6/7/20 Sunday
Roasted peppers and a chopped Walla Walla sweet onion sautéed in olive oil, salt and pepper, hamburger meat and buttery pasta noodles. Another leftover surprise dinner, the kind I love to fix. I like the creativity of cooking and the challenge of using ingredients I already have, which is usually whatever my son did not eat the week before. No tv tonight – just dinner, a candle, a fat glass of milk, and this thin blog machine with a backlit keyboard that allows me to express my heart to the world.
I’ve felt pressured to write about current events, but there’s something about that pressure which has rubbed me the wrong way. Should I be outraged about police brutality? Of course and there have been bad cops doing bad things for a long time and it needs to change, but there have been a lot of other bad things happening to people and where is their justice? Where are the protests and outrage about domestic violence, child abuse, drunk driving, animal torture, world hunger, and on and on? There’s such a tendency to be swept up in the crisis of the moment. Before George Floyd it was coronavirus, before that Me Too. In my opinion the real problem is a crisis of accountability. People should not be judged by the color of their skin, where they are from, if they are fat or skinny, rich or poor, male or female, old or young, gay or straight, or if they wear a uniform. There are plenty of police and military who put their own lives at risk and do extraordinary things for many on a daily basis. People from all walks of life do good things and bad things, it is action (or lack thereof) which should define us – we are all responsible for our own behavior and should act as such. All of these problems will see improvement when we approach others with compassion and respect, which begins inside each one of us.
I’m sure I won’t be making any new internet friends tonight with this post, but writing for others is not where my own blog came from. My own story comes from trying to make sense of the circumstances around the collapse of my marriage over a year ago, and my struggle to persevere and eventually rebuild my life and move forward. I never intended to make the blog public, and ended up doing so by accident because I’m somewhat of a technological idiot. But in doing so I’ve since found a lot of support and understanding from other writers who are courageous enough to step forward and tell their own stories, however hard it may be.
I’ve been tempted to unpublish this blog again because so much of it is personal and painful, and I’m normally a private introvert. My emotions and vulnerabilities lie exposed to the world, and probably most intimidating they lie exposed to my ex who is still not technically my ex because our divorce has been going on for over a year now. I don’t know if she reads this or not but I have to come to terms with that possibility. The few people who have read my posts from the beginning know that although our relationship crashed and burned in a pretty spectacular way, I still respect her as a person and have great sympathy for what she has had to deal with.
In the end I’m deciding to keep my blog public because it helps me, apparently it helps some others too, and I need to have the courage and conviction to say what comes from my heart regardless if my views are popular or not, or who reads them. Riots? Protests? Coronavirus? My ex wife? For a couple of hours today I took a break from the world, took my son to the beach and dug a giant hole in the sand for him to play in. We paddled out in the Salish Sea and looked down in the water at schools of young perch and baby halibut. The sun came out briefly but long enough to appreciate a quiet moment away from the world, and the confidence to share it with others.
After the Rain 