Think. Overthink. Repeat.

Things used to be simple. There was a time when my thoughts were only about one thing: surviving grief. Now, also jammed in the mix are how to honor my wife, and how to live without her. Surviving was about the present, total minimalist. But the other two are about the past and future. You could say my thoughts are hard to organize these days.

If you ask me what I'm thinking at any given moment, I'll probably answer you "what?" I spend huge swaths of time dwelling on how to go about dating, TV and music to de-stress, and writing to memorialize my wife: often semi-simultaneously. Also, often replaying the same thoughts over and over for no discernible reason. And this is with me meditating once or twice a day (if I think of it). New thoughts are being generated faster than old ones can be cleared out! Critical mass! System overload! Phrases!

Oh yeah, and with everything on my mind, I have a job and a schedule and a-sponsablilties to remember, too. I don't have to be thinking about them, but I sure can't forget! I should buy a day planner: for my subconscious.

Things used to be simple. There was a time when my thoughts were only about one thing: surviving grief. Now, also jammed in the mix are how to honor my wife, and how to- Wait...I think we passed by this thought already.

Normal is boring (but I feel fine)

I think the charm of grief is wearing off. I've been a little stumped trying to think of stuff to post these past couple of days, at least things that can be funny and on-topic. It's just not what it used to be. We all know how much natural humor there is in grief, how fertile a ground it is for comedy. But as I settle into my new job and roll closer to that one-year milestone, grief's just becoming...boring.

I still have a lot of griefy moments, but it's kind of getting old. Turns out, even traumatic tragedy has a finite period of novelty, much like a shiny toy or Invader Zim (if you don't get the reference, that's the point). I cry and it's like "Yup. Doin' this again. Sucks. Again."

I am by no means asking to go back in time to the seven month mark when it was easier to make fun of grief. I knew I was setting a challenge for myself trying to write a funny(ish) grief blog, but I didn't anticipate the challenge coming from, well, normality? I don't know if that's the right word, I'm not quite sure I remember what normal is, if I ever knew. This may have to do for normal. But if anything, I'm going back in time like 18 months and preventing all this hell.

The silence has been filled

I don't do silence well. See, I have these stupid anxieties, and when it's silent, I start hearing the walls creaking and little ambient noises that could be dust settling, but also might be a tarantula or burglar or the ghosts of my high school self. It was nice to have a wife, someone with whom conversation never felt out of place. But now, I'm like some kind of sound junkie, desperate for a fix.

I like a lot of 'regular' music, but when she died, I got big into classical music to relax. Then Celtic music, and recently, the white noise of rain, and even more recentlier, music from Japanese anime. I was thinking today about starting to explore blues or blues-rock. Because I need to fill the silence, and every on of my silences needs a custom-tailored sound, apparently.

When I sat down to write this, I had to select some acoustical accompaniment, of course. I tried and turned off two things before deciding on a third. This is what grief has done to me. I'm so addled about the brain that I can't even pick my own sound! I decided on rain noise. I figure that in the next few months and years, I'll branch out even further. Perhaps I'll explore the sounds of badgers weaving wicker baskets, or trance remixes of Belizean folk songs, or pop music. Oh god. I hope I don't get so desperate for new sounds that I turn to pop.

The stone at the grave (not a gravestone)

So it's been 11 months since my wife died and still there's no headstone. Am I pissed? You bet! But I've also heard how long it can take. I don't know, we've been cutting stone and engraving it since the Egyptians. I figured the techniques would've improved since then. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason why it takes so long. But 'perfectly good' isn't enough.

I do, however, finally have a hint that the stone may exist. When I visited the cemetery this evening, there was cement, still in a wooden mold drying. It's not a gravestone, but it's the stone at the grave for the gravestone, I assume. Fucking weird thing to see.

I wasn't sure how I felt, really. I took some pictures of the blank cement next to a vase of plastic flowers (her mom probably bought them at the dollar store) which was tossed aside by the workers, like some piquant symbol of are-you-fuckin'-serious?

Then I got an idea. A fantabulous idea. The cement was almost dry, but not quite. So I decided to scratch my own epitaph! So I keyed the title of Our Song in like a romantic vandal. It's what I told her grandma to have written on the stone, but I'm doubtful she remembered the correct wording since I've heard she's going senile. Well worth ruining the spare key to my lockbox to write in cement that will be covered up forever soon.

"This is perfectly normal"

Just me and my shadowy thoughts

Losing a significant other is a little different than losing most any other other. In addition to losing a friend, a lover, an ally, I also lost the one person in the world I could talk about anything to. And I mean anything. She endured a lot of creepy shit, bad puns, poorly-thought-out ideas, inane babbling, embarrassing stories, closet skeletons, crushing cynicism and dirty words.

Now, I have to keep all that stuff locked up in my head, and let me tell you, it is not well-organized. It's like an old-fashioned rolodex with all the little cards. Then it exploded. Now, I have nobody to talk about the serial killer book I'm reading with, or vent to about how I said something to a coworker that could be misconstrued as racist, or to help me pick up all these rolodex cards. Or That Thing. She would totally not mind listening to me talk about That Thing. She knows what I'm talking about.

It's how I know that I had true love: she knew everything. She could've blackmailed me for the rest of my life and on into ghosthood. But she didn't. Instead, she replied by telling me everything. I can't tell you how great it is to have your worst aspects be perfectly tolerated. But now, I have to hide it all away so I don't get thrown in the loony bin or driven out of town by a torch-mob. I do not need that again.

Riding In Cars With Coworkers

Today at work, a company van needed service, and I dropped it off and picked it up, which meant that for one trip there and one trip back, somebody needed to drop me off or pick me up. Two different people helped me, and they gave two different reactions when they found out I had one of those dead wife things you hear about sometimes (it just came up, I wasn't like "hey, thanks for the ride my wife's dead).

One person was unfazed, or at least showed zero outward reaction. The other had actually known about it already, but forgotten. Neither are going to be joining my support circle. So which one bothered me most? The answer may surprise you!

*Wait 30 seconds or so before reading the next paragraph for suspense*

Trick question! I didn't really give a fuck either way. Even when Forgetful apologized numerous times, it didn't matter, and it was easy to forgive. And I'm guessing that Unfazed didn't want to say anything to possibly upset anyone, or just has his own bullshit to deal with. Luckily for me I'm pretty numb to petty crap you know, because of the horrendous grief-pain. Dealing with death is useful for one thing: comparing other pain to. If you can survive losing someone you love dearly, you can survive an apocalypse (zombie or Biblical).

Patton Oswalt pt. 3: Now it's just getting sad

So I'm sitting here trying to think of something funny to blog about the Patton Oswalt show last night. You know, the standup comedy show? What's something funny...something funny about the comedy...hmmm. I guess this is why he's the badass comedian and I'm just the whiny blogger.

Oh yeah! The show! The show was funny! That's a thing. But you kinda had to be there. There was this one part where he was like doop-bop-beedily-boop-pee-! Eh, umm...nevermind. Something cool that isn't very funny is that I met him after the show! I hung around with the rest of the vultures behind the venue for one more brief glimpse at a comedy genius in the five feet between the door and the safety of his rented black escape SUV at the curb.

I shook his hand, told him he was a hero of mine and that tonight was the funnest (or I may have said funniest) night I've had since my wife died. Stammered, I should say, as I was completely starstruck. I've been thinking about trying to meet him for a few days, what I might say, and when it was my turn in the little line of us to meet him, my mind went blissfully blank. He quickly jumped in, asking how long we were married and how she'd died and it was clear in his rapid replies that he was trying to make the conversation as courteous but brief as possible. I can't blame him, he's four months, almost five into grief. He doesn't and shouldn't give a fuck about me, that one fan that after that one show. But the fanatic in me wanted a full conversation, and one about him being an awesome comedian and not about my wife and how she died. I didn't even get to mention that he's a big part of why I spent three years in Los Angeles trying to be a standup comedian.

Naturally, I've been rehashing it in my mind ever since, and I know exactly what I should've said and what I could've said and what I would've said if things had been starstruck. And I cried and felt bad for myself and tried to tell myself that I don't need him and I'm just gonna keep working on my book and that'll show him!

And when I can, I remember how awesome and hilarious the show was -- it was very. Like I smoked an hour's worth of crackeroin. Opener Nate Fernald was great, too. Patton Oswalt is always looking to promote new, underrated comedians. Because he cares about comedy at it's core, just like me. It's why he's a hero of mine. It's why I started this blog: so I wouldn't lose my sense of humor after losing my wife. But I tried my hand at standup, I'm just a big fan. I wonder how Patton Oswalt would end this post? He's one of the people who taught me to always end on a big joke.

Belligerent brain goo

Think love is a battlefield? Try grief! To take the metaphor of grief being a battle inside my head to the Nth degree, I've determined that chemical weapons are, in fact, being used by both sides. In fact, it's all chemical warfare! No gas masks can save me now! See, animals have survival instincts, things that happen automatically, for example, releasing chemicals to numb the pain of injury until done running away from the predator who caused the injury. But only humans have grief responses, like producing more CRH, a hormone that, in high levels, is related to major depression. You've heard of dying from a broken heart, right? I'm dealing with survivalist brain chemistry and bereaved brain chemistry simultaneously: it's a lil cray-cray.

In the beginning, the grief's forces overran us! My survival instincts were in full panic-protection mode: we were hunkered in the bunker of my body, barely able to move with all the suppressive fire. There were Griefies in the trees, we were flanked on all sides, and there was no support from the air. Trying to survive, we could do nothing more than sustain the position. But in recent months, the survival instincts have been striking back! After such a long siege, morale is low among the Griefies. My will to survive is rallying the troops for a new stand!

The absolute beauty of this battle is that however it goes in the short-term, I know already who will win in the end. I will survive. I'm not going to die from a broken heart. That threat level has been lowered from red to orange. Grief won't win a war of attrition: I can endure. I can't tell you what it means for me to be able to say that, but it's true. Even though it has often felt like I'm dying, and many days, I still lose little skirmishes and sorties. Grief likes to pick fights, but survival wants them to end.

Male fangirl fan mail

So Patton Oswalt, a favorite comedian of mine since I was totally, like, a tween, is coming to MY hometown!!! IEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! Imagine how a twelve-year-old girl would react if Nick Jonas or that guy from One Direction with the flippy hair was coming to her town, and now imagine that same reaction by a chubby 27-year-old guy with a ginger neckbeard. And because he is a widower (just like me!!!), after I bought my ticket, I cried for like twenty minutes. You know. Hormones. So naturally, I figured I had to try and spin this funny. I mean, they say comedy equals tragedy plus time, so really, the joke's already in there! Wait for it...

...

......

.

.

..

.

............

So can I tell you how shocked I am that Patton Oswalt is coming? One, because it's only been like five months since his wife died, and two, because my home town is not....one of those cities...that...people come to. But I'm so excited! If my parents embarrass me, I will just die. And nobody better say one single word about the first time I talked about Patton Oswalt's wife's death. Nobody's gonna ruin this show for me, or I will just scream!

...So. Time has passed. Is the death of a spouse funny now? I think I heard a few sniggers from way in the back? No? Just crickets? Eh, it'll hit you on your way to work tomorrow and you'll laugh so hard you have a fender bender. Now, I just have to decide what to do for when I go. Should I bake him some cookies? I am definitely wearing that slutty skirt mom hates...

The once and future tense

As a thingman that likes doing the writing, I often think wordishly. In grief, there's trouble with tenses. These days, if I'm talking about my wife, sometimes the past tense applies (which pisses me right off in general), but sometimes, the present tense still works. Kind of makes talking to someone who doesn't know my wife, or that she's dead, a personal minefield.

"Oh, my wife loved that song."

"She doesn't love it anymore?"

Somebody's about to learn some somber shit! Awkward silence in T-minus 5 and counting. Or I could've said 'My wife loves that song' which implies she's still alive, which is bullshit, because if she was still alive, I wouldn't be having this conversation right now, I'd be having a conversation with her, thank-you-kindly.

But I will always say "I love her" in the present tense. Her death did not interrupt that continuity. And don't even get me started on the conditional unreal tense with things she "would've done if she were here." Or the future progressive tense with "She'll be watching over me." It's more than I want to deal with: just too tense.

I hate adulting

This is going to sound like a resume, but I'm a very fast learner and can learn to do almost any job. My new job is no exception. That being said (and how you can tell this isn't a resume), I hate all jobs forever. My new job is no exception. The work is no problem. The problem is that it's a job.

I've been dealing with some waves of depression in the almost two weeks since I started this gig. The work is fairly easy, the people are incredibly nice, and everyone's been telling me I'm doing a great job. So naturally, I already want to quit. I must be wired wrong for what most adults do every single day: work a regular job.

Like all jobs, I need this. Settling into the grind of doing this every day for an unpredictable number of months or years is daunting, to say the least. But I have a secret trump card. Turns out no job is worse than losing my wife! I'm indestructible, now, really. My wife can't come back to life and die again, so what's the big deal? There is no big deal. Just a humble-grumble grind.

Single, ready to mingle (platonically)

I'm still not ready to date. Oh, sorry, thought I heard someone ask. But today in my grief group I heard from a widow of a similar age to myself, who has gone on a couple of dates recently. She's 14 months into her grief, I'm ten-and-a-half. One: I'm so glad she was able to try that, I know it was confusing and new for her. Two: there is no way I am going to be ready to date in three-and-a-half months. Three: I'm still pissed I even have to worry about dating.

I had to laugh, though, when she told us how she was saying things to her date, basically to try and scare him away. I can identify with this. As I've confessed before, I occasionally find myself composing an online dating profile in my mind, one of the saddest caliber, basically written to repel and frighten. And I can only imagine that if a woman took up the challenge of dating me, I would try to scare her off.

I guess it's a test, really. If you still want to 'come back to my place' after I cry to you about another woman, I'm intrigued. Although, at the present time, 'coming back to my place' would involve awkward instructions on not waking up my parents. Yeah, three-and-a-half months won't be enough time.

Labor Day Pride goes before a Fall

It's my first Labor Day without my wife, and we both loved celebrating the American workers by not having to go work. I'm in my second week at my new job, and already I have a day off - this is the life. More than anything, today reminded me of crap I'm feeling all the time: it's almost Fall again, we always loved Fall. How has it been so long since she died? It's really coming up on a year. It's hard for me to look very far into the future these days, but it'll be a year come October.

So yeah, Labor Day wasn't that big a deal for me.

I refuse to let my wife's death ruin my love of Fall, however. It was our favorite season, my wife and I. So this year I am going to walk through fallen leaves swishing my feet like a four-year-old. I'm going to get apple-cinnamon candles or whatever: fuck pumpkin-spice. I'm going to close my eyes and smell cold rain off the lake. And dammit, I'm going to bawl my eyeballs out.

It's going to be so hard to still love Fall, since my wife during that last one. I won't be able to do it every day. But I'll be able to love Fall the majority of days. Fall is, and has always been, symbolic of change. It's when the school year starts, it's when the leaves on deciduous trees change, it's when college guys in my town put on thicker and thicker hoodies, but keep wearing shorts because "this cold doesn't bother me." I know all too well that change will come, whether we want it to or not. But change is about adapting. And as much as humans suck in other areas, we kick ass at adapting to change.

Them's fightin' words

I talk grief a lot, if you can't tell. I made this blog to do nothing but put words together about grief. It's rather excessive, really. I'm kind of becoming an unwilling expert on the subject. So when some friends of mine experienced a death of someone they were close to, naturally, I didn't have a clue what to say.

I feel like a failure, really. I want so bad to be supportive and empathetic, but I've been mostly resorting to cliches and awkward questions via text message. And 'text message' means I can think about what I want to say before I say it. But everything I think of saying seems like either condescension or like I'm trying to one-up their loss with talking about my loss. Guess I'm no grief guru after all, just a grief hobbyist.

If anything, I'm good at my own grief and nothing more - a specialist, not a jack-of-all-graves. I've been fighting my own grief so long, but I can't move on to the next fight until I win this one. My friends will have to fight their own grief battles. I can tell them what worked for me, but when it's time for me to duck, it might be a better time for them to jab instead. And there's no one-punch knockout for this crap. You only win by surviving.

Bullshit rocks

One of my grief groups, a handful of months ago, passed around a dish of cheap, artificially-colored rocks. They were supposed to be pocket reminders of gratitude, some gimmick like that. It sounded silly, but I saw a purple-and-black one, one Mia would've picked, so I picked it for myself. The colors are mottled and it looks like a small, polished thumb, which, upon close inspection, has a chip right where the cuticle of the nail would be. When I remember, I carry it around it my pocket. But most of the time, it just sits on my desk.

The thing about grief is that it changes your thinking. You learn to let yourself bullshit yourself, even if you know it's bullshit - just because the bullshit thoughts are more helpful than your real ones. It's no bullshit. I've often thought myself fairly nihilistic: a believer in nothing in particular. But grief has me seeing the usefulness of a kind of faith. When I saw my gratitude stone sitting in the middle of the floor a few times in a short period of time: I decided it was a sign from my wife.

Was my wife physically reaching through the Aether and placing the stone down for me as a reminder of both herself and gratitude? Probably not. I have cats who knock crap over, as cats are wont to do. But it makes me feel good to think that it was a mystical harbinger from the Hinterland. It's kind of alike the grown-up version of playing pretend. I liked playing pretend as a kid. After seeing the stone on the ground, in roughly the same spot on numerous, consecutive occasions, I brought it to work in my pocket, and it made me happy. I need happy, folks. And I'm more than grateful to get my happy from a childish game. Grateful. That's...kind of like gratitude, huh?