Yellow Mouse Comeback is Dire

I am here to tell you that money most certainly does not buy happiness. It buys choices, as the saying goes, but you can have a whole pocket full of cash and a whole array of choices and still be having an absolutely suck time.

This is the first time in my life that I can say that; at least the part about money. The Playboy of the Western World (my father in law, now gone to that big bath house in the sky) left us pretty well off. Having money is definitely better than the alternative, but it made no difference in the quality of the suck factor when everything around here decided to take a massive shit.

I am a person who likes my home life stable, happy and free of drama. I work hard to keep things that way. Growing up surrounded by alcoholics, criminals and sociopaths, I swore that I would never let my family life be tainted by that kind of chaos, once it was my turn. That decision had absolutely no magic 'drama-averting' effect on my life subsequently, but it did mean that, like any other vermin, problems were hunted down and exterminated as they arose, instead of being left to fester and multiply. I loved my family, I sacrificed, I made good decisions, blah blah blah blah fucking blah.

I don't know if it's just American culture or just me or what, but once you have achieved the home and family thing, the societal models kind of peter out. So I assumed,like a doofus, that things must pretty much just peter out on the inter-familial stress front since there was apparently nothing left to report. I figured the kids moved out, you got wrinkly, you went to Vegas a lot, then had a hip replacement and eventually died.

Ahem.

There are times over the past year that I wished I'd never made the decision to have a family. That's a new one for me. I went into the endeavor thinking that if I did everything 'right' that things would, you know, turn out right. Which in retrospect was astonishingly naive of me. Had I been raising feeder mice perhaps that expectation might have proven closer to the mark; feeder mice don't cause a lot of drama and either way you end up feeding them to anacondas. During the course of this past year, there were people in my life that I would have liked to have fed to anacondas. I would be surrounded by obese anacondas right now. Obese, non-dramatic anacondas.

Half the problem is me. I might be pushing 50 hard but the rotten kid who used to vandalize things at random and get into fights is still very much alive and well here. I should be mature enough by now to be able to keep my shit together; to be able to pull back, to separate from things that are no longer under my control. Am I? I am not. I want to leap onto things that are no longer under my control and rend them into bleeding shreds, kind of like what happens to stray teenagers out for a casual walk through the woods around Forks, Washington on a moonless night, only everyone involved would be wearing a shirt. The only difference between me now and then is that back then I used to get off on being enraged. Now it just makes me feel like shit.

So are we in counselling? You bet your little red wagon. This rotten kid does not give up. Ever. Resistance is fucking FUTILE.