Good Morning Folks. I wish my Canadian friends would come collect their geese. We have a gaggle of them that roam around my neighborhood and this past weekend they straight up blocked my progress trying to get back home. I slowly had to ease up on them and they eventually parted and let me through. I got out of the car and tried to wave them away… but that only caused them to hiss at me and stand their ground. If you have been reading the blog for awhile you will know that they also blocked my progress when I was trying to get back to the visitation for my wife because I forgot to bring her glasses. Last night they also briefly blocked my progress when I was going to a dinner thing. It seems like they exist to be a roadblock for whenever I need to be somewhere.
Yesterday was a lot. It would have been my wife’s 49th birthday and as a result we planned on having a dinner thing at 7pm at one of her favorite restaurants. She was basic and loved Olive Garden… what can I say. I think her ACTUAL favorite restaurant was Desi Wok an Indian/Desi place in Midtown Tulsa, but it has a super small dining room and could not have supported the big group that we had last night. I am not sure the actual headcount but it was somewhere around twenty people and I mostly did okay. In truth I was way more stressed by being around that many people at one time, but I took it in good spirits. I did not get out of there and back home until around 10ish… so I was exhausted and pretty much went straight to bed. My children aka the cats were super grumpy that I had been gone all night, but quickly assumed snuggling postures with me in bed as I did my dailies in the few mobile games that I play before falling asleep.
One of the things that I need to do is come up with a reason for me to get out of the house more, and honestly be more active. I am pretty damned sedentary and have been over the five years of remote work. One of the things that I used to do with my wife was go off on camera shoots, looking for various interesting things to photograph. I am a bit fan of urban decay and turning benign subjects into abstract ones through the photo lens. One of the things I hated about this however was the weird proprietary chargers that we had to use with our canon cameras. So I started out looking to see if anyone made a version of the chargers that used USB C. Instead I found something way more cool. These are some replacement batteries that you just hook up with USB C as though they were a power bank. I bought a pair of them to try out and maybe this will jump start my desire to get out and take some photos.
My friend from High School that keeps tabs on me has also said that they want to go out and shoot photos more so I might be able to convince them to join in the madness. There are a few places that I would not mind revisiting. For example Downtown Coffeyville Kansas was really cool the weekend we took a trip up there circa 2014ish. There is also plenty of stuff in and around Tulsa to take photos of that is interesting. I remember we made a trip out to Guthrie and that was pretty great as well. Mostly the camera was a good reason to go somewhere other than my home, and while walking around looking for things to take photos of… I completely forget that I am walking around and end up putting on a bunch of steps that I am unaware of until get home and realize how tired I am. I need distractions I think and this seems like a reasonable one.
Another distraction that I am heading towards is starting up collecting and painting Warhammer 40k miniatures again. I’ve missed this but have not really had the space for it. At some point when I find someone to donate the library of math books that my wife collected over the years, I will probably start turning her office into a hobby room. At some point I envision having 3d printers set up in there and a painting desk. In the short term though I have been watching stupid amounts of videos trying to determine how best to ease back into things. The same friend from High School has said we need to do a few painting nights rather than me making a rash decision with which of the dozens of paint lines that I want to buy into. They have a smattering of various paints so that I can get a feel for how each of them works. The hobby industry has expanded significantly since I last paid any attention to it… which was around the release of Warhammer 8th edition.
Prior to that I was a Rogue Trader through 2nd edition Warhammer 40k player back when we were in High School. I grew up daydreaming about having access to all of the things that I saw in White Dwarf magazine. We did not have access to a GW store of any sort, with I think the closest one being over five hours away in the Dallas Metroplex. What we did have access to were woefully incomplete product lines at various small comic shops, but we made the best of what we could get and had a lot of fun painting them. Quite honestly having a paint night with this friend is going to be a massive throwback to our high school days where I would go to his house and abuse the large collection of apple barrel paints to paint up my squads of beakie space marines from the 30 count plastic box.
I played some more Titan Quest 2 yesterday and rolled another melee character, this time going warfare and earth instead of warfare and storm. There is significantly more synergy there and I went hard on doing a fire based whirlwind character like I have done so many times in Last Epoch. It works well enough, but still feels a bit more clunky than I would have liked it to be. However I do think a lot of what I am reading as clunk is just the slower pace of this game as compared to Path of Exile or Last Epoch. There are two problems that I need to solve with this build, the first being mana regeneration and the second being some sort of either life leech or regeneration that will keep my health topped off when I encounter status effects that I will not be able to easily avoid since I am up in the face of everything I am fighting. My goal with any build is to make them so they are self sustaining in way that I never have to hit the health potion, or at least not without me taking some massive spike of damage.
One of the things that still annoys me is how there are cases where you do not care at all about the early tiers of abilities for a specific mastery. For example I rushed pouring my divinity points into Earth so that I could pick up the aura that would make every melee attack that I do deal fire damage, because the two spells that were in the first tier were useless for the sort of build I was going for. This is sort of the thing that I was saying when it did not feel like there was much synergy between abilities. Some abilities have ways to mutate them into other types of attacks… for example you can make Lightning Bolt be a spear attack which is cool… but it would have been cooler if you could have just made that work with ANY weapon attack. Part of the reason why Path of Exile 1 is so awesome, is that in most cases you can use any attack or spell with most weapon setups, giving you some really broad freedom in how you build your character. There is more flexibility here than in Path of Exile II for example… but it also really feels like they have a build in mind for each of the trees.
Anyways. I think I am tired of writing for this morning. I am still sort of exhausted from last night, not so much sleepy tired… but emotionally drained. I told my folks when I got home that it was awfully “peopley” in there, and my Dad laughed who is also a confirmed curmudgeon. I now need to figure out what all I missed yesterday while I was not working, and figure out how to pick up where I left off from Monday. I hope you all have a wonderful day and I will figure out something to talk about tomorrow morning.
The post Of Geese, Cameras, Wolves, and Whirlwind appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
You get a Gracie photo since this is a bummer of a post.
I know I talked the other day about not wanting to allow grief to become my personality, but it seems the longer this goes… the more of my personality that seems to occupy. I am immensely broken inside and I feel like the shambling dead moving through life on autopilot right now, trying to retain some semblance of normal out of the wreckage of my life. I don’t like this, not one little bit. However I also sort of feel helpless to do anything about it. My brain feels like it is stuck in this gouge that was placed in my life at the beginning of this month, and no amount of flailing about seems to be able to unseat me from this channel. I know grieving is a process that takes time, but I hate how much of my processing cycles it seems to be taking up. To paraphrase a quote attributed to Oppenheimer… I am become grief, the bummer of friends. I know I am a drain on the mental health of those around me… but I just don’t know how to exist in any other fashion right now.
I’ve spent a lot of time retreating into books and games, and that has helped considerably because I can temporarily place my mind in someone else’s life. I get that this is also not really me dealing with my situation, but I feel like I can only be me for so much of the day without it tearing me apart. There is this Catch 22 of the situation I am in where I have equal numbers of individuals who deeply care about me both wanting me to move on with my life, but also needing me to be the constant grieving husband. I am attempting to do both in equal measure, because I am both at the same time. I’ve made a bunch of largely meaningless changes that I could have done at any point… but never did until I just decided to do them. I’ve also done nothing at all to tackle the mount of stuff that I should find a new home for, that I will never actually use. The extreme heat has been slowing some of my progress… but also I think I mostly just need to set aside a project or two every weekend and push through them. I think one of the low hanging fruit is probably to go through her jewelry and package it up so that folks can go through it and see if there is anything that they want to keep before donating it somewhere.
I think the thing that I am struggling with the most right now… is the way in which my wife is being remembered. Like she was so many different things to so many different people. She was an extremely complex three dimensional person, and there were sides of her… that only I knew… that were combined with all of the different sides that she showed segments of the world. We were both pretty private people and had a bad habit of segmentation of ourselves… into the person that people wanted us to be in specific situations. So many of these people who are remembering her fondly… only know one small facet of who she was as a human being. They are mourning this person that they knew… as though it was the totality of who she was as a person, and there are times I want to shake them and scream at them… that this person they have invented didn’t exist… at least not in the way that they think it did.
There is this thing that happens when someone dies… that I have not so lovingly referred to as the canonization phase. Where they shed anything that might have been edgy about a person and only choose to remember the most positive of virtues… effective erecting a new saint in the place of the person. To her church family they all viewed her as this hyper godly woman… because it was the faithful aspect of her that she chose to show them. To her educational family they all viewed her as this penultimate teacher… because she spent countless hours in her office in self doubt stratifying her thoughts until they were razor sharp and ready to be presented to the world. To her family, specifically her sister and her closest friends she was this rock to lean on… always there with a kind word when you texted her… but that largely existed because she had numerous relief valves that allowed her to blow off any negative energy so she could keep up a positive facade to the world.
In the retelling of stories about my wife… I am seeing so much sanding off of rough edges and slowly rounding the narrative of who she was into the most readily accessible and digestible fable. That is not to say that she was not all of these things that people are saying and more… it is just that the totality of who she was is getting lost in the retelling. The totality of who she was… was probably really only known by me. It hurts so bad to see all the nuance being lost. It was that nuance and quite honestly flaws… that allowed her to be the person that she showed to the world. So I feel like I have to remember the real her, like it is some sacred mission that I must uphold and I am scared to death I will forget that nuance over time. I have a shitty memory if we are being perfectly honest. I am scared I am going to forget some key moment in this delicate matrix of who she was as a person… because I can’t lean on others to remember her correctly for me.
Tomorrow is the twenty seventh anniversary of our wedding, and I know it is going to be an exceptionally hard day for me. I took the day off work because I knew there was no way I was going to limp through a series of meetings. I should probably go do something… I just have no clue what I actually am interested in doing. I might stay here and work through some of the projects that I know need to get done. I might also just say “fuck it” and spend the entire day reading or playing games. I know I will break down several times throughout the day and that is okay. I’ve had many people offer to come over, but really… that would only serve to stress me out in different ways. The only person that I did not feel like I needed to put on a mask for was my wife. She was my person, and the only one I ever truly let me guard all the way down around. Ironically a lot of my friends that I made through gaming, and have never met in person… have probably seen a more genuine version of me than most of the people I know in person.
It does make me wonder how I will be remembered, and what edges will be sanded off when someone tells my tale. I largely think I will be forgotten, because I have been too weird and hermit-like for most of my adult life. Sure I have been the pillar of several gaming and blogging communities, but most of that doesn’t really translate to the real world. I play a fairly important leadership role in the workplace… but I also struggle to care about that right now. I have been trying to pour myself into work as a coping mechanism, but it has been hard. Nothing that we do there feels like it matters anymore, or at least not in the same way it used to when my wife was still around. There were so many things that worked, because I knew I had another human being that supported me at home. With that gone… I sort of don’t even know who I am right now.
None of this is a cry for help, or asking for someone to come along and fix me. I am going to have to make it to the other side of this chasm on my own. I am not one that accepts help terribly well, and even when given… it often stresses me out more than it actually resolves my problems. I have to figure this out on my own. I have no clue if I will make a blog post tomorrow, because I have no clue if I will actually get out of bed. We will see what tomorrow brings. I might go get cronuts from the fancy donut place in an attempt to start he day on good footing. Anyways if I do not see you tomorrow, think kind thoughts.
The post Grief: Bummer of Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
One of the curses of being GenX is that I often visualize my life through movie scenes. There is a scene in Heathers where the Dad is telling the entire funeral that he loves his dead gay son. For whatever reason this is the scene I think of when I think about being overwhelmed by grief. I am scared to death I am going to allow my own grief to become my personality. I’ve seen it happen too often, where memorialization of a dead loved one… becomes the driving purpose. I see that my blog has largely become me working through my feelings about what has happened… and am scared that I am starting to do the same thing. I also see the fact that I had a weekend where nothing much happened, because I lacked any drive to do things. Nothing really brings me any semblance of joy, so I kind of feel like I am just checking off boxes and doing the things that have to be done… until I can go back to sleep again where I blissfully am free of both grief and the need to think about anything.
All of this said… I also feel overwhelmingly guilty that I am even attempting to move on with my life. Today is going to be my first day back at work, and on some level I am looking forward to having something to distract me from the pain. However I wonder if I deserve to be distracted. This is not even two weeks old at this point… and I am just not sure how to exist in the world. I feel like my attempts to keep moving forward, are somehow an affront to the importance of the pain that I am experiencing. Everyone needs me to be this person who is feeling everything in the same way as they are… and I am not even sure entirely what I am feeling. I think on some level there are parts of me that have gone numb as a defense mechanism because the pain was just too much. The cats need me to keep functioning enough to keep feeding them and loving on them… and my body needs me to keep functioning enough to keep feeding it… and now my workplace needs me to function enough to be able to resume my job. The only way I know how to do all of these things… is to disconnect my brain from my heart… and just sort of do what needs to be done.
The thing that is killing me right now… is that I am having hallucinations. That is honestly too strong of a word for it, because it isn’t like I am seeing things in the world, but more that I am experiencing brief after images. Like for example I keep thinking she is in bed with me. I will turn over and swear she is beside me… only to realize that I am not hitting anything but empty space. Last night I had the overwhelming feeling that I needed to go down and check on her… which is a thing that I would often do after a few hours in my office. In fact that is the entire reason why I went downstairs on the night she died, was just that I had been by myself for awhile and figured I should check to see if she was okay. There are these burnt in pathways in my brain, and I swear I keep feeling like I am seeing the hazy afterimage of her still there… only to realize that it is just my expectations working against me. The only thing I can relate it to is the discussion of phantom limb syndrome, but in this case I am walking into a room certain that someone else will be there… but they are not. I know this is just the built up impulses after twenty six years in the same house… but this honestly is the thing I am struggling with the most.
Right now I am distracting myself with Path of Exile, Movies, and YouTube Videos. It isn’t so much that I am enjoying playing Path of Exile, but more that it is a familiar pattern that does not require too much of me. It is a thing I can do… that does not require me to spend too much time thinking about the situation I am going through. The thing is… I am getting zero joy out of it, but I am also getting no joy out of pretty much anything I do. I put in a request to our “Employee Assistance Program”, which I still feel like is a weird name for mental health assistance… and I am hooping that I hear something back. I am not sure how this process works, but I am hoping at a minimum that they can refer me to someone… preferably online so that I don’t have to deal with going into an office. Everyone wants to help me… but I am not sure what I need, or even how to explain what I am going through. I feel so fundamentally broken right now, and I am not sure what is even broken to begin trying to resolve this. I know this is just part and parcel of grief and loss… but I don’t want it to override what is left of my personality. Then again… I am still not even sure who the hell I am without my wife.
I’ve also been back in Guild Wars 2 some, largely because it is a good task based structure that I can focus on. It asks me to do certain things every day, and doing those… pushes me closer to some goal. I should in theory be cleaning out closets and preparing things to donate… but that is all too fucking heavy right now. I should really actually be working on thank you cards… but I am not even sure where the fuck to begin with that. I need to talk to the person who is working on setting up the scholarship fund and figure out what they need from me for that as well. There are a ton of donations coming in through the Church and they want somewhere to put that money. I recorded and edited AggroChat this weekend and also edited the church sermon… so that was some semblance of normal. I had to figure out how to get onto my wife’s facebook account so that I could grant myself access to the church facebook… because there were a bunch of things that she took care of after I had posted everything. However I think I more or less have a gameplan going forward, and next weekend I should be able to generate the powerpoint that she used to do for the church digital display that we bought.
Then there is the duality of people reaching out. On one hand I appreciate it greatly, because it is keeping me from falling too far into isolation. However on the other hand I am a massive introvert bordering on a hermit… and I just want people to stop intruding on my life. It feels like I am sitting in the living room floor, trying to rebuild a castle out of blocks… and then when someone forces their way into said living room… it all gets knocked asunder and I have to accommodate another human being inside my head for a bit. I can’t just be “chill” about other people in my space. That is not the default state of my existence. My wife and I pretty much spent countless hours with it being only the two of us in the house, and anything other than that just feels fucking weird. On some level I feel like I need time to acclimatize to it only being me… and I can’t really do that if people keep interjecting themselves. Like someone from the church brought food by yesterday… and it was very sweet of them… but it forced me to suddenly have to deal with not only a stranger existing in my world… but now trying to file away food for future use that I was not prepared for.
Like on one hand I just want to lock everyone out of my life until I am “better”, but I also have no clue when that will be… or if I will ever reach that point. Human beings doing human being things… stress me the fuck out. For most people… humans are comforting… for me… they are just chaotic variables in the equation of my life that I don’t quite know how to account for. All of this continues tweaking my fear that my personality is becoming one of grief and loss… and I will never be myself again. I am not saying don’t reach out and check on me… just do it in a way where my participation is optional. I love the people who text me, because that is something that I can answer at my leisure when I am up to it. I detest the people who call me… because it requires me to spackle over the gaping holes and force myself to be mentally well enough to have a conversation. The cardinal sin however is when folks show up at my doorstep unannounced because so much of me wants to hiss at them like a startled cat and run away into the darkness never to be seen again.
I am dreading going into the office tomorrow. I have a new employee starting and I need to be functional. I am not functional. I especially hate the thought of being forced into conversations by people who I have not been face to face with for roughly five years. I expect to bail early on the day, or at least as early as I can. I have no fucking clue how to do any of this. I just want the world to pause until I am well enough to exist in it.
The post Grief As A Personality appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning folks. I am slowly getting back to my normal self. It is going to be a long road… covered with many potholes… but bit by bit I am returning to some resemblance of the person I was. I got a second good night of sleep, and probably would have gotten more hours were it not for the fact that my mom called as I was heading to bed… and then talked for an hour and a half. I love her… but she has never known social queues and also has zero chill when it comes to not telling me everything that she is thinking at that exact moment. She like everyone simply cares about my well being and is worried about me. Legitimately… I never knew this many people actually cared. I’ve mostly thought of myself as background noise most of the time, but apparently I am noticed and appreciated.
My friend Krikket has gotten the ball rolling on the Blaugust 2025 festivities with the traditional Blaugust is Coming post detailing all of the information. My mind went in a bajillion directions when my wife passed away, but one of them was to go into the mentor area of the Blaugust discord and admit to them that I could not do this. Krikket was the first person to offer to take up the mantle, but almost immediately everyone chimed in and just ran with it. This is the most beautiful thing for me because I wanted to build some semblance of a community that could exist without me… and apparently I did just that. I think it was Wilhelm/TAGN that created the logo… which admittedly captures the essence of pretty much every logo I have ever created. They busily planned in the mentor channel and I sort of let it all wash over me, not really paying much attention until yesterday when the announcement post went live.
I cannot fully express in words how thankful I am that this is going to happen, and that I am not having to touch anything. I am still trying to keep the media kit page updated, since that page gets a lot of hits during the event. You can find relevant things like the sign-up form and links to the various social accounts and discord. I am not 100% sure how much I am going to participate in Blaugust proper but I am signing up. It is going to be interesting taking a backseat to this event, but quite honestly… I am very happy I am not having to drive. That was honestly a thing that I learned with the guild that I lead in World of Warcraft… I mad everything too personal to my vision. In truth with Blaugust I wanted to create something that was malleable and could be formed into whatever vision it needed to take that year. As such I tried my best to keep a light touch on the steering wheel so that if I ever needed to jump from the moving vehicle I could, and let someone else take over. Apparently that more or less has worked.
Rebuilding Normal
I’ve had this string of big deep emotional posts lately, but I am not sure what new revelations I have for you this morning. I’ve come to realize that I was not the one mangling our sheets… because making the bed each morning is as simple of an act as pulling up the corner I turned down. I’ve also decided that laundry is super simple since I almost entirely wear dark colors, and can simply chuck things directly into the washing machine until I have enough to run a load and then run it regardless of what day of the week it is. I ordered a whole mess of Chinese food last night so that I can eat on it for most of the weekend. Other than that I am just trying to carve out something resembling a new normal. I need to talk to my boss this morning and find out how Human Resources wants me to codify all of the time I have been taking. I made some early inroads for dealing with some of the financial and insurance things, but quickly came to the point where I am going to have to have final death certificates before I can actually wrap any of that up.
I desperately need to go out into the garage and clean, so that I am going to have room to stack the things that will be coming from her classroom. Essentially on the day of the visitation, her teacher friends offered to pack up her room for me and separate what were educational resources and what were personal effects into different sets of boxes. The thing is… my wife would have wanted to pack everything up herself, but I am just going to allow them to help me with this thing. My vehicle can hold a lot of stuff and it will be easy enough to drag things home. I just need to clear out some of the boxes that I have not broken down yet, and take a load of cardboard to the recycler in order to make room to stack this new stuff. The ideal time to give away teachers resources is right now, just ahead of a new school year… but I am not sure I am going to have it in me to deal with any of it this year.
She also took up 80% of our closet and I intend to go through all of that at some point and find some organization to donate it to. There is always a high demand for professional clothing that fits larger women’s sizes, especially among the whole “pathway to work” type organizations. So I know at some point I would want to donate that, because there is no use in any of the clothing effective just rotting in my closet. We already regularly donated quite a bit of stuff so I have zero qualms about this being the avenue she would have wanted. Her dad was saying something about selling things… but he has always focused on the money and for me… it is more about helping others than trying to profit from this situation. Sure we spent plenty of money over the years on nice things… but I largely view that as the cost of existing as a human and not something I am going to ever attempt to recoup.
There are things that I want to do… but I have to reach the point where I don’t feel guilty for doing them. Like we had talked about getting rid of the nasty loveseat in the loft, so I am absolutely going to do that. I am however probably going to replace it with another comfy couch option and set up my consoles out there. Originally we had planned on turning it into a reading nook for her to curl up, and that would have been lovely… but that is also not necessarily me. I prefer reading from bed when I am reading books, and then more often tend to consume books in audio book form while I am playing games. So I am will be taking the initial inspiration and then just shifting it to make sense for me. I still want to maintain the living room as a more generic space and don’t want all of my consoles hooked up out there. I have my Switch 2 hooked up but that is about it, and that is also a pretty lightweight affair.
Whenever I deal with giving away the educational resources in her office… I am probably going to start shifting that space into more of a hobby room. I used to love painting miniatures, and I just never really maintained that hobby throughout the years. I liked painting way more than I actually liked playing the war games associated with it. I’ve always wanted to get into 3D Printing, so I am thinking her office might be the ideal place to set that up. Again… I am going to have to reach an emotional point where I can deal with even going into her office… let alone packing it up and giving it again… but someday. I feel guilty even thinking these thoughts. I don’t want to erase my wife from this house, but it also seems silly to have entire rooms of the house that are no longer functional because they were devoted to a thing that will never happen again. She was way less emotional about everything than I am… so I would like to think she would want me to re-engineer the spaces to fit my needs. Its just really fucking hard.
She was always the person who kicked me into action on all of the little ideas that we had. I was the one who was mostly happy with the status quo, because the status quo was simple. I am going to have to channel my wife if I ever want to get anything done. I miss her so god damned much. I am so angry that this happened and I am not sure that will ever change. She was my person, and I never imagined a world without her. Now that I have to deal with that reality… I am trying my best to cope with it. One life ended on July 2nd at 8 pm… and out of the ashes of it I have to figure out how to build a new life.
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