good way to go out. From personal experience, I would also argue it beats taking your last breath in hospital room after you've been told there is nothing else they can do.

I can see the sad story angle too. Why must she face down cancer for so long only to have her life taken in a sudden and unexpected way. That doesn't seem right to me. I think she used the chemo not to beat cancer but to dictate the terms of how she will leave this existence.

On the bigger picture, I wonder about the women's soul. I wonder what the real purpose of the woman's time here was supposed to have taught her. What was her real destiny? Was she meant to die from cancer in a cold hospital room, or on the beach. Why did she have to endure cancer if it was meant that she would die from head injuries in a fall off of a horse?

As previously stated, this section will be high on the "delete" list since it really has nothing to do with me. I reserve the right to change my mind, so if you are reading this........

I've Looked Into the Eyes of the Pale Horse

Although I think that most people have brushes with possible death over the course of their lives, I can think of the three instances where I came extremely close to dying. The first was on New Year's morning in 1993. The next was while I was driving up Interstate 76 in northeastern Colorado in July of 2000 and the last time was when I was playing with a gun that I didn't know was loaded around 2005 or 2006.

The New Year's morning incident would have been the fault of my own and my hard partying ways. It was right around noon the previous day that I cracked open my first beer. I had secured an eight ball of good cocaine to help party the old year away. 1992 had been a very good year for me, I had just become a father. My wife Gretchen and I split the cocaine and by the time four in the morning rolled around I had drank more than seventy beers. Somehow I got it into my head that it might be nice to go soak in the hot tub for a while.

As soon as I got into the hot water, I felt paralyzed. I could literally not move and was having hard time breathing. I could feel my ass sliding down the seat of the tub. The water level kept getting closer to my mouth and nose as I continued my helpless descent down the seat. For some reason Gretchen was coherent enough that she decided she had better check to see if I was alright. I she had not done that, I have no doubt that one of my neighbors would have found me floating in the water later that morning.

The Interstate 76 occasion would not have been my fault at all. I would have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was following a semi-truck that was going less than the speed limit in the right lane. As I pulled into the left lane to pass him, he pulled into same lane to block me. I went back into right lane to get around him that way. Again, the trucker blocked me. This cat and mouse game kept going on for several miles. I was fucking pissed at the driver, cursing him up and down and flipping him off.

I finally gave up and pulled into the right lane hoping that that the trucker would exit soon. In the moment of that decision, a little old lady going the wrong way in the left lane passed us. If not for the actions of that trucker, I would have more than likely hit that old lady head on at a pretty high rate of speed.

The gun incident was just total stupidity. I won't bore you with the details, because it's a tired old story that has claimed countless lives probably since the invention of guns. The gist is of it is that I was looking down the barrel of my pistol and thought it would be amusing to pull the trigger. When I did this, the gun jammed. It wasn't until I was unjamming the gun that I realized that there was a bullet in the chamber. A 9mm slug almost painted the walls of the bedroom with my brain matter.

I have no doubt that there were probably occasions that I was very close to death and didn't even realize it. I think all of us have.

What is the Perfect Age?

I have always wondered what the perfect age to die is. When I really think about the question, it seems to me that life is either too long or too short. I have always rejected the notion that longevity should be the goal to life. Shouldn't it be about quality over quantity? When I was younger I worked in a nursing home for about two months, and I decided right then and there that there was no fucking way that I was going to end up in one of those places. Under no circumstance do I want to suffer the indignity of having somebody wipe my ass because I am afraid of what will happen once this life is over.

As I write this, I will be turning 49 in just over two weeks. I have always had the feeling, going back to my childhood that I would never live to see the age of fifty. It looks to me that I am going to hit the half century milestone, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Julie died when she was forty. My father, Don, died from a massive heart attack when he was 42. I've had grandparents linger in nursing homes well into their 80's as they waited to die. I had childhood friends die before they reached adulthood. I had one friend lose their recently newborn child. My first wife and I went through a miscarriage before our daughter was born.

My stepfather, Wallace, died at the age of 62. I remember acquaintances attempting to console my mom by telling her that he was far too young to die. Even during the sermon at his funeral, the priest said something to that effect. I can't put my finger on it, but that just always struck me as odd.

At this point in my existence, I realize that I have lived a good life. I'm happy that I have been around long enough to see that my daughter Alexis has turned into the beautiful well rounded young woman that she is. I'm lucky that I have my health and people around me that I care about, and know that they care about me in return.

That said, I can feel that my body is slowly breaking down through the natural process of aging. After having 20/20 eyesight the majority of my life, it just deteriorated once I got into my forties. My hearing is paying the price for too many years of loud music when I was a kid. When I am in the gym, my muscles can only push about one quarter of the weight I could do when I was in my twenties.

I'm getting into that grey area of life, and I'm not just talking about my beard. I always laugh to myself when I hear people talk about their plans for retirement, be it financial or otherwise. My retirement plan has always been pretty simple, not live long enough to worry about it.

A Legacy

The closest main thoroughfare to where I live in Davenport is Division Street. If I take it south towards the Mississippi River, it comes to a dead end at City Cemetery. It is the place I took my camera the day that I went to Credit Island. I thought about the cemetery and that I would take a walk through it with my camera. It was a really old cemetery, with some of the death dates going back to the 1800's.

Many of the stones that marked the graves were blank. The names and the dates of the persons that were buried below had been eroded by the elements of time. It made me wonder if there was any other human alive that was left to care about that corpse. I wondered about all of the lives underneath those gravestones. Is thier existence completely forgotten by humanity?

I think that it is a common condition of humans to want to be remembered and know that in some small way that their lives made a difference, no matter how trivial or insignificant that it might seem. It occurred to me that the majority of human beings only achieve immortality through old photographs. Their memories remembered by loved ones are only preserved as long as the loved ones are above the soil. In the end, time will pass all of them by.

The more that I think about it, I think that creativity is what will preserve your immortality. I don't write, paint, or do photography because I want to be remembered. God knows that I don't do it because I want to make money. I do it because I enjoy it, it relaxes me. Most of my artistic endeavors are complete crap. I don't even like the end result, but I loved the process.

Every now and then, I do something that I am really proud of. I think that it is creativity that leads us to immortality in some fashion. There are many ways, and many mediums to be creative. Creativity can be subtle, or it can be over the top. Either way, it means something over nothing. "Something" will always be here, but" nothing" is what it is by definition. It is the blank canvas that I wrote about earlier.

Natural Wood

Some might find it strange that I didn't really watch a whole lot of pornography before I met Julie. She came with her own collection of porn when she moved in with me, most of it was girl on girl stuff. We watched all kinds of porn the first few years that we were together. We watched it while we were alone too.

After Julie was diagnosed with cancer, and it got to the point where we were sleeping in separate beds and were unable to have sex for fear of the chemo drugs, it became habit for me that as soon as I got a cup of coffee and a cigarette in the morning I would start watching porn, and shortly thereafter I would be jacking off.

After Julie died, this became the norm for me. It was a daily habit. One morning I woke up with a natural hard on. When I jacked off with it, the orgasm felt so good. I realized that it was better without the porn.

It really was a moment of clarity for me and a sign that I closer to being Cory again.

The Obstacle of the Rocky Mountains

Iowa City is where many of the pioneers started their journey west in the nineteenth century. The city is about an hour from the Quad Cities. The reason that this was starting point for these trailblazers is because that is where the westbound railroad ended.

The story of those pioneers makes me think about what will eventually be my journey back west. I am not sure if my destination will be California, or back to Colorado or maybe even a different locale. When I came to Davenport, the east bound rails metaphorically ended for me. This is as far from the Pacific Ocean as I want to be.

Like many of those pioneers, I will have to figure out what method I will use to get back west. I won't have to worry about covered wagons, horses or hand carts. I will have the luxury of cars, planes or countless other means of transportation we have in these modern times. I may not face the same obstacles of those who preceded me like typhoid, dysentery or attacks my native Americans, but I will have my own obstacles most of which are mental or financial.

I will not be heading west in search of gold, land, or animal furs. I will be searching for something more valuable, peace of mind and contentment.

I was raised in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains. I was born in Grand Junction on the west side of the peaks and grew up in Pueblo on the east side. I spent most of my adult life in the western suburbs of Denver which are basically the foothills of the Rockies.

My point is that I have spent my entire life looking at that majestic scenery almost every morning. I remember waiting for the school bus in elementary school and looking at the snow covered peaks. There were times that I would drive home from work in my adulthood and see smoke rising from the hills as they were burning.

So often I wondered about the early pioneers of this country. There they were just driving their covered wagons across the great plains on their way to California, and at some point the mountains came into view and they had to think to themselves, "Holy shit. Houston we have a problem."

What was the thought process they had when they first saw them? How do they get over them, or did they go around them? Do you just try to sneak through them, or do have the balls to just go right over the top?

There is an early pioneer that I completely detest. I have always wondered why Buffalo Bill Cody is such a celebrated figure in American history. From most of my education and understanding, he was a complete fucking douchebag. The asshole almost singlehandedly brought the species he is nicknamed for to the brink of extinction. He was so callous to kill those magnificent beasts solely for the money that he could collect by selling their pelts. After he shot them, he skinned them and left the rest of the carcasses behind for the scavengers to consume.

The only logical reverence for Buffalo Bill is the theory of capitalism. The actions of his life can only be about the motivations of greed.

As Mike drove me around Iowa when I first got there, I noticed some kind of homage to him on a road side point of interest sign. I think that he may have had a ranch in the state, and if I remember correctly, I saw a similar sign in Wyoming.

Not too far from where I lived in Colorado, there is not only this killer's grave but another ranch as well. Buffalo now roam on that ranch near Evergreen, which to me has always been completely ironic. If Buffalo Bill were alive today, those bison would only be skeletons rotting in the sun.

Five Stars

For the week that my book was free on Amazon, 45 units were downloaded from across the globe. There were people from the United Kingdom, Denmark and South Africa that had it on their Kindles. The cherry on top was that between May 31 and August 24 I had sold five copies. I have earned a whopping $4.20 in royalties. Finally, I had achieved my dream of being an international bestselling author.

The best part of my experience of self-publishing on Amazon was a five star review from "Cthomas in Carmel, Indiana who wrote:

"I really enjoyed this book very much. I laughed at some of the stories and cried at the end even though I knew how it was going to end! It made me think about what is important to me and not to take my loved ones for granted."

I thank you "Cthomas".

Being a writer is tough and lonely gig, but every now and then you get a small nugget that keeps you inspired to keep banging away on the keyboard.

Seven Years

Earlier in the book, I included a photograph of myself at an early birthday party. I look at that picture, and I know that is me. Or is it? It all seems so alien to me. How many lives have lived between then and now? It seems like hundreds.

Given the fact that the cells of the body regenerate every seven years, we are, from at least from a physical standpoint, ever evolving beings. Taking that into account, and that I recently had my 49th birthday, it has been almost seven completely new bodies that I have had on this planet since that picture was taken. To take it a step further, I may now be the seventh person that I have been in life. In truth, it just feels like many more than that.

With all of the experiences I have had , it radically alters who I am from the innocent baby boy in that picture who was born in a room at St. Mary's hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado on September 15, 1965.

So much has happened. I've watched as my father's coffin was lowered into the ground when I was ten. I fell off of a cliff when I was twelve. I lost my virginity when I was fourteen. I fell in love, got married, became a father, got divorced when I was twenties. I spent my thirties concentrating on raising a beautiful, smart little girl. After I turned forty, I met the love of live, spent seven (mostly) great years with her before watching her take her last breath.

Seven years from right now I will be 56 and have a completely different body from the one that is sitting at this table typing these words. If history is any indication, I'm sure that I will have a completely different mindset as well. This is all assuming the fact that I will still be alive and that certainly is no guarantee. I have lived for the most part a very good life, but I'm not oblivious to the fact that decades of hard living have probably taken their toll on this current physical shell.

All Shades of Grey

The winters in the Midwest can be brutal. It really isn't that they get colder, or have more snow than Denver; it's just that there is no color in the Midwest. When you drive across the state border into Colorado, it says "Welcome to Colorful Colorado!" I never really appreciated the states motto until I moved to Davenport. When I look out my bedroom window here, there are only variances of color that go from black to white. Even the sky doesn't look really blue.

I have no idea where I will end up once I get into my car and start driving in a southwest direction. The ideal would be that I sell one of my books, or find some other way to make a living as a writer. Like any other form of art, it's a tough gig. At the moment, Dr. Pepper is supplementing my life as an artist.

I search my companies career website. It wouldn't be real difficult to transfer to a better location. It may not seem like much of a plan in life, but I've thought that it was a plan that might be necessary. I've had plans for my life in the past, and never once did any variation of my plan have me living in Iowa.

I guess that is what makes life fun. You never know what's going to happen next. Maybe that is why pinball remains such a great game to play.

The Troubleshooter

I still follow the news from Denver regularly. One story that caught my eye was about Tom Martino. Martino is a media icon in Denver. He is a radio and TV host who is known as the "Troubleshooter". He is a consumer affairs activist. He has helped thousands of people who have had some type of dispute with a business. He amassed a small fortune doing that type of work. For the most part, his name was synonymous with honesty. He had a hot wife and what he claimed was a great family.

Cracks in Martino's public persona started to appear around 2011. He filed for bankruptcy that year. In 2013 he was arrested for assaulting his wife. I guess what made the news story interesting for me is that he said his life started to unravel when "he surrendered himself to Jesus Christ". He referred to his tribulations as a "cleansing" as he was taught that he didn't need money, a trophy wife, or fancy cars to be happy. He started the divorce process with his wife.

Martino's story just gave me reason to think about my own life. A person's life can be turned upside down on a moment's notice. Although I had not surrendered my life to Jesus Christ, and I am always suspicious of people who make that claim, I do believe that when my life was smashed into pieces, it was an intervention from a higher power. There is an important lesson that I am supposed to be learning. That is something I am still trying to figure out. I guess that is at least part of the reason that I am writing this book.

Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places

I really miss being in love. When things were good between Julie and me, there was no better feeling in the world. I don't want to call it "unconditional love" because believe that it is term than can only describe the love of a parent for a child. I'll just call it the "right love". I'm smart enough to know that it is a condition that just can't be repeated on demand, but sometimes my patience gets the best of me.

In the early fall, I decided that it was time for me to put myself out there again. I'd been to enough bars since I had been in Davenport that I knew that I wasn't going to find love there. I had gone on a few dates with girls from dating websites before I met Julie. It wasn't a horrible experience.

I signed up for both Zoosk and Plenty of Fish. I got a little interest and traded a few messages, but nothing really ever became of it. For some reason, I was just never motivated to follow up with girls that I met online. I finally just deactivated my accounts.

I'll just wait and see what life throws my way.

No Fear

I have asked before why longevity is the goal of life? My initial thought is that it is all based on fear. The majority of humans spend their lives living in fear of what might happen to them, and it seems to me that above all else they are afraid of dying. I understand the sentiment, but I can't say that I really identify with it.

I have come to the realization that I am no longer afraid of anything, but I want to clarify that I only say that with a regard to my own personal wellbeing. Of course I worry about Alexis' or anybody else that I love for that matter, but as far as my own personal wellbeing goes, I could really give a fuck what happens to me.

I guess what I am saying by this, is that I have been to the bottom. Life has thrown almost everything at me that it can, and I am still standing. As a ten year old boy I watched my dad's sheet covered body get carried out after he died of a heart attack at the age of 42. I watched my soulmate face death with dignity. Although Julie never admitted that she was dying, she did it with grace.

I love it when people see me smoking a cigarette and say to me, "Those things will kill you".

I always respond, "Not fast enough".

Just Look out the Window

I have never lived in a place where the people talk about the weather as much as they do in Iowa. It makes sense. Iowa made its bones on the backs of farmers and the weather would determine if it was going to be feast or famine. The wrong weather means no crops and no money. I guess it just became ingrained into the population, even those that don't do any farming.

I'm just not used to it. There is an old adage about living in Colorado that goes, "if you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes and it will change." The dirty little secret is that nobody that is a native of Colorado pays any attention to what the T.V. weathermen have to say. They just look out the window.

Seasons in the Sun

I was sitting in the living room one night scrolling through Facebook when I came across a post that made my heart sink. The girl that I lost my virginity too had died the night before from an overdose. My understanding is that she had had a problem with prescription medication after her son was murdered a couple of years earlier.

Her name was Wendy and she was one of my friend's little sister. We tried to keep our relationship a secret while we were in high school, but to make a long story short her father followed us to bar that regularly served underage kids. Needless to say that didn't end well. The friendship with her brother got very strained. She was forbidden to see me and we ended up losing contact.

Another one of my closest childhood friends was a kid named Michael. We just clicked from the moment that we met. Our interests were almost synchronized. We both had families that enjoyed waterskiing vacations and we both had motorcycles. The two us were fervent fans of the Minnesota Vikings.

We also shared a bond that came with each of us having a parent that had died. His mom committed suicide. He endured a lot of tragedy throughout life including the murder of his older brother.

He had spent much of his adult life in San Francisco and we talked all of the time. Life just kind of happened to us and we lost touch with each other. He ended up moving back to Pueblo but we never reconnected.

Another friend of mine, Kim, still lived there and one night while texting I asked her if she had heard from Mike. She told me that they traded voice mails every few months, but that was about it. I asked for his phone number and she sent it to me.

After almost seven years of non-communication I gave him a call. I was expecting a joyous conversation. He answered the phone in an almost monotone voice that I had never heard from him before. He told me that he had friends over and couldn't talk. It made me kind of sad.

Kim texted me later and asked me how the conversation went. I told her. She asked me if I had heard about his younger brother Patrick. I had not heard that he had committed suicide only a few months earlier. She told me that Mike was heavily medicated before that happened, and since then he got a whole lot worse.

I texted Mike "I Love You" a couple of days later, but he never responded.

I don't know if I will ever talk to him in this world again. I don't mean that with bitterness. I love him as much as I did in the sixth grade, but don't know if either of us will get over the damage that life has done to us. We aren't victims we just deal with different demons.

I felt bad for my childhood friends and the grief that they were going through with the loss of their siblings. I'm sure they felt bad for me when they heard that my wife had died. We just never got to talk about it.

Grandparents

It kind of seems amazing to me that if Julie was still alive and life had worked out like it was supposed to, her and I would have been doting grandparents at this point.

Since my wife died, I have had no contact with her family. It's a shame. I didn't like her parents, and they didn't like me so fuck them. I could care less. I did however like Julie's daughter Maiya for some strange reason. I thought we had a cordial relationship, but I guess she didn't feel the same way.

Alexis remained friends with Maiya on Instagram. It turns out that Maiya had a baby in early September. I smiled when I heard the news, but my gut instinct tells that Julie would have been pissed off.

Although I will never be sure of the reason, I suspect that Julie would not have liked the fact that she would be a grandmother by the age of 41, or the simple fact that she wouldn't have thought that Maiya had the maturity to be a parent. Julie's anger would have been short lived, but those first few days would not have been pretty.

It was a Saturday afternoon when my phone rang. It was Alexis. I always get a a little nervous when she calls me out of the blue. Usually she texts me or we make arrangements to talk when we needed to hear each other's voices.

I answered "Hi, baby girl", and when she said "Hi, dad", I knew that she had something to tell me. I didn't sense that it was anything really bad, as she sounded more nervous than upset. We made small talk for a few moments until I cut to the chase and asked her what was going on.

"Well," she hesitated. "I'm pregnant." I was shocked in one part of my mind to actually hear the words, but I wasn't really all that surprised. She had called me about a week earlier telling me that she was thinking about going to the emergency room. She was having bad cramps. I asked her at that point if she was pregnant, she said she didn't think so because she had just had her period the week before. I told her that would be the first thing that they would test her for.

Still, it was mind boggling to hear that one is about to become a grandparent. I was at a loss for words. Of course I was happy that there was going to be a new baby in the family, but there was also a sense of melancholy that Alexis wasn't really my little girl anymore. She was a woman.

It took me about a week to come to terms with what was happening and get excited about the prospect of becoming a grandpa. After she told me about her first doctor's appointment, at which they told her that everything was fine and that she was in her second trimester with what appeared to be a baby girl, I got even more excited. She was due in March, and I knew that I needed to get back to Colorado to be the patriarch of my soon to be expanding family.

About two weeks later I awoke from a dream in a very confused and upset state of mind. In the dream I was at that airport-like place that I described earlier talking to a child who kept morphing between a boy and girl who was maybe seven or eight years old. The conversation of the dream was very casual. I didn't remember most of it, but it was something along the lines of us both agreeing that we wished we had more time to spend together. There was nothing scary about the dream, so I couldn't understand why I was so agitated when I woke from it. It took me a few beers and some cigarettes before I was able to get back to sleep.

Early the next morning, Alexis called me to tell me that she had been in the hospital all night. There was something wrong with the baby. It wasn't getting enough amniotic fluid and wasn't going to survive. To make matters worse, Alexis was endanger of getting an infection that was putting her life at risk. My heart broke, and it made me think of the dream I had had the night before. It seemed to all make sense to me now, except why the child in the dream kept morphing between sexes.

The day after Alexis had surgery to remove the fetus, she told me that the doctor had been wrong at her first appointment. It wasn't a girl. It was a boy.

Unlocking the Universe

There was a time in my life when I did a lot of "magic" mushrooms. I always enjoyed them, I spent most of the trip just laughing my ass off. At some point, I don't remember exactly how, I came across a gallon size plastic bag full of 'shrooms. My friends and I were tripping nearly every weekend. We were having "Gary Busey Parties". At these parties, we would eat a handful of mushrooms, snort rails of cocaine, smoke pot and drink case after case of beer. This went on for the better part of an entire summer.

After that, mushrooms became pretty hard to come by. I don't recall ever having any hallucinogenic revelations while doing mushrooms. I pretty much just laughed hysterically the entire time.

After I met Jay the soda guy, he would tell me about how mushrooms would expand your mind. I figured I was too old to do that kind of drug anymore, but the more he talked about them, the more intrigued I became about trying them again. Maybe I was having so much fun doing them when I was younger, that I ignored how mushrooms would expand my mind.

Jay told me how mushrooms affected him and his friends. The fungi changed the way they thought and how they viewed the universe. When I asked him what he meant, and he told me, I tried to explain to him that the was the way I thought anyway, but he would have none of it.

The curiosity built within me until I finally bought some from him. I planned the night so that I could just relax and trip, maybe get a little writing in. I admit that I was nervous to do them, after all it had been nearly a decade and a half since my last experience. The way Jay talked, it seemed like we might be talking about two different substances.

Nope. The trip was nearly exactly as I remembered. I may not have laughed as much as before since I was alone, but it was still the same. Jay seemed dumbfounded that I did not unlock all the mysteries of the universe. He hypothesized that I had not taken enough. So I bought some more. This time I took even a bigger dose. It was still the same trip. The third time he gave me the mushrooms for free. He referred to it as a "heroic" dose.

When I saw him a couple of days later I told him that despite the larger dose, the end result was still the same.

"I guess you just must be immune," he said. He seemed disappointed.

We are Columbine

In another one of those "airport" dreams I was face to face with somebody who looked vaguely familiar, but I really had no idea who it was. He was quite a bit younger than me, and he was wearing a shirt that said "We are Columbine".

Before I could even say a word to him, he just started screaming at me, "You don't get it. Why the fuck aren't you paying attention? Why do you let them lie to you?"

That was pretty much the extent of the dream. I don't know if I said more than three words the entire time. The whole thing was pretty much just him screaming the same thing to me over and over again.

I woke up from the dream and spent most of the rest of the day watching raw news footage of that horrible day of April 20, 1999.

That dream has made me think about if I still believe the official version of the events of that day. There is so much of it that doesn't make sense.

Comedy is Tragedy

I guess hearing about Robin William's suicide will be one of those events in life that you will always remember where you were when you heard about it. I received a text from Alexis one afternoon when I got home from work. I was initially shocked at the news, but the more I thought about it, I wasn't really surprised. Williams lived an intense life. That is what made him so brilliant as an entertainer. That kind of intensity smolders so hot, that it eventually leads to the burning out of the soul.

When a person of note commits suicide, I always get annoyed with society's and the media's reaction. It is usually ridiculous to try to find a reason that somebody would take their own life. There are always the cliché's about depression, addiction, money problems, etc. To me, it just seems that for some people, the mind just dies before the body does.

Que Sera Sera

In my freshman year of high school I met a girl named Kim in the student smoking area. She actually lived in the same neighborhood as I did, but we didn't know each other because she went to a religious middle school. We rapidly became close friends as we smoked Marlboro Lights. There was nothing we wouldn't tell each other. There were undertones of romance to our friendship, but for some reason it just never happened. For lack of a better explanation, the timing just never seemed right.

Kim and I have always had some kind of synchronicity, or serendipity to our lives, depending on how you want to define it. Kim has just always had a unique soul that I gravitated to. We both loved art. She was the perfect muse to my camera's lens. We loved to go to flea markets and garage sales. Kim could go to Goodwill, spend $10 on an outfit and make it look like she spent twenty times as much.

Our adult lives kind of mirrored each other. She married John right around the same time I married Gretchen. Our kids are very close in age, Alexis was born just between her children. Gretchen and I used go over to Kim and John's house to watch all of the Mike Tyson fights. The four of us would party together often.

After I divorced Gretchen, Kim and John moved to Colorado Springs about an hour away. I might have went down there once or twice to visit. John was offered a better job in Pueblo which would once again become their home. Kim and I would still talk a couple of times a year.

When I met Julie, one the things that attracted me to her was her similar personality to Kim's. They were both such beautiful free spirits who always saw the best in life when they wanted too. After I married Julie, I tried a few times for her to meet Kim; I knew they would have been immediate friends. But as is the case when you live two hours apart, we could just never find a time to get together.

It had been a long while since I had talked to Kim when Julie was diagnosed with cancer. I texted Kim to let her know what had happened. She told me about how she had lost her mom to cancer. She also told me that she had divorced John, which somewhat surprised me, but not really.

In the months after Julie died, I didn't talk to Kim at all. In fact I didn't communicate with a whole lot of people for a while. I went into a self-imposed exile as I dealt with my grief in an alcoholic haze until I sobered up and wrote my first book.

It wasn't until the day that I started throwing my life into the dumpster that I reached out to Kim. I told her what I was doing and that I was moving to Davenport, Iowa. Kim was surprised that I wasn't moving to San Diego. I let her know that with the amount of funds that I had I would soon be living in my car in California, but I would have a house to myself in Iowa.

The strange thing about reaching out to Kim that day was that she was also throwing her life into the dumpster. That was just another example of the synchronicity we had shared since we were kids. There we were, both of us throwing our pasts into the trash so we could see the future beyond all the clutter.

Just before I went to sleep that night, Kim texted me: "Don't you think there is a reason we are both throwing our old lives away?"

I texted back: "Do you remember that time we were walking on the beach and I told you that I thought you would be my third or fourth wife?"

She did. Que Sera, Sera, whatever will be, will be.

The Reward in Life

I often thought about that day I started driving across Nebraska towards Iowa, I felt a sense of guilt about leaving Alexis behind. I had totally disrupted her world. In just a matter of a few weeks, because of my own selfish actions, she was forced to find a new place to live, get a better paying job to do so, all the while driving a car that was far past being on its last legs. She would have to rely more on her less on her mother.

The jury is still out on whether I made the right decision in moving to Iowa for myself personally, but six months after the fact, I could definitely say that it was a good decision for Alexis. She seemed to blossom after I left. She now had a good job as dental assistant, had her own townhome and recently got a good deal on a brand new car. She has accepted the responsibility that comes with adulthood with such grace. She is wise beyond her years.

Part of me still feels guilty for not being there when she needed me most like when Jeanie dealt with her leukemia, and especially when she lost the baby. I know that there is not a whole lot that I could have done in those situations. It's just that I wanted so badly to hug her and tell her that I loved her. I realize that I was there for her during those events, although not in a physical state.

I like to think that my move to Iowa actually improved the strong relationship that we already had. In hindsight, I think maybe our relationship got a little sideways, not necessarily in a bad way, after Julie died. Alexis, being the sweet soul that she is might have felt like she needed to take care of her grieving father. I appreciated the comfort, but that isn't how I wanted things to be. I was her father. I was the one whose job it was to comfort her. That may sound old fashioned, but that is the way that I felt.

The Last Happiness

In mid-July I was driving along the Big Muddy and remembering that it was almost the one year anniversary of Julie going back to work at the North Shore Bar & Grill about four months after being diagnosed with cancer. When I heard the diagnosis and researched Small Cell Lung Cancer I never dreamt that she would bartend again. She had just endured four rounds of chemo. It truly was one of the happiest days of my life.

The downfall was that that day gave me false hope. I knew what the statistics were, but at that point it really seemed possible that Julie was going to kick cancer's ass.

It was pure bliss to have her pour me a beer. For a fleeting moment, the world seemed normal again.

Do I know you?

Although I had a brief stint living in San Diego, I have spent the rest of my life in Colorado. Something strange started happening as soon as I immersed myself in the Quad Cities that has led me to develop the theory that there are only so many makes and models of human beings in America, if not the world.

It seems to occur multiple times over the course of the week that I will see somebody that reminds me of somebody that I know or have seen in Colorado. In some cases, the similarities have been uncanny. On several occasions I have come close to saying hello to a stranger thinking it was the person I knew from Colorado. On a couple of occasions, it seemed like the other person knew me as well.

I don't remember it being that way in Southern California. I was of course a lot younger and hadn't seen so many faces by then. I think now that I am older I am more attentative of my surroundings.

A Vicious Cycle

I wrote earlier about the old journal that I found and decided to keep that was written between 2003 and 2005. The one where the first entry was written in Mazatlan and the final while I was in Cabo San Lucas. I have kept two separate journals since I started living in Davenport. I ended the first journal on December 31, 2014, deciding that 2015 going forward needed a journal unto its own.

There was a theme to the old journal about being depressed because of heavy drinking. Wait maybe, it was that I was drinking heavily because I was depressed. Whatever the case may be, as I wrote the newer journal I realized that drinking and depression have pretty much been a theme for much of my adult life.

In the earlier journal there were entries that chronicled 45 days of my life where I was completely sober. I used no substances at all including tobacco. I had almost no recollection of that period until I read about it. Since then I have had periods where I didn't drink, or I didn't smoke, or I didn't smoke pot, or I did this or I did that. But I can't think of another era of my life since I was teen where I put it all together at once.

It's easy to bemoan all of the time that I wasted in a drunken stupor. I think of all that might have been had I just simply didn't like the taste of beer. Who knows what direction my life would have taken had I only rushed home to have a nice iced tea. How many more friends would I have had if I was just the guy sipping on a bottle of water and not that asshole who was always drunk?

It's possible that I might have cared enough to work my way up the corporate ladder had I chosen to live a life of sobriety. I might have wrote my first book at an earlier age if I had lived a straight edge. My first marriage may never have ended, and I would have been a father to my daughter every single night of her life.

Looking at that last paragraph, I realize that the regrets that I do have in life are very negligible. I like who I am. I have had a great life. Every choice I have ever made have led me to where I am today and I can honestly say that for the most part I am a happy human. I also think that I am good person. I try to help people if I can, and I never go out my way to harm anybody.

Sometimes my drinking gets out of hand, and what I think is fun just seems to lose its flavor. That's when the depression sinks in. As I have gotten older, I have learned when it is right to take a little time off and let brain cells grow back. Then a couple of months later, I'll just say "fuck it", and buy an 18 pack of beer. Then I'll have a great time for the next nine or ten months. Then the depression comes, and I start the whole cycle starts over again.

This has been the story of the second half of my life.

We Meet Again

I had set a personal goal of finishing the first draft of this book on September 9, 2014. I went to bed the night before knowing that I had to write fourteen chapters to meet that goal.

That morning at around 5:30 I woke up extremely peaceful. Julie and I met in that location that had been a frequent setting for my dreams. The whole thing was like we were having a date in the middle of the dream. We just sat in the place and talked. It was like two old friends who hadn't seen each other in a while just catching up. The dream ended when we both decided that it was time for us to get back to wherever it was that we had come from. I walked her through this lime green station and we were pulling her luggage with a pallet jack even though there wasn't very much of it.

During the dream, there were a couple of times that Julie insisted that we weren't in a dream at all. To this day I have wondered if she was right. It seemed so real. Even if it was just a dream, it was nice to see Julie again.

All the World is a Stage

I've read many articles and thoughts on the stages of grief, but I'm not sure if they were accurate for me after Julie died. It seems reasonable to me that the stages could not be uniform because they are so many factors, each death is uniquely different and each survivor a different soul. I suspect the stages for a suicide would be different than those that arise from the death of somebody who lived to be over a hundred years old.

"Relief" was not a stage of grief that I read about. That may come after a loved one dies from a lengthy illness. As odd as it may sound, when I watched Julie take her last breath there was almost a sense of relief that the whole fucking nightmare was over. I wasn't going to have to watch her suffer anymore. There wasn't going to be any more doctors. There wasn't going to be any more chemo. There wouldn't be that constant sense of worry that I had felt for the previous six months.

After Julie died on October 20, 2013, five months and 21 days after she was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer, I might have had too many distractions to go through any other feelings except relief. After the initial sense of emptiness that I felt, it was the beginning of the holiday season. Sure, it would be tough to go through Thanksgiving and Christmas without my wife, but there would be plenty of distractions to keep my mind occupied.

After the holidays were over, I planned a trip to San Diego with Alexis to spread Julie's ashes. The trip just gave me something else to think about and keep my mind occupied enough to not give my recent widowhood much thought. Even as we spread her ashes around Ocean Beach I don't think I was feeling any of the stages of grief.

From what I've read, it would seem to be agreed that that the first stage of grief is "denial and isolation". I could probably make that the argument that this stage could be a form of relief. If not, I don't think I ever went through the stage. The second stage is "Anger". I did go through that one, some days I still do.

The subsequent stages of death are "Bargaining" and "Depression". I think I probably had gone through bargaining when Julie was first diagnosed with cancer. The type that she had with was just a stone cold killer. It really didn't matter if we had even caught it earlier. Once the diagnosis is small cell lung cancer, the days are numbered. Treatment might prolong your life for a little while, and chemo will reduce the tumor, but you will never be cancer free again. Once that tumor starts growing again, it grows with a vengeance.

It strikes me as silly that "Depression" even has to be listed as a stage. That is common sense. Depression is just part of life, so how could it not be part of losing somebody that means the world to you? You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out. If I didn't go through this stage it seems highly doubtful that I would even be here writing about it.

The final stage of grief is "Acceptance". I have come across many souls over the course of my life that never reach this stage after the loss of a loved one. I can always see the sadness in their eyes. I can't imagine any scenario where I wouldn't someday get to that stage.

I don't how close I am to mastering this final stage. Let's just say that I am still in the midst of it. That is what this what this whole book is about. It's about my journey of coming to terms with the loss of my soul mate and what it is that I am now to do with the rest of my life.

I don't know how this book is going to end. I don't know that full acceptance is a destination that will be reached before I run out of pages.

Standing in the Rain, Talking to Myself

One of my favorite movies of all time is "Cool Hand Luke". One of the most underrated scenes of the entire film is where the inmates on the road crew are working when a rain and lightning storm rolls in. The rest of the inmates scramble for the truck, but Luke stays out looking up at the sky.

As the rain is pouring down, and there is lightning all around, the inmates are screaming at Luke to get into the truck as they fear he will get killed. Instead, Luke keeps looking at the sky and screams, "Is that all you got old man?" He waits for an answer. "I'm just standing in the rain talking to myself."

That pretty much summed up where I am at this point in my life.

One Last Kick in the Ass

After that meeting with Jeanie in the hospital, and subsequently moving to Iowa, I continued to follow her battle with leukemia indirectly in conversations with Alexis and sometimes directly via Facebook messages both with Jeanie and her husband Nate.

She had finished her initial thirty day round of chemotherapy but she was still going to need a bone marrow transplant. She received that in July and after a little further treatment she seemed to be doing really well. She was still susceptible to infections so she would have to wear a mask and remain in as sanitary conditions as possible.

Eventually Jeanie's leukemia was declared to be in remission. As a celebration of life over death she made arrangements for her entire family, including her "fifth daughter" Alexis, to spend the weekend at a cabin in Winter Park, Colorado. To hear Alexis tell it, everybody had a really nice time.

It was only a couple of weeks later that Alexis called me to say that Jeanie was back in the hospital. The cancer had returned. I asked Alexis if they were going to do another round of chemo, but she didn't know. Based on my own experiences, that didn't sound good to me.

Nate called me a few nights later and we talked for about an hour and a half. The doctors had told him that Jeanie would only live maybe a couple of months longer. We tried not to talk about the medical issues or the inevitable. We mostly just swapped stories about our wives. After we hung up, I went to bed with tears in my eyes. Realistically, I know that there are thousands of people going through what I went through on any given day, but it broke my heart for somebody that I personally knew to be going through it.

Jeanie decided that she didn't want to die in the hospital or in a nursing home so she made arrangements to spend her final days at her mother's house. In between visits by a hospice professional, the plan was for the family to take shifts caring for her. They had been cautioned that without the oxygen being given to Jeanie, she wouldn't survive more than thirty minutes.

The second night out of the hospital it was Amanda and Alexis' turn to care for Jeanie. Another one of Amanda's sister was there as well. At some point, Jeanie decided that she wanted to get out bed and wash her face. She collapsed in the bathroom. The three girls tried desperately to get their mother back on oxygen, but the hose wouldn't reach. It took all of their strength, but the girls got Jeanie back into bed and got the oxygen attached. Within a few hours, Jeanie was admitted into a hospice care facility.

A mere two days later on December 2, 2014, Jeanie Miles, the second mother to my daughter lost her battle with leukemia.

Time to Go

After the dream where I met Julie in the airport place, I thought about it constantly. Although I do not remember exactly what was said, it was along the lines of us telling each other that we were doing okay where we were and that we missed each other. There more I thought about the dream, I knew that there was deeper meaning to it.

About three months later, it occurred to me what Julie was telling me. I think that what she said was that it was okay for me to go on living. It wasn't me that died, and that she hadn't really died either. She was just somewhere else in the universe and there were things that she needed to do. It took me awhile to figure it out, but she was also telling me that there were things that I needed to do.

Since moving to Davenport, I thought I was doing okay. Actually, I was doing okay. I was learning how to live my life without Julie. The problem was that I was living my life without her in a very unhealthy way. I was working a job that was completely beneath me, I was eating a shit diet and getting to the gym sporadically.

And as was the case with my first book, I was drinking heavily when I started writing it. The difference was now I was drinking more heavily than ever. On my days off, it was nothing for me to drink a thirty pack of Busch Light. Of course when I drank that much, I tend to smoke a lot more cigarettes. There were days when I smoked over two packs of Marlboro's.

I would be lying if I said that part of me hadn't given up on life.

Then just out of the blue one day, it hit me. I needed to take one more shot at living the life that I have always wanted. Iowa isn't a bad place, and I actually enjoyed my time, but it isn't where I want to be nor do I think this is where the universe meant for me to be. I think that the powers that be want me to do more with life than putting pop on shelves furthering the obesity epidemic in this country.

Taking that one more shot at life was going to take a lot of change. No more beer. No more cigarettes. Healthy eating. Getting into the gym. Praying. Self-hypnosis and visualization. Basically, a renewed focus on getting both mentally and physically healthy.

I get the feeling that God is about to kick me in the ass again.

