Just Me

“Only in America do we spend one day of the year being grateful for what we have then going out the next day of that same year to buy more stuff.” This is something that I muttered to my son this morning as I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV this morning. And while that comment made my son laugh, I couldn’t help but wonder at how true it is. Then again, the only shopping I am doing tomorrow is Christmas gifts for my kids. I won’t be buying them everything; just the expensive stuff (and hoping I can score good deals on them!). Then I started thinking about an article I read the other day about how that whole story of the first Thanksgiving being between the Pilgrims and Native Americans was a lie. Then about how there are so many people reminding us about how so many Native Americans were slaughtered and driven from their land after the arrival of the people on the Mayflower. (We get the same kind of lecture every Columbus Day!) Yes, the...

Today is the official one-month anniversary of when I stopped drinking alcohol. I have been officially alcohol-free for an entire month. Just a little over a month ago, on October 11, I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance because I was having severe chest pains. My kids and I thought it was a heart attack, but it wasn’t a heart attack. It was pancreatitis. And it struck right after I finished drinking one beer. Just one! Up until then, I don’t think I’d ever heard of pancreatitis. Sure, maybe it was discussed during a Health class I took in college, but I don’t remember for sure. I didn’t know what pancreatitis was. I didn’t know I could get it. Hell, I didn’t think I’d get anything from drinking so much alcohol, since I’d already been drinking heavily up until then and the only thing I had suffered from were some really bad hangovers. I thought I was fine, but I wasn’t. I didn’t think I would get hit with anything serious because of my drinking, but I did. Sure, I knew that dri...

I have been reading the book Wishcraft by Barbara Sher recently. One thing I have noticed about what she says in this book is the value of putting everything down on paper. While I have firsthand experience of experiencing therapeutic healing and relief from writing about things, lately I have bottled up A LOT of things that I was dealing with. And since it got out of hand with driving me to drink and then breaking down last night and crying about it all, I feel that maybe it is time to let it all out and write it down. I am going to go further and post it all on my public blog. I just feel that I should because a lot of people like to judge me, condemn me, hate me, kick me out of their lives and spread lies about me when they don’t know what I’m REALLY going through, dealing with and carrying around. Not that they even care. But here it goes. I’m angry at myself for failing to achieve my dream: Being a successful novelist. The problem is that I gave myself a deadline to make that drea...