So I have been out in this barren desert hellhole for six years now and still cannot adjust to the life here. The people, the way of life, the products, the attitudes, the landscape…the general atmosphere is not something I’m able to accept and live with. It’s just not ME. I hate it here with every fiber of my being and do so more and more each day.

Over the past several months I have started dreaming at night of being back east. Every night I find myself back there driving around all the familiar places and revisiting all that I love, feeling safe and comfortable and at home. And it’s all so vivid in my dreams. I can smell the place…in my dreams. When I wake up and realize where I am I cry. This place is just very unfriendly and hostile to me. And yes, I did give it a fair chance when I first got here but IT’S JUST NOT FOR ME. All the bad feelings that are inherent to my personality are magnified now and getting stronger every day. And my control over myself is almost gone and that scares me. I need to be able to hold on until I can escape this nightmare place, it would just help some if I knew WHEN that escape might be possible. It’s the fear that I might be stuck here forever that truly frightens me. I can tell you one thing for sure…if I am indeed stuck here forever then forever will be very short, I’ll see to that, guaranteed.

It just seems as if everything out here is dead. The landscape is brown and dirty, whereas back east you go outside and you see green and life. I just pray that one day I’ll be able to go back.

I know this is a week or so early but I thought I would take a look back on the past year. To be honest, most of 2008 is NOT something I want to remember. It was the year that I finally accepted some hard truths about my family and myself.

But there were a few goods parts too. Yeah, I’m as amazed as anyone about that. In the beginning of the year I started a new pastime that I really think I could enjoy especially if family wasn’t interfering (yep, there’s that bad stuff again!). I’ll explain. I started creating stained glass stuff. I could really get into this as it’s an incredible feeling to watch something come to life and know that it’s because *I* made it happen. Now for the bad part…Mom insisted that I pursue this hobby out in the garage. I would have setup my workstation in the house like a real person would but having to listen to Mom go on and on about it was too much to deal with, so I setup in the garage. It’s not that that is a totally bad place to do something like this but it means that here in the boiling pit of hell that I live in I can’t work on anything in the summer months (which out here is about 6 months long)…it’s just too fucking hot. And there is also the thing about Mom starting her usual panic rant about money anytime I say I want to buy more glass. So yeah, that shit does take some of the passion out of things. But in the short time that I was able to work on stained glass I created something that I am really proud of (see image on right). This is something I hope to continue with.

The second good thing came out of having to take a break from the the first good thing – the stained glass stuff. Since I couldn’t work on the stained glass during the summer months, in August I started creating themes for Wordpress to be distributed publicly thru my new site The Cloisters. Much to my pleasure and surprise, my themes are fairly successful. And it really is a great feeling when someone likes something that I had an incredible amount of fun creating. It’s awesome! So check out the site and maybe download one of my themes – I offer pretty decent support too!

The third good thing was getting to go back east for a week in June. I swear the minute the plane landed back there I felt I was home. That’s a feeling I haven’t had since I came out here to this desert wasteland. I do have some pictures that I took and will eventually get up on this site. And since I already wrote about the trip in the post Back Home Again, I won’t repeat things here.

I think maybe I’ll stop here and try, for once, to keep things light and end this hellish year on a positive note. So Happy Holidays to everyone and here’s hoping 2009 will bring some good changes.

As I was going through my “before bed” routine last night I realized that I’m living in a state of fear brought about in a big way by our current society. My “before bed” routine consists of making sure all the windows and doors (including the heavy duty security door) are locked up tight. I have to put a screwdriver in the track of my garage door because we have these fun-loving folks that get kicks out of driving around and using their garage door openers to open every door they can. I turn on the outside lights because out here in the desert we apparently do not believe in street lights. The last thing I do is the set the alarm system thus ensuring that I am indeed a prisoner in my own home.

I am also looking into getting one of those fancy locking mailboxes because of the fools who love to drive around neighborhoods, during the day mind you, and steal people’s mail. I guess they want to make sure our state stays at the top the the identity theft list. I won’t drive 2 feet down the road without my car doors locked because the rate of carjacking is so high.

And before anyone decides that this is just my paranoia kicking up again, I can say with absolute certainty that it’s not. I watch the local news and read the local papers where stories of all the home invasions, murders, rapes, assaults, vandalism, carjackings, etc are prominent on almost a daily basis. I drive around this town and see more houses with alarms and grates on the windows and doors than not. Hell, it’s even in my own neighborhood. The cars on either side of me were broken into, and across the street not only had one of their cars broken into but another car parked in front of their house was tipped over onto it’s roof! I guess the only reason my car hasn’t been bothered is because I use my garage as a garage, not a storage shed. And let’s not forget all of the gang markings all over the place. And up in the north end of town (the self proclaimed upper class area – they insist on having their own name) someone was going around in the middle of the night setting fire to cars parked in driveways. Constant drug related shootings and such. The crime is rampant in this shithole of a town I’m currently stuck in and I’m scared to death.

So thanks to all the bleeding heart liberals and all the people who are soft on crime, this is our world now and I fear it’s only going to get worse. God help us all.