Anyway, some shit has been bothering me, and I have NO other output for it (since, try as I might, I can't seem to write a poem about it) I decided to let the "journal" function of LiveJournal take front stage for a brief moment.
I am an emotional wreck.
Last night, reading in ANA's Friends list, somebody posted something about hugs ... how one needed 4 a day to survive, etc. etc. etc. ... as I posted there, I'm likely to get 4 hugs a MONTH (not counting ... which is not to discount ... hugs from my daughters, aged 5 and 1, but those are more "functional" ... i.e., they are hugging daddy not ME ... like the difference between "The President" and "Dubya"). This obviously hit a sore spot.
Then, this morning, The Wife went fucking BALLISTIC on me, wanting for us to get going to drive out to the suburbs (with the below mentioned rental car) to go to IKEA. Now, I had slipped into my office to do a quick check of my e-mail, and to print out some maps to figure out where the damn store was. Through a particular chain of events, I was on AOL (my regular ISP was busy contemplating its navel or something and couldn't find any of the sites I needed) and two associates of mine hooked up in IM conversations with me, BOTH having significant questions for two business ventures. So, there I am, TRYING to do a little bit of WORK and The Wife is tearing me a new asshole for not being in motion towards her little shopping expedition.
Then, when we finally get back home tonight, I try to get back on the computer to get my e-mail (I registered two new domains last night for a project, and I need to set them up as re-driects ... but hadn't gotten the "welcome letter" from the service to let me know how to go about this ... and I have been, understandably, wanting to get that moving) and she AGAIN blows up, demanding that I come out and play with Daughter #1 ...
Now, I dearly love Daughter #1, but we had just spent all day together, taking her to her all-time favorite restaurant (The Rainforest Cafe), and indulging her in all sorts of stuff ... so she should have been able to do without daddy for a half hour or so while I checked to see if this info I needed had come in! Unfortunately, The Wife, for all practical intents and purposes, hates Daughter #1 for being too much like me (or, in her worse behavior, like my mom), and is even more unreasonable with her than she is with me ... and tonight she just didn't want to deal with being mommy.
Now, I realize that it sounds like I'm blithering here ... but I'm 100% sure that sometime tomorrow The Wife is going to launch into me about "WHY DIDN'T YOU GET ANY OF THIS STUFF DONE OVER THE WEEKEND???" Like I'd been lounging in front of the TV 24/7 instead of exhausting myself running around trying to comply with her agendas.
And, then it hit me ... folks had wondered why The Wife and I got married (aside from some strange attractions of two moody loners), and suddenly I realized that HERE was a woman that was every bit as blindly self-centered as my mother ... a woman who could not care LESS what other people needed, as long as her neurotic obsessions were getting top billing ... a woman who only had a family because it fit her preconceived notions of what she should have, never mind what she did or didn't feel for the PEOPLE that comprised that family ... in short, here was my MOM all over again, in the emotional deadness (except for the tantrum when she's not getting her way), the disregard of everybody else's problems, the ability to completely shut out consensual reality if it is conflicting with her neuroses!
Damn (and don't even get me started about her damn anti-depression drug merry-go-round).
Anyway, where I was going with this ... from the "hug" thing ... is that I'm feeling pretty pitifully sorry for myself at the moment since I have (again, not counting the kids ... and it's not fair to lean on them!) ABSOLUTELY ZERO EMOTIONAL SUPPORT in this world ... but looking back, I have NEVER had any emotional support ... NEVER had that postive human contact ... but it is hard as hell when the very people that one would HOPE would be providing emotional support are the ones twisting things tighter and tighter (I've spared you the rant on the shit my Mom's been pulling recently ... just leave it to say that she ALSO seems to think I spend 24/7 popping bon-bons into my mouth and waiting for non-reality-based projects to get dumped into my lap).
Of course, to top things off ... I don't have any friends other than the on-line variety.
There was a time when I had TONS of friends, used to hang out and have people hang out with me. Well, those are one of the things that just seemed to be an "acceptable casualty" of marriage ... but it did seem strange when I was thinking that except for a couple of visits from her relatives ... we had not had ANYBODY set foot in our place in over five years! One by one (and sometimes in whole bunches) The Wife made it impossible for me to continue long-term friendships ... so now I don't even have the low-level emotional support that friends would provide.
All this is to-the-point these days as I am under HIDEOUS amounts of stress, with the destruction of Eschaton, the up-hill battle I've had with RSI (you try network marketing with severly damaged "people skills"!), hell, even the projects that I'm working on with Telepathic Media and the Libertarian Party of Chicago ... ALL of these, of course, on top of my efforts to "find a job", being now in my 86th month with no paycheck ("do what you love and the money will follow" is the biggest fucking lie anybody has ever uttered)! If I could find a way to work 72 hours in each 24 hours day, I could very easily fill the time and STILL not be 100% caught up ... but those who one would expect to be providing SUPPORT to my efforts, are the ones working the hardest to make my life a living hell. I mean, I can keep going on 3 hours of sleep a night ... really, I can ... but my EMOTIONAL tank is EMPTY ... I'm coming to the point where I just can't fucking CARE about anything. I was even thinking of writing a nice note to both of my daughters tonight telling them how much I loved them and how it would be perfectly OK by me if they blamed my death on their mother ... and then stay up working all night (since I bloody well haven't been able to get a fucking thing done all weekend!) and run the rental car under a truck on the way to take it back to O'Hare tomorrow. Sounds like a plan. Hell ... we've upgraded the damn life insurance! Then The Wife would be able to organize things to her liking ... she could kill the fish, kill the birds, send Daughter #1 off to boarding school ... and have endless fun destroying my library, record collection, and all the other things that are trappings of ME ... while she and my mom fought over who REALLY pushed me over the edge!
Bleh. It sucks being me.