i guess i’ve been broke for a long time. i remember reading an article from some lady… it talked about how if you were broke as a kid… and that is what you were expecting as you got older… then you’ll repeat that pattern over and over. That’s depressing. and it sounds a little off. and it sounds a little true.
regardless. I’m broke.
and i was broke as a kid too.
right now… it’s that time when you have a choice. you can either point fingers or take responsibility. and what i find most surprising… is that those that are your best friends, those that love you… they make it the most difficult to take responsibility. because they know what you’ve been through. and what you’ve faced. and where you come from.
regardless, I’m still broke.
i can get great jobs and make a lot of money. however. because i married someone that i divorced for being a really unkind person to me and to our kids, i must pay the price. what’s the price? I’m broke.
i remember the day… the day i was picking up dog shit.
our cool dog, Oliver produced a lot of shit during the winter in the Chicago suburbs. and it was my job to pick it up when the snow melted. dads everywhere, you know what i mean.
i was picking up dog shit. in, what chicagoans call “warm weather” in the spring. it was probably 40 degrees. if you’re in the midwest you’re thinking, “yea so what?” if you’re in the south you are thinking of the story of the frog in the boiling water. yes. in chicago, we think 40 degrees is pretty warm. and it certainly melts the snow revealing all the dog shit to pick up.
i have a jewel bag in my hand. i’m wearing gloves so the bag is sort of hooked on my glove. if the damn thing slipped off i wouldn’t even notice. and i’m using a crappy garden hand shovel the size of a spatula to scoop up the shit. looking back… that’s the best strategy i could come up with? I have an $800,000 home and i’m picking up dog shit with a garden shovel and a jewel bag? anyway. i was.
and. of course. the wind was gusting at about 120mph. yea, having a jewel bag full of small tears full of dog shit blowing around you, always on the edge of flipping and dumping feces all over you is no big deal. my strategy was to stay low. if that fucking bag flipped over it would spill on the ground, not on me. i think i felt that somehow the wind had less effect on me the more i bent over and screwed up my lower back. nevertheless, it was a strategy.
now, think about this. i did this many times in the winter. i probably should have done it 10 times in the winter. instead i did it 5 times. and because i only did it 5 times, my bag of shit was about 3 tons. so, trivia… how much weight can a jewel bag hold? 3 tons.
guess what happened this time i picked up shit?
first, let me tell you what happened other times i picked up shit.
i thought about work. the kids. how my face was freezing off my body.
i thought about summer projects in the yard… building a new deck, putting in a pool.
i had the biggest lot, the biggest house on the street. of course, that alone could make me broke. and for all the real estate, financial advisors, and other social media professionals, they’d say it was a major contributor. i’d say, it was the least of my fucking worries. as big as it was.
i normally picked up shit, mowed the lawn, picked up kids toys, and other dad things… and used that time for some therapy. the good kind. the kind where you reflect. and you just relax a little.
let me tell you. this day. this day i picked up shit. it was fucked up.
i’ll explain more before this day, and more after. i’ll do that at some other point. but what you should know now, is that… on this day, i had been through 14 years of verbal abuse from my spouse. told i was stupid every day. watched her verbally torture the kids every week. That’s where i was. generally speaking.
so there i was. picking up 3 tons of dog shit.
and you know what happened? i swear. this is what happened. you’ll hardly believe it.
i bent over in the front yard to pick up dog shit. and 2 seconds later…
i stood up in the backyard with 3 tons of dog shit in my bag.
i shit you not.
however long it took me to pick up all that dog shit… i missed ALL of it.
i stood up and just about freaked out.
i only know 2 things about what happened between 0 and 3 tons.
#1: I had been thinking about how my dedication to my spouse was pure dishonesty and disservice to my kids
#2: I might be on the brink of pure insanity and certified mental breakdown
and because in Chicago, you measure time like it’s the most valuable resource (how long from 94 & Ohio to O’Hare… etc…)… I knew that picking up 3 tons of dog shit was between 50–57min worth of time, that for me to completely black out that long was serious.
and that’s the beginning of how dog shit took all my money
