Three things

Man at Long Beach swap meet yesterday carrying Pegasus Mobil sign
We sold all day, did well. Little things but steady.

I was talking to a friend today who said something interesting to me. We were talking about our divorces and I mentioned that it was a good thing that my ex wife had left me because I didn't have the emotional strength to admit that it was over. 

Had been awful for two or three years but I didn't want to see it. Some serious personality defect on my part. The writing was on the wall and I was apparently a specialist in lost causes. 

I ended up traveling to a war zone and praying that a missile fall on my head and it actually got close a couple times. Short story, war ended, I came home and thankfully she left a couple weeks later. His story was similar, he was in Vietnam when it happened the first time.

"Anyway," he said, "three most difficult things for a man to lose, a wife, a job and his hair." My friend is bald and I snickered, hopefully not too loudly, he was being totally honest and he told me that he lost his hair at twenty and it obviously did a number on him. Never seemed like such a big deal to me.

But I am with him, at least on the first two. I have never lost a job and didn't feel like a failure afterward, even a job that I hated. Sort of like Stockholm syndrome, not sure why. 

I have only been married one other time, to a woman who was sleeping with one of my best friends and at least several other gentlemen during the last several years of our tumultuous relationship and pretty much extorted me for all my worldly possessions and yet I still found myself hurting and bemoaning my fate and missing the few good times we had together. Perhaps it was less about her than my own ego. Could not admit that things had completely fallen apart and that the end was indeed nigh.

Left me dead broke with the our dogs and her horses. Said that I was a millionaire, that I would become one again. I could never understand anyone that would run out on their pets, she had owned the horse since she was 12, but hey, people throw their own kids off of bridges, people are just no damn good. Some people leave on good terms with their ex spouses. Not me. Haven't seen her in thirty years and have no desire to ever again. Love can turn to hate so fast. Luckily I found the right one later, 32 years and running.

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It was a tough week for me. A good friend who is a doctor and has been on hospice had a serious stroke. I visited him in the hospital, he can't talk real well, right side impacted by the clot on the left side of the brain. They had to take him out of hospice to work on him. I visited him in the hospital. Wife said he wouldn't be real happy, he would have preferred to die but I get it. I would have done the same thing she did. Sometimes you are just not ready to say good bye to the person you love.

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A man called me Friday and asked if he could have a consigned painting back. His wife had died and he was redecorating the condo. "Sure," I said, and confided that I didn't know she was sick. "She wasn't," he said. She evidently went on a drinking binge and took her own life on pills last weekend. Left a note and blamed him for her starting drinking again. What a way to go out and leave somebody you have loved.

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All in all, with my late brother's birthday and all the mishegoss, a very strange and depressing couple of days. Still got my hair.