Confession To The World

Rob Says1 Comment

Have you ever done something that if the people around you found out you did it, it would change how they look at you, what they think of you? That it would literally change their worlds, and yours, forever?

I have. And I did.

You see, a little over four years ago, I committed a crime. I did something that could get me locked up for the rest of my life. In some areas of the world, it could get me executed.

I have committed Murder in the First Degree.

It was premeditated. I did it in cold blood. I did it without remorse as to the suffering of the individual that I killed. And I would do it again given a chance and if I had to do it again.

Who did I murder, you ask?

Just this guy I knew. I knew him my whole life and he was one miserable, unhappy son of a bitch. In all honesty, what I did to him shouldn’t be classified as murder, if anything, I should get a medal for what I did. If anything, I should be considered a hero. I don’t consider killing him as an act of brutality so much as an act of mercy. I put that motherfucker out of his misery.

I grew up with this guy and I watched him grow and do his thing. He wasn’t a bad looking guy, but he couldn’t see it. I tried telling him time and time again that he was good enough, but he wouldn’t hear it. I watched him hurt himself with drinking, the occasional drugs, and the shit food that he ate. I heard him talk of dying on and off throughout his life. If anyone wanted to die at one point or another, it was this friend of mine.

He was a good guy, don’t get me wrong, but god he could be a doormat sometimes. It was pathetic really. It was sad to watch him settle for less when he could have had so much more. If only he could have seen what I saw. You can’t make someone see the truth though, they will only see it when they are ready to see it.

That’s why I don’t try and “fix things.” People are going to do what they are going to do, and you can tell them all the reasons that they should or shouldn’t do something, but until they have crashed and burned enough times, whatever you tell them will fall on deaf ears.

There’s a meme that does the rounds on the internet and has done those rounds for several years. It goes something like this:

“What advice would you give your younger self?”

And of course people throw all sorts of nonsense out there about what they would tell their younger selves, about how if their younger self listened to their older self, their lives would be better somehow.

It’s all bullshit of course. What advice would I tell my younger self? Not a goddamn thing. Why not? Because my younger self had it all figured out and had all the answers and wouldn’t listen to guy an older guy like me, not even when it was me. It’s truly awesome being a late teen/early twenty something and you know it all.

Same thing could be said about my friend that I ended up killing. He had all the answers too, and you couldn’t tell him anything. Since he had all the answers and his life was such shit, I figured that all he wanted to do was die, so I obliged him.

One night I snuck into his house, creeped up to his bed, and woke him up when I put the barrel of a gun against his forehead.

It was so quick that he didn’t have time to say anything. But his eyes. Oh his eyes said all sorts of things. Mostly pleading with me not to kill him. But kill him I did. He needed it. He had it coming. And I’m glad I did it. Like I said earlier, I would do it again. The only thing I would do differently is I would have killed him sooner than I did.

The day after I killed my friend I told my now ex-wife that I wanted a divorce.

I won’t bore you with the details of that set of conversations and dramas, suffice it to say that ultimately here we are.

One of the things that I did say to my ex-wife though was this:

“Don’t consider this a divorce. Consider it a funeral. The Man you knew and loved and fell in love with is dead. I killed him. The Man standing before you looks just like him, so much so it could be his identical twin, but I’m not that Man that you married.”

Yes I killed him. Guilty as charged. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

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Nothing Like A Good Old Fashioned Horror Story.

Rob SaysLeave a comment
man lights legs silhouette
“I was sent by Triple A? I heard you have a flat tire? I’m here to help.”

For pretty much all of my life, I’ve been a fan of the “horror genre.” Books, movies, TV shows, you name it. Most of the fiction literature that I’ve read has been one form of horror or another.

Vampires. Were-wolves. Zombies. Aliens. Let’s not forget, at least when it comes to movies, guys in hockey masks, guys in blue coveralls, guys with knives strapped onto their hands.

Looking back on a lot of it, man, it was cheesy and hokey. Some of the films I used to watch, while they wouldn’t scare me, but maybe they would give me a sense of unease, of dread. Lately watching some of these films, I tend to find them somewhat silly and even boring.

I guess you grow up, you mature. Nothing wrong with any of this material, it definitely has a nostalgia factor to them. I can remember where I was when I first read or saw whatever it was. Good times.

I guess the horror literature and movies don’t do it so much for me anymore because of what can actually go on in the real world.

True crime is a horror genre in itself, the only difference is that the boogyman is real. I find this particular genre fascinating in and of itself as well. The how’s and possible why’s of what one individual or group of individuals did to another person or group. The why’s don’t bother me as much, they did what they did because they could and they wanted to, after all. Anything else is really just a label, a compartmentalization, a rationalization. A way for us the readers and viewers to say, “I could never do that.” Sure you could. Given the right circumstances and motivations, we are truly capable of anything.

There’s another boogeyman that’s real though too.

This one isn’t outside of us. It isn’t some other individual or group doing things to us, it’s in our own minds. It is us.

That boogeyman is very real. It’s all of our doubts and insecurities. It’s that nagging voice that tells you you can’t. It’s that thought that you aren’t good enough. It’s the voice of “why bother.” And it resides in all of us. It’s our inner critic, our slave driver, our own personal demon(s). It’s even that inner whisper of perfection.

If only you do X, Y, Z, in ABC order, then, and only then, will you find perfection. You’ll not fail. You’ll succeed beyond your wildest dreams. But…

People are going to be watching you. They are going to laugh when you fall down, they are going to jeer when you fail. And your failure will hang around your neck, like an albatross, cursing you for all eternity. So just give up. Laughter and pointing fingers, and the judgment that you surely will receive! Everyone will see you as that failure. You will wear that scarlet A. And you will be outcast. Shunned. Unforgiven and alone. A pariah.

Men and women will tell stories about you to their children to frighten them into obedience. “Don’t do that! Or you’ll end up like….And you don’t want that do you?”

Am I being outlandish? Sure I am. And yet I’m not. We all have our personal demons that whisper to us and tell us these frightening things. They tell us that we can’t succeed, that everyone is watching, waiting for us to fall down so they can laugh and judge. They tell us why bother. They tell us, don’t worry about it, do it tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. And yet, tomorrow never comes.

They tell us that what we have to offer is of no consequence. They tell us someone else has already said and done it before. They tell us there is too much competition and that the market is too saturated.

They tell us that we will never be good looking enough, athletic enough, strong enough, thin enough, young enough, rich enough, and smart enough, so why bother?

These demons in our minds, they will tell us a lot of things. And we’ll turn them into reality if we listen long enough and believe them.

But we don’t have to. We can choose to ignore them. We can choose to exorcise them and cast them out. We can choose to listen and believe in something else.

We can choose to accept that we are not perfect and never will be. We can choose to figure that we are good enough. We can always strive to do and be better, but while striving, we can be okay with where we are at and who we are. We can look back at who we were yesterday and see the progress that we have made today.

We can choose to see those demons for what they really are. Smoke and mirrors. Hokey guys with fake machetes and plastic masks, dripping fake blood.

We can choose something else.

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Hedge Your Bets

Rob Says6 Comments

ace bet business card

I want to preface my thoughts and the story that I’m going to tell with this:

I love women. Yes, I said it. Ladies, you are amazing. The way you look, the way you smell, the way you feel. All of it. With that in mind, if you are a woman, and you either follow me here, or if you are a woman and you happened to stumble across this post and my site in general, I’m going to ask you to stop reading now. Look away. Go read something else. Go somewhere else until the next post. I need to talk to the Men for a minute.

Okay Men, now that the ladies have left (and if you didn’t, what I’m about to talk about, if it upsets or offends you, you deserve it) here’s the deal:

I live by a few axioms or adages. Today’s adage is Always Hedge Your Bets. I got this adage from years of trial and error and hard won experience. Ignore it at your own peril. Oh, and if you do ignore it, you get what you deserve.

So here’s the story:

A woman that I had met at my second job reached out to me via text the other day. She introduced herself since I didn’t have her number at the time, and asked me if I remembered her. Of course I did. She’s a good looking woman, so that’s why she ended up with my business card and phone number.

We get to texting back and forth, and initially I kept it to business. Then she asked me if I would like to have coffee with her. Of course I would. But now, now “it’s on” as far as I’m concerned. She didn’t preface coffee with professionalism or anything that would indicate that coffee wasn’t about getting to know you, but was strictly about business, so to me “it’s on.” (As a side note: “it’s on” is another adage that I live by, but that’s for another day.)

As another side note, I believe in the adage, “Go Big or Go Home,” which to me means escalate the interaction until you either get where you want to go, or you get blown out. So that’s what I did, I escalated the texting to flirting and being fairly transparent about where I would have liked to see where all of this was going.

She seemed open to my ideas, my suggestions, my flirting and my banter. Now this texting went on between us for approximately two days. If I had to break it down into hourly time, it was maybe 2 hours total. Anyways, on the second day of heavy flirting, I decided it was time to “go big or go home” yet again, and also to Hedge My Bets.

So I call her up instead of texting her and I suggested that instead of meeting over coffee, that she just come over to my house instead. She accepted and I gave her my address.

Now here’s the thing that I’ve learned about women:

They are notoriously flaky. They truly live in the now, in the moment. They are like crows that see a shiny object, or squirrels gathering nuts. Yes this is AWALT. All Women Are Like That. Even the ones you date steadily for long periods of time, or even the ones that you marry.

Anyways, so I go back to my day, but something felt “off.” Even now as I’m writing this, I’m not sure exactly what it is/was, but it was something that I still can’t put my finger on. Honestly it doesn’t matter.

So I figured that the scenario that I had created with her would have three realistic possibilities:

  1. She comes over, we get to know each other better, we have sex.
  2. She comes over, we get to know each other better, either she or I decide to not have sex, so we don’t, but I get to enjoy her company either way.
  3. She flakes and doesn’t show up.

Can you guess which one happened?

Her: “Fuck I’m so sorry but….(insert reasons here)

Me: “So it’s not gonna happen huh? No worries.”

Color me shocked.

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Been there, done that. Got the t-shirt.

Here’s the thing though, I figured that there was a really good possibility that this would happen, because I’ve been there before. This way though, I got to stay home, which is where I wanted to be in the first place. I didn’t have to put gas in the car, go downtown, have wear and tear on the car, deal with traffic, find parking, deal with a noisy coffee shop, only to get the “I can’t make it” text, 15 minutes before we would have actually met. (Yes, she actually texted me 15 minutes before we were supposed to meet.)

So I set up a no lose situation for myself. Either she would come over, or not. Either way I “won.” I got to be at home, which is where I wanted to be, without all the wasted time and hassles.

The funny thing that showed up for me as well when I thought that there was a strong possibility that she would flake, was would she just ghost me? Or would she actually give me a story about why she couldn’t make it. I put the odds on that one at fifty-fifty. To her credit though, she actually gave me a story.

In all honesty, I appreciated and still appreciate that. At least it was something.

So you Men reading this, realize something:

Women hedge their bets all the time. It’s second nature to them. They’re willing to do things with you only if you are their best bet, otherwise all bets are off. So you might as well hedge yours too. Whether that means you have another woman on stand-by, some of your fellow Men, or just a nice night at home where you don’t have to go out for no reason and waste your time.

So Always Hedge Your Bets. It’s a good adage to live by.  Trust me and thank me later.

Stay tuned for more adages that I live by and that have served me well. I’ve got a few more for you in later articles.

And ladies, if you ignored what I said earlier, and here you are? Don’t hate the player, hate the game. You were warned.

 

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