…

I don’t know where the time went. I was coping with stress like any normal human would. Denial, distraction and substance abuse. I was leveling-up on a monthly, weekly and then daily bases. Leveling-up is a mind game where you take hold of each new stress (an opportunity in work lingo), swallow it with one big adult gulp, push it down to the floor through your body and stand on it like crushing cans for the recycle bin.

Levels

My father was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in the fall of 2015. He was in and out of hospitals from that point forward with one illness after another. It became routine to travel up to Buffalo, New York on a moments notice where my family was located. By September 2019 I found myself in a hospice room on my way to Amsterdam for a vacation. I was expecting to stay for a weekend then jet off, but instead, I stayed and comforted my dad the best I could until he died on October 11, 2019 from encephalitis and lymphoma. This was a steep level to normalize. I don’t recommend that experience to anyone.

On May 20, 2018, my father found my brother dead in the basement of our Depew home. Depew is a relic immigrant blue-collar suburb of Buffalo. I received the call from my stepmother while driving back from an instructor meeting in Ft. Collins, Colorado on a Sunday evening. It was the night before my new “Data Wrangling” class. I’ve been working-on the class for quite some time. The impact on the future of how we do data science in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service can not be overstated with this class. It was very important to me, so I stayed in Ft. Collins and taught my sections. I flew home on Wednesday morning to bury my only brother. He died slowly and painfully from years of alcohol abuse. A horrible life destroying genetic disorder that pulses through our family. The death of our mother left an indelible mark on my brother years before. She died in October of 1989 of alcoholism when I was at Unity College working on my BS degree in Wildlife Biology. I was pulled out of my technical writing class and flew home from Maine only to arrive by her side too late. She was ice cold when I kissed her for the last time. Again, not an experience I recommend to anyone.

I’m not looking for sympathy by walking through the math on how many cans I crushed. Fuck those cans! Knock the office vending machines over and stomp the glass shards into the candy bars! I’m pissed-off. Can you tell? Funny though, I can scream and destroy everything around me and it won’t make a damn bit of difference. What’s gone is gone. Some level additions are better left uncounted and thereby unknown because it’s less of a mind fuck to make it through the day. If ignorance is bliss, then I don’t even want to know my name.