Ben

 In the early 2000s, I wrote a short story called Seeking Listrania. It never went anywhere, though I do believe it was one of my better pieces -- and at the time, I considered it my masterpiece, the culmination of several years' worth of creative writing classes and a sense of entitlement. With some polish and editing, I could probably expand upon it or get it published in a literary mag somewhere even today, twenty-plus years later.

Seeking Listrania was purely a fiction piece, a "love story" of attraction and addiction. Though fictional, I'd heavily based it on interactions with my friends at the time. I'm sure there's a lot of fiction writers out there who do the same thing. There were only three characters in the story -- a fictionalized version of myself, the character Listrania (based on my friend Ingrid --yes, that is her real name, who there was a sort of mutual infatuation with for a brief period in real life) and my character's friend, Ben -- who was, for all intents and purposes, a carbon copy of my actual friend Ben. Much of the dialogue in the story between my character and Ben's character was very close to, if not verbatim, actual conversations I'd had with the real Ben in real life, about real women. Ben serves as the moral compass of sorts in the story.

Reading through the story again now, it is very clear that it was written by someone in his early twenties. It's not bad, but it's quite far from being "good." I'd intended to submit it to different places, to use it as a steppingstone, a portfolio piece I could point at and say "look, I actually can write." Ben read through the draft of it once I'd finished it, and was concerned. I remember him asking me if he should be worried about me doing the same things in real life as the character based on me did in the story. I told him no, it was fiction. He countered with the fact that his character seemed like a pretty realistic portrayal of him, so he wanted to check. 

Ingrid never read the story. The title character, loosely based on her, dies in the end. Spoiler alert. The reader doesn't find out how. It's an unflattering portrayal of a person, to be honest, and I'm glad she never read it. I lost contact with Ingrid a few years after college; she'd been engaged to her boyfriend the entire time I'd known her, but at some point that fell through and I just sort of fell out of contact with her. I looked her up a few years back -- what information I could find on her was sparse, but she appeared to be married (she'd changed her last name, so that's usually a pretty good signifier) and was living/working out of state somewhere. 

Ben, however, remained in my life and was sort of an inspirational figure in it for many years. I met Ben in 2002, during his first year at WVU. I am not exactly sure how or when. He was part of a freshman class to WVU that included a number of lifelong friends I acquired pretty much all at once. All of them had gone to high school together and had all come to WVU at the same time. I have no idea how we all met up and became close, but it was likely at the Mountainlair, WVU's student union, which was like a second home to me throughout my undergraduate education. Ben was a bit of a legend until I met him; I'd heard stories about this man who did X things in Y places and lived to tell the tale. Sometimes those stories were true, sometimes they weren't -- as I'd get clarification on a lot of them throughout our friendship. Sometimes, the stories you expected to be complete bullshit for someone his age -- like blacking out drunk while trying to get laid, and waking up the next morning in the homeless shelter -- were absolutely true. 

He and I should not have gotten along. He was intensely charismatic and charming, and was well-built and muscled, with a shock of afro-like curly hair and a goatee. He was also one of the funniest people I've ever met. He was a competitive fencer and joined the fencing team at WVU; I believe he won some awards for that. Ben was also a heavy drinker (which explains the above story) in college, and was able somehow to balance that with being extremely busy at almost all times -- he had a scientific mind, so in the beginning he decided he was majoring in Biology or Chemistry or something like that, I can't remember. It was...rough on him. I, meanwhile, was the fat, nerdy English major who drank too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, and -- for as intelligent as I was -- I did not know a fucking thing about real-life, applicable chemistry or biology, especially not at the college level. I lived at home with my parents in a pretty sheltered existence; Ben was the very first friend I met who had his own apartment, in a prime location juuuuuust off campus, within a five-minute straight-line walk from the building that, at the time, housed the WVU English Department (so, I was always somewhat close by). 

On the surface, Ben and I were absolute polar opposites. But personality-wise, we were very similar. Both of us were very funny, sometimes loud and extroverted people (yeah, I was a very different person twenty years ago than I am now). We both loved the same types of music and media, as well -- we were both into anime pretty heavily at the time, and that's part of how we formed the WVU Anime Guild -- the first official anime club to ever exist at WVU, which later became the WVU Japanese Animation and Manga Society (or, as we called it, WVUJAMS). Ben was elected President for about a year or so, and I was his VP. We'd later swap positions, so that I could serve a term or two as President as well. 

Ben was a polarizing figure. There were people who loved him and people who could not stand him, or found him immature and cringe-inducing. I felt a kinship with him there as well, as a lot of people had the same love-or-hate feelings for me. I know there were a fair number of people I knew in college who I was absolutely grating to. Ben held some controversial views here and there, but it was the out-of-control persona and his unreliability due to his alcohol use that made some of the more straitlaced amongst us sort of roll their eyes and figuratively wave him off. Of course, I was a pretty heavy drinker at the time as well, though I wasn't as overt about it.

As our time in college went on, our schedules got busier. There were still, however, adventures -- I remember one morning skipping class and a few of us meeting Ben at his place to pile into his van -- a van with close to 350,000 miles on it or something like that, with a recording of Howard Dean's scream as a car alarm (or so he told me) -- to go to the Meadowbrook Mall in Clarksburg, something like 40 miles away...for...something. I have no idea why we actually went, but I remember that there was a purpose. For me, it was exciting. It was illicit, it was something I shouldn't have done, and something my parents probably would've been really upset about -- getting into a friend's vehicle for an 80-mile round trip? To a mall? In the middle of a weekday? When I should have been in classes and when nobody knew or had any clue where I was or that I'd left not only campus, but the city? It would have been scandalous. 

Knowing Ben was always like that though. There was always going to be a little debauchery here and there, some questionable decisions, some adventures. In 2003, he invented the term "anger soap," which I would write about in my blog at the time -- though I gave it the misnomer of "angry soap":

That was the kind of person Ben was. Always good for a laugh or some new terminology, a turn of phrase, an adventure. He once told me that his favorite game to play on Friday nights (because after all, WVU was and still is a "party school") was "Don't Get Arrested" -- where, well, I guess the name of the game gives away the overall goal.

This is an actual conversation we had circa 2003-04:

Me (6:15:51 PM): Were you drunk when you left me those messages at like 3:30?

Ben (6:16:09 PM): Oh man, not you too!

As well as...

Ben (11:40:51 PM): Woo!

Me (11:42:06 PM): o_o;;

Ben (11:42:20 PM): I'm drunk!!!

Ben (11:42:24 PM): And hyper!

Me (11:42:43 PM): Dude, calm the fuck down.

Ben (11:43:06 PM): woo!

Ben (11:43:10 PM): Heheh, ok.

Ben (11:44:12 PM): Man, you're the best.

Ben (11:44:22 PM): Haha, I know I'm being stupid drunk, but you're my bro.

Ben (11:44:26 PM): And don

Ben (11:44:31 PM): 't you dare fuckin save this convo!

Ben (11:44:34 PM): lol

Me (11:44:57 PM): Too late, I have a program that makes AIM logs automatically.

Ben (11:45:04 PM): Noooooo!

I loved Ben. I felt a true kinship with him. He was like a brother to me, despite his flaws -- and there were many. This is the man who ate raw bacon that was half-frozen just to tell us the story ("It mostly just tastes like ice"). This is the man who did know, even then, that he had some...ahem...major problems with alcohol and acknowledged it, but also at times reveled in it. This is the man who went on at least five dates with one of my friends I went to high school with (this was purely coincidental; she ended up being on the fencing team with him) and he still didn't know if she was "into" him. But, this is also the man who went to Japan to teach English for a few years after graduating from college. This is also the man who would listen to you talk about your problems not just because he was there, but because he wanted to help -- and sometimes, he gave great advice. If back then were today, Ben would have been canceled so many times over by so many people for so many things, his sense of humor being just one of them, but it wouldn't change the fact that he was, as they say, a good dude. I don't think there was a dishonorable bone in his body. He always prided himself on doing good, in the same way that Superman does good. 

In the years after college, I moved out here to the midwest and contact with a lot of my friends back home, including Ben, became largely sporadic. While a lot of my friends from college gradually moved away from a lot of contact-by-instant-message, I steered even harder into it, as it was my only means of communication with many people, especially after I moved out here. As such, Ben was one of many folks I slowly, over a period of time, slipped out of regular contact with. We'd see each other online here and there for a few years, but after 2010, 2012, something like that, I don't think we actually had any further conversation. He'd occasionally comment on my Facebook or drop me a line here and there, but after a while even that stopped. 

Ben died three days ago at the age of 37, "after a brief illness." His funeral was today. There's been no confirmation of what the "brief illness" was, but I've heard from some friends through the grapevine that it was likely pneumonia that went septic. I have no real way to confirm, and honestly, it doesn't really matter anyhow. He's gone now, like so many others we've lost over the years. 

I've had a not-insignificant number of friends die suddenly, not just from illnesses but from accidents and suicides, and two of them (two!) were outright murdered. Every one of them touched my life in one way or another. Some were casual acquaintances. Some I was closer with. Some may as well have been family. Ben was almost family to me. I'm not going to say he was far more significant to me than he was, but he did feel almost like a brother, and I have a lot of core college memories associated with him.

In the days since his death -- and I found out the day it happened -- I've been trying to process my grief, but it almost feels like I should have more to process. It's almost as if I feel like I'm not grieving enough, or like I'm not caring enough. Ben's death feels so distant, as if he died in an overseas war or on a galactic starcruiser on the other side of the galaxy, but he didn't. He died in West Virginia, where he was born, grew up, and lived most of his life. My lack of feeling makes me question myself as a person, as if I'm beginning to lose my empathy, or if I'm just becoming numb to tragic events. Ben's death was surprising and unexpected, but it wasn't the sharp punch to the gut that knocks the wind out of you that my friend Meredith's death was, or the car accident that killed my friend Robbie was, or the murder of my friend Shannon was. I was deeply in shock and in a deep grieving process for those friends. Why don't I feel the same punch to the gut for Ben? I just feel an emptiness, like the universal starlight just got a little bit dimmer -- but I am not sick with grief, and to some extent I feel guilty about that. Maybe it's part of the process. I don't know. 

Also in the days since his death, I have done my part in reaching out to those of us in our friend group who did not already know, essentially making me the bearer of bad news for a good chunk of people. When I did this, it was shocking to me to find how few of us are actually left and still in contact with, well, anyone from our friend group really. I felt a sense of duty, though, as his friend, to make sure other people from that era who would have also considered him a friend knew about his death. I would want others to do the same for me. Nobody I broke the news to actually knew of Ben's death. Part of that may have been to his own design; as an adult and after college, I got the sense that Ben was an intensely private person. He wasn't posting on Facebook every day (the last post I saw actually from him or by him was in 2017, thanking people for wishing him happy birthday). He may have been active in one online community or another, but I never saw any of it. The last time I personally heard from him one on one, it seems, is 2014 -- eight years ago, a few months before Daisy and I got married. I was still living in Kansas at the time. That seems like a lifetime ago now. We were in contact pretty regularly up until that point, though it started to wane around 2010, 2011. 

Ben was not married. Ben did not have any children (to his knowledge; that was a running joke in college that I still use to this day). Regardless, as far as I know he never had any kids. He had girlfriends here and there, including a long-term one for several years running, but his Facebook says "single." I know that to be incorrect, as his obituary mentions a girlfriend by name. I cannot imagine what she's going through. 

As he got older, just like many of us do, Ben appeared to have let himself get out of shape and he put on some weight. Hey, I don't judge. The latest few pictures I've seen of him, including some photos from what appears to be a friend's wedding about eight months ago as well as the photo included with his obituary, shows that in his later years he filled out a bit and became a heavier man, much like myself. That tells me that he was at least somewhat comfortable in life. He was still recognizably Ben in these new photos, but seeing him in them compared to when I knew him and when I was close with him was much like Luke Skywalker unhooding himself at the end of The Force Awakens, showing the fans how much he'd aged.

I'm sure Ben would appreciate being compared to Luke Skywalker, as well.

I have relatively few photos of Ben in my collection of pictures I've saved over the years, but no other photo of the man I've ever seen more exemplifies the Ben I knew than this one -- tan, muscular, thoughtful, and wearing the Mario shirt I must have seen him wear 20 times or more over the years. 

Thank you, Ben, for the memories and for your friendship.

I'll see you on the other side, brother.

Linux No More: A Labor of Love

 Hi all.

This is a brief story about a labor of love. It is the story of my new PC. Feel free to ignore if you're not particularly interested; however, I have some feelings about everything that's transpired since I got this new computer, and wanted to write about it here. Some of the following is going to be technical and/or very boring if you're not deeply into computing, so if you're not -- look, I get it. It's okay. 

Shortly after Christmas, in late December 2021, I finally purchased the refurbished machine I'd had my eye on for a while. What that machine is, is a refurbished and updated Dell Optiplex 9010. It is the replacement for my old Acer machine that spectacularly died on me last fall, and was chosen because I use a smaller, simpler (I guess) Dell Optiplex 9020 for work -- the 9020 is the machine my company issued me when I needed to replace my old HP work machine last year.

As you know if you've been following this blog for a while, I did purchase and had been using, up until recently, a slightly more beefed up version of the same HP machine I had for work -- which I purchased as a backup machine for about $140 or so. It ended up becoming my primary machine when repairs on the Acer failed. More on that below. For now, back to the main story.

This is a brief, partially inaccurate rundown of what my new machine has in it:

My PC has the i5 processor, Windows 10, and 16GB RAM. It does include a DVD-RW, but not a Blu-ray writer. And, the hard drive is 2TB, not 1TB. 

The 9010 came in a number of different configurations upon manufacture -- there were two small form-factor versions (a small and an "ultra-small"), a desktop, a mini-tower, and an AIO (all-in-one, where everything is one unit, including the monitor -- plug in a keyboard and mouse and go). I have the "mini-tower," which is the largest of all of the units. I did this on purpose -- I want the machine to be upgradable and I want to be able to easily swap out drives if/as necessary, as well as have room inside the machine to move my hands around, easily be able to plug in another 16GB RAM stick or what have you. Keep in mind that I have another 2TB HDD from the Acer that is just taking up space and has been fully wiped clean, so I may add that in for extra storage eventually...or I may end up just putting it into an enclosure and attaching it to my PS4, who knows.

Anyway.

I ordered the PC from Amazon in the end of December. I did so because the HP I had been using as my "backup" machine had become my primary machine, and even with Linux on it, it was dreadfully slow. It was loud, it took forever to load programs, sites, videos, its network card seemed more than a little wonky (it would just randomly drop internet connection, for no reason, and would need me to unplug/replug in the wifi extender to reset and re-obtain a connection multiple times per week, and sometimes multiple times per day). It was the very definition of a backup computer -- use it in a pinch until you can get something better and then put it into storage, because it's not built for anything but the most basic of computing needs.

Well, that was always the plan from the day I purchased that machine. My life is spent on the computer and on the internet. You could say, and be mostly accurate, that my life at this juncture is irrevocably entwined with being online, and that it would be very difficult to function without a computer that could meet my needs. There was no way I could just not have a fully functional, working computer that I could use without worrying whether or not it was going to fail catastrophically on me, as the Acer did. Add to this that in the few weeks leading up to Christmas, the HP had been freezing/crashing a fair amount for unknown reasons and with unknown causes -- it would just randomly freeze up and decide it didn't want to do anything. I had similar issues on my old, old HP Pavilion about twenty years ago now too, and it turned out that was the motherboard slowly dying on me. Eventually, it just blew out. This was absolutely not an experience I wanted to deal with again. 

The new Dell was about $200, give or take -- professionally refurbished and with a fresh installation of Windows 10 Professional included. Remember this, it'll be important later. $200 is not an insignificant purchase for me, especially for one singular item, but it did give me the baseline of what I needed to get back to the sort of computing I was used to -- namely all the RAM I'd need for daily use and a 2TB HDD for my storage needs. It came with a generic $5 keyboard and $5 wired optical mouse, the latter of which I accidentally broke into a million cheap plastic pieces when I was unpackaging the giant box this new PC came in Oops. It doesn't matter, I have a fancy LED-backlit mechanical keyboard and wired, LED-color-changing optical gaming mouse anyhow, but it's nice to have spares, I guess. I have another similar gaming mouse in a box behind my television too, in the event that my current one dies or what-have-you. I have options and I come prepared. 

My first step upon its arrival was to back up everything I had on the HP to my external HDD, so that I would not lose a single, solitary file. This was a long, arduous process on that old HP -- while the Acer backed up stuff/copied files relatively quickly, my external HDD is eight years old, and it's a disk -- it's not solid state or anything like that. So, a slow machine moving files to a slow, old drive was an incredibly ponderous process that would legitimately take hours -- just my 200GB podcasts folder alone usually took about 4 hours or more to copy over. Everything else would take, on average, about three hours to move. 

Keep in mind that I didn't trust the HP at all, so I was doing these backups weekly -- usually every Friday or Saturday night -- over the course of the several months I used the machine as my primary computer. 

In the interim, I had gone out and fetched the latest Ubuntu Linux distro and burned it to a DVD, as well as making a second copy on a blank bootable USB drive. I also went to our linen closet and grabbed a spare pillowcase (from my Star Trek: The Next Generation sheet set, if you can believe that) -- this will also be important later. 

The new versions of Ubuntu are very...feature heavy? I guess you could say? They're bloated with a lot of stuff that most users don't want and will never use, along with a few different atrocious "desktop environments" to choose from that are either stupid-looking, hard to use and unlike anything Windows/Mac has to offer, or both. I always used the GNOME desktop environment on my Linux distributions, simply because it was more like a traditional Windows/Mac environment -- top and/or bottom bars, easily accessible menus, desktop icons, the ability to pin things to bars or to menus, etc. As that GNOME got "upgraded" over the years, it also got more bloated and difficult to use/configure properly, and eventually became something completely different than what it originally was supposed to be. Frequently, I would have to go back out and re-download it back onto my machine after an OS upgrade and reconfigure it by hand, which was not something I was a fan of doing, as it eventually got dropped completely in favor of another desktop environment called Unity. 

It got a little easier when after some outcry, a few years ago they released "GNOME Classic," which more accurately mimicked the systems that all of us had used for many years -- but it was far from perfect and not anywhere near as customizable or useful as it looked like it would be (or as old-school Linux users were used to). And really, that was the big part of what I liked about Ubuntu Linux from 2006 to around 2019 or so -- you could really make it your own system, make the tweaks and upgrades you wanted, have it look and operate the way you wanted it to, and not sacrifice functionality. Sure, it was a little more complex to use and if you were a novice to how it ran, you'd be lost until you learned the basics -- but I had many years of Linux experience under my belt and the extra effort was worth it to me to say that I had a lightweight, free-to-own-and-use, open-source operating system with a community of dedicated users supporting it and continually upgrading it.

After a while though, especially from around 2019 forward, that began to change. Once Ubuntu began reaching the 20.xx versions, it began to get slower and less compatible. Programs I'd install and run -- that were said to have full Linux functionality -- would freeze or crash, even though I far surpassed the technical specs needed to run them. It became less customizable and you were more or less forced to use the desktop environments the way the developers wanted them to be. Different media file types stopped being supported, despite the proper codecs being installed and tweaks being applied. One of the system upgrades even broke my default display drivers and forced me to go in on the command line to manually switch to some sort of universal display driver -- something that a novice computer user would never have the patience for or knowledge of how to do. Certain software packages couldn't be disabled or removed or it would break the entire system, but if you didn't have them on your machine and configured properly from a previous legacy upgrade, the machine would also become mostly unusable. I had the Acer configured to work mostly how I wanted it after several OS upgrades and my own personal tweaks over the years, as I'd owned it since 2017, and it did mostly everything I wanted it to -- but every year I would become increasingly more jaded at Linux with each new major upgrade. I still believed in the concept and overall goals of the Ubuntu project, but it felt hollow. I wasn't really enjoying using it anymore. I felt constrained by what it used to be able to do but could no longer do, and truth be told, I'd lost the excitement in making things work the way I wanted them to work -- I just wanted everything to function properly without needing to manually reconfigure every time something changed. It all became so damn tiresome. 

So, all of this being said, I did some research into how to seriously dual-boot with Windows 10 -- meaning, taking a computer with an existing Windows 10 installation on it, and installing Ubuntu Linux alongside it with the choice of which one to load into at boot. There are a few ways to do this, though it used to be far, far easier to do with the much older Ubuntu releases, as well as with earlier Windows releases. Basically, you have to create a partition on the hard drive to hold the Ubuntu OS, blank it out (for lack of a better term) and then when you boot from the Ubuntu DVD or USB stick, install it to that partition. You also have to make sure a secure-boot setting is disabled and check a few other tweaks as well in order to make the machine let you select which OS you want to boot into upon startup. It was simple enough and seemed pretty straightforward, so once I set up the new Dell -- which included fully setting up and customizing Windows 10 a bit -- I made the necessary tweaks and was ready to give it a try.

I'd like to pause here for a moment to say that outside of work, or for a few minutes messing around with Daisy's laptop, I've never had any real experience with any Windows OS past Windows XP 20 years ago. Even my experience with Windows 10 was limited to what my work PC would allow me to access and do on it, which is shockingly little -- IT has all of those machines locked down to do nothing but the minimum of what the company will allow its employees to do on them. All settings/updates/performance tweaks and enhancements are locked up like a vault at the bank. The system runs fine for our work uses, but as a user you don't get a feel for what Windows 10 is or what it can do -- it is as barebones as it gets for our work PCs, with almost everything disabled or removed from the OS itself. When I started at my job, all of the machines had Vista on them. This was updated to 7 for everyone, and then to 10 about 2-3 years ago -- shortly before Covid hit and we all migrated to work from home. All three operating systems were locked down, and 10 has so far been locked down far more than the others were.

As for Windows XP -- the last version of Windows I really used before I started on Ubuntu in 2006 with version 6.06, I loved that operating system. I was a Windows fan in college; it did everything I needed it to do quickly and efficiently, it allowed me to play almost any game I wanted (mind you, games from 20 years ago were a lot less hardware-intensive than they are now) and my Computer Science 101 course at WVU was literally nothing but Office XP. I mastered a great deal of Windows XP and only moved to Ubuntu in 2006 because my computer was quite literally dying and I needed something lightweight to squeeze another few years of useful life out of it. Ubuntu fit that bill and worked wonderfully on my aging PC, allowing me to use it until 2010 when it would've otherwise been completely obsolete by around 2007 or 2008. After that I put Ubuntu on all of my machines from the get-go, completely wiping whatever version of Windows it came with. 

This time around, however, I did not want that to be the case with my new Dell. I wanted options, I wanted to be able to be happy with the PC that I'd just spent $200 on. With Ubuntu becoming increasingly bloated and more restrictive, I wanted the ability to say "today I want to use Windows and boot up a game that wouldn't run in Linux because it's unsupported" and other days, say "today I want to use Linux and do everything I'm used to the old way."

This. Did not happen.

Though the .ISO disk image of the new Ubuntu burned flawlessly, and the new Dell booted into it from the DVD drive, it errored out spectacularly upon loading -- giving me dozens of pages of random failed code scrolling down my screen. 

I switched the options on it, upon boot, to a "graphics safe" install (meaning, mostly text-only) -- it sat on my screen and tried to load for fifteen minutes before hanging up and again displaying crazy-long lines of failed code. 

I thought perhaps I'd just burned an old/failed DVD, or that the disk image itself was corrupted somehow. I grabbed the last install DVD I'd made, when I got the HP and was setting it up, and instead stuck that one in. It was an OS-upgrade older, but it would still work -- I'd just have to perform a system upgrade once installed. It also failed. 

Okay, I thought, maybe this machine doesn't want to boot properly from the optical drive. I rebooted the Dell again with the USB stick plugged in, so it would recognize and boot from that -- it also failed. It wouldn't recognize the bootable USB no matter what I did. 

Hm. 

I reassessed the situation. I could either see if the DVD would do a live-install, as the older Ubuntu OSes did, I could get a much older version of Ubuntu off the online archives (like, ten years old or more) that I knew would work, I could go in and mess with a bunch of the configurations in Windows to see if I could get it working -- without knowing exactly what I was doing or if it would break my machine, or.....I could just figure it out later and use Windows for the time being, as theoretically I already had all the parts in place to install Ubuntu alongside Windows basically any time I wanted, whatever version I wanted -- I could go get an old one and configure it all the way I wanted it to run, then carefully upgrade multiple times to make sure it didn't get rid of my configurations (this option would take the better part of a few weeks, likely, of a few hours every day of mindlessly watching an OS download and install, knowing any failure would likely be catastrophic for my data). 

So I made the hard decision to, for the time being, let Linux go and embrace Windows 10. It was, indeed, a difficult decision and one I didn't take lightly. I just no longer had the infinite patience to fuck around with trying to get Linux to install properly and configure it from scratch on yet another machine, or risk deleting/wiping yet another perfectly good Windows installation just to say that I'm still "the guy who uses nothing but Linux no matter what."

What I found was surprising. Windows 10 is...delightful.

Now, mind you, I am far from a Microsoft shill. I don't really like any big corporations for much of anything, and try to stay out of the mainstream on a lot of big corporate tech -- the only real exception being that I've owned three different iPhones over the course of the past eight years. As long as I can remain an iPhone guy, I will always be an iPhone guy. But I am...very impressed with Windows 10. Like, far more than I expected to be. 

After downloading multiple large updates (apparently my PC had a fresh install that had never been updated whatsoever) and changing around some of the options and startup stuff, I had an incredibly functional computer that, honestly, seemed like it could/would do anything I wanted it to do. I immediately started adding software to fit my needs:

1. LibreOffice -- the open-source, free office suite I used on Linux, to get around needing to get/use Office 365 or something similar. I've used LibreOffice for years. I know its settings. I know its tweaks. All of my documents -- from about 2010 forward -- are formatted for LibreOffice. 
   
   
2. Windows CleanUp! -- terribly outdated (I don't think it's had a new version since 2005 or so) but the best program out there to wipe out old data, clear caches and cookies, delete old registry BS, as well as a bunch of other things that'll clog up your hard drive. I've used it since I had XP on any and all Windows machines I've ever touched, including my work machine. Unfortunately, I had to leap through four or five mirrors until I actually found an install file that Edge would let me download securely, since the program is so old. Speaking of that --
   
   
3. Microsoft Edge -- wow, what a browser. I'm not kidding. I've been a Firefox or Chrome guy quite literally since the early '00s, and I'm highly impressed with what Edge does. Microsoft may have, honestly, perfected the browser here. I do not say this lightly. I've used a lot of different browsers on all of my machines, from Netscape 1.1 and Internet Explorer 2.0 in 1996 to Firebird (the precursor to Firefox) and Opera, all the way up through the newest versions of Firefox and Chrome. Edge is really nice.
   
   
4. Google Chrome -- because even though apparently Edge runs off the same Chrome framework, I still want Chrome on my machine as a completely separate entity. I'll likely eventually install Firefox as well.
   
   
5. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. It is a 20-year-old computer game that has been on every PC I've ever owned since the game's release, and has been my go-to game to zone out/decompress/release some stress ever since I purchased it back when I was in college. I do not expect this to change anytime soon.
   
   
6. PCSX2 -- I don't know if all of you folks have heard of this, but many of you likely have. PCSX2 is the best PlayStation 2 emulator available. Since I can't pop a PS2 disc into my PS4 and actually play the game (sadly, there's no backwards compatibility) I needed another option. PCSX2 allows me to put the game disc into my computer's optical drive, plug in a USB controller, and play it as if I were playing the game on my actual PS2 system. It'll play downloaded games too (I don't have any of those) and upon testing it last weekend with Star Wars Battlefront II, it seems to work really well. I'll now be able to put my PS2 systems into storage and keep a handful of games around in my office for when I want to play them. 

There's a lot of other stuff I should be able to do in my free time pertaining to gaming as well -- this new PC should be able to run stuff like Magic: The Gathering Arena and Star Trek Online flawlessly and natively in Windows, and I do still have my caches of NES, Super NES, Game Boy/Color/Advance, and Sega Genesis emulators and ROMs as well, some of them dating back to the 90s when I originally downloaded them. I'm purposely not installing all of this stuff yet because, frankly, I don't have the amazing amount of time it takes to play games all day/night on my days off. I could put Steam on this machine too, as I do have an account for it (as Steam did/does have some Linux compatibility) but, again, time.

Overall, I'm rather satisfied with my new machine. There's some stuff it could do better, but a lot that it could do worse. Here's a few of its more glaring drawbacks, though:

1. This particular machine is not compatible/capable to upgrade to Windows 11. My processor apparently isn't fast enough, per Windows itself. All of my other specs are fine.
   
   
2. Because so many versions of the Optiplex 9010 were built, unless all of them run off the same motherboard architecture (overall unlikely, especially for a PC I bought secondhand and professionally refurbished), it's going to be a nightmare to figure out what kind of RAM I need if I wanted to put another stick or two into it to max it out. 
   
   
3. Device drivers are likely going to become a pain again at some point in the future.
   
   
4. I do, once more, have to worry about antivirus and the like, which for Linux is not a thing that exists.
   
   
5. Windows is still Windows -- meaning yes, it's going to have painfully long updates that make me reboot my PC over and over for some of them.
   
   
6. A few programs I loved in Linux are either not compatible or don't exist for Windows 10, and the ones that do the same things generally cost actual money for the Windows versions.

So, all, there you have it. I've been running this machine for the better part of a month now on Windows only, and have been really satisfied with it thus far. I'll let you know if that changes, of course, but apparently I'm a Windows guy now. Again.

Oh, and since I mentioned the pillowcase earlier -- in the event this new machine does die or blow a major part, I slipped the old backup HP into the pillowcase -- protecting it from dust/dirt/vape residue, etc -- and it is now in "storage" next to me at the side of my desk. If I need to use it again, I will, but it can finally get some well-deserved, much-earned rest.

New Year's Resolutions 2022

 Hi folks. Happy New Year.

This is a simple post -- it is a list of 22 things I'd like to accomplish in 2022. Some of them will likely be easier than others. Some may be impossible. Let's dive in and explore them together, shall we?

1. Reach my (first) target goal weight of under 300 pounds, and keep going.

  

This one should come as no surprise. I have plunged into the 330s after being at nearly 380 in 2017-2018. 2022 should see that trend (hopefully) continuing with some patience and discipline.

 

2. Write the novel, complete it, and edit it -- to get it as clean as possible to shop around to publishers/agents -- and do so.

 

This is my other big goal for the year and the reason this site will not have a large amount of content posted for 2022. I need the novel to be my ticket out of needing to work a day job for the rest of my life, so anything I can do to make that happen, I'm going to devote all the time possible to it. It will not be easy. There are times where it will likely be quite frustrating and maddening. But..I just have to get it done.

3. Declutter the fuck out of this house -- sell/trash/donate/recycle everything possible.

 

This will likely be my big project for the winter/spring months while it's cold. So much needs to go. I've already got a donation bag going for old clothing from my closet, and Daisy will be gutting her upstairs office soon too in order to completely reorganize it. I'm so tired of being surrounded by just...shit. Things. Stuff that needs to go away. This extends itself to old comics, games, books, housewares, shoes, electronics, old prescription glasses, papers that need to be shredded, expired foods in the cupboards, etc. I want to leave no part of the house untouched. 

4. Get on a gym schedule and stick to it.

 

I have not been to the gym since August. Daisy goes once or twice every few weeks. I need to get into the habit of getting back there and working out hard once or twice a week. This will be one of the most difficult goals on the list to accomplish, because time and energy are both very large factors in it. 

5. Finally stop the vaping habit.

 

This was on my goals for 2021 as well, and yeah, that didn't happen. I still have a ton of batteries, supplies, and working devices that I'm very obviously not just going to throw in the trash, as all of them cost me a great deal of money over the past seven (yes, seven) years now. That being said, I have gotten rid of a lot of the stuff I'd been keeping for "backup" purposes -- old tanks I'll never have coils for again, old wires/tools/etc I'll never use -- even some old devices that didn't really work that well or no longer served a purpose to me. But, the fact remains that I still have a lot of stuff to go through, and juice is readily available to me at the shop down the street. 

6. Do everything I can to get rid of the diabetes.

Look, I understand that this might not be an achievable goal, and it sort of goes hand in hand with the weight-loss and gym goals above. But, honestly, it's not inconceivable. My diabetes isn't that awful and isn't untreatable. I feel as if my diet has made amazing amounts of progress over the course of the past eight months or so -- though there are times where I'll order and eat an entire pizza or two over the course of a day or two, and there are times where I want a fuckton of ramen or rice. I've pared down that stuff as much as possible and have tried to make those events rare and appropriate, with pretty high levels of success most of the time. 

7. Get my next tattoo on my 40th birthday at the end of the year.

Yes, this is basically a given.

8. Take the time and money necessary to travel for family events where possible.

Daisy has a "family reunion" of sorts in Canada in the summer, that centers around one of her cousins' weddings. We'll be going to that without question, barring any unforeseen circumstances. I also need to see my parents again and get the last items out of the house in WV, and Daisy has also mentioned wanting to go back to Maine at some point. I don't know how or where we're going to get the money or time to do any/all of this -- I simply don't accrue that much PTO over any given year -- but what is possible we will make happen.

9. Overhaul my attitude and mental health (as I can).

This encompasses a lot of different things, both big and small. Daisy wants me to go see a therapist. While I am not planning to do that (money/insurance coverage, time, and transportation are all large factors there, plus the fact that I have no desire or perceived need to go to one), I do need to look introspectively at myself and examine why and how I act and feel the way I do a lot of the time, and work to change some of those things within myself. I'm keeping specifics vague here on purpose, but really, it's an all-encompassing goal of finding ways to be more spontaneous and go-with-the-flow than I am now, and that is very difficult for me. There are some things that are hard-wired into my personality that I don't think I will ever be able to "fix" (and many others that I don't think need to be fixed, despite what some people may think). 

As an aside I'm also (still) of the mindset that most therapy is useless and cannot fix the circumstantial problems that cause things like depression or anxiety or lack of life fulfillment. Yes, for some people, it is a genuine chemical imbalance, a real health issue. For me, I do not think it is, at all. To me, the whole "if you can't change your situation, change your perspective" thing is meaningless and highly situational, because I fully realize that I have a pretty good life. That doesn't get rid of the things that cause me stress, anxiety, or make me feel unfulfilled. Only outside forces can fix those things, and for someone like me, medication(s) would simply be a band-aid. I don't want a band-aid, I want real world solutions (i.e., never needing to work a job again, being able to be in control of my actual life, being able to sleep as little or as much as I want, and/or never needing to care about anything money-related would completely solve about 95% of my issues/problems, both physical and mental). I want the world I was promised by politicians, advertisements, educators, and the media. I don't want the false perception of a "changed perspective," I want everything to be better in reality. 

10. Be a better husband and partner.

Look, a lot of you are probably like "but Brandon, you and Daisy seem to have the perfect relationship!" and for the most part, you'd be right -- my marriage and relationship with Daisy is a very, very strong one. But it's not perfect, it is nowhere close. Truth be told, there are many things I can improve on, from interpersonal communications to intimacy (I won't go into detail there). I am not the easiest person to be married to, nor am I the easiest person to be in a relationship with. I have a lot of little improvements that can be made in all arenas that would create reverberating changes throughout the entirety of our relationship. I'm working on them. It's not an easy process. 

11. Only write here when necessary.

The Isolation Diaries posts have finished (more on that soon). I'm not forcing myself to write here every day anymore. I need some rest and some breathing space, and some time to work on the novel(s) I have rattling around in my brain. As such, you'll likely only see a small handful of posts here for the next year or so until I can sort everything out. 

12. Find a form of passive income. Actual passive income.

Pretty self-explanatory here, really. Anything I can do as a steppingstone to get away from my day (read: overnight) job and towards independence -- both financial and spiritual -- would be very good here. I cannot tell you how much I want to be unemployed. I cannot tell you how much I just want to live my life without being confined to a work schedule. I am so very tired of my time and energy being signed away wholesale just to be able to pay bills and eat food. 

13. Get a car.

Note: I will (probably) never get a car. That's why I have to keep re-adding it to the list every year. 

14. Be present.

This sort of goes hand in hand with some of the other resolutions above, but some special clarification has to be said and some active thought time devoted to this. So much of my life is spent just going through motions without being all there mentally. I've noticed it a lot at work recently, but it also happens in a lot of time otherwise -- I'm just mentally off the clock, off in my own headspace, quite a bit these days. 

15. At the same time, embrace "me time" more fully.

I have a lot of trouble balancing how to be a good/better partner and husband, how to be more mentally present, how to work on my own mental issues, and how to actually take some time for myself, because it frequently feels that I don't have enough time or energy to do all of these things at once -- and one or more (or all) of them end up being neglected or completely dropped because I just don't have the space for it. It's like the spoons analogy -- only have so many spoons in a given day/week. When I get the chance for "me time" it is usually short and fleeting -- an hour or two to read some comics, or play a game on the PC or PS4 -- before I have something else, or a list of something elses, to do. Sometimes my "me time" is stolen from me by the need to sleep, or a crisis that pops up out of my control. So, as my last resolution this year, my goal is to wrest some of that control back.

Finally, all, here's a list of criticisms I've been given over the past several years that I will once more not be addressing or changing at all in the coming year:

1. "Be more approachable." No. Fuck yourselves. I'll approach you if you're needed. Otherwise leave me alone, I have too many responsibilities as it is now and I'm not taking on yours too (this is more of a work thing than anything else). 

2. "You need social interaction; get out and go do things more." Also no. Spiritually, the pandemic has been one of the greatest things to happen to my psyche, because it means I have no more social obligations. I do not want to leave my home. I do not have to leave my home, for work or socialization or otherwise. I like having groceries and food delivered to me. My wife, the cats, the internet and my electronics, and my furniture are all I need to be happy.

3. "Be less narcissistic." Nope. I'm always going to be #1. Daisy is my world, but everything aside from her is all about me. Always has been, always will be. This doesn't mean I'm callous and lack compassion or empathy, because I don't -- Daisy always says that one of my greatest strengths is that I have an incredibly kind and giving heart and soul, and I do -- most people who know me would say that as well. This just means that I'm taking care of me and her, me and mine before anyone else gets a cut of my time or mental energy.

So, there you have it, folks. Happy 2022. 

A Good Marriage Questionnaire

Greetings, all.

 

A while ago, I stumbled across this link, which is a list of questions to ask your married friends before you get married. I made a note of it and saved it in here so I could write a post about it because I found it fascinating, and promptly forgot about it for the better part of two years. So, if that link doesn't work by the time you read this/by the time I get around to posting this....sorry, ain't my fault.

As you're likely aware, Daisy and I will hit our 8th wedding anniversary this coming spring, and 2022 celebrates ten years of us being together in total. 2022 is full of milestones, it seems. Anyway, I thought that this would be a really neat little experiment/questionnaire. This site can't all be about my day to day life, after all. 

If you're thinking about getting married, if you're planning to get married or engaged, I encourage you to bookmark this post as well as the link above and read through everything in both of them -- both the explanations of the questions at the link above as well as my answers to them here, below. Read them a few times if you have to. Marriages aren't disposable arrangements, even though a lot of people seem to see them that way these days. For all of their -- at times -- archaic symbolism, they are more than anything else a pact, a commitment, a job, a retirement, a vacation, and overall partnership. 

 

With that being said...enjoy.

 

01. What is your secret to making marriage work for a lifetime?

I think the biggest and most obvious answer to this is patience and understanding -- but it has to be mutual, and it has to come from both sides. Before I met Daisy, I was not a patient person at all. I was actually a pretty miserable person a lot of the time. Daisy had to work with me, a lot, to get me to where I am today. I had to learn to become a bit more free-spirited, a little bit more go-with-the-flow, and sometimes even now that's hard for me because it's not really in my nature. I also had to learn that Daisy is really not just a carbon copy of me with longer hair -- she has her own quirks and things that irritate me, things she excels at and things she falls short of as a person. She has her own wants and needs that are at times, very different than mine. We all have those things, and learning to understand and accept them in one another, and not immediately write them off as dealbreakers are another really big step in having a successful marriage.

The secondary answer to this is, probably without surprise, trust and communication. I fully trust Daisy, in everything. There's nothing about me that woman doesn't know. She knows stuff about me that I wouldn't tell my parents, her parents, a priest (if I were a religious man, I mean), or say in a courtroom. I'd like to think I know most everything about her at this juncture as well, and I do, but I still learn new things every day. Similarly, I trust her to be honest and faithful, and she trusts me to do the same. Neither of us have to worry about that with one another, which is a definite sign of a fantastically successful relationship. But, trust goes further than that -- it transcends just the relationship stuff to encompass everything. Yes, I trust that Daisy isn't going to go out for a night on the town with the girls from work and start blowing dudes at the bar, but I also trust that she'll pay bills on time, keep gas in the car, think through any and all decisions rationally, and be my safe space when I need to lean on her. Likewise she trusts that I'll do the same, and trusts that I'll keep myself as healthy as I can so we can live a good, long life together, etc. 

There are going to be things that your spouse puts a lot of importance on that you don't, and vice versa. Sometimes these are little things, sometimes they're big things. Learn to adapt as much as you can. Try. I promise if you try, even a little -- to make the effort and take the time to prioritize the things your spouse deems important, even if they're not necessarily important to you (or you think they're silly or a waste of time), your relationship will be better for it. Make the effort. Try. So many relationships/marriages end or fall into disrepair because one partner or the other becomes too complacent and stops trying at one single thing, and that becomes a domino effect that takes it down from both sides -- oh, she doesn't care about x, so I'm not going to care about y. He doesn't care about a, b, and c, so I'm going to find someone who does. She doesn't care about d, e, and f, so I'm going to find someone who does. Etc. Just try. Suck it up and act like an adult and a partner. Not everything has to revolve around you, nor should it. It's not about me or you, it's about us.

There is no one secret to making a marriage work for a lifetime. It's a long list of things. It's something that you figure out as you go. Sometimes you'll be better at it than others -- sometimes you'll screw up or fail hard. Sometimes you'll excel at it and be the hero. As long as there's mutual understanding there, as long as both of you are giving it your best, you'll be fine. It's not a light switch or a checklist to mark things off of, nor is it something you should go into with a "well, if this doesn't work out, we'll just get divorced -- no harm, no foul" -- trust me, there is always harm and there is always foul in a divorce. My parents had four previous failed marriages between them (with other people, of course) before they met and have now been together for almost thirty years -- without getting married. Everything is a learning process, and it is a process of unconditional love. If you can't understand that, and I mean really understand it, you're really not ready for marriage.

02. How do you make finances work?

Uh...well, I guess this is likely a good question for some people. It's never really been a huge concern for me and Daisy, but here goes.

When we got married, we opened a joint bank account. I believe we opened it the week before we got married, actually. Alongside that joint account we opened a joint savings account. Both of us have cards, both of us deposit money into both accounts and remove money from both accounts. We both keep track of it -- I keep track of it literally in a handwritten ledger that I meticulously update when any money is deposited into or spent out of the account for any reason, so I always know what we have down to the exact penny.

She pays bills every month of her own out of the account -- her credit cards, student loans, our cellphone bill, etc -- and I pay my own bills out of the account too. We both keep track of every expense, such as when bills are due, when utilities and subscriptions and the like are going to auto-debit, and budget/calculate how much we have left, how much can be spent on food or household stuff or entertainment, etc. When we have an unexpected expense that would wreck our financials for the month, we can dip into savings as necessary -- and when we have a little more to work with, we can dump some money back into savings as well. It is a financial ballet that has worked very well for us for our marriage, and in the almost eight years we've been married we've never overdrawn our account or forgotten to account for a major expense or anything of that nature, even if funds were tight.

I've come to realize over the years that for a lot of couples, this isn't the norm, and that surprises me. I've known quite a few couples that are like "what I make is mine, and what you make is yours, we have separate accounts" and "this month you pay the rent, next month I will" or stuff of that nature and...I can't really fathom that. Daisy calls that being financially divorced and to an extent, it's actually sort of shady. Marriage is not a what's-mine-is-mine, what's-yours-is-yours sort of scenario. If you go into marriage believing that, your marriage will likely fail sooner rather than later, generally because one party or the other will be much better at managing money, and the party who isn't will be underwater because there's no shared safety net.

So, that's my advice for handling/managing finances in a marriage -- don't be financially divorced. Share everything. Mutual respect and responsibility, mutual knowledge and accountability. 

03. Is it normal for us to argue?

Yes. Yes it is. About any number of things big or small, at pretty much any given time.

Never believe someone who says "our marriage is perfect, we've never had a single argument or fight in over twenty years" or some other bullshit like that. That is not real, that does not happen. If you believe that, you are living in a fantasy world.

The thing that everyone has to realize about marriage is that it's not an exact science. It's not perfect. No relationship or marriage ever can be perfect, and making perfection your goal will set you up for the worst kinds of relationship failures that you could ever possibly experience.

When someone tells me they never argue or have never had a yelling match or fight with their partner, my first question is "Why not?" Because I am genuinely curious.

They usually shrug and say "we just never have anything to fight about."

Well, I'm here to tell you that's wrong. Good marriages are work, they are jobs that require attention to detail and actual care. Think of it like buying a '72 Chevelle new, and then driving it hard every day for the next thirty years without ever changing the oil, spark plugs, brakes, coolant, etc. In the beginning, even for the first few years maybe, it'll run wonderfully with just regular fill-ups of gas. But sooner or later it's going to blow a tire. Sooner or later it'll overheat and crack the block because the radiator has run dry and the oil has taken on the consistency of southern gravy. What I'm saying is that you can't ignore maintenance on your marriage any more than you should ignore maintenance on your car.

In the cases of the couples who "just never have anything to fight about" I usually later find out that one partner is terrified of the other, usually the woman being terrified of the man, and just goes along with everything he says and does out of fear. That's not a relationship, that's owning a slave he gets to fuck (or not fuck) whenever he wants and who cooks all his meals for him. That's not a marriage or a partnership.

Your spouse doesn't always have to agree with you and he/she certainly doesn't have to follow your orders or edicts. Yes, it is perfectly normal to get irritated or angry with your spouse and to have an argument. Daisy and I fight all the time. Sometimes it's small spats, sometimes it's big blowouts. More often than not, it's over something stupid and inconsequential. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes the fault is on me, sometimes it's on her, sometimes it's on both of us. My point is, if you're married and it's a true partnership, you're still going to have disagreements and you're still going to fight. It's part of being human, and it's part of being partnered with someone. However, I will offer this very solid piece of advice about fighting with your spouse...

Pick your battles. Read that again, but more slowly. Pick your battles.

Not everything is worth a fight or argument. You can be irritated and just deal with it and brush it off. There are so many things I've stopped myself on and just remained silent, because I knew if I'd spoken the next sentence we'd be in a three-hour fight. I'm sure Daisy has felt the same way as well from time to time. There's a lot of give and take to successful marriages. If you feel that you're not being heard, or being ignored, by all means make sure you speak up so that your partner knows there's something wrong. But, as hard as it may be at times, sometimes you just have to let anger go. If there's nothing else you take from this post, take this advice to heart. Sometimes you just have to let it go. Sometimes you just have to brush it off.

Along those lines, realize that when you do fight, there are some fights that you will win, and some that you will lose -- and realize that sometimes, you need to lose. You can fight, you can make yourself heard, but you can never force your partner to agree with you, see eye to eye with you or obey you. And moreover, you should not expect that -- not out of your partner or spouse, or out of anyone you have interpersonal connections with. Sometimes, you need to lose in order to realize that your point of contention wasn't that important in the grand scheme of things, and sometimes you need to lose in order to realize you're being an asshole.

One last thing -- when you fight, always apologize when you make up afterwards. Especially if you were being an asshole, and even more especially if you "won" the fight. It doesn't matter if it was your fault or not. It doesn't matter if you were right or not. You apologize and move on, and learn from the argument. Both sides need to do this, and both sides need to admit fault for their part in it. Any arguments you have should be learning opportunities. They should make your relationship stronger, not tear it down -- as long as your relationship is not a toxic one.

04. How do you successfully practice work-life balance?

Personally? Actually quite poorly, but part of that is due to our work schedules/circumstances.

Allow me to explain. Any of you who have been longtime readers of this site know that I work overnights, from home, five nights a week from 10pm to 7am. Daisy works an 8am to 5pm day job, most of the time in an office and not at home. There are times where I have to start work an hour or two early in the evening, and there are times where I work an hour or two late in the mornings. Similarly, there are times where Daisy is stuck at work an hour or two late, and by the time she gets home we each have about an hour of real downtime together for dinner and light chatting before she has to go to bed and I have to start my shift.

So...making a work-life balance happen for us is really difficult. Saturdays are usually our day together where we can go out, run errands, have a "date day" sort of thing -- stuff along those lines. Sundays we spend most of the day together too before I work in the evening. Basically, what I'm saying is that our work-life balance right now is not ideal, but we do what we can. When Daisy says she wants us to go to an event or do something together, I may not always want to, but most of the time I do it with her and go along with it because I know it's quality time together, and we tend to have so little of that.

Here's the other thing they don't tell you about working a different shift than or having a different sleeping schedule than your spouse -- you will almost never occupy the bed at the same time while both of you are asleep unless one of you has an extra day off here and there. I'm not talking about sex (that's an entirely different category), I'm talking about sleeping together. If you do, it's either for a short overlap period before one person or the other gets up, or it's for a random nap on occasion. So, if you work different schedules, you'll just have to get used to sleeping alone, and that sort of sucks.

My advice, because not every couple sleeps together successfully -- problems with this are far more common than you think (one person or the other gets too hot, or snores, or can't get comfortable/stretch out with the other in the bed, pets get in the way, etc) -- do everything you can, when you can, to make it happen. Savor every moment of it. Sleeping together, sharing a bed, is one of the greatest parts about being married. It is incredibly intimate. It is a safe space. It will do far more for your mental health and your shared psychological needs than you know, trust me.

05. How did you decide on how to split up holidays?

Split up holidays?

My parents live over 1,000 miles from here. Daisy's parents live about five miles from here. Her sisters are not in town; one lives in Denver and the other in Canada, respectively. There's no holidays to split up for us. We spend them with her parents. I haven't been home for Christmas in ten years.

But that's just us, so let's go with a more idealized scenario. Say you and your spouse are from the same town, and your families both live in the same town, and both do holiday gatherings/dinners/what-have-you. I'm sure this covers most of you reading this who are married or are possibly going to be married in the future.

So, in most scenarios, it really depends on the size of the family. If you're both only children, it'll be far easier to do dinners and events and the like with both sides of the family. You can attempt to do both sides in one day, but I can tell you from experience that is very tiring and very hectic. You can coordinate between families -- say, one does Christmas Eve dinner/celebrations and the other does Christmas Day dinner/celebrations, something like that...or, if you have a decent-sized house and/or living arrangements (plus, well, money) you can just say fuck it, everyone comes to our place and do everything there. That would, of course, mean that everyone has to be on good terms and get along with one another, which is sometimes easier said than done, but it is generally the easiest scenario if you have the space, the means, and the idealized local family.

Otherwise...well...alternate? I guess? You're both gonna have to make some compromises here and there for family gatherings or you'll likely run yourselves ragged and burn yourselves out. I only wish that all of our collected family members lived relatively close to us so that we could gather on the holidays for dinners and presents. If you have the ability to do so with your own families, compromise with your spouse and make it work; do everything you can to make it work and be mutually satisfying to both of you. These memories will last a lifetime and opportunities to have everyone in one place are few and far between as all of us get older and older, and as our elders begin dying off. You won't realize how important it is to you until you can't do it anymore.

06. How did you figure out the household chores?

Honestly? Sort of organically, really. It's basically based upon our skills, knowledge, desires, and quirks.

I lived alone for a long time where it was just me and the cats -- almost three years. In that time, I learned or otherwise taught myself how to do a lot of things that in marriages or cohabitations would generally be split between partners. I taught myself how to cook (somewhat), I did all my own laundry, I cleaned up after the cats, did my own yard work, worked on my own car, vacuumed, dusted, scrubbed down toilets and sinks, etc. I didn't have anyone else to do it for me or to help out with it, so I had to.

When Daisy and I first got together, I insisted on cooking a bunch of meals and insisted on cleaning a lot of things my way, taking care of the cats/cat pans my way, doing the dishes my way, etc -- because that was what I was used to. After a few months of being married, though, we organically began to share the workload of things around the house. Daisy is a far better cook than I am, so I let her do almost all of the meal planning and cooking. I do laundry far better and more quickly/efficiently than she does, so I have always handled that. I used to take care of the cat pans, but she asked to take them over -- she added three more pans to the household and changed the litter we use, and now most of the time they don't stink and our male cat doesn't pee on things outside the box because he's mad at the pans.

When we bought the house, I was originally the one who did most of the yard work. We began alternating more on that, and now it's Daisy who does about 70% of the yard work outside the house -- this shift happened when Daisy built the backyard garden. When it snows, most of the time I will attempt to shovel first, even if I don't want to, but we tend to alternate on that too, or do it together to save time and energy. Daisy used to do/took over all of the dishes and loading/running/unloading the dishwasher, but these days it's recently become something I do more often than she does. I do the dishes almost exclusively during the week now, since I can do it in the overnight while working/while Daisy sleeps.

I still handle all of the mail, keep all of the finances in check (see above), and do everything I can to keep the household stocked in supplies and groceries we both use. Daisy does get a good bit of groceries on her own, but it's usually from places like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and Natural Grocers, and that stuff is usually specialty stuff for her or for meals she plans to cook. I, in turn, do the bulk orders of household supplies and other foods (including about 90% of the cats' supplies) from places like Amazon and Walmart.com.

Daisy almost always takes it upon herself to clean the bathrooms and to clean/organize the kitchen, though I have been known to scrub down toilets and sinks from time to time as well, and have cleaned/reorganized the kitchen on numerous occasions over the past few years.

These are just examples. I suggest that you come to an understanding or mutual agreement on chores and responsibilities one way or another. It can happen organically and with a fluidity like it does for Daisy and myself, or you can both sit down with lists, draw straws, pick chores from a hat, etc. The main thing is that you need to find a balance of sorts and split things evenly. If one spouse or the other does consistently more than they should be doing, it's going to breed resentment and bad vibes.

07. What kind of boundaries protect your marriage?

Daisy and I have some spoken boundaries and some unwritten ones, and for the most part they're pretty obvious ones. No infidelity or physical violence of any sort are quite obviously the big ones. No screaming. No putting ourselves in toxic situations, or into toxic friendships with toxic people -- in fact, we don't really have people we'd call "close friends" that she and I don't equally share. Daisy and I both have people in our lives that we've known and have been close with for 20+ years, but of that small number of people that we see and/or interact with on a fairly frequent basis, none of them are solely my friend or solely her friend -- when Daisy and I married, his and hers became ours. That doesn't mean we share all friends, but the most important ones are definitely shared friendships that we both invest time and emotional energy into. There's also a secondary rule/boundary here though -- we don't get involved in other peoples' fighting or petty drama or what have you as it's not worth our time and it does nothing to serve us.

Along those lines, another boundary is that nobody gets more time or energy from me than her, and she gets more time and energy from me than anyone or anything else in my life. This is a big one. We can have some separate friends or acquaintances or hobbies, yes, but nothing is more important than time spent with one another. Time is very important in our relationship, both the concept of it as well as closeness/bonding/intimate time together.

Another boundary/rule we have is that -- not that we don't trust one another, but for peace of mind's sake -- there is never a time where she doesn't know where I am and what I'm doing, and there's almost never a time where I don't know where she is and what she's doing. It's a scary world out there, and while we're both safe and cautious in it, we also tend to do most things together. When we don't -- such as when she goes out for drinks with her work folks on Friday nights or what have you -- she always checks in with me to let me know she's safe and okay. That sort of reassurance goes a long way. If I ever left the house or had actual interpersonal friendships outside of my computer screen, I'd do the same for her, of course.

Daisy and I also have a rule that if we're in an argument and either she or I needs to walk away to cool off before the relationship is damaged and come back when cooler heads prevail, we get to do that. I have to tell you that I am very bad at keeping this boundary, because when I'm heated it almost feels like a complete cop out for her to be able to pull the "I'm walking away now" card, and I absolutely do not like it, but I am working on it. We also have the rule/boundary that we don't say anything out of hate or spite or with the intention of hurting the other person, even if/when we're at our angriest point in a fight.

Things like this I think are good examples for relationship boundaries, but this is but a baseline framework. It's up to you as a couple and you two alone on how to set and apply boundaries. Some people have open relationships, some people don't need or want to know where their partner is at all times and couldn't care less as long as they come home at night, some people don't have any "rules" whatsoever when they fight, and to some people marriage is just a piece of paper that you both sign that allows you to file joint taxes and get joint health and life insurance. But, I will stress, it is very important that before you get married, both of you work together to set some hard-set boundaries and red flags, because once you're married...like it or not, you're stuck with that person and all of their flaws as well as their strengths. While I didn't have one myself, I am a proponent of the "long engagement" and of cohabitation before marriage. You will never get to know the ins and outs of someone if you don't live with them first and if you don't have an engagement period of at least a year or so.

I do have an example of a boundary in our marriage that I wanted to put into place, but Daisy wouldn't allow it -- and that is the use of the "hard no." I've asked Daisy before -- begged her at times, in fact -- to allow its implementation on both sides of the coin. The "hard no" is a simple rule, and either of us would get to use it, if only as a nuclear option -- if one of us wants something or wants to do something or get something or go somewhere or etc etc, it doesn't matter, and if the other is vehemently opposed to it, they get to utilize the "hard no" and there's just no more discussion on it after that point, it doesn't happen, full stop, period, it doesn't ever get brought up as a possibility again, the end.

In the entirety of our almost eight-year marriage, I can only think of about three times offhand I would've ever thought about using the "hard no" to end a discussion or a fight. It's not like it would be an everyday thing.

Mind you, I didn't just want this power for myself -- I wanted Daisy to have it too. She wouldn't allow it, stating something along the lines of "why would I ever want to deny you something that's important to you?" Which to me is not a great argument, because I believe in any relationship -- not just marriages, but friendships, at jobs, etc -- you should be able to draw a proverbial line in the sand at any time that doesn't get crossed, that lets people know that this is your stopping point. Anyone should be able to do this. It is the definition of a boundary. It doesn't matter what your reasoning is. There are just some things you should be able to stand up for yourself on and say that you will never do or you will never allow to happen.

I guess that brings me to the final boundary I'd suggest you set up in any relationship before marriage -- you still get to be your own person. Within reason, of course. Yes, a marriage is a partnership and what you do in life reflects on your partner once you're married. But that doesn't mean you get to give up your freedoms or change who you are just because you took some vows. Don't say no to everything, but also don't say yes to everything. Set the boundary for yourself that you're going to be who you are, and make sure your partner knows that as well -- if they can't accept you for the real you and for the person you really are, they are not someone you should be marrying. If your partner is a smoker and you hate smoking, you either accept it or you move on. If you're a vegetarian or vegan and your partner is an unabashed carnivore and hates vegetarians and vegans, it might be time to move on. If you're intelligent and your partner is a Republican and/or Trump supporter, it is definitely time to move on. Don't go into a relationship or a marriage thinking you're going to be able to change someone or "fix" them, or that one day they'll have an epiphany and will decide to see things from your point of view. You've probably heard this before, but people only change things about themselves if they actually want to. You have to be able to accept one another without judgment if you want a relationship to work. The previous examples I've made are common ones for the most part, but some more serious ones include extreme differences in religious beliefs or political/social ideologies, and more minor ones even come down to taste in music, movies, or pop culture as a whole. When you hear a cause of divorce as being "irreconcilable differences," this is why. Don't go into a marriage without that acceptance. 

So yeah, there you have it -- there's my thoughts on relationships and marriage. I will tell you, I am not a perfect husband or person. I am, in fact, far from it, and I don't believe anyone can ever achieve true perfection. Everyone has flaws and foibles, pitfalls and perils to navigate. I feel that I am a better husband than most, and I feel that Daisy is the best wife I could've ever asked for. If there's nothing you take from this post (other than the "pick your battles" section above) understand that everything in a marriage is a learning experience. You will make mistakes. We all do. But you learn from them, and then you move on. If you don't learn, if you don't apply your gained knowledge, your marriage is destined to fail.

Don't take what I say as gospel, though -- what works for us may not work for you, and vice versa.

Birthday Thirty-nine: "I shaved my arm for this?"

 

Today, I turn 39.

 

As I write this, I technically turned 39 two minutes ago, at 6:22 PM eastern time.  

 

I will say that yes, I accomplished my primary goal this year -- I did indeed get a new tattoo for my birthday, in the exact style I wanted, in the exact place I wanted, for much less than I expected to pay. So, with that large revelation out of the way, let's tell the story of how we got to that point, as well as the time and the effort it took to get there. To do that, I also have to start the story, roughly, on Saturday night in the overnight hours.

On Saturday night, I was not in a good mental headspace. I was intensely frustrated with a number of things, and then wrote a large amount about those things in my December post before paring it down and eventually deleting almost all of it. I have not been sleeping well in any sense of the term; my hopes even now are that I can get some good rest in the overnight tonight/into the morning and daytime hours tomorrow and "reset" myself. I do have to work the next two nights, after all. They'll either be horrible or they'll be dead silent. Judging from my inbox, things are cooling down quite a bit as we inch closer to the holidays.

 

But I digress. I was not in a great mood on Saturday night; my mood was downright foul. I felt as if everything was starting to fall apart, not just everything surrounding the holidays but everything surrounding my mental state. This year has been hard, this month has been hard, and I just needed some things to start going well, some things to start going right, before I lost my mind.

 

Thankfully, some puzzle pieces began to slowly fall into place, and when I woke up yesterday morning, I had a much better, more laid-back outlook on life. Sunday, in fact, allowed me to get a lot accomplished, and allowed me to feel a lot better about everything going on in the lead-up to the holidays. Breathing space, I guess. Allowing me to accomplish most of my goals on Sunday led me to be able to accomplish most of my goals today. I wrapped all of Daisy's presents -- the ones that are here already, anyhow, as the final four arrive tomorrow. I got some PS4 time in. I spent some quality time with the wife. She went and picked up Chinese food for us from our favorite place, and we had a nice lunch together (I still have a fair amount of leftover lo mein, in fact). I got some decompression time in on my computer here with a nice, leisurely strategy game. We ended the night by going to Home Goods (at like 9pm, when they close at 11) to pick up a few small gifts for the parents for Christmas. I was even successful in getting a couple of bars of fancy soap and some seasonal snacks for me. I even did a grocery delivery order, in which I was finally able to get some Quorn Meatless Pieces (they've been out of them for months). The biggest bonus of Sunday was that Daisy confirmed with me that yes, she had begun ordering Christmas presents, and that they'd begin arriving Tuesday-ish.

With the stars coming into alignment a bit more (so to speak), it was time to plan what we'd actually be doing on my birthday this year. I had a list of things I wanted to accomplish, which I gave the rundown of in this month's main post...but you haven't seen that yet, so I'll make a revised list here to share, and then we'll dive into it.

1. get my next tattoo

2. see Spider-Man: No Way Home

3. see Daisy's parents, if possible

4. talk to my own parents

5. do something fancy-ish for dinner

6. possibly do any last-minute Christmas shopping still necessary, with Daisy

7. finally take the "Santa" pictures with my hat on so I can shave off the beard

8. hit up the vape shop for more of my raspberry juice (I had a birthday coupon)

 

Etc. These were the main goals, and I knew before I even started the day that I would not be able to accomplish all of them. Which, I mean, it's fine -- it is what it is. There's only so many hours in the day, and I'm only one person with finite energy.  So I'll start with the things I did not get to do, and why I couldn't, before we get into what I actually did.

I didn't get to take the Santa photos. That was, unfortunately, one of the things that fell to the wayside today, as I just didn't have the time or energy for them with everything else that was going on. We didn't do any other last-minute Christmas shopping, either -- there was also no real time or energy for that. We were mostly mission-focused for the day.

Unfortunately, we did not get to see Spider-Man: No Way Home, either. Most showings over the weekend in the area were either completely sold out, or almost sold out, and because of the tattoo timing today, although theaters were a ghost town on a Monday morning/afternoon, there's no way we could've committed to a time and pre-booked tickets before leaving the house without knowing how long it would take to get my tattoo done, if I'd need to do an appointment setup or have a first-come, first-serve thing. 

Everything else, surprisingly, I did get to do. But there was a long road to that, so buckle in, this will be a story with a lot of twists.

I found out, on Saturday, that the shop I normally go to (I say "normally" but I've only been there once before, for the Starfleet tattoo two years ago) was closed on Mondays. Today is Monday. It's my birthday. I have the day off and it's the only day that I could get the tattoo done. Getting it done on my birthday is important to me. It's a tradition I started in 2019, couldn't do in 2020 because of Covid, and I knew that even this year it would be, ahem, a bit hairy to get it done somewhere because Covid is still a thing that we had to worry about. Many shops have gone appointment-only, many operate on reduced hours, and almost every shop I've ever seen requires everyone to wear masks for every second you're inside them, even now. With 24 hours' notice, it was unlikely I was going to be able to get an appointment set up for Monday morning or afternoon. I shot an email off and requested some information/if a Monday appointment would be possible for the shop down the street (where Daisy got at least one, maybe both of her tattoos many years ago) and never got a response. I talked to one of our close friends (and one of my current colleagues at work), and she tossed out a few recommendations for different shops in the area -- she is covered in tattoos of her own, and her husband has worked as a piercer at several shops around town, so she knows the "scene" -- I trust her judgment and recommendations far more than I would anyone else I know, honestly. 

 

I called a shop across town, who said that they were appointment-only and were all booked up for Monday, but they'd had a few folks drop out of their Sunday afternoon appointments, so if I had the time I could stop by and they could discuss it with me, see if they could fit me in, etc. At the time, that would have been a really strong maybe and I told them I couldn't commit to being able to do that -- Daisy was currently out picking up the Chinese food, and I'd had the grocery delivery scheduled for the 4pm-5pm hour -- the shop closed at 5. Daisy also wanted to do the Home Goods run too.

 

After eating the Chinese food and digesting a bit, it was well after 2pm. There was simply no way we'd have enough time to go get a tattoo consultation and the work done, if possible, before the groceries got here and before the shop would close. I felt bad about that, especially as those guys seemed cool as hell on the phone, but for that shop at least, it would have to be a no.

 

I came back upstairs and looked into the other shop our friend had recommended. It was a few miles away, and Daisy said she'd been there at least once before -- not to get work done on herself, mind you, but with one or more friends. So, I gave them a ring. They confirmed that yes, they were open at noon on Monday -- 12p-8p hours, were walk-in only (first-come, first-served) and that they were a cash-only business. I thanked them, told them I'd likely be there bright and early on Monday when they opened up shop, and hung up. So...we had a plan.

 

As an aside -- is there some law prohibiting tattoo shops from being anything but cash only? Do you have any idea how much more ink I'd have if I could put it on my Discover card? Tattoo shops may be the last "cash only" business model left in the world, or at least in this area anyway. Is it because debt collectors can't repossess tattoos, or something? Surely there's some reason for it.

 

Edit: I guess it's because artists can set their own prices, and so if someone with regrets after the work is done decides to dispute payment, they can't do that. Stuff along those lines. Which is fair.

 

Anyway.

 

With that out of the way, we began formulating our plans for the day. I told Daisy I was pretty open to whatever she wanted and how she would be willing to do it -- outside of the time frame for the tattoo, of course. She, in turn, told me she was pretty go-with-the-flow and that it was really up to me. My only real request of her was that she didn't drink caffeine in the afternoon or evening hours so that she could get some decent sleep on a reasonable timeframe, because I wanted to be waiting in that parking lot when the tattoo shop opened.

 

Sunday night, as the clock hit midnight, she ran into my office and loudly sang the happy birthday song to me, which I thought was adorable. I actually ended up going to bed -- yes, to the bedroom, where I was able to wrap up in my new plush blanket I purchased on deep discount from Macy's last week -- before her, and passed the fuck out. All I remember is being vaguely aware that she'd come to bed when she had, and that the cats were sleeping with us. 

When I awoke, it was still very dark, and it was around 6am. I had to use the bathroom (a few times, in fact; apparently adding high-sodium Chinese food to my diet the day before, even as a treat, wasn't the greatest idea I'd had in recent months) and I was just...awake. I read several comics, I played a little on my phone and on my computer, and saw that my mother had texted me happy birthday and said she had a job interview at noon. So, I called my parents and talked to both of them for some time. I gave them the rough rundown of our plans for the day as well as asked them the fateful question of "when I shipped your Christmas gift to you, did it come in its own box with a label smacked on it, or did it come in the shipping box?" My mother confirmed that yes, it had shipped in its own box with zero discretion and zero surprise whatsoever as to what it was -- a Sodastream Terra machine. I told them both about what it was and how it operates, and what you can do with it, what flavors you can add to it, etc. My dad also explained how my Christmas gift -- an expensive, fancy safety razor -- was the gift he'd gotten for all the men of the family this year.

I also told them about the plans for the tattoo, which they didn't exactly seem surprised by (they were somewhat surprised by the Starfleet tattoo idea, but at the time to them it was a novelty because I'd never gotten a tattoo before). During that conversation with my dad, I mentioned that it would take a decent amount of time to prepare, because I'd have to shave my forearm first -- tattoo artists can't really draw through hair, and I have hairy appendages. 

"I hope I don't take all this time and planning, shaving my arm and the like, to get in there and have them tell me they're full up for the day," I said. "That's why I want to get there early and be waiting when they open up."

"Yeah," my dad said, "you don't want to be like, I shaved my arm for this?"

 

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen -- the title of this post. 

 

I heard the bed/floors creak, signifying that Daisy was waking up. Daisy came into my office a short while later to proclaim that our oldest, most feeble cat had apparently pissed a puddle into the carpet/floor behind her computer chair in her office, six feet from the litter box. Daisy was not happy. I would not have been happy either. The cat is old, and she is very loving, but she isn't all there anymore -- and she is getting a little worse every year. She has a lot of trouble getting around and in/out of the boxes, getting on and off the couches, etc. I told Daisy we could stop at the pet supply store while we were out to get a gallon jug of the cleaner we use to get rid of those smells and stains. 

"Have you eaten anything?" she asked. "You really want to eat something before you get a tattoo, especially knowing how you are with needles."

Now, mind you, I had not eaten anything, but needles only really bother me when they're taking blood out of me, not at any other time. I've had three Covid shots and a flu shot over the course of this past year, and not a single one of them bothered me. I'm not all Bravo Six, going dark over a tattoo, especially not since I've already had a tattoo and knew what to expect about it and from the experience. But, it was my birthday, and she wanted to cook breakfast. Daisy made us (vegan) scrambled egg sandwiches with (vegan) bacon. Well, she made the bacon and eggs. I added them to super-low-carb bread and added real cheese to them to make sandwiches.

While she was waking up and getting the food ready, I absconded to the bathroom, where I popped a new cartridge into my Mach3 razor and meticulously shaved my entire forearm wrist to elbow, all the way around, using my sensitive skin shave gel. I have hairy arms. It took multiple passes, multiple minutes, just to get all of the hair off to give the tattoo artist a clean, open area with which to work his/her magic. I wouldn't need the entire arm shaved, of course, but I did it anyway. What if I changed my mind on the placement? What if I needed a larger area? Screw it, might as well just do it. 

 

I knew the tattoo design I wanted would be large -- 3-4x the size of the Starfleet tattoo, and it would need some space and fresh skin. I also jumped into the shower to rinse off all the excess hair and shave gel cream and to get cleaned up for the day. Once I had showered, I put a thin layer of Hustle Butter on the shaven skin and rubbed it in -- that stuff is like a miracle cream, and is well worth the $20 I spent on it two years ago. It makes the skin so soft, so moisturized. It's mostly a post-tattoo treatment and moisturizer, but I wanted to prep the skin, because apparently if you do, the pain is lessened -- or so people say. While the Starfleet tattoo didn't really hurt much at all (it did in a few places, for brief moments), I knew today's tattoo was going to be bigger, wider, longer, and hopefully contain a few colors in it. It was also going to be in a different spot on the opposite arm, so that alone was going to make it more difficult and possibly far more painful than the last one. Once I was satisfied and the, ahem, butter was absorbed into my arm, we got ready to head out.

There were two things we had to do before we could head to the tattoo shop -- we had to get gas in the car, which was almost empty, and we had to actually stop at our bank to, y'know, get the cash for the tattoo. 

I had no idea how much my tattoo idea would cost. I knew that line art, if I wanted to leave it black and white with a little shading, would likely start around $100 and only go up from there. If I could add color to it? I was likely looking at three bills or more. I'd just gotten paid on Friday, all of my bills are covered until sometime in January, if not early February, and Daisy gets paid on Wednesday. I also get paid again on New Year's Eve...so, I had a little wiggle room, and some monetary flexibility to work with. 

We took out $400 and deposited an insurance refund check of $90-something at the same time. We figured this was likely more than we needed; I was absolutely not planning to give the go-ahead on a $400 high-detail tattoo just because I wanted one on my arm, but it would be enough to get some semblance of what I wanted, and would likely leave us with some cash left over to get some food someplace or what have you. 

 

"Maybe I'll get another tattoo too," Daisy mused. 

 

"It's walk-ins 12-8," I told her. "We'll already be there and it's not like we have anything to do or anywhere else pressing to be. If you want to get something new, I'm all for it, baby."

 

This was and is true; Daisy has not gotten a new tattoo since before we got together. Like, a few years before we got together. In 2022, we'll celebrate ten years together, so...it's been a while. She has two small tattoos -- one on her left wrist, and a small landscape at the base of her neck on her back, between her shoulder blades. 

Because of traffic -- which, for a Monday at 11am, during the week of Christmas, was excessive -- we arrived at the shop at like, 12:01. They hadn't unlocked the doors yet. I waited until they unlocked the doors and switched on their "open" light before we went inside.

I've been in a few tattoos shops over the years, so I sort of know what to expect to an extent. I have seen shops that were very barebones and shops that were decked out with all sorts of art and merch and the like. This place was pretty square in the middle. Lots of art on the walls, but not an excessive amount, no real merch to speak of, no snotty staff. It was very clear that the location had once been a hair salon at some point, just due to the interior construction and the placement of mirrors. It was also in a strange location -- in a little strip-mall area a few miles from the house -- so nobody would ever really suspect it was there unless you were a repeat patron or knew the scene/industry in Omaha. In my experience and my knowledge of friends' tattoos and their experiences over the years, tattoo houses like this were usually pretentiousness-free and no-bones-about-it, these folks were in it for the fun and the art and not the "scene" or reputation. They also tend to produce some of the best work.

We were greeted by the guy I had been on the phone with the day before, who was kind and helpful. "What can we do for you today?"

"Yes, I'd like one of your finest tattoos, please," I said with a grin, which could not be seen under the mask I was wearing. That was another big thing -- anyone who entered the shop needed to be masked, no exceptions. They were hardcore about this.

I told the front desk guy about my ideas and showed him my design, which was this:

And there you have it, folks -- you get to see the genesis of the new tattoo for the first time.

"Oh, that's pretty line art," he said. "Lemme take this back to our guys and he'll come out and consult with you here in a few moments."

"Sure," I said.

There were three guys on staff in the shop, including that front desk guy; all of them were artists (I would later find this out by doing a deep dive on their website in the evening hours when I started writing here). The front desk guy has some amazing work posted out there on the web, and while we were there I learned one of the two other guys (not the one who did my tattoo) had been working there and tattooing for twenty-one years, through two different iterations of the shop -- apparently recently they'd done some remodeling. 

The artist who came out to consult with me, and who would eventually be the one doing my tattoo, was named Tony. Tony cheerfully and actually excitedly looked at the design and was like "I can do this; how do you want to do it? Just the line art? small or large? Colors?"

"Well," I said, "I'd like it to take up a good chunk of my forearm, so I'd like it to be fairly large," I said. "Color is going to depend on what the pricing scale is for it, but I mean, if possible/affordable, I'd like the roses to be red and the vines/leaves green."

Tony looked over the design from a few angles, zooming in and out on it a few times on my phone, and then air-dropped it to his own phone since he also had an iPhone (woooo, iPhone users unite!). 

"Well, the line art would be quick, I'd say less than an hour, about $100 or so. Color and shading will make the time and cost go up considerably."

Ah, there it was, I knew it. I braced for the number.

"I'd say to add the colors to it, we're probably looking at around $200, roughly."

"Sold," I said. "I'll absolutely pay $200 for full color."

"Alrighty!" Tony said. "Let's get this printed up for stencil and we'll get started here in a few minutes."

With the photo template air-dropped to his phone, he went to the back to the printer in order to get the design printed up and onto the stencil paper/ditto paper, whatever it is they use to superimpose the tattoo design onto your skin to trace it. It's pretty neat technology. During that time, I took this photo and sent it to a good chunk of my friends and family:

Yeah, I'm a nerd like that. And yes, those glasses really ARE that big. Purposely.

So, anyway, he came back with a printout that was....way too large for my arm. Don't get me wrong, I totally would've done it that large, but it absolutely would have been a $400 tattoo if I had. Instead, I told him a little smaller, and he came back with a much more reasonably-sized one. I agreed to it, he printed up the stencil, and began mixing the ink.

I watched as he pulled out five different ink colors, which I found intensely interesting. There was the black, of course, for the actual lines/design, but in addition to the bright red and green for the petals and leaves/stem, I saw him do up a little vial of brown and a little vial of white. This intrigued me, but I wasn't really concerned or anything. The artist is the artist, and I wasn't about to argue with his artistic license or what colors he chose as long as it looked somewhat like what I expected it to look like in my head. 

 

Little did I know at the time how spot on he'd be with that when all was said and done.

Anyway, once he'd gotten everything done up correctly and his tattoo needle machine USB charged, because what a glorious future we live in -- with multiple needle tips ready to go -- we got started. 

I will tell you that when I had the Starfleet tattoo done, it was on my left inner forearm, and it wasn't bad. I barely felt a lot of it. There was a little pain here and there on it, especially some of the shading in the center of the emblem, where there is apparently a nerve cluster riiiight beneath the skin there... but it wasn't overall painful at all, and I was in and out pretty quickly. I told my mother when she asked if it hurt that it felt like someone drawing on me with a vibrator with a knife attached to the end. That was a pretty accurate statement.

This experience was a little different. For one, I learned pretty quickly that Tony was a very detailed artist, and that he had a heavy needle hand. I didn't mind this at all -- it means thicker lines, better art, and a deeper color. But I did not anticipate that some of it would be quite painful. Not unbearably so, but as mentioned before, the art was being done on a different arm, and a different spot on said arm than my other tattoo. So there were sections of it -- especially the leaves at the bottom of the stem, that were holy shit levels of painful for a few minutes at a time. 

The actual line art took maybe forty minutes, max. I found that the brown ink was used to add a little shading/shadow to the leaves/stems to give them more definition and a sort of 3D quality, perspective, etc. This looked far better than the line art by itself, and I was impressed.

Sometime in between the line art being completed and the coloring being added, Daisy had decided that yes, she did want to get her own tattoo as well, impromptu. She asked Tony if he'd do it for her once he was done with mine.

 

"Oh, I suppose," he said, playfully.

 

Yeah, I liked this guy a lot. Really funny, really appreciative of our patronage, and seemed to be an all around good dude.

 

As for the coloring...

 

Hoo boy. 

 

Like, I knew the shading and addition of color would be painful in some spots, and places where colors were blended or where shadow effect was needed I figured that would hurt. In reality, those were the parts that didn't really hurt at all to get the coloring added. It was the solid coloring, such as the green on the leaves, that hurt like a bitch. I watched closely and for the addition of color, it wasn't just one needle that was being used -- it was a needle tip with four or five of them lined up horizontally very close to one another that injected the color, acting like a sharpie on my arm. The coloring took another 40 minutes or so, and a good chunk of those 40 minutes I was in some fair-to-middlin' pain. Again, not overwhelming, not excruciating, but a, say...6-7 on a scale of 10 in a very small, localized area for brief moments. 

"It's wild how some of it you barely feel," I said, "and then for some reason for some places, there's a nerve cluster close to the skin and it'll just scream at ya."

"Oh yeah," Tony said. "What's bad is if you hit one that sends that radiating pain all the way up your arm, and just aches at ya."

I didn't have that, thankfully. 

 

But, I did have a side effect that I hadn't really expected or really thought of that much -- I began to bleed. Like, not a lot, but some. Noticeably so. I also noticed that the bleeding was coming primarily from the more painful sections -- some of the leaves, one of the larger petals, etc. 

As the color and shading was added, the design and style took shape, and the more he worked on it, the more I absolutely loved it. Tony had put his own style into it, and it appears that his style is very much that classic, timeless Sailor Jerry sort of tattooing style -- a style of art that I adore. I've heard that described as sort of a "stained glass" look as well, and that's sort of accurate also. I had told Daisy beforehand that I hoped whoever did my tattoo would do it in said style, because I was a huge fan of it, and I found it immensely old school and classy.

"That's just beautiful," I told him.

"Ah, why thank you," he replied. "Just have to do some accenting/lighting with some white and we'll be all done."

Ah, so that's what the white was for. 

He spent some time, took it slowly, and outlined most of the larger petals and some of the leaves with thin, white accenting. I have really pale skin as it is, so I was afraid it wouldn't really show up well. But, the way he did it, it makes the design pop out even more and appear to shine. He also let my natural skin tone show through as natural highlighting and accenting as well on some of the petals. The effect, and the completed tattoo itself, was gorgeous.

"Okay," he said, "All done. Oh wow, that took less time than I thought. $180."

"Awesome," I replied. 

He wrapped my arm in several tight-ish layers of plastic wrap to help protect the tattoo, and I guess to make sure nothing would get in it. 

 

"Some shops bandage it up," he said, "but when people get a tattoo they want to be able to show it off, you know?" 

 

I was instructed to keep it covered for at least an hour, though 3-4 hours was likely best, and to wash it/apply antibiotic ointment on it a few times a day. Washing should only be done with soap and hand, no scrubbing, etc. I knew Daisy had triple antibiotic cream at home, and I also knew I had my trusty Aquaphor and Hustle Butter. Later in the day, I would also purchase a few tubes of bacitracin zinc/antibiotic ointment as well, just to make sure we had some extra in the house.

I slid my coat on, gave Daisy $200 in cash out of my wallet so she could pay him for mine if he wanted that before he started on hers, and went outside to vape.

The arm ached; it hurt as if someone had beaten me there for hours on end. It was sore and tender and hot to the touch. But, it did not burn or tingle or feel like there was some sort of nerve damage to it or anything like that -- my Starfleet tattoo burned for the rest of the day after it was done, and every once in a while it would twinge -- like I would feel a jangling nerve that felt like the needle was digging into my arm anew. That feeling hit once or twice a day for a week or two. I thankfully did not feel and have not felt that with this one.

What I did not know at the time was that I, uh, hadn't really stopped bleeding from the spots where I had bled some while the tattoo was being done. And with my jacket on, covering the arm and the plastic wrapping over the tattoo, I didn't notice. There was no padding, no bandage to soak it up or really stop it, so I slowly continued to bleed under the plastic, and the blood -- body temperature, of course -- didn't dry, it just sort of moved around under the plastic on my skin. I couldn't feel this; to me, it just felt like my arm had plastic on it. 

When I came back in after vaping, Tony was prepping Daisy's tattoo and the stenciling for it -- she wanted three stars on her outer wrist, with a swirl of blue-green fade to look like a galaxy inside. Stars have meaning to Daisy; it's part of a secret inside code thing she has with her sister (the Canadian one) and, additionally, we're all made of stardust -- just like the famous Carl Sagan quote. I did not recall until later (though I did know it) that it was a grand coincidence that she got a stars/stardust tattoo on my birthday, which is also the day Carl Sagan died -- he died December 20, 1996, 25 years ago today. 

Daisy's tattoo was fast -- he had it done in maybe 25 minutes at the most. 

"$60," Tony said. 

Daisy's tattoo was very pretty and super simple, but sometimes those are the most elegant ones. I really like it a lot. 

With $180 for mine and $60 for Daisy's, that came to a total of $240 just for the work. I wanted to tip him well, especially since he decided to do Daisy's tattoo on a whim too, and because the work was gorgeous. I also fully expected before leaving the house that morning that I'd be paying something like $240 for the base price of mine alone, not even factoring in a second tattoo for my wife. 

We ended up giving him $300 or $310 total, I believe -- a $30 or $35 tip from each of us, which we thought was pretty fair. We had also watched a couple who'd come in to get tattoos from one of the other guys in the shop tip the artist $5 each on $150 of work, and we were like we're not going to be like those buttholes. 

 

Truthfully, I think Tony was shocked when he counted the money and saw how much we'd given him. As we were getting in the car, he ran out the door and personally thanked us, like a little kid. I think it absolutely made his day. At his personal workstation he had a few photos up of his family, and he had at least two or three kids. I glanced at them and hadn't really paid close attention, but Daisy had, and made a mental note of it when we were driving off. 

I always want to be a kind soul -- this dude did amazing work on both of us on a Monday, during the week of Christmas, when many other folks would be already checked out during the holidays. And he has kids. If I can do something to make his Christmas a little better and make his kids' Christmas a little better, I'm going to do so. This shop treated us with respect, these guys were all class acts, they had humor and talent without pretentiousness, and I will absolutely have them at the top of my list every year for future work. 

So I guess here's the part all of you have been waiting for throughout this whole post, right? Here's the finished work:

It's sort of difficult to get a great photo of it because it's legit right on top of my arm, and to put the camera over it directly creates a shadow which obscures it. 

Also note that these photos were taken almost as soon as I took the plastic off, before I was really able to clean it or moisturize it that well, so I hadn't had any ink leaching or skin peeling or minor scabbing yet. 

Needless to say, and I'll repeat it again here, I love it. I think it's beautiful. Sure, the colors will fade some over the years, and it'll blur here and there, and the hair on my arm will grow back over it, but yeah, this art is gorgeous. I have zero regrets. It is exactly what I wanted.

 

Now imagine if I'd had it done so large that it took up almost all of my forearm, like the first printout he tried. Yeah, again, definitely would have been a four-bill piece of work.

Now for Daisy's tattoo:

Blue is a gorgeous tattoo color. My next tattoo(s) will likely have blue in them. Daisy's stars came out really well, though she said that they were incredibly painful to have done -- far more than the other tattoos she has already. This surprised me, but they're also on the outer part of her forearm/wrist area, and that's where the leaves on mine were the most painful, so I believe it. Again, Tony has a heavy needle hand, and that's part of why I think both of them came out so well.

Also of note: I asked Daisy for her permission to post this photo, and she said it was fine. I also asked her if she wanted me to crop the photo so that it didn't show all of the cleavage for days that my fine wife sports while wearing that top. "Hell nah," she said, "YOU SHOW THAT SHIT OFF." And I was like "YES MA'AM."

So. Anyway.

Moving onward, there's a lot more of my birthday story to tell.

In the car, Daisy asked if I wanted to go see the parents to show them the tattoos. I emphatically said yes, as I knew the parents would want to see me on my birthday anyhow (even though we already had my birthday dinner and the like on Saturday) but because I also wanted to show off our new ink. 

Remember how I said that I had kept slowly bleeding, but didn't know?

Well, by the time I got to the parents' and was able to show them the tattoo, the slow bleed had basically begun to fill the plastic wrap around my arm, and it was allowing the wrap to move instead of stay in place. I had my jacket on, so it's not like I noticed, but believe me, when I rolled up my sleeve to show the parents, I noticed -- it was close to dripping out and soaking the inside of my jacket sleeve. It was not a lot of blood, but I mean, it was enough. It made the plastic and my arm somewhat uncomfortable. 

We socialized with the parents for a bit and showed off the art, before I told Daisy, quietly, that I was beginning to bleed through everything and needed to get home to remove the plastic and clean it all off, coat in Aquaphor, etc. She was exceedingly understanding and had the patience of a saint -- especially when I told her I had to, had to hit up the vape shop before we went home, bleeding or otherwise, because I was almost out of juice.

So, I did that -- used the birthday coupon code they sent me, in fact, to get something like 30% off my total -- and then came home to wash the blood off my arm. That's one of the strangest sentences I've written in a while.

I very carefully washed it and applied some Aquaphor to seal it and keep the moisture in the skin. I don't know how many of you have tattoos, but it is a process to keep them clean and moisturized for the first week or two after you get a new one. You're supposed to be washing it with gentle soap and hand (nothing else) 3-4 times a day, applying moisturizer or balm afterwards to seal it -- like I mentioned above. You're also not supposed to wear any tight or form-fitting clothing over it that doesn't let the tattoo breathe, and you can't scratch it or pick at it or anything like that no matter how much it itches. Well, for those of us who have normal lives and/or get tattoos in the winter months when your skin is already prone to dryness and the like, that is sometimes really hard. 

 

Look, I know it's going to fade and go dull and lose some color and detail over the years, especially once the hair I shaved off grows back out under (and through) it. I'm okay with this. I can live with it, because that's what tattoos do. But I really don't want to damage it before everything sets and fully heals (usually about a week or two, but can be up to a month or two). 

After I took care of that, we wound down for a bit before I told Daisy if she wanted to get pizza, we could. We had a coupon for a free large three-topping from our favorite local place, and I figured we could order some cheese bread and tip them really well too, since we're nearing Christmas. I also told Daisy if she wasn't feelin' it tonight, or otherwise didn't want to, we didn't have to -- I could wait on pizza, I didn't need anything else if she wasn't into it -- I'd had a nearly perfect birthday. 

She did end up wanting to get the pizza, so we did -- a large pizza with vegan cheese, whole roasted garlic cloves, artichokes, and vegan sausage. Their vegan sausage is great -- I don't know who their supplier is, or if they make it in-house, but holy shit that is some good food.

And so ended what was really, really a pretty perfect birthday. I've had good birthdays over the years, and I've had some pretty terrible ones. It depends on the year and my mental state, really. Daisy has been amazing in recent years in doing everything she can to make my birthdays special, and this year was no exception. 

So, 39. One year short of forty. I have so much to accomplish in the last year of my thirties on this planet.

Let's see what I can do.