Erethkhaniel

Right.  Been forever, many times I thought of replacing that journal, but never got around to it.  I should've.  This will be a touch shorter than it really needs to be, but it's essentially a less-depressing placeholder.  I moved to New Orleans, finally, the only place that's ever truly felt like home despite never really having lived in her before.  Met some cool people, and one who not only changed my life, but how I view myself, who showed me how all the pieces I had scattered within me fit together.  Still haven't gotten them all connected and working, but I've grown an incredible amount, and continue to do so, almost exclusively because of her, with the "almost" put in there because some of it's me, as well...but that's pretty much it.  For those interested, she does have an account on here, being a professional photographer, and a damn good one.  Drowningwoman.  Beautiful, intelligent, amazing, exacting.  Her very existence raises the bar.  

On to other things, I have a job, though I'm looking into getting something better.  I have a place with a room of my own, albeit small, but at this point that's largely by choice, and I like my cave.  Once it's fully organized it will be just enough room for everything I need...it's about 75% there atm, so really not bad.  I don't get online much anymore, but I'm hoping that will change with a relative swiftness here soon.  

My city treats me very well, and loves me as I love her.  Things I need often end up provided by seeming coincidence and happenstance, quite the opposite of the way my life used to work, where everything I wanted or planned would get foiled by the same sort of random happenings.  Not everything is chocolate and roses, not everything goes my way, and I fuck up now and again, but all things considered, life is much better than it has been in some time, and for a good while there, I'd say about four months-ish, it was better than it'd ever been.  EVER.  So...I can bitch, but I don't really have a whole lot of right to.  Some, sure, but not a lot.  

Not having read the other journal in forever, I forget the timeframe...so it may perhaps be news that my desires, and a few mystical workings, were realized in that my ex's boyfriend liked the job less than he thought, and couldn't find a place to live to save his life, and so returned here for an indefinite period, they may not move at all...or it could be next year.  But I have more time, so that's good.  I've seen my daughter several times since, in fact.  

I have a lot of hope, for myself, and for other things.  I await March with baited breath, but am going to seek to do as much as I can for myself and my life in the meantime.

For those of you that don't know, I'm not entirely certain myself of my sources, but to my knowledge a Kabuki Theatre was essentially an Eastern comedy in which all manner of terrible things would happen to the main character that were amusing to the audience, but would be horrific in real life.  That's how I've felt for the past ten years.  All plans and ambitions are foiled by seeming "coincidences" over which I have had little or no influence whatsoever...any time I am even content, to say nothing of happy, things align in such a way as to rip it from me, often in the harshest way possible.  I can't count how many times I'd climb back up from the hole I got knocked down into and manage to achieve some kind of stability and contentment to my life, only to have, almost immediately, a load of completely unassociated shit come crashing down to tear everything apart for no apparent reason.  Yes, this is going to be a massive unloading email, a bitchfest predominantly comprised of a mere sampling of the past year or so.

To begin, many of you do not know this, and I kept it quiet for good reasons which you will see, but I am, very temporarily at the moment, married, have been for six years.  Have a beautiful daughter.  We've been separated for a good six months, the reasons for such soon to follow.  She changed, after the pregnancy, tendencies which before had merely been tendencies began to expand, grow, and bloat in very un-positive ways.  Selfishness and self-centeredness in the extreme, not the physical vanity, but more the "my needs and desires are paramount" sort of way, plus a gradual but marked growth of bipolar tendencies, which began to approach a serious problem, plus a denial complex the size of a continent in which nothing was ever her fault, and nothing she desired could possibly be bad, or wrong, or have negative consequences, and when confronted with evidence to the contrary, she'd either blow it off, find a way to turn it into someone else's fault, (usually mine), or simply ignore it.  Either way, she'd forget about the whole incident in which she was informed of her problems within a few days.  I tested it.  All she'd remember was that we had a conversation/argument, and that she got mad at me.  None of the actual words exchanged would be extant in her memory.  She also had a tendency to use me as an emotional punching bag, in which everything was my fault, everything I did was wrong, no matter how I did it, even if it was the way she'd told me to do it previously, and various and sundry other matters.  You can imagine how this would be to live in.  We'd separated twice before, both on her desires, because at the time I still loved her.  This time, I finally got tired of being the one expected to bend over backwards and carry the relationship on my shoulders, tired of being the one expected to fix the problems, change myself and the way I acted, to accomodate her refusal to even admit that any of her behaviours could possibly be even part of the cause for our problems.  So I finally agreed to leave.  That was six months ago.  I have no car, and the only place I could go was several hundred miles away, to live with friends in a place with virtually no job market.  I have since busted my ass to try and get my shit together, and see my daughter whenever I can, generally contigent upon her coming down to pick me up to go stay for a few days.  Due to job difficulties, I was barely able to pay rent, and sometimes not even that, I'm lucky my friends are so understanding, so obviously I wasn't able to give anything for child support, despite wanting to and of course loving my daughter very much.

A few months after I left, she mentioned she'd started trolling around this fuckbuddy site, adultfriendfinder.com, and finding, well.  Now, even when together we'd always had an open relationship, though neither of us had ever made much use of it...in fact, she only seemed to do so during the times we were apart, but she did so with gusto, let me tell you.  But that's there, not here.  So she finds a few fucks, then one of them apparently catches her eye and she jumps into a relationship with him a mere month after meeting him.  A month later he's moved in.  Now, I'm very apprehensive and skeptical about this, as I know she's got body-esteem issues which were likely apparent on the site, and was emotionally vulnerable, or at least easily considered so, due to the fact that she'd just gotten out of an at the time five year marriage.  It's also readily obvious when one meets her and talks to her for a while that she's both easily influenced and easily attached.  Imagining the sort of person who jumps on this and pushes a relationship as fast and far as possible doesn't bring many pretty pictures to mind.  I expressed my worries to her and asked her to be careful and keep an eye out, only to be blown off.  My only concern was my daughter, because there are environments in which it wouldn't be healthy for her to be raised.  Anyway.  A few months after that, he decides he wants to move back "home" to some place in Illinois.  Now, for the record, I live in southern Louisiana.  Do the math, I'm sure you can figure out why this wouldn't necessarily be the greatest idea, to say nothing of the fact that while he had friends and family up there, she had neither.  She was strongly considering it, and chose to inform me xmas night.  She didn't seem to give a flying fuck about the fact that it would take my daughter from me, essentially, she seemed to think that me being able to visit a couple times a year, at great expense, after I got my shit together, would be perfectly fine, either that or I could find a way to move up there myself.  Yeah.  Real considerate.  She said flat out that she wasn't going to let the fact that I and my daughter might end up almost never seeing each other to "influence her decision".

Fast forward a few weeks, and several arguments, and she discovers she's pregnant.  She's initially not certain who the father is, due to the fact that her boyfriend has been up in Illinois getting job training for some time, and she's been fucking around in the meantime, supposedly with permission.  Whatever.  Despite the brevity of the relationship, her own financial instability, and the fact that we got married due to a pregnancy, and you see how that went, she decides that if it's his, she's going to keep it.  You can imagine how this might step up her plans to move.  I express worries about this, as she'd been talking Juneish, wanting to live in her brother's house rent-free to save up some money, as well as see if the relationship panned out right.  When I express such worries, she backs it up to December, saying no way is she moving whilst pregnant, etc.  Due to her extremely changeable nature, and her tendency to bullshit and tell me what I want to hear so I don't have a bad reaction, I call her on it, and she of course gets angry.  During the course of this conversation, which happens on the drive home after I've been visiting for a while to see my daughter, she also chooses to mention that she isn't going to be up for the long visits anymore, because it "confuses the child and makes her think I'm back", and she doesn't want to have to deal with her crying on the way home after dropping me off, and then asking after me for a few days afterwards.  Because that's such a trial in exchange for her seeing her father now and again.  Now, I can get that particular visit, and the one before, being a week, and four days, respectively.  But she's talking no more overnight, just find a ride, meet her somewhere, and I can spend the day with her or whatever.  Anyway, so she gets the dating from the doctor, does the math, and is convinced it's his, so she tells him.  He is, of course, thrilled, but I don't believe it's for the reasons she thinks.  Now she tells me today that she's decided to move, and that it's been moved up to March.  Yeah, you read that right.  Let me type it again.  MARCH.

And she seems to refuse to see my position on this, as a father essentially about to have his child taken away, how this will affect me and our daughter, or anything else.  She told me I was making it a big deal when it wasn't.  You tell me.  Is it a big deal, having your daughter taken several THOUSAND miles away, and being faced with the prospect of seeing her a couple times a year whilst she is raised by a man you find of questionable character?  Is that a big deal, to not even be given any say or input into the matter?  I mean, okay, I haven't called as much as I might have otherwise, I was good about it for the first month or so, but after a while I so often got blown off due to my daughter being asleep, or them being out, or busy, or whatnot, that I got out of the habit.  I couldn't visit as often as I liked, but seriously, I had no car, and money was a problem.  She hadn't filed for child support and we hadn't really done any custody arrangements or anything, mainly because she knew I'd send what I could when I could, and once I was stable it'd likely end up more in the long run anyway, and the custody, well, I had no idea anything like this would happen, much less so swiftly out of nowhere.  I know I haven't been able to send anything, though I dropped a fair amount on her for xmas, so that limits my rights in people's eyes as well.  Nevertheless, I have been trying.  It just hasn't been working, due to the aforementioned universal "fuck with me" sign I seem to carry around.  

Oh.  And to put the cherry on top, I got a speeding ticket the day before moving out of my ex's place and hundreds of miles away.  I got a little pink piece of carbon paper with no date, no ticket amount, and no phone number on it.  Obviously, with no information, I could do nothing about it, even if I wanted to pay it, which I did, just to get it out of the way.  Recently, my ex got a letter in the mail addressed to me saying I had to show up with a $100 remittance in cashier's check or money order, and a letter from the court saying I'd shown up, and they'd reinstate my license.  Failure to do so within 30 days would result in a warrant for my arrest.  Due to having just been cut from my seasonal job, the only thing I could manage to get in this barrent wasteland of a job market, and my last paycheck had gone to rent, I was lucky to scrape that much together, and had almost convinced my ex to come get me for a day or so to take care of it, despite her previously expressed desire to not do such things.  So I figured, hey, it sucks, but I can get it out of the way and see my daughter in the bargain.  I can deal.  WRONG.  I call the number on the letter to figure out wtf with the court note, since I'd obviously missed my court date.  Come to find out the letter neglected to mention several steps in the process.  I had to go to the court, pay the TICKET, which was $150, plus a $25 late fee, THEN the court would give me the letter, and I could go to the DMV and give THEM $100, and they'd reinstate my license.  I barely managed to get together $100, no WAY do I have $275.  So looks like I get to have a nice visit from the po-po soon.  On TOP of everything else.  Oh, and due to my lack of work and rent, despite paying the last two months and this month not being due, it seems the master of the house has decided that this month is the one he'll be less tolerant on, and said that I need to find job or another place to stay soon.  Oh yes, and despite not really having cared or been in much of a rush to get it done due to expenses, suddenly my ex is filing the divorce papers and bugging me to sign, asking if I'll lie and say we've been separate for a year so as to make it go faster.  Her excuse is so I don't have to sign a little paper saying I'm not the father of this child.  Yeah.  That's totally why she's suddenly rushing it, 'cause she's already said she has no plans to marry anyone anytime soon, not even him.  And we all know what her word on what she will and won't do is worth, right?


So there's the rundown, minus several bits that were shitty, but less important, of the last year, ish.  Let me know if you want to hear about the other NINE.  

Oh, and the shit with the ticket, the ultimatum about March, and the ultimatum about shaky living situation all happened today, in the midst of divorce talks.  Yeah, I've had a GREAT day.

Edit:  For the record, she wasn't always like this.  In the beginning, things were great.  Her selfish tendencies were just that...tendencies.  Nothing major, and I'm naturally a giving person anyway, I'd have given her enough to satisfy her mild selfishness even if it wasn't there, so it fit.  Everything fit, at first.  And stayed that way for several years afterwards, so it's not like she deceived me or anything, she just...changed.  After the birth, she had post-partum depression, really bad...and I don't think she ever really got over it, not sure she understood how, and perhaps the depression itself removed her desire to go to the effort.  Anyway, after that, it was a continual downward spiral, things just kept getting worse.  She was a little moody to begin with, but not really all that much more than a normal piscean female.  And I was able to handle it pretty well, what with the combination of being a fairly understanding and reasonable person, and the fact that, well, I loved her.  Well and truly did, a lot.  The denial complex didn't even rear it's head until much later, so I'm thinking that was something acquired, and maybe the bipolarity was too...and both of those seemed to feed the selfishness and self-centeredness.  I tried to deal, tried to express how I felt about how she was changing, what she was doing, how she was acting, and how it was affecting our relationship.  I won't say I'm blameless in the problems we had, because I wasn't, but I tried, oh, did I try, and she just never seemed willing to do the same, or even admit that anything she was doing was contributing to our problems at all.  There's a denial complex for you.  Unfortunately, such things tend to be, shall we say, resistant to being fixed, because by their nature they disallow admittance that a problem exists.  I eventually just couldn't take it anymore, and gave up.  If things had been different, had she gotten help, or therapy, or medication, or even just admitted to the problems and made an attempt to fix them, even that would have been enough for me, and I'd have redoubled my efforts, and we'd probably still be together.  But she didn't, she outright refused the one time I asked her to put some effort into fixing the relationship so I could have something, some sign that it mattered to her, to go on and keep me going.  Instead, she continued with what seemed like a slow, systematic destruction of every ounce of love I had for her, the one thing I felt was sacrosanct and indestructible...and as such, it's shaken a lot of what I feel for the world, a lot of what I believe in regarding emotional attachment, and it's messed me up pretty bad.  I was always a hopeless romantic, yet also an extremely analytical individual...and, well, the former got pretty badly damaged when the latter was finally provided with enough evidence and experience to essentially prove it wrong.  My faith in love was one of the core aspects of who I am, the things that aren't supposed to ever change no matter what happens.  I'd weathered storms before and come out fine, as it's supposed to be...but this time it got hit hard, and bad, and it broke, and when a part that integral to you breaks, well...you aren't the same afterwards, you're kind of broken as well.  I wish to the gods it were otherwise, because it's made me significantly more cynical, bitter, and resentful, and I don't like that...that, and if it were otherwise, we'd still be together, I'd have a chance at a happy family, and I'd be with my daughter, instead of feeling like she's being taken out of my life, permanently, and there's not much I can do about it.  But there you have it, I was too happy with her, joyous and happy, and it seems the universe simply couldn't allow that to be.

Yeah, so I'd been wanting to do a new shoot for bloody ever, just kept either not having time or forgetting, or simply not being motivated.  Managed to pull one off last night, but didn't think it through at all beforehand as far as exactly what I wanted out of it, and seems to me that's a big part, apparently, 'cause it shows that it wasn't much of a preplanned shoot.  Still, a few nice shots anyway, and some entertaining accidents that make it up regardless.  

Primary reason I wanted to do a shoot is that as of Sunday I'm moving out, and will no longer have access to the good digital camera, or my own personal computer, though I hope to remedy that as soon as possible once I get a job in the new place.  I also won't have much in the way of interesting trees or landscape nearby, sadly.  So I didn't know when my next opportunity would be to do even a half-decent shoot, and I didn't want to leave everyone just hanging after already being quiet for however long.  On the bright side, this aspect of the move is temporary, and come late August I'll be living in New Orleans, which has more stock photo opportunities than it knows what to do with.  The mood is how I'm trying to be more than how I feel atm, but things should be well, all in all.

So yeah, I finally got off my ass and did a bloody shoot!  Felt good!  This one's primarily by request, though I ran with it a little bit, for some decent werewolf stock.  I wasn't really planning on doing shirtless for a little bit yet, but the one doing the requesting, well....let's just say it's only fair and leave it at that.  So Genie, this is all for you, and so very, very sorry it took so long.  Look 'em over and see if this is what you were wanting, I'm thinking about maybe going out and doing a second shoot for this after I get some feedback, primarily from you, on how to do some of it better.  

For the rest of you....I'm alive and back in business!  Critique encouraged, hope you like what you see.

iamidaho.deviantart.com/journa…

wolves.wordpress.com/2009/02/1…

That's right, more screwed up, violent, cruel bullshit being undertaken for the simple sake of mindless entertainment in the form of random, unmitigated slaughter.  What a piece of work is man, yes?  

Sad thing is, people manage to desensitize themselves to such things by imagining that they're just dumb animals, like they don't feel pain, or don't matter, or are otherwise worthless.  I did a project on coyotes for my ecology class in college, and found out they're damn near as smart as we are, and in many ways more adaptable.  Give 'em opposable thumbs and they'd probably take over.  But yeah, they're just vermin.  Dumb animals.  We're God's Chosen People, given this world to do with as we please, and all the animals in it too.  So we don't have to give a fuck about anything, it's all our property, right?  It doesn't matter.  They're toys.  Animate objects placed on this planet to serve our pleasure.  Right?  

I hate humans.