I haven’t been writing very much. Not just here, but I also haven’t been writing much music. I just haven’t been playing a whole lot in general. I’m not sure I can exactly explain why, but I suppose there are several reasons.
Aside from just turning 41 not too long ago I am still trying to come to terms with living with diabetes. Most of the time it’s really not a big deal. I still crave my DP, but I don’t drink it. Changing the diet isn’t that bad. I’ve lost weight, my blood work looks fantastic, and I feel pretty good. Sometimes I want to go crazy and drink a DP or eat something I really shouldn’t, but I do a good job of sticking to my diet. We are still tweaking my medication. I was able to get off one of my meds because my blood sugar was consistently too low. Now I am in a waiting cycle to go back and get tested again to see if everything is stable. I hope so, because I’d like to not have to worry / wonder if it’s OK and whether or not I need to be altering my diet even more.
But what really gets me is reading the horror stories about what can happen to you if you have diabetes. Loss of eyesight, loss of limbs, kidney failure, heart disease, etc. And it goes on and on. I got bummed out the other day when I read that people with type-1 diabetes (I have type-2) only reduce their chances of kidney failure by 50% if they take care of themselves. That’s a pretty staggering number. Fifty-percent. A 1 in 2 chance that your kidneys will say “fuck it” and kill you even if you did everything you were supposed to do. There were some more stats for other issues, but they all boiled down to not-so-good odds if you have diabetes. I couldn’t find any stats for type-2 people, but I suspect the odds don’t change that much. In other words, it’s a bit depressing and while not nearly as bad as being told you have cancer it’s still difficult to think that my life could be cut short by a disease for which I don’t even fit the classic profile.
I suppose that it’s no different from anyone else that gets something like cancer, or is suddenly struck dead by a heart attack or an embolism. You just don’t seem to think about these things, much, when you are 20 years old. Once you are 40-ish they seem to be dancing around up there in your brain. About the only thing to do is live your life and do your best to take care of yourself.
But that’s not the only reason I’ve been a little de-motivated. I’m a bit unhappy with work right now. Without going into a substantial amount of detail I feel like our company is not really committed to my division and that we could be doing a lot more. To that end, I also feel like I am not doing what I could and should be doing. I sort of feel like I am wasting my time and that’s not a good feeling. It’s also been just terribly slow lately and that doesn’t help. At least when I am busy I don’t have time to dwell on things like this. On the positive side? I’ve been home for the longest stint I can think of in years and I’m taking advantage of this time to get things done that have been neglected for a while. So that’s not entirely bad, but I sure would like to see the company pick up and really start doing something with our professional services division. We have some really bright and talented people working for us that just aren’t being utilized to their potential right now. It’s a shame.
And while there may be other things going on right now one of the things I am really pissed off about is what has happened to one of my best friends. Years ago his wife cheated on him and unfortunately it was with at least one of his good friends. He got real paranoid about everyone and didn’t trust anybody after that. I can’t say that I blame him as that was a terrible thing to have happen to you. Over the years his paranoia would ebb and flow like the tides, but for the most part it wasn’t that bad. Sure it was difficult to deal with sometimes, and when he got into drugs it got really bad. It fucked his life up pretty bad, and I finally had to tell the guy that he needed to get off drugs or we couldn’t be friends any more. He was destroying himself and I couldn’t watch it any long. Fortunately, he got off the drugs and cleaned himself up, but he always had some problems with the paranoid and somewhat self-destructive behavior.
A few years ago, he met someone and they started dating and hanging out. As luck would have it, he had put himself in another bad position and there was some turmoil and drama surrounding the relationship. While all of this was going on I could tell he was struggling to find himself and he joined up with the Army. He later went to Iraq to serve a tour of duty. During this time he and the person he met became closer and they decided to get married. I didn’t hear much from him while he was overseas, but when I did I was always very happy to know he was doing OK and that he seemed to be happy.
When he had an opportunity to come home on leave me and my g/f flew out to Vegas to meet him and his soon-to-be bride. We witnessed their wedding and had a great time hanging out with them. Fast forward to him coming home from Iraq and them moving in to a new house and learning to live with each other. I could tell things were difficult for him, but I’d also say it’s fairly normal considering their circumstances. Relationships are not easy and they had a very romantic and spirited relationship that was mostly fostered by their time on the internet while he was deployed. Naturally, there would be some difficulty and I also could tell he was struggling with being out of the army. For him, the daily discipline and regiment was a good thing and left to his own devices he had a difficult time dealing with them.
All in all – normal life as we might call it. And then it started to change. It was subtle, but he suddenly stopped talking to one of our other good friends. This guy would call me and ask if I have heard from him. Of course, I talked to him all the time. Maybe not every day, but quite often. This guy tells me he hasn’t heard from him in weeks and while he calls him almost every day, emailed him, and texted him he wouldn’t respond. I finally asked my friend why he was treating our other friend like this and he kept saying he had “weird vibes” about him. For a while that’s all he would say, but he finally explained that one night they were hanging out and our mutual friend had his shirt off and my friend though he was hitting on his wife. I explained that this guy deserved a response – if not an explanation, a “fuck you and leave me alone” would suffice. I saw the old paranoia creeping in. He’s always been insanely jealous of whoever he was dating, etc., but now he had basically ceased all communication with one of our good friends without even talking to him about it.
Some time goes by and I am working out of town a lot. It’s getting near the end of the year and I’m tired and on the road all the time. My friend and I still stay in touch and try to catch up when we can. He’s telling me that he believes his wife is having an affair, but he goes much further than that. He starts to tell me how people are tracking him with GPS receivers stuck in his car. How his home network has been hacked. How his cell phone is acting strange, etc. I try to talk some sense into him, but he’s clearly not convinced that this is a little over the top. The problem with him is that his paranoia is so bad that it’s questionable as to whether or not his wife was really having an affair or not – and she was pregnant at the time. I didn’t believe that people were tracking him and hacking his networks and all that, but I didn’t completely put it outside the realm of possibility, either. There is a big difference between possible and probable, and I was not having much luck of getting him to understand the difference.
Then….radio silence. He won’t return my calls. He doesn’t respond to text messages. He doesn’t respond to emails (not a big deal, he was never good at responding to emails). I’m so busy on the road for three or four weeks in a row that I don’t really pay much attention to it. I am too busy to notice the signs, though I am getting frustrated with it. When I’m traveling I am largely disconnected from people except via phone, text, internet, etc. And let’s face it, most of us need some sort of interaction with our friends. As timing would have it, I come off the road and my friend’s wife goes in to have a c-section and delivers their son. My friend calls me and asks me to come up to see his new son, and would I please stop by their house and grab their daughter on the way up. Absolutely! And Congratulations!!
I went up to the hospital and his family was there along with their new son. It was really nice to see everyone and I hung out for a bit and he and even went down for a smoke (I don’t smoke, he does). He asked me if I was OK because I apparently didn’t look so great – I had lost a ton of weight and was really haggard from traveling. I said I was and asked how he was doing. He didn’t say much other than being tired from trying to be ready for his new son. I could understand that.
Within about a week of this – radio silence….again. Now I am getting angry. Thanksgiving has come and gone and he didn’t so much as shoot me a quick text to say Happy Thanksgiving. I even left him a VM that said I understood if he was busy, but just let me know how things are going, etc. I mean, let’s face it. You can’t be THAT busy with a newborn. You can’t be so busy that you don’t have time to say you are busy and you’ll call when you can, etc.
By now, I’ve given up on trying to get in touch with him and while I don’t understand why he stopped talking to me (again) I did at least recognize it as being very similar to what happened with our other friend, but again, I can’t figure out why. I wasn’t even in town!
Christmas was rapidly approaching and I was busy doing Christmassy things. The Friday before Christmas he called me out of the blue on a number I didn’t recognize. He just said “Hey, what’s up?” like nothing had happened. I told him I was wrapping presents, and asked what he was up to. He was out with his wife doing some last-minute shopping for his kids. I remember at one point in the conversation I asked how things were going and he said “oh..you know…” and I pretty bluntly said “no. I don’t.” He suggested stopping by for drinks and I suggested we meet up for dinner and drinks since I was getting hungry. He said good idea and that he’d text or call in just a bit after his wife came out of the bathroom. I never got a call or a text. Radio silence. Again.
Christmas came and went. So did New Years. Nothing. I heard freaking nothing from this guy. I had had it with his bullshit at this point, but sure enough he calls me up one day and I really laid into him and told him I was pissed off, etc. We talked for a while and then he wanted to come by the next day and talk some more. I agreed. I was still pissed, but he was still my friend.
When he came over he had a new car. At the time I couldn’t figure out why he would have put them in debt when his last car was paid for, but I’ve since come to the conclusion that he did it because he believed his old car was being tracked. He’s changed his cell phone and phone(s) more times than I can count. He’s telling me how his wife is cheating on him and that’s he’s got proof – he’s setup recording devices in his house. He wants me to listen to them and help him clean up the audio, etc. We talked for a long time because I told him I was not comfortable with this.
Reluctantly, I eventually agreed. I wish I never had. It is such a monumental invasion of someone’s privacy and I am deeply ashamed that I did it. I will say, though, that there was *something* on that recording. I can’t say what for sure, but it was definitely sexual in nature and this supposedly happened early one morning when he had to report for duty. Me? I’d never have an affair with someone at 6:30am. That’s too fucking early to get up to go have a piece of ass – no matter how good it might be. He had a brand new laptop – again, purchased because he believes his old one was “compromised.” He asked for some help getting it online while he was here at the house. No big deal, I configured it to connect to my network so he’d have internet access.
While listening to the recordings he’s hearing all kinds of shit that I just don’t hear. Multiple guys at the house. People saying things, etc. And I am honest with him and tell him I just don’t hear it, but that I do hear something. In the end, I’m very much convinced that something was happening, but probably not quite what he thought was happening. I felt bad for him because it certainly seemed like the possibility of his wife having an affair was very high and I told him as much. I told him that I believed him. I even told his psychiatrist / counselor that I believed him.
I did finally understand why he had stopped talking to me, though. While I was out of town….months and months back…. He claims he found an airline ticket for his wife to fly to Salt Lake City, UT. Now, I never got clear details – he never knew she flew, just found the ticket, and the ticket was only for a day trip. Not even an overnight trip (if I remember correctly), but it happened to coincide with the exact week that I was in Salt Lake myself. What he believed was that she snuck out of the house, flew out there and we had a romp in the hay where nobody could see us, and then she flew back that night. Again, that’s a hell of a thing to do for a piece of ass and let’s face it. I may be good in bed, but I’m not *that* good in bed. Not worth the time, effort and expense to do that for a couple of hours – it’s about a 3 hour flight to SLC, plus time to board, go through security, leave the airport, return to the airport, etc. In other words, you are looking at a minimum of 8 hours just to get there and back in one day.
At the time he said he believed me when I told him I wasn’t even aware of it. Then he made a joke about the hairs that were sticking to my wool jacket (still cold out) being his wife’s. I thought it was an odd joke, but dismissed it for the most part and explained that it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a hair from her or his dogs on my jacket. I had been over there many times in the past. I should have known better.
But I also had time to talk to him over a day or two and I was utterly convinced that he was losing his freaking mind. He had all kinds of conspiracy theories – people hacked his phones. People hacked his car. People hacked all of his laptops and computers. It goes on and on. He believed his wife was telling him she had to go to work when she was secretly sneaking off in their new car and having sex in it with other people. He believed people were following him. He feared for his life – and this is where I started to become very concerned for him and the safety of his family.
I asked Why? Why go through all that trouble? His answer was so that his wife could get away with it and that everyone could laugh at him. I’m not kidding. I finally had to tell him that he was losing grip with reality and that he needed serious help. I mean SERIOUS help.
Over a period of a couple of days he came over and kept listening to his recordings and asked for help on working with them and manipulating them. I helped him to an extent, but I also felt it was a bit futile. Why not just divorce her and be done with it if he thought it was this bad? And then, one night, he was still dicking around with his laptop and what-not. I had left him to himself and decided to watch a DVD so I was in the other room.
He came out of my office area and asked me if I knew that he trusted me. I basically told him “no,” but what I didn’t realize at the time was that he probably expected me to say “yes.” He said something else and then he said “you’re a really funny guy….real funny.” At that point I could tell something was wrong so I asked him what he was talking about. He showed me his laptop and the WPA key used for the wireless – my WPA key – and asked if that was it and of course I said it was. It’s been the same for years, but he thought that I was a slight against him. I’m not kidding. He thought because of what the key was I was making fun of him. I rapidly realized that he was accusing me of being involved in the conspiracy. He asked why his computer kept joining my network – I told him that I set it up because he asked me for internet access while he was at my house. And the hairs from my jacket? He had been plucking them off of me when I didn’t know it and had saved them in a cellophane cigarette wrapper. He was planning to have them analyzed and see if they were his wife’s, etc.
He was rapidly and frantically gathering up his things and we both agreed that it was a good idea that he leave. I wanted to beat his ass, but elected to just let him leave. I was also a bit stunned. Not only to be accused of having an affair with his wife, but to further be involved in this grand conspiracy.
We’ve not spoken sense. If we did, I’d have to tell him to go away and leave me alone. That I don’t want him around me. I’ve since heard through the grapevine that he really believes I’m one of the main people behind hacking his laptops, hacking his phones, tracking him with GPS, coordinating with people to have him followed, fucking his wife, the whole enchilada, in other words. I’ve also heard he has some pretty crazy theories about other aspects of his life, but I won’t go into details about that, here.
Nobody hears from him, much, if at all. We all hope he is doing better, but nobody knows. I sincerely hope that he gets better. That he gets some help and comes out of this – even if we never talk again. But I gotta tell you….it makes me very angry the way he’s treated me. And, it hurts. It’s both infuriating that he would treat me the way he has, that he would believe these things about me. I’ve stuck by him through all his crazy shit for 25 years. He was one of my absolute best friends, and he took that from me. I also can’t help but think it’s the fucking Adderall that he’s on that’s made him so crazy. It’s fucked up everyone I’ve ever known that was on it for any length of time.
I can’t imagine what his wife and kids are going through. I don’t see how he could completely hide it from them and they have to be feeling the effects or at least noticing it, somehow.
I’m normally a very private person and don’t discuss my dirty laundry with people. I appreciate the same level of respect from them, so it’s been difficult to not talk about this with anyone, but I also look at it like this: When he suspected his wife of cheating on him and started the paranoid stuff I was only third party to it. He was telling me stuff about his life and I wouldn’t discuss that with other people. But when he made it about me, when he accused me of all of this crap, it was no longer his privacy and his life, it was now mine, and it’s real hard for me to respect his privacy if we aren’t even friends anymore.
My g/f tries to remind me that he’s sick and needs help. That it’s not really any different from someone who has Alzheimer’s and can’t remember you. I realize that, but I can’t help the way I feel.
*sigh* OK….back to work.
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