Coming up with 3.8…

Well, the holiday season is approaching - you can tell from all the Christmas displays! This means, of course, another one of those pointless, annoying, collections of CDs that Ken (referring to himself in the third person again) likes to pawn off as presents.

Last year, I worked on the CDs for the better part of three months, to have them finished by Thanksgiving - when I went up to Tim & Autumn's. This year, I want to have them done by November 7th, when Vicky and I are leaving (unless I forgot the real day) on a short vacation to LOCATION WITHHELD BECAUSE I AIN'T TELLIN' VICKY. That gives me two weeks.

And I haven't even started.

Can you say "delusional"???

I could have started them this weekend but I wasn't really in the mood. One of the disks, Ken 3.8, is read by myself and will cover some key events in the past year. (One of which is NOT Arbor Day!) But I wasn't really in the mood to tell about acting or Rosa or writing or Vicky… especially Vicky. The parts about Vicky are meant to be happy and upbeat but things between us have been neither. In fact, Friday night, we were fighting again.

Now, it's not my nature to tell what we were fighting about so let's just say it was the same old thing and we hadn't yet lived together two months - far too short a time, in my mind, for there to be a same old thing to fight about. This only made me feel worse and I readied that part of my emotions that read "Escape Hatch. For emergency use only." Honestly, the more we fight, the less I believe things are going to work out. Finally, I just got my stuff together and told Vicky I was going to San Diego for the weekend. I was going to go on Saturday, anyway. What's a day early? She didn't ask me not to or try to stop me. In fact, she even suggested that I'd be talking shit about her behind her back. That one really stung because it was so unlike me. Look at how long I've been divorced and think about how often I talk/talked shit about Rosa - my track record there is pretty good and I don't even like her!

So, I went down to Tim's. Of course, he was expecting me the next day. When I got there, he was already asleep and not even the cacophony of his barking dogs woke him! I settled into the back house, where I always stay when I'm down there, and called Vicky. We worked things out so quickly on the phone - I wish we could do that when we were face to face! Then, I found out a Southpark marathon was playing on Comedy Central. By 4am, though, I went to sleep.
At 4:30, Tim came out, surprised to see me. A mouse had been caught on a glue-trap in the main house and he had been woken by the screaming. (Mouse screaming is louder than dog barking, it seems. Must've been quite a mouse - RIP.) He stayed out there until 7am, when he had to get ready for work. I immediately fell asleep.

And I had the most disturbing dream. I was walking up to my front porch and who was sitting there, waiting for me, but Rosa. "I have to talk to you," she said. "Are you nuts. It's too late! I live here with Vicky!" And who should walk up, just at that moment, but Vicky! "Who the hell is this?" she asked. Talk about your dueling psyches!!!

After I awoke (at 9am, so much for sleeping), I spent the rest of the day reading, finishing Neil Simon's memoirs.

I was also fortunate enough to see John Kerry speaking before a crowd of more than 10,000 in Pueblo, Colorado on CSPAN. By some miracle, or lots of practice, Kerry's speech was delivered very well. It reminded me of Michael Dukakis, back in '88. He's started out as a charismatically challenged candidate who became more comfortable in the last 10 days of the race. He ended up losing, and look at what happened! Let's hope history does not repeat itself.

When Tim got home that afternoon, he immediately started drinking. Let me be clear on this: Tim has a drinking problem. It was rather disturbing to see him drink as early and as fast and as much as he did. By dinner, he was drunk, loud and obnoxious, and he kept drinking. Seeing him like this put off my desire for a drink, a condition which may last for several weeks. He passed out in a drunken stupor long before I left, shortly after 11pm. It hurts to watch him do this to himself - and this is, by not means, a recent development. Tim, you need to cut it out.

But enough casting judgment. I got home fairly quickly. Vicky was still up, coughing though she took her prescription cough medicine. I tried to read… but the coughing kept on and on. "Vic? Honey? Would you like me to go to Rite-Aid and get you some regular cough syrup?"

"No," she said, coughing. "I'm fine."

"Are you sure," I asked as she burst into another series of coughs.

Her coughing continued. "No. I'll be fine."

Normally, when I offer help, I wait for an affirmative response. Vicky, however, is not good at giving affirmative responses. "I'm going." I told her. Rite-Aid was closed, of course, but after driving around for another 20 minutes (and, mind you, it was 4am!), I found an open Sav-on. I picked up $25 worth of medicine, brought it up to the front… and found no one there. I literally could have walked out with the goods had I wanted to. (I suppose they figure shoplifters are too lazy to be up at that hour.) I finally found an employee on the floor, putting away some cans.

"Excuse me," I said, "is there someone who can help me up front."

He got up. "We don't just wait around at this hour," he said, apropos of god knows what.

As he was ringing me up, four employees came in and, at this hour, I could only guess it was a smoke break… a crack smoking break! They were far too awake.

Thankfully, the medicine worked and Vicky was soon asleep.

It didn't take too long, only a few hours after she awoke, for us to start fighting.

This isn't going to last, I thought. We're never going to make it to the wedding. We'll be lucky if we make it through the holidays.

"We've got to find a way to make this work," I told her later on. "Our relationship is too important not to and I don't want to see us fall apart. I don't want us to screw this up." When Vicky and I first got together, I remembered how problematic things were with Rosa and I'd sworn I wouldn't screw up for let the other person screw things up like that again. I'm a lot more stubborn this time.

The weekend ended and I never started Ken 3.8 but knew I had to get on it right away. There had to be a Ken 3.8… if only because I have a feeling Ken 3.9 is going to be pretty interesting no matter what happens.