A story about extended family

Yesterday afternoon, my grandfather died.

Clarifications are necessary. My stepmother’s father died.

It’s not just for brevity that I call him my grandfather. If I wanted to be brief, I’d just call him Papa, which is what I have called him for literally all of my life.

I remember my childhood visits to his home in Kalamazoo, a home filled with endless amounts of knickknacks and books that I believed only he could be smart enough to read.

There was the summer house up north, where he taught me how to drive his old motorboat while wearing a green, floppy hat that did absolutely nothing to shade a glowing smile.

There was the road trip, just he and I, where for three and a half hours I rambled on as children do and he told stories as only wise men can and the dread that I had felt before that trip began was totally replaced by an appreciation for the time we had spent together.

Then there was the stroke that took most of my Papa away from all of us, that left him in a wheelchair, largely unable to function and enshrouded in a cloudiness breached only by occasional flashes of clarity and humor. I learned to swallow my nervousness and read Russian poetry to him as though he were the grandchild and not I. I learned to help get him into and out of his wheelchair from the car. I silently lived in fear for years that the last time I saw him would stop being the last time until next and would eventually become the last time forever.

And that day came on the last Sunday of 2008.

I last saw my Papa at my aunt’s wedding. Some part of him must know that I loved him. I told him before I returned home. Some part of him knows I respected him. It was written upon my face each time I was around him. I hope he knows that a part of me always wanted to grow up to embody the best of his traits, because to do so would bring me so much closer to being a good man.

As I grew up, I sometimes wondered what it would be like if my parents had never gotten divorced, if Dr. Dad had never remarried. I eventually decided that this was crazy talk. On this day, I am fearful that such a reality could have ever existed.

Most people only ever get to have two grandfathers in their lives.

I got an extra.

Goodbye, Papa.

How to stop an exploding man

Unabashed Heroes fandom and strange pciture aside, this is a more serious post.

My mother commented when I last visited her that in the past year, I have seemingly become a more bitter, grumpier, less smiley person.

At first I thought she was merely being mom. This is the same woman who proceeded to lecture me about how I needed to start looking for a woman to marry me and bear forth my offspring to forever terrorize the planet.

But then there’s one of my coworkers, who commented (I’m not sure if she was joking or not) that I will probably give myself an ulcer or a heart attack or an aneurysm or something because I always seem to be upset about something.

I don’t remember changing into a grumpy person. I don’t feel the urge to tell kids to get off my lawn. And at the same time, I do notice that I am different. I play with my cat. I go to work. I volunteer for anything and everything I can at work for reasons I have yet to justify to myself, aside from the fact that it seems to make the most sense because I’m the only one who doesn’t have a family/significant other.

There wasn’t a point at which I started hating life or hating the world. I just don’t know if I am still seeing it with the same hope in my eyes I used to. The past couple years haven’t been tragedies, but to be honest, I’m still not over what happened with The Nurse. I haven’t been hopeful about finding someone in literally a year. Most of the people I went to college with are dating, many are engaged, more than a few are married. And here I am. A crazy cat man.

I don’t know what to believe anymore. When I close my eyes, I can still see a few glimmers of hope somewhere. I just don’t know how to live like I once did, living with the knowledge in mind that the sun would come up tomorrow and that everything would be okay.

I miss the way I used to be. If you see my old self, point him in my direction. He and I need to get reacquainted.

The story of how to become an Internet crazy cat person

I am that person. The one at work who talks about their cat. Specifically, I talk about how mine tries to kill me (one of his little kitty toys almost made me put my head into the wall a few nights ago).

Mind you, I keep this in check, for the most part. I know that my coworkers don’t want to hear about EVERYTHING about my cat. So I keep it to the high points. How he tries to assassinate me.

And it’s now into the next step: Insanity. My talking about him, not his attempts to kill me. Those were insane from the get-go.

I’ve been on Twitter (www.twitter.com) for months. Many of you who read this blog also follow me on there. Now you can also follow my cat.

For those of you interested, I’m twitter.com/a20s. My cat is twitter.com/CyrusTheCat.

I realize this will strike some of you as strange, ludicrous even. One of my coworkers has before commented that it seems I like to comment about my whole life on the Internet (she’s on Twitter too, mind you, so nyah). This isn’t a cry for help.

This is me using the Intertubes to have fun.

This has got to stop

I remember being able to write blog posts just for the sheer joy of it. To be able to tap out thoughts, raw, powerful, and to share them.

And the sharing was not the point. It was the fact that this was my outlet, my creation, myself poured out through my fingertips.

Until I got caught up in this illusion of audience.

Some of you are my friends. Some of you are my family. To this very day I find myself mystified that complete, total strangers could find themselves interested in the thoughts of a man who lives in a shabby apartment on the wrong side of town, whose cat tries to kill him and who is a workaholic because it seems like the right thing to be.

I am not special. I am the everyman. This blog’s title was supposed to be the ever-present reminder of that. I am just a face in the crowd, the voice of one who is many. My life is the ordinary and therein extraordinary, because each and every one of us has a story and I decided to share mine with you.

But who are you?

I got so caught up in this illusion of audience that I stopped writing for me. To thine own self be true was to mine own self betrayed and all of a sudden, I found myself helpless, powerless, uninterested. I stopped writing blogs. I stopped reading them.

The stories I could tell were not told because I didn’t have the time. I didn’t take time. I couldn’t make time. Welcome to The Rut. Population: Me.

I would log in to this blog and stare. My mouse pointer would hover over the button to write a new post and each and every time I felt as if a sword was hanging over my head straight out of bad Greek mythology.

About 10 minutes ago, something clicked.

“This is ridiculous!” I declared and my cat thought I was talking about him.

It is time to start over.

Time to start anew.

Time to take time.

Time to tell stories.

Time to get on with it.