Everybody gets one…

    Caleb Roy is a heartless, selfish, inconsiderate bastard.

    I know. Okay? You don’t have to keep telling me already, I’m aware of it.

    … (sigh) God… you know what? I just take it back. Go on and say it. Definitely… say it.

    I know you only do it because you’re angry. I know you don’t really believe the phrase is educational, or that you’re really telling me anything I didn’t already know.

    But… y’know… I know. Just FYI to dispel any other reason for your saying it other than pure, emotional indulgence. And I know what a fantastic drug that is so if that’s the case go crazy.

    You know me. You’d do the exact same if it were you. You just old me you would. If your shop were sinking and you needed to lose some cargo… you’d cut me loose. Which, really, means that you’re a heartless, selfish, inconsiderate bastard too. Only difference between us is that I wouldn’t call you on it.

    … you know I never lied to you. I never, ever lied to you. Not about this. You’ve known. I have told you… that you weren’t first, that this was more important. And somehow, you’re still surprised. And I perfectly understand that, really, and I hate that part the most in this whole mess.

    Look… you just can’t afford to only trust me when you see emotion on my face, and only commit to those so few things. You’ve got to believe the things I tell you. I deliberately word them very carefully so that they cannot be misconstrued as anything other than exactly what I mean.

    I’m sorry. I am. Please know that it’s not personal. I know that you want it to be because if it were I wouldn’t be doing this, that the order of priority would have shifted and we’d be having some other conversation. But it’s not, and we’re not, and if I’m going to bother living this is what is going to be ‘personal’ to me.

    I have never mislead you about that. I have never said anything at all that even loosely could be interpreted any other way. This is what I am. I cannot compromise on this I will not put at risk the thing most important and I’m sorry for your sake that it isn’t you but I have done everything so far that I can in all considerable reason afford to do for you and still get my own self where I am desperate to be.

    Everybody gets one.

    I have done what I can for you. I ask, please, stop complaining about the loss of genuinely unavailable charity. Like before, when we were living rent free and that got taken away from us. You had the audacity to think we were losing something. It was never ours. Be grateful, for anything that anyone is generous enough to give you. Don’t be so spoiled that when you lose it you’re angry at the person who’s done as much in the first place, just because they can’t or heck, even if they just don’t want to provide it anymore.

    It’s like borrowing someone’s TV and calling them a bad friend when they ask for it back. C’mon… seriously? And I’ve even offered to pay for a taxi to a place where you can have all the TV you want for free. Seriously.

    When I get back, when I land again: I’m not just saying that I can’t pay for both our TV’s anymore. I’m not even going to be able to pay for mine and save what I need to save in the time that I have and make this work. Much less yours.

    I have to cut almost everything. You’re not the first thing I have to sacrifice to make this work, you’re the last thing on that list.

    I’ve had math in my head since that meeting. I’ve had numbers and dollars and estimates and… just piles of figures in my head and right now? Right now with the numbers that I’ve got to work with, these numbers? My absolute best shot, the best shot I’ve got is to immediately get another job for work in the mornings and I’m already on it, and I work both for the next 11 months with the morning job supplementing my current one, and I live in my tent till this time next year. That scenario right there is my best possible chance I’ve really got and even that is a weak one. Still might not even be able to do it. I don’t know how many bookings and shows I’m going to get over the next 48 weeks. I don’t know if I might have to miss work for some reason. If I do, at all, this will probably not work.

    That’s what I’m talking about. This is not about what I prefer. It’s about necessity.

    … I’m sorry. I really am.

    But you see… I’m a heartless, selfish, inconsiderate bastard. And what you see, is what you get…

You are broken.

“I am a phase made man. I am youth ‘embodied.’ I am Hope and Dreams and Passion incarnate. As you know me, you’ll grow towards me, and then… you’ll grow out of me. And I will cease to exist. Because I was never really here, and never really human. I am an idea, alone. I was a phase, an icon, a manifestation of you, and where you were when you were young, and your heart still leapt towards your faith.”

Internet Famous

    I have always known that us guys are a foundationally “why not” based society. If you put a sticker in the urinal that said “Pee Here” we’d aim for it just because we didn’t have a decent reason not to.

    That’s a cool idea actually you know I think probably now I’m going to make that sticker… because, you know… why not?

    Should have thought about all that before because if I had I might have been able to predict what was about to happen.

    Sometime on Friday I posted an ad to Craigslist: (abridged)

    I need some dude’s. – m4m – 22 (Facebook)

Date: 2009-09-10, 8:53PM EDT Reply To This Post

I need some dude’s. Dude’s with internet access. I don’t care if you’re straight, gay, bi, young, old, fat, thin, I don’t care. If you have a penis, I need you for a favor.

Here’s the deal: My girlfriend makes a fuss about how I’ve got more girl friends than I have guy friends. It is juvenile and stupid and it’s… basically it’s about Facebook. Having lightly checked she’s right, I have about 3:2 ratio girl to guy friends on facebook. She worries about this. She thinks I need more guy friends. And I’ve asked her if she thinks I need more guy friends or if she just wants me to have less friends that are girls so that she doesn’t feel threatened all the time.

“I just think you could use more guy friends.”

Which is stupid. I have 400 million guy friends. The fact that I have 600 million girl friends is what’s getting her. Has nothing to do with how many guys, obviously, it has everything to do with how many girls.

She begs to differ though, so here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to add me as a friend on facebook. www.facebook.com/calebroy That’s me. Add me, and at least once a week for… what a month? Please make a comment on my wall about how awesome it is to be a guy and be friends. That’s it.

Example: “Whatssup Caleb! Just being my guy self here! Great to be your friend man!”

Please also send this to any penis-wielding friends that you might know and help a brother out.

Cheers-

_Caleb

Location: Facebook it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

    I copied the post and I put it on reddit. I thought perhaps I’d get maybe 20 friends out of it if I was lucky.

    The next time I checked my email it crashed my offline client. So I loaded facebook while I waited. I had 300 friend requests. This is less than 2 hours.

    Reddit had upvoted it to the front page of the funny section and eventually the story hit the frontpage of reddit itself. Once that happened I was getting a new friend request every 15 seconds for almost 2 hours.

    The posts on my wall I think brought them in, like a giant ‘pee here’ sticker. It started out simple. Just like the example I wrote in the post, several just copying and pasting it in. Some of the dudes adding me decided I needed a little extra.

    ”Hey man, remember that time that bear attacked me and you wrestled it to the ground and ripped it’s arm right off? And then you ATE it? Totally manly, bro.”

    Or my favorite.

    ”One time, me and Caleb were walking and a grizzly bear stood up in front of us, threatening to attack. Caleb balled up his fist and you could see the bear was like “Whatever, I’m a bear. And then Caleb punched through a solid rock wall and oil gushed out. Before you knew it developers had moved in and destroyed the bear’s whole habitat. That’s how my boy made his first 8 figures.”

    This has been going on all weekend.

It is STILL GOING.

    RIGHT NOW SOMEONE IS POSTING SOMETHING RIDICULOUS ON MY FACEBOOK WALL.

    300 friends in I had to turn off all my facebook email notifications. I had 1200 emails from facebook alone at that time. I made a new folder and told hotmail to send anything with the world FACEBOOK in it directly there so I could keep my inbox splash clean.

    For the first few hours I was still trying to send everyone who added me a thank you. Then I’d hit refresh and there were 140 new confirmations and I just started clicking “CONFIRM CONFIRM CONFIRM.” Refresh. Only 38 more. This is faster.

    Someone started photoshopping my face into various images, me fighting a bear, standing with lumberjacks, atop Everest, with the Chilean Navy, using a katana to kill some huge hairy monster.

    I tried to comment back to everyone who commented on my wall.

    My dudes… I’m leeching wifi from the neighbors in the downstairs apartment. I do not have the internetz for this kind of memery.

    Next day: I cannot use facebook chat without my browser crashing. Firefox, Chrome, and IE, all explode the moment I turn it on. Opera doesn’t for some reason. Good on you Opera. No idea what you’re doing different. But thanks. Not that I can talk to the 150 people who want to talk to me, simultaneously, about that time that I dropped kicked Chuck Norris and killed 400 Somalian pirates with kitten bombs while riding a narwhal and it was totally awesome.

    Next Day: 1000 friends added and still going strong. My wall is ridiculous. Switched entirely to facebook lite. (Thanks also reddit for the referral to that one.) Also: Kristin is PISSED. 4 trolls got at her email and facebook messages calling her names and telling her to f* off. Kristin switches off her Facebook account.

    That evening: Kristin and I have a long and mostly completely unproductive discussion.

    Next day: Kristin turns her facebook account back on and I ask the dudes to show her some love. Love is shown.

    Somewhere in there I managed to gather a total of 1400 facebook friends. Rotate the ratio from 3:2 to about 1:37. Was contacted by a guy who wanted me to advertise his website on my status updates. Told him no, didn’t want 1000 pissed of redditors. Was contacted by a film producer in LA who said he thought there might be movie potential in a bear-wrestling, ninja-slaying bro like myself. I told him I didn’t see what he was seeing I guess but send thanks for the email, tell me what’s in your mind. And I guy living in just the next suburb over invited me to a party cruise leaving the harbor just ten minutes away walking time from my island, and I missed it by five minutes.

    I got a picture of it with my phone and sent it to him. Ha.

    The post went from Reddit to Buzzfeed to a dozen blogs and newspapers and I was told that at one point there was even a radio station reading my wall posts for their morning show because they were so hilarious. Now if you google me I appear on every page for at least two-dozen pages.

    I have been personally responsible for I’d guess not less than 100 working man hours lost to various businesses whose employees ignored their tasks to read or post or follow the chatter.

    At one point someone even had a Wikipedia page devoted to me. But it was taken down.

    Over the weekend I became I minor internet celebrity. This morning I woke up and only had to click in 20 friend requests so we’re slowing down… whew… never been on the inside of this phenomenon before… it’s pretty cool.

    Thanks for all the help bros. Thanks for the good times, the laughs, and for all that ridiculous stuff you’re keeping alive on my wall.

    You are awesome.

_Caleb

Dear Dad’s Kids

    I’ve started writing this letter a hundred times and I never got very far because I never knew exactly what I was writing. I never knew exactly what to write you about seeing as I was only writing just one letter.

    For those of you that remember me I’m the guy that would come in and sit in Mr. Roy’s class and poke fun at him while he taught, played guitar, and distributed push-ups. I was the one sitting in the corner quietly hacking through your school’s firewall through my dad’s laptop so I could check my facebook and hotmail. And who tried to teach you how to do just that on your own time when Mr. Roy remembered that this period you were supposed to learn history and geography, not hacking.

    Then I packed up everything I had and moved to New York with only five hundred dollars and ended up spending the better part of the year up there.

    Then, last year I took three weeks and drove all the way across America and flew to Australia. I left my car outside the Greyhound Bus Station in San Francisco if anyone wants it, it might still be there.

    I landed in Sydney with three dollars in my pocket and no work visa, which means that I was not legally allowed to get a job. One year later I’m living on an island on the coast working full time making more money than I’ve ever seen before and I’ll be spending this December touring Japan for no better reason than I’ll have a ton of money and I feel like it.

    So basically these past few years have been a steady sequence of defying the odds, astounding my friends, and carelessly scaring my mother to death, over and over and over again.

    And if this were a classic kind of letter, after all of that, knowing that I’ve done all that, been through all that, what I would be supposed to say in a letter back home would be: explaining what I’ve learned along the way.

    … Which is not what I’m going to write about because I honestly haven’t learned an awful lot on the way through it all except for novelties like… I dunno, I can look at an asian person and tell you if they’re Japanese, Chinese, Tai, Vietnamese, Korean, or Malaysian. Useless things like that.

    When I was younger, I read a book about how to get rich, I don’t even remember the title of the book but I read through the whole thing and there was actually nothing even in there about exactly what things to do in order to get rich. There were no steps like: “Go to the bank, get a loan, buy this, sell this, do exactly this with your money.” The book didn’t even tell people how to get rich, it didn’t even tell how the author had gotten rich. It was just… nothing. It was 255 pages of “You have to think like a rich person. Visualize yourself being rich. Don’t work for money, make money work for you.” Nonsense.

    It was a stupid book and didn’t explain anything.

    I’m going to actually give you some keepers. Things that I think you might actually find useful.

    First: Charm, Ambition, and Resourcefulness. Those three things will get you absolutely everywhere. Charm makes other people like you, Ambition tells them you’re going somewhere, and Resourcefulness tells them that you’re probably going to get there. Why is this important? Because it makes you a good investment. An investment is something that people put themselves into (time, money, whatever) because they know that what they’ve invested is going to be well looked after and good things are going to come of it.

1. Charm is best gained by thanking people for things. For anything and everything. It’s more than manners, in fact if it were just to be polite I myself would probably never do it.

    When you thank someone for something it marks in their mind that they did something for you. Even if they never thought of it as a favor before. Even if they didn’t think they needed to be thanked for it. This does a whole cocktail of things in their brain and most people don’t even watch themselves closely enough to realize it.

    It means to them, that to you: they’re useful. And people like being useful. It means that you appreciate something they did, and people like being appreciated. It means that in some measure, they’re charming as well, and that’s step one.

    In the back of their minds, without even realizing it most times, it makes them just… like being around you, because when they’re around you they feel useful, and appreciated, and charming, for no reason other than you’ve just always made them feel that way. Being around you reminds them that they have a reason to like themselves and that alone can make you massively addicting. Give this time, and it will always be true so watch for things to thank people for, don’t make a big deal out of it, but slip it in there when you can.

    Smile with your eyes when you’re doing it too, that little thing goes such a long way. Watch yourself and your friends and how it all works and you’ll learn heaps of other little tricks that will make you the most charming person you ever heard of.

    2. Ambition means being able to go and get something out of sheer will. It means that things that you want, you get. Not because they’re easy to get, but because you don’t care if it’s hard to get, you’re going to get it. My dad can tell you all about this one.

    I could never relate when he’d talk about it. My dad would talk about biting down and gritting your teeth and tensing up and pushing harder and all that sportsy athletic jazz that wasn’t ever really my thing.

    The principal is still really important though and I only nailed it by learning to tease myself with the possibilities and learning to tell body when to hush up.

    Teasing yourself with possibilities is pretty easy and it’s when you’re absolutely, flat-out, knock-down, drag-out can’t take another step if my whole life depended on it tired.

    I was there, I was pushing my car up a steep hill in San Francisco with smoke boiling out of the hood and 100 degree heat fuming all around me.

    And hey, for the record here: cars are HEAVY.

    And I was flat-out, knock-down, drag-out can’t take another step if my whole life depended on it tired.

    And I tapped myself on the shoulder in my mind and said “one more, bet you can.” And I set my feet and I squeezed the bumper and I pushed on the car as hard as I could and shoved and heaved and spit and winced…

    And the car didn’t move at all.

    And in my mind I teased myself “C’mon just one more. Bet you can. Betcha it’s possible. What if it is and you don’t, and you waste it?”

    And I pushed till I’d moved the car one more step and then I held it there with my head on the trunk sweating and breathing way too hard and I tapped myself on the shoulder in my mind and said. “Dude… you did it. That was awesome. Hey I bet you could get another one.”

    Second bit about this is ‘learning to tell my body to hush up’ and that’s one of the most important things I think anyone of any age can keep in mind.

    It seems no matter where you’re from the general just about everyone agrees against something we used to think was obvious. You are not your body. You’re something else inside of it, around it, or something and we don’t quite know what but you’re not exactly your body. Most people who study the thing intently can tell you that there’s something else going on, whether you’re Christian psychologist and muse Dr. James Dobson who will tell you that you are a soul and you body is a vehicle for this earth till you go to heaven, or even if you’re atheist author Richard Dawkins who will tell you you’re not your body, heck you’re not even the protagonist in your own story line, your body is just your DNA’s vehicle that it uses to get around and multiply itself.

    That’s a little involved though and not what we’re talking about. The point is: you’re not your body, it just belongs to you. The reason this is important is because your body has its own personality, outside of you, without you. It will want things, and tell you about things, and even keep things from you. It’s basically just your closest ever friend. But being the closest doesn’t mean it’s always your best friend.

    What am I talking about? Your body is smart. It will tell you when it needs nutrients, and it will even tell you what kind of nutrients it wants, we call it a craving. It remembers that when you last put a banana in your mouth it got some potassium out of it, so if your body is running a little low on the potassium, it’ll ask you for a banana. Heck I’ve craved things I don’t even like eating because of this.

    What you’ve got to learn is to be able to tell when what goes through your mind is you, and when its just your body just wanting your attention. It can generate some pretty strong feelings for some things that you know better about. And it can get really, really hard to ignore certain things, especially if you think it’s you. That’s why it’s important to know the difference. It’ll save your life.

    It’s actually not that hard to do, your body is not much good at thinking ahead. All it cares about it between now and 7 to 10 seconds from now. That’s it. To check, just think about tomorrow, if you’re not going to care about this thing then, it’s probably just your body. Doesn’t mean you should ignore it, your body is smart, you need potassium, but think ahead.

    3. Resourcefulness is massively important. It is the most important of the other three. It’s more important than intelligence, charm, math, science, literature, and everything else combined, at least it is to me.

    The reason I think resourcefulness is the most important thing you can ever have is because I think we’re in for a paradigm shift in education.

    If you have never heard of that before it’s pronounced like “pair-ah-dime” shift and it means a change in the way you do things. Like going from record players to cassette tapes and from tapes to CD’s and from CD players to an iPod.

    Right now school is the facility that makes you smart so that you know how to work. It prepares you for getting a job. That’s what school does. Some time ago, there was no school, and the way you prepared for getting a job was different. Most people just grew up working with their fathers or mothers on what they did for a living and took over the family business when the father or mother died. If your dad was a carpenter, you’re going to be a carpenter, if he was a blacksmith, you’re gonna be a blacksmith.

    There was a paradigm shift, and now instead of just learning the one job your parents are, you get to go to school and learn more than just one trade, and pick, and choose. This is better because if your parents are blacksmiths and you’re better at carpentry, you can be a carpenter. And if your parents are fashion designers and you’re better at atom smashing, then you can go ahead and be a nuclear physicist. Or whatever.

    … I think there’s another one coming. I think that in America, specifically, public schooling is on the way out as the way you prepare for getting a job. And I think there’s a new way coming because the world is changing very, very fast.

    I think I must have read it in 2006, Time magazine published a statistic that the top 1% of students were dropping out of high schools and colleges in America. The kids with the highest IQ’s are dropping out of school and college faster than any other demographic that year. Naturally this confused a lot of people because you don’t predict the people with the greatest potential for success to be the largest group that gives up.

    So they couldn’t figure out why and I couldn’t figure out why and no one knew and… basically that was all the article was about: how this statistic could not be explained.

    And I figured that these kids have the highest IQ’s out of everyone. Smartest kids we have. And I wondered: what do they know that we don’t know that is getting them to drop out of high school and college?

    When I figured it out I promptly dropped out of college and shortly after that I moved to New York.

    Before we get too deep into it I am NOT telling you to drop out of school. DO NOT DROP OUT OF SCHOOL. (If this is being read aloud make an audible note please that the preceding sentence has been typed in ALL CAPS. Thank you.)

    What I am going to do is to put school in perspective. We understand that we go to school to learn so that we can get a job, a skilled position that will pay us money doing things that we wouldn’t know how to do without this education.

    This… is not entirely true. Well… not anymore. And this is the thing that’s changing. The fact of it is that if you’re looking for a job, every job is going to be different. Every company will do things just a little bit differently no matter who you work for. There is rarely ever a profession that just… streamlines its work and does absolutely everything exactly as you read about in your textbooks. I would dare be so bold as to say that 90% of what you end up doing at your job… you won’t learn until after you’ve been hired.

    So what is school for?

    Well presently it saves your employer money on that training time. You’re going to be trained on the job for just about every job you take, education means that you know enough that they can spend less time training you because you have a vague idea of what’s going on. You can hire and train anyone. They can just about be retarded, and they can do a job if they’re trained on the job. But you waste less time and money if someone can prove to you that they know their own way around what you’re basically asking them to do.

    A college degree is basically that proof.

    Here’s the problem: 3.2 million college degrees are going to be distributed next year. That’s just America. If you had five cents for every American earning a degree this year you could pay your way through four years of medical school plus housing. If you had a dollar for every one of them you wouldn’t need that stupid job because you’d retire.

    The thing is- everyone’s got one. So everyone’s even to the employers so how do you decide who you should hire? Well you go for the bachelors instead of the associates, the Ph.D, the doctorate, the masters.

    And because it’s college: now everyone’s broke. Or your parents are broke. Or you’re way in debt. And you get to the interview and the 6 other people, out of 3.2 million, have done just what you’ve done and have what you have and you’re still even.

    That’s where the paradigm shift comes from. And this is why, I think, resourcefulness is more important than education, or even intelligence.

    I had a talk with a guy in New York, he was only back in New York on vacation. He’d dropped out of college and moved to Italy when he was 19 for no better reason than because he wanted to live in Italy. He got a job there not doing what he wanted to do, but working in the field that he wanted to work in. A year or so later he got a promotion, a year or so after that, having done well with his promotion: he got another one doing different work and so on and so forth until he was doing what he had wanted to do in the first place and being well paid for it only three years later.

    He came back to New York and all his friends were just starting work with all that debt from college behind them. He said it seemed silly that they’d spent the past four years paying to get into their field and he’d spent the past three years making money, not a lot at first, but some money at least, and getting into the field that he wanted to be in without having to fight other applicants at an interview.

    Three years of working with that company was worth the same, if not more proof of ability than a college degree to that employer. So he and his friends from college were in basically the same spot, except with the only difference being he hadn’t paid for college.

    In my job, I do a lot of IT work. Everything I do is computers. I do not have an IT degree. When I was in college I was there for a teaching degree. And even at work I was never trained on the system or software or programs that they use at my company. But last week I was paid $40 an hour because I was able to fix everything that went wrong with their systems, quickly, and that saved my company a lot of money and time.

    Literally: 90% of my job is Googling stuff. If I don’t know the answer I Google the crap out of it. And that, almost every time, solves my problem, or tells me how to. Often I’ll learn more than I asked for along the way and I keep what I learn and I put it together for next time’s problem so that next time, the problem is solved faster, with less Googling.

    I don’t know everything there is to know about computers. I know a lot about computers only because I have messed with the things my whole life. But if there’s something I don’t know about computers and I need to know, I know how to find the answer in under three minutes. And that’s for any problem, not just in computers, but in just about any field.

    The educational system of today with school and college and degrees was constructed for a knowledge-dependent world where you would have to know the answer in order to solve a problem. The world is changing very quickly into a tool-dependent world. You don’t have to know how to do everything, you just have to know which tool and how to use it. You don’t have to know the answer, you just have to know how to find it.

    Like using a calculator to find the square root of 17,161 is 131 instead of working it out in your head not just because you’re lazy but because no matter how awesome you are at math using a calculator is
faster and speed equals money to a business.

    If you get a job as a historian you’re not going to need to know about chemistry and if you’re a chemist you’re not going to have to know a great deal about when to use a semicolon and when to use a comma… I mean honestly. And this fits because… in a tool dependent world you don’t have to. All you need is a foundational understanding of how to find knowledge if you need it, instead of learning as it is today where you’re asked to know everything whether you need it or not.

    School today gives you a knowledge foundation so that you can know a little about everything just in case. The paradigm shift, I believe, will give you only what you need to know to operate the tools that you’ll need to find out about and solve the problems about anything, even learning new tools, so that everyone can work in whatever field they want without burning so much time in between.

    It used to be the library, now it’s the internet. In school if you need to know how many lanterns Paul Revere saw before he went on his ride you have to memorize it. In the real world you could memorize it but you could also just google it, or go to Wikipedia. In school that’s cheating. In the real world you can call it whatever you want but if the answer is right the answer is right isn’t it? Really?

    That’s resourcefulness and that is what I think will determine how good a job you get in a future where just like every other decade… half the jobs you’re able to get don’t even exist today. Getting that job, and getting paid will depend on your ability to find what you need and do what you need to do regardless of what you learned in school in the first place…

    And the ambition to do it…

    And the charm… maybe just for good measure.

_Caleb.

Connie’s Response to Yahtzee

My response to Caleb
Back to Full Blog

Caleb,

I read everything you wrote and I am saving it to read again. You are right that passion begets passion. I think the opposite can be true too. Lack of passion tries to beget lack of passion.

“Shhhh, Connie…..slow down, Connie….calm yourself, Connie (that was my fave)…..relax, yer making me nervous, Connie…..”

I could go on….add your own favorite one in there.

I did the right thing, Caleb. God, I did the right thing all my whole life. I never veered. I never swayed. I stayed. I tried to fit my square butt in that round box they made for me until I couldn’t breathe anymore. I tried, didn’t I Caleb? I tried soooo hard. I thought I made a difference. I honestly did. Whenever the county called with one more….or three more….I said yes. I put more chairs at the table. Made up more beds. Made more dinner. Baked the brownies. I was like a spinning top that just kept spinning faster and faster and faster.

I was filled with passion. Passion for life and passion for people. Looking for purpose. Always looking for purpose. Looking for a reason to stay in the world…..in the midst of a passionless people.

They were not bad people….leastwise I didn’t think so until they left me to freeze in my car for seven days. The world would still call them good people.

I’m the bad person.

I’m the one who left.

I’m the crazy one.

I’m the one who was wrong, wasn’t I?

But I still love them. Every single one of them. I never stopped loving Tom. I just wanted to let the passion out. It wasn’t passion for another man. It wasn’t passion for the stuff of life. It was passion for God.

They proved that they were the ones that don’t love. You said what they did was inhuman. My passion for God was mocked. For years it was mocked. Even by the myriad of Christians I was surrounded by. “Shhhh, Connie….do you REALLY need to dance in the aisle?….shhhh, Connie….why can’t you just calm down and act your age?”

I still haven’t danced in my underwear with King David. We love to sing, “I will dance like David danced”….but we don’t really mean it, do we Caleb?

DO WE?

You might mess up your makeup, Connie. You might start to cry. You KNOW we HATE those tears. You’re dressed so nice, Connie. “Calm yourself”.

Yeah, go use that line on King David. It doesn’t work with me anymore.

I’m not married. I’ll never be married again. I will never allow another man to tell me what I can and cannot do.

“Who is that man I should place over her for who is like Me?, says the Lord” Jeremiah 50.

God gave me that verse 15 years ago. I never forgot it.

I will never allow a passionless man to make me feel like I am the crazy one again.

Like I am the stupid one.

Like I am ugly one.

He brags…actually brags…about how we adopted children. I was so humiliated. It was the LEAST we could do in this crazy mixed up world. It was no great thing. It was our duty to God. That’s not to mention the fact that he never wanted children to start with. It was my passion for life that created that family.

But I stayed didn’t I? I did what everyone said was the “right” thing to do. Some can’t figure out why I would leave after so many years. The real question is how did I manage to stay so long?

I almost died, Caleb. Freaky stuff. It just kept coming against me. Two different times I bled almost to the point of death and like the woman with the issue of blood the doctors couldn’t stop it. God stopped it when I finally took authority over my own body.

Where did that telephone pole come from? Waking up while hitting it going 60 miles an hour was the stuff of my nightmares for 6 mos. after it happened. There’s more. There was always more.

I allowed the passionless to steal my passion. Remembering that I’ve lost them still steals it at times if I let it. Just the thought of it. After a while though, it wasn’t just my passion that was being stolen….it was my life. Not just my spiritual and emotional life. Even my physical life.

That’s why I never said you were wrong to do what you did.

Yes, I worried about you.

Yes, my heart stopped at times knowing what you were doing.

But I never said you were wrong.

I knew you were doing what I would do if I’d had the inner fortitude to extract myself from my cage.

Well, I finally did it, didn’t I?

You’ve asked me several times to come to Australia. You even said you would take me in when I come. A year ago that would have seemed like an impossible dream. It doesn’t seem like such a leap anymore, Caleb.

I’m free.

It didn’t come easy. It didn’t come without severe pain. The ripping away of everything that was attached to me was so excrutiatingly painful that night after night I begged God not to let me wake up in the morning. Every morning I begged Him to let it be my last day on earth. Then I would go to work and just try to get through the day….and so it would go, day after day after day…..night after night after night.

Tears still come….not as much though. Not everyday.

I might come to Australia someday….I don’t know yet. I don’t dismiss it though because I’m free.

You found that freedom earlier in life than I did, but you found it.

Now I have too.

I need to hear the things you say to encourage me to keep going…….to keep shaking the dice….to keep going…….to keep shaking the dice…..to keep going……….

Love,
Connie

This is my… faith.

    I don’t know how to start this.

    I don’t know how to write… this. Or any of the hundred trillion things that I was supposed to have written so long before… now. Like that letter to my dad’s classroom kids or that letter back to Bethany explaining just exactly what special little something I see in her that she doesn’t see in herself.

    Blogs to comment on, essays and commentary to write on political, religious, economical, heck even medical issues lately and it’s just so much… junk. So much stupid irrelevant unimportant sidebar stuff that I’ve been wrong to let get in the way.

    I have been so caught up and I have been so entangled and I have not listened to nearly enough good music lately, and I haven’t been… me.

    And I caught myself in that as I’ve designed myself to do. To grab myself by the scruff of my own neck and shout, as loud as I can into my own face “This is your life!”

    I think it might have been just the natural decline of my basic nature because I’ve spent so much time lately planning for things instead of just… doing them, as I’m used to. This whole Japan trip has had my head somewhere else because not only do you have to plan every day of living in a country you’ve never seen before you also have to figure out doing it by reading literature and research written mostly in a language you can’t even begin to speak…

    I’m managing that. I don’t know why I even mention Japan that’s all been so minor.

    … I’ve got a growing suspicion that a lardy customs inspector has eaten the Tim-Tams I sent back to America. I hope they were thoroughly enjoyed. It costs 20 dollars just to send each box. Miserable wretches…

    I don’t know why I mention that either…

    Kristin and I had a genuine… crashing apart this past week. This past week we fought. Hard. Messily and hating it all the while we were doing it, each of us.

    … one of those nights, when I went to work my phone was answered by a 97 year old gentleman who thought it was hilarious that I’d call him up to invite him to a free seminar, as everyone over the age of 69 does. And he told me his age and he told me his wife’s age just for the novelty of it, as they all do. And I told him that he must half burn the house down when they try to light all the candles on his birthday cake. And he laughed.

    And then right out of the blue he said “We’ve been married since before the end of World War II.”

    And that floored me. There was something in it that just… finally sank in. The association finally caught and I finally felt it. Like when a guy tells me he used to make 12 million a year that’s just numbers to me anything above 300,000 and my brain kind of loses the gravity of it because… really, it’s just too big. But you break it down and you figure it out, 12 million dollars in one year, that’s a million dollars every month. … That I could feel. That’s $250,000 every week. THAT I feel.

    And something about ‘before the end of WWII’ stuck and for two seconds I didn’t say anything and I just… felt it. And then I said “Wow… that’s a… that’s a very long time sir. I don’t think I’ve known anyone my age that can make a relationship last more than… even one year much less 50, 60… what’s the secret?

    And he laughed as if I’d asked him something absolutely ridiculous and I guess to him I had. “Oh… I don’t know the secret.” He chuckled through his 97 year old lungs.

    And it made my day.

    It equalized everything for just a moment.

    I don’t know… I haven’t got a clue. And my three year old nephew doesn’t know and he’s never been in a relationship he doesn’t even have the chemicals to want it, and my parents don’t know and they’ve BEEN married, and now this guy who’s been married since before the end of the second world war doesn’t know and he’s never gonna know.

    He’s going to die not knowing the answer to just one more thing that no one really knows the question to and it was so tremendously fair.

    And I got back to Kristin… and she told me like I’ve heard a hundred million people say in a hundred billion different moments to a hundred trillion people, with tears in their eyes. “We’re going to be together.” Knowing inside her that it was meant to be.

    Because of what you feel.

    Because it’s… something you’ve never felt before in your whole life and it’s so… worth every kind of pain in the world beautiful that it must… mean something more than just a feeling like any other feeling it just can’t be all you and only you there’s something else bigger and greater that makes this emotion and this experience majestically unique, and unquestionably significant.

    As if the whole universe meant it for you.

    And this guy, married for 60+ years, when I asked him about it, about what makes it work, didn’t say “When you feel this feeling then you know you can make it work.” He just plain said it like it is, 97 years worth of life experience: “Oh… I don’t know…”

    … pfft. Bugger it all right? Don’t you guys remember? Can’t anyone remember back when, before relationships were dependant on this… love? Before when they weren’t started spontaneously from love and that stew of glee that runs in your veins when you see your one and only because it DIDN’T MATTER? Because you picked your life partner because of… whatever else. If you even picked. Remember? Back when you weren’t in love first or your parents picked and the divorce rate wasn’t 60 bloody percent.

    Higher amongst Christians now… I could tell you exactly why. It’s the exact same problem that everyone else has, Christians just have it worse. It’s the culture.

    I… I don’t want to get married, because I’m in love. It’s not good enough. I don’t want that to be why. I don’t want that to be the reason. I mean really, do I believe it can be eternal, last forever? Sure, why not? Don’t see a good reason it couldn’t happen, and I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t, often. Why not?

    But sometimes… it breaks. And when you’ve founded everything you have with and for this other person on that feeling and throughout the whole relationship you’ve never found a better reason. You and your lover, are not going to be lovers anymore, and you’re going to be frustrated, and you’re going to be miserable, and you’re going to watch out for that feeling and you’re going to spend money on it… you’re going to go to counseling, you’re going to go to therapists and marriage experts and read books and self-help yourself into financial oblivion looking for that feeling again and when you find it again finally it’s not attached to the person you’re married to its somehow mysteriously stapled onto someone else and it’s weird and it’s bizarre because you never imagined and couldn’t believe that this feeling could ever happen… twice, and because it’s a feeling…

    …because you feel it and you trust it, because it’s the most powerful god damned feeling you’ve ever encountered in the whole of your existence… again… you realize, that you were wrong, before, and this, now… is right.

    And you and this other person hemorrhage and gore away from each other with all the traditional post-marital flotsam in your wake and it’s insane. It’s barbaric sometimes the way you end up being with someone that once, way back when, you loved… like that.

    And there’s no way in heaven or hell that I want to base the rest of my life and the life of another person, my partner, and the subsequent lives of my children on something as fragile as that. It’s not worth it.

    I will not mistake a feeling that tells me where I am for a sign telling me where to go
and invite nor compel other people to be involved in a misinterpretation of that magnitude.

    I tell me where to go damn it.

    I tell me where to go.

    And I caught myself by the scruff the other day and shouted with spit into my own face “THIS IS YOUR LIFE.”

    And I had my own anthem drummed back into me, involuntarily… “Get what you want.” The selfish, singular chant that’s inadvertently drawn me everywhere I’ve gone and the message that buried into almost everyone that saw me and compelled inordinate amounts of reasonless, unrequested support.

    And somewhere in the mess this week I was losing it.

    And it put me in a terrific funk.

    … pfft… nationalized health care… I don’t even live in America anymore.

    And Kristin was a perfect picture of sublime maturity the whole bloody time as if she knew… and she didn’t know, what I had clunking around in my head about the whole of it the whole time.

    I’ve told her, now. She and I are alright now and I’ve told her since about not getting married for love. It’s not a misconception to keep. It’s more than being on the same page. It’s a better chance.

    … of being 97 and having her there, still, looking like death from age and still smiling because we made it work.

    And telling the telemarketer that I still don’t know how it happened.

    … that teaspoon of random…

    … flinch… pfft. Why not…

    It’s not how you’re supposed to do it. But it’s a bet either way. For a three year old kid, for me, for my parents, for a 97 year old success story, for everyone. It’s a bet.

    Anyone who knows me knows I’m no believer in fate. It’s a mockery of… will.

    … Kristin asked me if I were sure about it. Her and I. And I said yes, just like I always had before when she’d asked.

    Then a second later I told the truth.

    ”No.” I said. “… but it’s what I want.”

I finished my novel

    ”No no.” I could just see her, in my head, on the other end of the phone wagging her finger in protest, a thousand miles already away from her and knew only by the tones in her voice that her finger was deliberately swishing back and forth through the air. “Don’t you dare bother I don’t need you.” She insisted. “I’ve got the whole of your nature all stored up in my head and anything I want of you can be gotten of there all I have to do is reach in and take it. I could open this book and have you read it aloud to be even and I would hear it, in your exact voice in my head with your every tone and inflection included and applied. Just as slow or as fast as you would read it, line by line, pausing where you would and breathing as you would while reading. I could even hear you stopping at words I know are unfamiliar to you because I have known you that well. You and all your complete wholeness are here within me now and I don’t need you to experience you.”

    ”It wouldn’t be the same.” I said.

    ”Oh and how would it not?” She huffed gently, preoccupied with her packing in the background.

    ”Because really, I’m still not actually there, reading it to you. No matter how accurate your mind’s synthesis of me I still won’t remember having ever done it because I’ve never actually done it and you would know that. And that’s what we’re doing when we share an experience, doing something that we both remember… sometimes we even do things that we don’t want to do or even hate to do because we’re with someone that makes it worth doing. And you can’t fake that… it’d be a lie.”

    I heard a faint exhale and blindly, across the thousand miles between us I closed my eyes and saw her adjust the phone to cradle it in her shoulder. “I’m going to a desert island you silly boy, all by myself. And at that point, by yourself, just yourself… with no one else in your world to keep track… ah well everything is a lie.” She smiled. I could hear her smile at the cleverness of the conclusion she’d drawn. And then she hung up on me, and but for the lies in my head, I never heard her voice again.

    And in the glorious afterglow of that exchange, with the crackling click of the phone still fading to a ring in my ear, I heard a familiar friend, my own voice, speaking softly in the acoustic theatre of my mind, to her- I knew you too, that well. But I cannot make happy a voice in my head, and it was in that, that I derived my happiness and in that… that I treasured having known you… -But she’d never hear it, and in that exact moment… I never wanted her to.

Facebook just f***ed up.

WTF just happened.

www.facebook.com now IMMEDIATELY redirects to LinkedIn.com, another social networking platform.

My 30 second research span indicates that Linked in and Facebook have been in the most minor competition of their free clientele. Users etc. But Facebook… I mean heck it’s always been the strong one right? I mean.. right?

WTF JUST HAPPENED TO FACEBOOK? And in the mid morning in the United States… bad time Facebook. Bad time.

I’ll post more when/if I get more details.

_Caleb

UPDATE: Facebook seemingly back. No explanation yet.

Season III

    I decided to go to Japan just the other day. A completely random, almost thoughtless idea, an almost instantaneous transition from “this idea has occurred to me” to “it is now happening.”

    And it struck me, just then:

    Yup… I’m exactly who and what I always wanted to be.

    I had to call Codi Phillips just to tell her, and to make her really jealous about it because pretty much she had owed me photos of all the crazy things she’s been doing with her hair for half a year now and has not followed through even once so she deserved some spiting. But not a lot. She’s still my friend. ^_^

    This is a bit of an involved story. I don’t have many that aren’t, I think. It starts with SRO Marketing, a little call centre just a ways from where we’re living now and at which I’ve been working for just over 5 weeks.

    We set appointments for free finance seminars. There’s this magical thing that Australia lets you do with real estate that no other country in the world (so far as I know) lets you do that’s absolutely fantastic called Negative Gearing. It’s where you have an investment property that you’re renting out and you purposely make less in rent than you pay for the home loan each month. Say you make 800 rent each month and pay 1000 dollars a month to the bank. That 200 dollar difference can actually be directly written out of your income taxes. Suppose I make 1000 dollars a month and I’m taxed 20%. That’s 200 dollars. I can tell my employer not to take out any taxes and then at the end of the year, come tax time I can just say “Hey I wasn’t paying income taxes because I was paying off my investment property and needed the extra money to cover losses I had because the rent is lower than my repayments.

    And the government gives you a nod and LETS YOU DO IT.

    So basically… you own the property, but your renter, and the government, are paying for it every month until it’s completely yours and THEN, you just make 800 dollars a month on it. Kerpow.

    Anyway the seminars teach people to do that. There’s a lot more that we also teach that’s pretty cool but that’d be a completely new post.

    My job is to get people to the seminar. The seminar is free so it’s not hard. Having free coffee and cookies doesn’t make the job any harder either. Thing of it is people don’t like people calling up and talking to them out of the blue, selling something or not, if they don’t know you and you sound anything at all like a telemarketer which hey… I understand. Me neither right?

    I am GOOD at my job… Especially lately. We work on commission. You get people to the seminar, you get paid more. Easy peasy. I’ve been the highest paid operator there for two of the five weeks I’ve been there and not far behind in the other three. I had the highest showrate percentage to bookings and actual highest showings total last week. 9 attendees on a board averaging 2’s and 3’s.

    Not surprisingly I make a lot of money at this job as a result. Last week I made 1052 dollars. In one week. Next week I’m making 1174. You multiply that by 52 weeks and I’m netting about 60,000 taxable dollars a year at only 36 hours a week. I’m making more than the highschool teachers that told me you can’t make any real money without a college degree and I wear jeans and a t-shirt to work every day.

    It is, needless to say: Awesome.

    So… what am I gonna do with all this money?

    I’m saving it and here’s why, (because I know it’s a good idea to save but I’d say that only if you know what you are saving it for. Repeat: Don’t save JUST to save. Have a reason, INVENT a reason, it doesn’t even have to make much sense but don’t do it just because. It’s a monetary relationship thing, one post I’ll explain the reasoning behind that.) I’m saving for a student visa and the time away that I’ll need to get it.

    As an American you can’t be in Australia to move your visa stuff around. Something about not being a base commonwealth country or something. Or maybe it’s retribution for what an incredible pain it is to get into America for any reason other than to just drop your money at the door and run back home. Regardless, I need be offshore during the processing of the visa application. Just like last time and the work visa. Same story.

    I was going to go to New Zealand. You know, take Kristin, make a whole vacation of it. Take a month off, just travel around, see what there is to see…

    Then one day it occurred to me… “Hey what about Japan?”

    … yeah, sure. Heck lets go to Japan instead.

    So I’m going to Japan instead, for a month. Why? Why the heck not? I don’t think there even exists in New Zealand a month’s worth of things to do. Japan? Pfft. The impression I’ve gotten is you could live there for years and STILL have no idea what’s going on.

    Processing for the visa and medical others takes about a month so that’s the trip that I’m looking at. Or that’s the trip that I… was, looking at.

    SRO Marketing does a number of invented little things to motivate people to make bookings and press for showings at the seminars and just recently it’s been an auction. For every booking you make 10 monopoly dollars up till your 5^th booking at which you start making 30 per booking.

    For people who actually show you end up with 50 dollars per showing.

    It’s been a week I’ve got about 1000 monopoly dollars. This goes for a month and after the month is over we have an imaginary auction using the monopoly money. The auction had a budget cap of about $400 real dollars so they actually polled for suggestions of prizes to be auctioned. As a joke I wrote “Sponsored Residency for caleb to Australia. Yay!” on my sheet of paper.

    My supervisor took it, saw it, had a chuckle, and immediately asked why I hadn’t asked about this.

    ”About what, residency?”

    ”Yeah, ask Catherine about it. You’re one of the highest performing workers here, you haven’t missed a single hour potential work since you started, you had the highest showrate last week, highest paid two weeks now, ask her about it.”

    … shrug, sure.

    I went in a little earlier yesterday to see if I could catch her (Catherine is the manager of the call centre). I couldn’t. (aw… sad face). So I asked Shane (supervisor) later than night if she’d be around for the Saturday shift. Nope.

    ”Why?”

    ”Figured… you know if you were serious, I’d ask her about sponsorship.”

    ”Oh I already asked her about it.”

    Kaboom, Kaboom, Kaboom. (that’d be my heart, pounding furiously)

    ”You did? Really?”

    ”Yeah, she didn’t say anything yet but I’ll ask her about it again tomorrow.”

    ”Hey cool, thanks man.”

    ”Yeah I was like ‘hey… caleb needs a sponsor.’”

    ”Right, yeah.”

    Etc.

    So I might not even need a student visa! It’s completely… you know… could absolutely not even happen (why am I talking like a 16 year old girl?) But if Catherine is willing I could actually get straight, direct sponsorship through a legitimate business. As in… DONE!

    AHHH!!! (Angels singing)

    Something like that would immediately half the $79,200 tuition for Bond University, saving tens of thousands of dollars. Would save an immediate 610 dollars on a student visa and save further on SO MUCH STUFF.

    … it would untangle so many anticipated knots about this entire process…

    And I wouldn’t have to stay in Japan for the whole month… not like that’s a major problem. I’d love to spend a month in Japan… but the only reason a month was the selected timeframe is because that’s how long it takes to process that stuff. We’d have to have left in late November because Kristin doesn’t get out of uni till then and a month after that is Christmas right on the nose and all the flights back are like a thousand dollars a head at that time. So we could go for… pfft, two, three weeks, whatever, and save HEAPS ON FLIGHTING AS WELL!!!

    NO MORE VISAS!

    … Phew… is THIS what if feels like when a Mexican gets a green card? I hope so… it’s a wonderful feeling and people should feel this. ^_^

    Still have to talk to Catherine… but this could be it. And even if it’s not… (because the worst she can say is… you know, ‘no’) It’s still been some good hope. And I’m still making 60,000 dollars a year there. WHOO HOO! But I’m not gonna get to keep all of it… taxes and all. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to pay tax to a country. I won’t be paying it for much longer… not knowing what I know about taxes in Australia nowadays. But for now… it’s a small price to pay.

    Also: the birthday was fantastic, thank you everyone who sent stuff. Bethany, you snarky little tart… I’ve got some rewriting to do for you eh? I’m apparently learning to surf… Markos went ahead and got me this whole course in surfing lessons so… I dunno, next time any of you see me I might be wielding a surfboard and speaking only in witless quasi-philosophical one liners like “Dude… if you like, see the ocean… the ocean, it sees you.”

    Totally.

_Caleb Roy 2009