Absent without leave. Hmm. That kind of describes me, in a way.

I've mentioned a few times that I'm trying to be scarce because I have this overwhelming urge to piss on parades, shit in cheerios and just, generally, be a pain in someone's ass - I don't rightly care 'who'. I've also pushed myself to realize that aiming my bad attitude at some undeserving rat-tick, instead of addressing the source of my ire, is fairly bad press for PF. From a part owner.

So, "what the fuck"? As of today, I have another six weeks before my hearing, on SSD. As of today, my mom is going on to her third day with a broken ankle/leg that she was trying to hide from people. Today, my roommate put the waterpump in his truck, that's been sitting here waiting to go in for some 3-6 months. Today marks the 20k mile mark past the previous oil change on my Durango. That just happens to be steel-on-steel for the back brakes - since it's been the sole transportation for 3 different people, for quite some time. I sit here looking around this shed of a house and see almost nothing of my belongings - everything I own is a couple hundred miles north of here. I'm struggling to maintain... what?

Sanity? Oh, hell no. I lost that, decades ago. A bank account that's in the black? Yeah, right! I've been in the red for as long as I can remember. Oh yeah... I don't know.

I just don't know why I keep pushing, struggling to make it another day, survive another onslaught. I just do. And pretty much keep telling the world to kiss my entire ass.

And that brings me back to AWOL. Friends, family, loved ones are exempt from that 'kiss my ass' thing. Mostly.

I mean, I have this secret hope that things will eventually turn around, and life will get better, bills will get paid, my truck will be maintained (and, in fact, that the truck will no longer be in my mother's name, while she makes payments on the fuckin thing - it'll be paid off), my living arrangements will improve, and I won't be such a grouch. It's not a lot of hope, I'll grant you, but it IS hope. And I keep it close by - it's stored in a matchbox that I didn't have to take any matches out of, first. I treat it like a sort of seed, waiting for it to grow bigger. You have to be careful with that shit, though. Too much water and it drowns, too much sunlight and it gets skin cancer, too much attention and it breaks. Hope is a fragile little thing!

Not like my cynicism. I can't hardly put a dent in that son of a bitch, no matter what I do. It either takes money, honesty, decency or compassion, in seriously enormous quantities, to even address it. And probably takes a combination of ALL of those, in even more unheard of amounts, to squelch. There's a term for that - self-fulfilling. The more I take on my cynicism as a foe, the stronger that cynicism becomes. And the more people are disregarded; the more I want to stay away from them. Thus, reinforcing the understanding that my cynicism seriously IS a foe. The Snowball Effect.

The one thing that can throw a wrench in that whole equation is patience. Though I often use the word perseverance, there, interchangeably. I just need to know where I can buy loads of that stuff at a discount - preferably someplace that takes IOU's.