Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Really Bad Day

I always liked this book when I was a kid, and it was kind of odd realizing this morning I hadn't read it in about thirty years.

Perhaps I should, because after how yesterday went, it might lend me some good perspective...

...or get me looking into how to immigrate to Australia, whichever comes first.

Because I live in a world where being completely open about such things is still considered an absolute no-no as it might alarm people into some form of action and/or reaction, I'll put this as succinctly as I can.

Yesterday sucked. A lot. So much so that the fact I'm even sitting here typing this out is not something that was guaranteed by this time yesterday.

It sucked because it was one of those really, really bad days where my mind goes to the places I try to keep it from going to, and it decides it's the perfect place to set up camp.

When I got up yesterday morning, I didn't feel quite right to begin with. I'd gotten some decent sleep, but as is my custom, didn't feel like I got any actual rest. Aware but undeterred, I ate breakfast, took a long hot shower and just tried to take care of myself. No real pushing. No forcing the issue. Just do what I've always done. Ride it out with the understanding that it's just temporary and I'll be okay.

Except by mid-afternoon, I wasn't okay. I was anything but okay.

I knew this wasn't just going to be an "ordinary" sort of bad day when I was trying to get more work done on my novel. Considering I don't have many more chapters to go, there is a definite feeling of excitement and accomplishment that is attached to each new page I finish. However, as is often the case in creating a story, I discovered I had a loose thread in an earlier chapter I needed to tend to first, so I can continue with the direction I was heading in later on.

I'd bet if you asked any reputable writer how many times they'd had to deal with this, virtually all of them would admit it's happened more than they can count. It's part of the deal, especially in a first draft when you're just throwing mental spitballs at a wall and hoping they stick well enough to make a relatively coherent picture.

But as I sat down and got to work, rereading the section of scene I needed to polish up, I came to a rather bothersome conclusion that I wasn't entirely sure of the motivations of my antagonist. And because this is a rather pivotal moment in the story, that is fairly alarming discovery to make. I racked my brain for about an hour trying to see if I could figure it out, but nothing seemed to fit right, and the big yellow snowball which had started rolling downhill when I woke up kept right on going and getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Now this is the point where I should probably inform those of weak constitutions or who possess the opinions that anyone dealing with a "mental illness" or such "imaginary flim-flam" is trying to garner sympathy to probably go back to watching reality TV or whatever it is you do to escape from actual reality.

The rest of my afternoon and evening consisted of me finding things to do that kept my mind focused on something, ANYTHING, other than seeking confirmations and justifications for why this world and everyone in it sucks so much that it doesn't warrant my being here any more.

Six continuous hours of trying to not engage in an argument with myself about how much I hate people, how they take for granted lives I would gladly detonate a sun to possess, why everything they do is right and everything I do is wrong and how pointless it is to try to convince them to care at all when the evidence is clear that they both can't and shouldn't, so why even bother putting up any more of a fight?

Sure I could've called someone, but what am I really going to say? "Hey, sorry to take you away from whatever life-affirming thing you're in the middle of at the moment, but I'm in the midst off a stage three mental nuclear meltdown. Can you spare a few minutes until I can isolate the problem and get the reactor back on-line?"

When I was younger and was in that boat, I did what most people do and called my family. The usual answer I got was, "Suck it up and deal and quit being so melodramatic about it."

If you've ever found yourself in that sort of a spot, I'm truly sorry. If you haven't, well...let's just say it's anything but a picnic.

At that point, I decided it was best to just unplug and take the rest of the day off. I shut off Facebook, stepped away from my novel, went out and treated myself to some sushi and played Skyrim until I was yawning so badly that I could barely stay awake. Figuring I'd be able to just collapse into bed and pass out thanks to the extra shot of Prozac I took at the height of my lowest, I actually was ready to fall asleep about three hours earlier than I usually do.

And I still didn't finally get there until after midnight.

Even though I didn't touch a drop of alcohol, which I would've probably been in the right to do under the circumstances, I woke up this morning feeling like I had a hell of a hangover. My head was pounding and I had a hard time seeing straight, but I know for a fact that one cannot get drunk on almond milk.

Today I'm feeling a little better, and given the nice weather outside, I'm going to utilize it later on for a workout before hopefully getting back into my book and finishing up what I need to get done.

And yes, I am looking into getting into see someone about this. As I am on the Washington State plan under the ACA, I can do so and talked to them about it at the end of last week, in fact. At which time, they told me I should expect a call back soon for available people to go talk to.

I'd like to say it's been a while since I've had a day like this, but it's not. They may not be as completely bad as this, but I do have them. A lot. For the record, I don't wake up every morning in the hopes that I'll have one on the docket for that day either. I'd much rather just have a "normal day" everyone else I know has of getting up, going to work, coming home or spending time with friends and family and knowing that the next day will be a repeat of that, instead.

 I don't think anyone should have to withstand with days like this...even in Australia.

Another Year Older

So I realized this morning that April is quickly on it's way out the door for another year, which means May is fast approaching, and with it...my birthday.

I honestly don't know when I stopped really enjoying the idea of turning a year older, but as my 37th approaches, I realize that it's probably been about ten years at least since I really felt like "celebrating" my coming into this world.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not the result of the stereotypical "Midlife Crisis" or fear of getting old either. I understood a long time ago that there's no way to stop the progression of life we all go through, and I made up my mind that I was not going to be like people I knew who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting they're not 21 anymore.

*Editorial Note - In fact, I remember waking up on my 30th birthday, rolling out of bed and feeling the same cracks and pops in my bones that I had the day before, so it was far from an Earth-shattering revelation that my 20's were now over.

This is where I was when I turned 36, choosing to run away and get lost for the whole week in a city I'd never seen before rather than stay home and try to find some arbitrary way to commemorate the occasion. But when it came time to actually acknowledge it, I didn't really do all that much other than treat myself to lunch in San Francisco's famous Chinatown (which ended up not being all that great, truth be told) and then going to a sleepy little dive not too far from where I was staying in San Jose called Singlebarrel and having a drink in a comfortable chair in a corner of the very dark space, drowning out the surrounding chatter and conversation with my iPod and scribbling down everything I was running from in my notebook.

Had I a job and the means to do so now, I probably would do the same thing and run away to somewhere else I haven't been to before, of which there are a great many places. Before I left last year, I posted a rather morose note to my friends telling them that I was, in a sense, doing them a favor by taking off and not having to go through the arbitrary paces of wishing me a "Happy Birthday," and for a while now, I've tried convincing them to treat it, (and I've told them this with absolute sincerity) as just another day and to really ignore it.

So why would I do that? Why marginalize, trivialize and disregard the fact that I made it through another year? As I sit here and rack my brain for an honest answer, this is what I've been able to come up with.

My continued existence isn't worth celebrating and even if it was, I honestly, truly, don't remember how.

Now I can already hear the comeback to that, "How could you possibly think such a thing?!" which is a perfectly valid question and also worth answering.

The answer is that looking at my life and what it is now from standing in the middle of it reinforces that opinion a little more everyday. I'm unemployed and frantically looking for a job wherever I can find one with next to no success. I'm single with absolutely no interest in dating or finding a girlfriend because my divorce and everything that came after eradicated my instincts and ability to trust either what I feel or the intentions whoever I might be interested in. I'm an absentee father to a brilliant little boy who is everything that I was at his age and I'm desperate not to corrupt him in the same way I was by my parents and the life of growing up in a broken family.

My days are spent grappling with extreme self-doubt and a total lack of both self-confidence and self-worth and even on the one when I go to sleep feeling good about myself, there's those inevitable swings back the other way and I consider my entire life to this point to have been completely and utterly wasted.

Now if I had a surging career, a nice house, less stress and all the things I've wanted, I'm sure I wouldn't feel this way. Those weren't the cards I was dealt so I'm trying to make good with what I have.

From my view, which is all I have to really go on here, there's only one legitimately positive reason why I should celebrate my birthday this or any other year.

Because despite all that shit and everything I've had to fight off, everything I want so badly to forget, and everything I want more than anything in the world to change...I'm still here.

Try as it all has to put me in the ground, and there have been many, MANY times where it was all but assured, it hasn't.

That has to count for something, I hope.

Love Thyself

The world seems to be full of epiphanic musings like this. I know because I've heard a great many of them in my life from people who've tried to convince me of what it is I'm lacking in order to get through this lingering state I've been in.

To be clear, I'm not the sort of person who believes that such advice is a terrible thing. On the contrary, being able to see yourself for who you are and accepting that reality isn't a bad thing at all, I'd like to think.

The issue comes when your self-image is predicated upon a foundation that was designed for one thing.

Maximizing self-loathing and self-hatred.

From an early age, I learned that being accepted by those around me would probably be the hardest thing I could accomplish. After all, going to school was a daily routine of degradation, abuse and rejection for a myriad of reasons.

If it wasn't the clothes I was wearing, it was the way I talked. If not that, then it was that I was smaller for my age. If not that, it was because I was smarter than most of the kids I was in class with and actually interested in learning. If not that, it was because I was descendant of a low-income family and not an upper middle-class one.

The one thing I never really understood is why it was that I became the constant target for such ridicule. I wasn't asking for it and I certainly wasn't encouraging it. I just wanted to be left alone, to have friends and to fit in, but it didn't happen because I was so different than "the norm."

As I went through all the calamitous crap I had to deal with in my late teens and early 20's, the level of self-abnegation I felt truly skyrocketed to where it's been ever since. No one ever walks out of a prison cell with a high opinion of themselves. They just don't. Why? Because that's not what it's designed for. Nor is the system which operates it.

The lie of this country is that we have a rehabilitative system for dealing with those who run afoul of the law for whatever reason. The truth is it's actually built around retribution. At no point did any of the shrinks I had to see ever work on building positive self-reinforcement. Not once. All it was, every week for five years was pointing out the worst parts of who I was perceived to be and hammering home how I could never have a "normal" life because there was something so wrong with me that I was no longer permitted to just be a regular person.

The severity of my self-loathing is not a sporadic occurrence. It has grown and been cultivated over a long period of time dating back nearly 30 years now and in that time, I have tried to figure out ways to circumvent that runaway train of thought and try seeing myself in a better light. Some days, I can, but it never lasts very long because there's always a trigger that sets my self-perspective back on what it deems to be the proper course.

Going through divorce and all that came after certainly didn't help either. If anything, it just reinforced the position I've always had.

Nobody loves you, Dev, and they're never going to no matter how badly you want them to. If they can't or don't, then there's really no point in you trying to either.

It's a vicious, self-sustaining cycle. You can only be accepted if you accept yourself, but it becomes harder to accept one's self if no one else wants them around either.

At this point, my self-awareness is so hypersensitive that I know both who and what I am probably better than I ever have before. I know what I've been through, the things I've achieved and overcome and every mistake I've made, be they trivial or otherwise. I live with memories, feelings and actions that I will always regret and wish I could change. I still have dreams for things I want to do before this life ends.

Love is an instinctual feeling we acquire from the moment we're born. Hate is something that is taught to us through outside influences. I know this because I only have to look at my son to realize that even at his age of three, he still sees the world in a totally different spectrum than I do, and I remember how at that age, I felt the same way. I didn't hate anyone and I certainly didn't hate myself by any measure.

But I still do now. I have for nearly the entirety of my life since. For me, it's much easier to exhibit love in an external capacity than an internal one and to me, it's no less real or valid. If someone ever hears me say the words "I love you,"to them, I honestly can't be any more sincere.

I can't because they're three words I've never, ever, been comfortable with saying to myself.

Comic Relief

So I know over the course of the next 24 hours, the internets is going to be awash in reactions, criticism and appreciation for How I Met Your Mother, and I assume rightly so either way.

I make the assumption, of course, because I've never sat down and watched a single one of the 208 episodes it's cranked out in its run.

*Editorial Note: Yes, I had to look that number up.

I can also say the same thing about virtually all the big TV sitcoms that have come out in the last ten years. Big Bang Theory hurts my brain with how over the top it is regarding geek culture. Two-and-a-Half Men was funny for about ten minutes and I lost interest in it, and I don't know half the other shows that my friends are seemingly invested in anymore.

With how little television I watch these days, I also realized something over the past weekend after watching one show I've grown rather enamored with. I seem to get more enjoyment out of watching macabre and potentially horrifying things like Hannibal, Luther and the other heavy psychological thrillers out there than I do watching something with a laugh track, and I'm not entirely sure why.

I mean I get having the need for being able to stand back and just laugh at the absurdities of life and when I was out with my brothers celebrating one of their birthdays two weeks ago, I probably laughed more in those four hours than I had in the previous four months.

Were I to try and pin it down, I guess the simplest reason I can throw out there is I seem to have lost the ability to see the funny side of life most of the time. Over the last few years, my perspective has shifted to see the world in a much darker and distorted light dominated by the more malevolent parts of the human psyche. It's not all awkward situations, easy resolutions and guarantees that the guy ends up with the girl in quasi-happy endings.

There be monsters out there. Real ones. And they are nothing to laugh at.

But it's in the midst of having such a cynical forced perspective that having any sense of humor to push those shadows back a bit is all the more important. I know I have sense of humor and I do genuinely like to laugh as much as anyone else does. I know because I make people laugh all the time, whether intentionally or otherwise.

It's just more than a little scary to think of all the things I may have lost in the last few years, my funny bone might have been one of the biggest casualties, because maybe more than I ever have, I need it.

Anime Madness

In the fall of 1993, two of my brothers, Erik Weswig, Matthew Johnston and I were riding home from the anime group we belonged to when Erik came upon a grandiose idea which was so very typical of him. With anime and collectible card games exploding in popularity in the U.S. at the time, we would combine the two into what we thought would be a fun and entertaining combination.

After some further brainstorming, we had a base idea of how the game would work and better still, we had a name.

We called it Anime Madness.

Being all of 16, and having a hard enough time getting through adolescence intact, we were incredibly green but undaunted and rather than go to classes and do the usual high school grind, Matt and Erik spent many an hour in the computer lab at Sunset High School designing the cards on truly draconian programs installed on a Mac SE/30 and I helped come up with rules, ideas and the occasional quote which actually ended up on one of the finished cards.

Erik's first idea for a card that started the whole thing was one called The Ugliness Compensator, which allowed the player, if they thought their opponent was rough on the eyes, as it were, the player didn't have to look at said opponent for the rest of the game.

We were 16. Maturity was still a ways off.

We had planned this to just be a fun thing we could use for the anime group  as a substitute for Magic: The Gathering, which had totally taken over our weekly meetings. And despite the occasional setback, we were having a ball putting it together when Erik died on March 5, 1995.

With the man who'd created the concept gone, Matt and I weren't sure what we planned to do with everything the three of us had put together. We wanted to finish it, and after some long talks, decided not only would we see it through but we were going to go all the way and turn this into a full-fledged, marketed game sold around the country and maybe...even the world.

So, we kept going. After graduation, Matt and I continued to get the rules codified. We even brought in his mom to help play-test it after we figured if she can learn to play it, ANYONE could.

*Editorial Note: To her credit, she did learn how to play it and in the first game she ever played, she beat me. I regret nothing.

Even when he went off to college, Matt continued to also refine the card design, thanks to the semi-improved technology available at the University of Oregon when we realized we needed one more thing.

We had a card game based on anime, but we had no anime to put on the cards.

So enlisting the help of some of our friends at Northern Oregon Vancouver Animation (NOVA for short), and after contacting the major U.S. anime distributors of the day, Pioneer, Viz, Streamline, U.S. Manga Corp  and AnimEigo, we supplied the gang with a couple of sample decks and instructions and let them go down to Los Angeles to meet with them at one of the many conventions going on at the time.

As I recall, Viz looked at it, but balked then walked out and Streamline wasn't even there. AnimEigo's head Robert Woodhead, though, was intrigued enough at the potential of what we'd done to let us have the licenses to three titles, Bubblegum Crisis, Riding Bean and Genesis Survivor Gaiarth. We were both stunned and enthralled and with laserdiscs in hand, YES, LASERDISCS I SAID, we went back to work finishing the game, spending many an hour with Matt's dad's laserdisc player plugged into a computer and running even more draconian video capture software over every millimeter of them to get the images we ended up using.

*Editorial Note #2: Keep in mind this was 1995-96. AOL was still around version 2.0 and Netscape still existed. Otherwise, there was no Google Search and therefore, no proper internet.

Despite that, by the time Matt was finally done after many, many hours of slaving over the damn things, we had our final designs and were ready to unleash it upon the world.

We had investors backing us and after setting up a deal with a card printer and the largest distributor of cards and comics in the country at the time, off it went into the great beyond. Matt and I were 19 years-old and still had the belief that we would indeed conquer the world with our game. And of course, we got nowhere close. 

In the end, we barely broke even on it, but our investors got their money back. While we were called as a massive Magic clone, and rightly so, we still managed to get recognition in major publications of the day and even won an award. Inquest Magazine named one of our cards one of their picks for 1996. Sadly, I don't remember what exactly it was, but it was something.

We were actually in the planning stages for a new set of cards, which I was much more involved in, when Matt and I made the decision to finally shut it down. To have done it once, at our age and with everything we would've had to do in order to make it work again, was just not possible anymore.

By that time, Pioneer, who had scoffed at our design, had gone with a competing design that was also at the same con, and eventually became Ani-Mayhem. They ultimately proved more successful than us, but really only just. By 1997, the CCG bubble had become so saturated that all it could do was burst.

I was disappointed, to be sure, but I got over it. 

To this day, I still have three packs of the game I helped create more than half my life ago now, and I'll never get rid of them. I haven't played an actual game of it since we first brought it out, and while it was an interesting novelty I'd show at job interviews for a while after that, in the hopes it would help show what I could do, that eventually stopped as well.

Honestly, I felt like we'd failed somehow and that while it was a nice ride, I couldn't really call it mine because I wasn't the one behind it. I felt like I was more along for the ride than anything and what we'd create next was truly going to have been my proverbial baby.

For the last three years, they'd been tucked away in one of my many boxes in my storage room, buried under other things I'd decided I didn't need to see or think about anymore.

But as I was going through my yearly Spring Cleaning, I remembered I had them so I went digging until I found them again. And as I've been sitting here flipping through them, the embarrassment and sense of shame I'd somehow latched onto these cards are gone. 

This is my game. I helped create it and I can say so because my name is on it. 

Matt and I could've quit, but we didn't. While our classmates were freaking out over geometry homework, SAT's, college applications and who they were going to prom with that Spring, we were doing the same thing and starting our own business, before we'd even gotten our diplomas.

That's not something to be ashamed of. Rather, I should be damn proud of it. And I am. Regardless of what anyone else can say about me, I helped create something both tangible and lasting, and not many people get to say that in their lives. If I can do it once, I can do it again with the novel I'm writing or anything else I choose to create.

We also never forgot Erik, either. It was his idea that started this whole crazy ball rolling and as his friends and brothers, we were crazy enough to see it through to the highly improbable conclusion. And we let everyone who ever put their $15 down on a deck know that when they opened it up for the first time.

I miss those days. I miss them a lot. For all the craziness of it, we also had a lot of fun putting it all together and then seeing the result of that be shared by other people. Apparently, we were a big hit in the Midwest. How many people can say that?

My Valentine

I have to admit my disillusionment with this day started at an early age and as I've gotten older, not much has altered my rather bitter and cynical view of it.

I get how we like to give ourselves a day to really celebrate something. After all, we have Christmas, New Year's, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, Presidents Day and even Flag Day.

Hell, St. Patrick's Day has gone from an Irish priest getting the snakes out of the country to people who have no hint of Irishness in them getting downright piss drunk before having to try and show restraint the other 364 days of the year.

Valentine's Day is supposed to be the day we set aside to both show and tell the significant other in our lives how much we really love them. And I guess therein lies my problem with it.

For me, one day just isn't enough for that. That's something to spend the rest of your life doing because if you really love someone that much, it should be fairly easy to do.

I've been single for three years now and despite that, I find myself not wanting to be bitter or angry today, because I remember how good it felt on the days when I could tell the someone I hold dearest to me that I still loved them that much and always will. And even though right now, it hurts a whole hell of a lot to know that I can't anymore, the fragile little optimist of my Yin is always telling me that maybe someday...if I'm lucky, I might.

Pink Slip

So yeah...this happened.

I had just gotten off the phone with a local city council member, after spending the better pat of two days running around talking to people, tracking down information and taking photos for the group of stories I was working on for the week, when I was summoned into my boss's office.

Ten minutes later, with my few possessions in tow, I was escorted out of the office I'd worked in for the last two years.

I didn't get an official answer to why I was being let go, but based on the previous two weeks and the sudden about-face which had taken place, it doesn't take much to figure it out.

I'd been notified at the end of the month that my productivity had fallen off and I needed to pick it up again quickly. Not an unrealistic demand to make by an employer and I knew that. And since we were having a change in management, the overall tenor of the office had changed somewhat and the word was given that we were all going to be held more accountable for our impact on the company, both good and bad.

So the following week, I did so. I got off my butt and out from behind my desk, of which I admit I'd grown a little too comfortable with, and tracked some good stories down. I didn't complain, didn't fuss or fight them on it. In fact, I didn't say much of anything to anyone.

I figured the best way to show my productivity was to actually BE more productive. Turned out that didn't work, either, as I was both written up and lectured again. This time, however, the lecturing took on a very different tone, because I was notified that I had, in effect, been spied on through social media for a good chunk of time.

Now, in this day and age of the NSA, Edward Snowden, semi-secret super-huge data collection sites in the Utah desert and everyone clamoring to be a part of the great social media engine that is Facebook, Twitter and the lot, I get why employers frown upon their people getting too immersed in it all. I do. Hell, I even wrote about my growing sense of dependency (for lack of a better term) on Facebook to have any sense of social identity at all.

I also understand that in a time where even the simplest choice of words on a tweet or a post can be so drastically blown out of proportion by those who might not understand the full context of what's being said, we have to choose our words VERY carefully. I'd like to think I did so, as I never spoke ill about my employers or anyone I worked with on Facebook or this blog and I made a concerted effort to not let either interfere with my ability to do my job.

Unfortunately, that was not the consensus agreement, and the fact that I was even using this platform to deal with everything I'm working through became an issue, which in all honesty, it shouldn't have.

I made no illusions about the fact that I am still working through my depression and other unresolved issues, and because my employer felt the need to raise the rates on our healthcare coverage to more than I could afford every month, I had to cancel it in favor of things like rent, food, electricity, gas and car payments. That said, with the passage of the ACA, I was in the process of getting my benefits back at a rate I could actually afford. Problem is, such things take time and for as impatient as I can be a lot of the time, turned out I wasn't the only one.

Then I got asked the most uninformed question I've ever heard from someone claiming to be a qualified journalist.

"Don't you want to feel better?"

Let me be as straight about this as I can be. Would you ask a person who is fighting cancer, or diabetes, or fibromyalgia, or drug/alcohol addiction that question and expect them to respond "No?"

Then why, in the name of common sense, is that considered something to ask a person struggling with mental illness?

Of course I want to feel better.

For years, the single hardest parts of my day have always been going to sleep and getting out of bed. My brain doesn't want to shut off at night, and when it finally does and I then have to get my butt up and do stuff, it doesn't want to do that either. I can't tell you when it started, but it's been a persistent battle I've had to fight for a long time.

I also don't like walking around feeling like everyone I know can't stand the sight of me, or doesn't want to talk to me, or doesn't care what happens to me. Even though I know that is completely opposite of how my closest friends and family actually feel, and I know this because they've had to remind me more times than I'm sure they'd like to tolerate.

And no, I don't like feeling so wholly inadequate as a human being that I have nothing to contribute to the world outside my door and would rather keep said door shut, locked, and dead-bolted than to let any modicum of sunshine in.

Nobody enjoys feeling this way, least of all me. Yet I do. All the time. So the question I so desperately wanted to ask in return was, "Do you honestly think taking my job away is somehow going to make me a healthier person?"

Sadly, I didn't ask it because I've been around long enough to know that in such situations, the perspective of management is always the right one and to question said perspective is akin to spitting on the Pope's shoes.

I also got the uber-patronizing consolation of, "Now don't go beating yourself up over this." Right. Like the fact that I am now out of work, in a country that's systematically taking apart its domestic support systems with the subtlety of Leatherface because it views its unemployed as "lazy and uninspired to work harder," and now have to worry about how I'm going to pay my rent, or my child support, or find another job in a still stagnant and atrophied economy, that makes it all okay. If we're still all about banging the drum of "personal responsibility," then why wouldn't I spend a great deal of time kicking the crap out of myself for losing my livelihood?

In the dictionary, under the word Hypocrite, it should say, "See: Management."

In the week since, I've already sent out about twenty portfolios across the country. I have my preferences on where I'd like to work, but on the whole, I really don't care any more. I just want out of here.

I would like to go somewhere fresh and totally start over from scratch. Leave all the bad memories and reminders at the border, plant my flag in fresh earth and chart a new direction. But to do that I need a job first.

Tally Ho.