An Executive Summary of the Last Fifteen Years

There was me before there was we.

Me had plans and big ideas. But me was a fiction. Me was quaint. Me took up the room.

I wish I could have explained what happened to me. I would have told me about we. I would have said that we have a strong back. We laugh. We are a shelter, a thick pair of socks. We actually exist.

"You aren't real," I would have told me. "I know you think you are. I know you think you're important. And I want you to feel the full, pressing weight of my love for you when I tell you that you are, at best, a scarecrow. But you will be more. When you are we."

But I know how well me would have listened.

For a time I resented the loss of me. It took time and your patience (you have more than you think, I am proof of this) for me to see what what the hole left by me, the hole that was me, would be filled with.

I did not understand that me did not die, that me never lived. Me merely wanted. But we do not want, not often. We live. We reach.

I started dreaming again this year. I hadn't much for, god, a decade? But I started again. Next to you. While we lumbered our sheets into knots and snored our way to the baby's milk breath of waking. I started to dream of mundane and silly things, and I clutch it now, terrified that I will lose it again. Like I could have lost we. But we were too strong for that, weren't we.

Me sometimes cries out to be allowed back home. Me howls like a tattered haint. Me doesn't understand that there is no home for a ghost, that ghosts have no eyes, that I will suffer no living thing to be haunted by me.

Cutting me loose to drift left scars behind, most of which you patiently hacked into me. I owe you a lifetime for that loving violence. Because now me is you is we is us is everything.

Sometimes I don't know whether to weep or sing or kneel or grab you hard. But then I let my hands go slack and I think:

Look what we did.

I May Be About to Make with the Schmoopy

As of this writing, the kids are finally in bed, lunches are made for tomorrow. Shirt's ironed. Jacket will be my newest, a summer-weight navy thing with stripes. Grey slacks.

Did that, cleaned the kitchen, took out the trash and recycling, then ran up to Kroger for some mascarpone cheese and heavy cream. Tomorrow they will be whipped together with some sugar and homemade bourbon vanilla extract. Protip:

1. Save old vanilla extract bottle from The Spice House.
2. Split a couple of vanilla beans and cram 'em in there.
3. Fill bottle with good bourbon.
4. Wait.
5. Sexyface.

This will then be splorped atop slices of red wine chocolate cake, which if made with good quality cocoa powder and cinnamon (see previous link to The Spice House) is asploding sexyface cracklin whiz biscuits. Protip:

1. Serve cake to guests.
2. Wait for facial expression showing revelation that their lives have changed.
3. Yell SPLA-DOW!
4. Mount guests on the dining room table in a manly fashion by order of height.

The cake is for my wife. The cake is for my wife because Thursday we will be celebrating the day of her birth.

I met her, oh, a dozen years or so ago. My roommate and I were in a bar. He was looking for someone to dance with, I was looking for a glass of scotch and a chair so I could sit and watch people have fun. It's a thing I do.

We were regulars in this place, friendly enough with the staff that a cocktail waitress felt comfortable asking for a little business assistance.

"See those two ladies over there?" Yes. "They came here to dance and it's slow tonight and nobody's asked them to dance and they're bored and about to leave. Help us out here?"

Roommate: "Sure." Me: "Fuck."

So we did. He got the short brunette with the curls, I got the tall blond with the total lack of interest in me. We danced. We had drinks and laughs. He had a thing for the brunette, so I figured she wouldn't factor into my future and turned my attention to the sound of the tall blond's vagina slamming shut when she looked at me.

It's a story I'll tell our grandchildren one day.

That night started a friendship with the brunette that turned into a deep affection that turned into lust that turned into fear that turned into the greatest damn decision I ever made in my life.

Now, I know I'm supposed to say that. You can't write a thing where your tone is more "marrying her was pretty good, I guess, I mean I'm not lonely and there's the whole having-boobs issue too". You are Not Allowed. But seriously, listen to this:

I was a fragment of a man-child when she came along. I was still wounded from the fallout of a long-dead relationship, was floundering in the pursuit of a totally impractical undergraduate degree, had no ambition, and was in fact one of those insufferable cockbags who writes overwrought blarf in coffee shops. I managed to shart out the first draft of a novel that in retrospect could have been titled No One Understands My Angst or Hidden Power. I was a flaccid summer shower of bullshit, the duke of peanut gallery wisdom, leaping from fling to fling like a methed-up bonobo with a bionic penis.

That's a robo bonobo boner, for those of you keeping score at home. And she sized me up and said "Eh, sure, let's give it a whirl." Can I get a whoop whoop.

Now look at me.

I'm thicker now, and balder. I get tired more easily. I drive a minivan. But I have two bachelor's degrees. I'm working on a master's degree in public health, with an emphasis in biostatistics. I have something approximating a vision for my life. I have ambition and drive. I meditate. I bake most of the bread that my family eats. I am using every tool at my disposal to build more awesome into my life, brick by brick by brick.

I found my voice as a writer, and I found it because I found her as my audience. I'm not writing this stuff for you guys.

I also made this:

I mean, come on. Look at that. I don't look like that.

Let me be clear: I would have none of this without her. None of it. I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd gotten what I wanted half my life ago, because it would have kept me from her. I cringe at the thought of what that would mean, what I would have missed.

You know how your pillow gets cold, and that feels nice to lie down on? In the winter, her butt does exactly the same thing, and it is Spooning Valhalla. The only problem is that, unlike my pillow, I can't flip her over to enjoy the cold butt on the other side.

My wife is the furnace of our home and family. She is its engine, its drive shaft, its beating heart. She understands that love means leaving blood on the floor. I do not deserve her.

I'm working on a fairly nerdy post that will get more into the details of this, but I have a running project in OmniFocus called "Marital Bliss" that I put things into that might make my life with her better. I started this recently out of the realization of just how much I fail her.

The thing about this project is that every time I look at it, I feel this faint tinge of sorrow. I feel this because I know that the day will eventually come when I have to go in and mark that project completed. And that will be the saddest goddamn day of my life.

She is as tough as overworked pie dough and she sobbed when a baby bird fell out of our attic and she is frazzled and she works too much and she gets seriously gassy when I make red beans and rice and she understands the importance of throwing up the horns when things are rockin' and she is a nerd and she is all curves and she is a god damned firecracker.

I send her every post I write here before I put it up, because I want her to be first in line. But not this one.

I have gone on too long. I am sorry. But I need to put up a marker. She has completed the first year of the fifth decade of her life, and no one on the internet has built a shrine to her. That is a problem I am correcting now.

I love you, Ferf. One day I will deserve you.