Where I am

It’s been over a year since I last made a blog post about something other than gun rights. That is partly do to the fact that I spent the bulk of the past year fighting for gun rights and partly do to the fact that my life has been sailing on pretty smooth waters for the past year. Contentment makes for lousy rants. But now the skies are turning dark, and my aging bones are starting to ache, and all of my senses tell me that a storm is brewing.

I spent a year of my life fighting for a cause in which I believe, and while I did, countless potential real estate deals slipped through my fingers. Though logic said I should dedicate my time and energy to making a living, passion usurped logic, and I found myself spending most of my time and energy fighting to change the world. And now the real estate market is in a coma, and if it doesn’t wake up soon, I’m going to find myself out of work and facing some serious lifestyle changes.

Though I am only moderately stressed over the prospect that I could find myself unable to pay the bills and be forced to move back into another crummy little apartment and take some horrible, meaningless job, my dad has already progressed to full-blown crisis mode. While I forfeited a year of my life to the fight for gun rights, he lost a year of his to a development project that took a couple of unfortunate turns, causing it to drag out much longer than expected (and at a lower financial return than expected). Now he’s ten days from turning sixty and harriedly battling market forces in an effort to close a couple of deals. Neither of us are having a lot of fun.

Without enough work (real estate or volunteer) to keep me occupied, I once again find myself in the unfortunate position of having enough time to evaluate my life. For the past year I’ve been very busy and fairly content with my life, but now, in the absence of any all-consuming projects, I find myself once again looking around and realizing that what I see does not satisfy me.

Yesterday (technically, two days ago, since I'm writing this well after midnight), I presided over the marriage of my two best friends. After nearly five years of dating, Jason and Alicia tied the knot, and I had the honor of pronouncing them husband and wife. As much as I enjoyed performing the ceremony, and as happy as it made me to see them married, I couldn’t help but develop a sense of melancholy as I looked around the reception and saw that all of my old friends are now either married or engaged. It feels as though they’ve left me behind. They’ve hitched up their oxen and moved on down the trail, and I’m still trying to ford the damn river.

I’m not the only one to notice that I’m apparently behind schedule. At the wedding reception, when it was time for Jason to toss Alicia’s garter, he pump faked over his shoulder and then turned and handed it to me. It was a sweet gesture on their part, but when your friends stoop to cheating at an old wedding superstition to try to give your love life a nudge, it’s pretty clear that your love life needs a nudge.

It’s not that I’m in a hurry to get married. I’m not even certain that guys like me are supposed to get married. It would certainly take a special kind of woman to tolerate me until death do us part (without trying to expedite the death part). And my friends will attest that I give new meaning to the word "picky."

It’s also not that I’m unable to meet women. For the past couple of months, I’ve been talking to an amazing young woman who is every bit as interested in me as I am in her. Unfortunately, among the many obstacles facing us (and not even chief among them) is the fact that this young woman is, according to conventional wisdom, too young for me. And as my friends will also attest, the last time I dated a woman who was too young for me, it didn’t work out too well.

Appropriately enough, a few hours before Jason and Alicia’s wedding, I ran into that young woman with whom it didn’t work out too well. Three years after the fact, our face-to-face conversations are still noticeably awkward. We’ve been on good terms for years and even exchange emails from time to time, but something about seeing her face-to-face still manages to jab a few old scars and knock the dust off a few stale emotions that I’d prefer remain forgotten.

With the woman I’m talking to now, I’m worried that she’s the one who’ll end up with sensitive scars that need guarding and stale emotions that stubornly get in the way of casual conversation. I know we all get hurt eventually, but I prefer not to be the one applying the “Damaged Goods” label.

I don’t know if I give off a pheromone that attracts nineteen-year-old artists or if I just have a self-destructive attraction to doomed relationships, but I do know that I never manage to fully learn my lesson. I learn something from every failed relationship, but it’s never enough to completely kill the romantic in me who, time after time, persuades me to board a train that I know full-well is headed someplace I don’t want to go.

So I’m on the verge of career implosion/financial ruin, my dad is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, my friends have all moved on to a stage of life where I cannot follow, and I’m falling in love with a woman who will undoubtedly prove to be the most logistically, philosophically, and psychologically challenging relationship of my life.

But I’m not complaining. If there is one thing I’ve learned in my 28.6 years, it’s that none of us choose the cards we’re dealt; we just choose how we play the hand. The way I look at it, I’m sitting on three of a kind. I’d rather be holding a full house, but there are plenty of guys making winning hands out of two pair, so I have no room to complain. I’d have to be a self-absorbed fool to look at everything I have and everything I’ve done and not believe that I’m one of the luckiest men ever to live.

If there are rough seas ahead, they’ll help me appreciate how long the water was smooth, and they'll serve as a reminder that we're all either navigating rough water or nearing rough water--Nobody's water stays smooth forever. So, I’m not complaining. I’m just telling you where I am.