NOTE: This entry was part of a blog I wrote called “Jesse 2.0” from 2010-2011. 

NOTE: I added a couple of (sad) photos to the first and second entries in this blog. As long as I’m documenting, I might as well go multimedia. Check them out.

I slept a little better last night, but today was tougher than I anticipated – a repeating occurrence so far. I still keep thinking about my mantra, which I’ll repeat here in case you’re too lazy to read the previous entries:

I can’t go back in the past to fix things. I can’t see into the future to know how bad they are going to get. All I can do is work with what I have today. Short-term, it is about me recovering. Long-term it is about me learning from my mistakes and taking steps to avoid them in the future.

I boxed up more of my wife’s things today and that took a heavier toll than expected. She really had a lot of stuff and it kind of reminded me how big of a part of me that she was. In a probably ill-conceived brief moment of humor after carrying a dozen boxes downstairs I texted her: “Phew, you have a lot of stuff. Sure we can’t work this out? j/k.”

She didn’t answer.

Sadness reigns supreme in my life, as noted yesterday, it’s similar to my father’s death in 2000. For therapeutic purposes I thought I’d jot down a partial list of things that make me sad now, in no particular order:

– Cooking dinner and dishing it out, because that was always a family affair.
– Dogs barking, because I miss my wife’s dog.
– Going for a walk, because her dog was always attached to me via a belt-leash.
– Families walking on the sidewalk outside the window.
– Being in our house, which we purchased together and were so happy to occupy
– Doing laundry, because I didn’t used to do it and it indicates something’s wrong
– Eating fast food because we enjoyed it so much and had our favorite restaurants
– Television, because that used to be “our thing” and we had many shows we both enjoyed
– Listening to music (that they liked)
– Taking pictures
– Driving alone

Another, I found out today, is Getting Groceries. Even Wal-Mart and (it would seem) every product in the store reminds me of them. I may have to shop somewhere else for a while. And that doesn’t include the heavy sigh when my debit card was rejected because I didn’t get cash (as my ex-wife told me a million times).

You add that all up, and it’s pretty much everything, which was really getting me down until I heard this famous line by the Grateful Dead on the car radio:

“I may be goin’ to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I’m enjoying the ride.”

What Jerry is saying there is that you can make a positive situation out of literally anything. It doesn’t matter what has happened, you can be positive, and I keep telling myself that.

If you look at the FX show “Louie”, Louis C.K. does a great example of taking our situation (divorce) and making light of it. Being divorced at our age is so sad, it’s almost funny. But he’s a talented comedian and I’m just another divorced schmo, so don’t look for me on the comedy circuit any time soon.

Still, I’m going to try to take Jerry and Louis’ advice into account as I move through these next few difficult weeks.

For now, I have (almost) made it through another day, trying to keep myself busy to keep my mind from wandering. I still don’t think I’m ready for public consumption yet so I will probably work from home tomorrow.

P.S.S.: I also got a haircut today, back to my normal short “do.” Another attempt to make things in the mirror look a little different than they did when all this went down.

P.S.: One thing I’ve been doing that has helped here at home, is “talking to no one” which is sometimes defined as “talking to the cat” if he’s in the room. Speaking of the cat, one good thing did come out of today: I finally worked a serious fur matty out of Starlight that had been bugging him for months. This is about my only success to report since Friday, and I know it sounds silly, but hey, something good happened today.