we're still in the game

I used to search for old loves online. I always wondered if anyone was looking for me. I decided that no one was, so I gave up on it. LOL

I think what you are describing is universal. We always wonder what might have been.

I am still torn between regret and a kind of remembrance of things past. I wonder about the "rest of the story" with those loves whose lives I shared at one point in my life. It does kind of haunt me a bit...I guess I want them to have a good life now...

Maybe they can serve them up like cold giblet gravy over my lifeless corpse in a very solemn Catholic Church Mass.

God, may you embrace this sinner and take him home, or in your infinite wisdom, send him to the other place. We're done with him here.

But afterwards I'd like to have fireworks and a drunken and cannabis assisted revelry, and dare I dream, a baby or two carelessly conceived but welcomed to this earth the night of my wake, and maybe even named after me.

Hunter is a nice name for any gender, in many languages.

I've always been very confident that whatever I did I did it because it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. Even at my most off-my-meds-bat-shit-craziest worst.

My feet are bleeding, officer? No, I hadn't noticed. Seems I forgot to wear shoes tonight.

Fortunately I was white and recognized as a mostly harmless diversion from normal graveyard shift police business.

Take Hunter home, help Hunter find his clothes on the beach, that was all pleasant cop business, and sometimes worth free pizza. (I had connections.) But sometimes my housemates didn't think so when the police were pounding on the door, do you know this guy? He says he lives here. But I was never disowned, not even the night the cop and I could hear a somewhat platonic ex of mine and my housemate very very loudly fucking. I wanted to go away 'til they were done, but the cop insisted, and kept pounding on the door.

Awkward.

I can't ever say, oh, I shouldn't have quit high school, I shouldn't have got myself kicked out of college twice, I should have run away as fast as I could from my first "real" girlfriend or else stood stoically alongside her as she deceived herself, her family, and minority investors in the company her father founded and she inherited.

Maybe I shouldn't have made my Senior Thesis a subtle "Fuck the whole lot of You!" because they wouldn't accept the thesis I wanted to write.

Maybe I should have taken that civilian job with the Navy (they even wrote me a big check I tore up), and on and on and on...

My history of burning bridges behind me and catapulting tons of shit back over the river, just in case, is secure.

Oh, hell yes, I've got scars.

I'm missing my left testicle, sold to the devil, but no regrets. Each scar has left me with a new story to tell.

That's what we humans do best -- we tell stories.

Male surgeons with two balls thought two testicles were important.

Really?

Bullshit!

They could have cut out the whole damned mess when I was nine years old and and could and saved me a whole lot of trouble later.

Reasonable "treatments" for the mental health issues came later. Tricyclic anti-depressants were not that horrible. I had three "crazy" grandparents, one who popped prescribed amphetamines just to get out of bed and go to work in the morning, and one "normal" grandma.

I think I owe my normal grandma whatever relationships I have in ordinary life, even though I flunked out of Hollywood as a plain spoken four year old. I have a brother who is still prescribed "old school" drugs. My doctor prescribes more modern drugs that seem to work as well, and they've been generics for a few years now so I don't even have to argue with my insurance company. Ten bucks. Less than an hours work a month.

My great grandfather's left testicle killed him when my grandma was sixteen..

Me and one of my brothers have so far escaped that fate, but he had to suffer chemotherapy, and I did not.

But I have always had regrets, even when I was a child. There is some OCD part of me that won't let the past settle. I've gotten a lot better about it in the last few years, but I still feel the sting of regret from time to time.

Something that I have done to help make my peace with regrets is to try to tie up unfinished business from the past. An example of that is that I dropped out of school twice when I was young. Not finishing college was always one of my big regrets. Well, I went back to school a few years ago and finally finished my degree. Another example of addressing regret is that when I was in my twenties I was mentally ill and hadn't been in a relationship in all that time. When I got better, I addressed the issue and found someone to love.

There are a lot of things that I cannot fix, however. It's those things that haunt me sometimes. It's been getting better with time and living right in the present. I've put a lot of distance between me and the bad stuff, and now I have more happy memories than sad ones.

The Dean told me he would recommend me for graduate school, "but not here" with a strongly Implied "HELL NO!"

He'd previously got me removed from college for fighting with one of his teaching assistants. But he also helped get me back in.

Looking back, I was an idiot.

But a tiny little part of me still thinks I was right. I didn't throw anything back at his TA, just words. TA first threw chalk, then a book at me, and then one of my classmates dodged out the door and called the campus police. Campus police knew me.

In my young adult, not fully formed mind, holy shit, I'm turning into my crazy mom, and we are escaping Franco's Spain in the middle of the night to France.

The Chair of my minor refused to sign off on me and then took off to Europe for a year, after a few canceled appointments with me. Europe was still far away then, before internet and cheap long distance calling. Anne escaped my nonsense.

Later, after graduation, I met my wife. She was a big city public school science teacher, and I was student science teacher practicing to be the same.

My wife was accepted to graduate school in another state and I packed up the truck and folowed her.

'everything happens for a reason' and to be honest, if I look back, I do see that there were excellent reasons why I did A instead of B, etc.

Think about something you don't often think about.

Read something you never thought you would read.

Help someone you don't know.

Show a child something.

Do these kinds of things every day and you will discover that you are much younger than you think you are, and in fact, that you will never be old, at least until you die.

their best moments, best photos and perhaps even exaggerations about what they're really doing.

It's the perfect medium to ensure we feel boring in comparison.

Don't beat yourself up! Go do something that is on your bucket list so you can cross off that "regret" off your list...

I'm having a bit of backlash after therapy yesterday.

Ruminating.

Bleh.

Or regret. We all share in this!

Interesting can be a pain. Remember the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.
I always thought I'd live in New York because I grew up close to there and thought it was the center of the universe. I've lived in Houston for 35 years. I am solidly middle aged, middle class and in the Midwest. I'm contest.

One lesson, I've learned from it all
Fortune and fame are disguised as your friend