Goodbye 2007, you kinda sucked…..

I am very glad that 2007 is coming to an end. Even though that puts me one year closer to death, 2007 was enough of a doozy year to make me at least curiously wonder if death might not be less harsh. Each of us will have a few years in there that aren’t so great. Sometimes there are years that we did things to ourselves, sometimes ‘they’ did things to us, sometimes we just continuously find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. For me, 2007 was chock full of all of that and then some. The year started out just plain crappy, then went to a really bland place, and then ended on a frenzied high that has left me tired but optimistic.

I thought I would leave the 2007 with a bit of a call back to the stuff I used to write; a little more edgy and more cynical. It is my own version of a year end ‘Top 10′ that probably won’t have 10 things in it. Here we go !!!

The beginning of the year started with me in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota. WTF !?! You Ask ? Well, way back in 2004, I tested at a little town next to Minneapolis for the position of Firefighter/Paramedic. After flying back and forth several times, many interviews, and 3 years (that’s right, I said years) of waiting they called and offered me a position. My wife and I flew to the City of Lakes to 1) pee in a cup, 2) take a stress test and physical, 3) take a psych test, and 4) find a house, school for our daughter, and general neighborhood to chill in (sometimes literally). Everything was going great, until the psychiatrist that interviewed me for, by my watch, 23 minutes decided that I “didn’t fit the profile desired by the requesting party”. That means that after 3 years and $2600.00 of hard earned money traveling back and forth, I got tossed out with a phone call from one of the Assistant Chiefs. To say it hurt would be the understatement of the year.

To make matters better (note the cynicism), while my wife and I were still reeling from the news (literally within an hour of being heart broken), our best friend couple (that couple that you and your wife hang with the most) called to let us know that the mother of the wife (get that?) was now unconscious and expected not to wake after a lengthy battle with cancer. We made it back to the hotel, paid the robbery like fee to have our tickets changed, and headed back to Texas. Within days, they ‘other mother’, as my wife and I called her was dead. She had requested that I be a pallbearer and I did so with several of the other adopted sons she had picked up along the years.

In February I began to notice that the pain in my back was getting worse and not going away. Being a big dude (I am currently a svelte 6′2″ and 276lbs.), I have little pains in my knees and neck and back and wrists all the time. But this was getting worse with every day and eventually, come March or so, I was in my bed on a handful of analgesics that were just not helping. Turns out, the Sciatic Nerve will put you down regardless of size and pain threshold. My family doctor suggested a serious course of action: Change your entire life. Start by loosing weight; not just some, but most of it. Quit smoking. Quit ordering from drive through windows. Get up out of the chair and get moving. I was confused because I still had that incredible pain, see. So the moving part was not something I was all that hip on. But I did get up, and I did loose some weight (at the time the doc said to, I weighed 298 – thanks a lot depression binge eating).

Months passed, and I payed bills, came to work, smiled for the camera, and tried to keep from hanging myself with an extension cord. ‘Long about May, my wife and I decided that, well, ‘this’ was all bullshit, with a capital B. We had a great fight (again with the cynicism), and convinced ourselves to get over ‘it’, and get on down the road, and yadda yadda. So we called up a friend, had him run our credit again (since we had been busting our asses at improving it for 3 years preparing for a move to Minnesota……) and he called back a week or so later and said, “Hey, go pick out a house !” So we did.

After all of the craziness of moving and cleaning and such, we looked up and it was Christmas. We had a very normal Christmas with our family, and didn’t even mention to each other that what was SUPPOSED to be our first Christmas in Minnesota was actually not. And even though both of us were/are still heartbroken, we realize that life moves on, time continues, and I will probably get turned down in 3 or 4 more places before somebody with a sense of humor takes a chance and says, “Would you like to come to work here? Because we would like that.”

Until then, the evil city still looms over me and my future with it’s scythe of annexation. And perhaps even more damaging than that, I still can’t seem to find a department flawless enough in which to build my desire to apply because, after all, how can I be sure that I will fit their profile?

2007 was rough on the Mookie’s, but I sincerely hope that it was better for you and yours. I lost a great family member, and I know some close friends went through the exact same pain. I met some fascinating new people, and I am beginning to believe in all that ‘things happen for a reason’ mumbo-jumbo. I hope 2008 is good for you, I know I intend to make it better for me. We will have some fairly incredible stuff rolling off the shelf here and at Texas-Fire, and I want y’all to come along for the ride. Thanks for reading, thanks for keeping the site something that I enjoy playing with, and most of all, God Bless Texas !