Hello my friends -

So today Scooter spouts off, for the second time, the name by which I refer to my honey, here on my Penny Blog. As in "Just because Marvin is cleaning up for you..." Wow.

What a fuck, huh?

And where does that leave me? Understandably bereft.

(Scoot, bereft mean very, very sad.).

I am bereft because I like my Penny Blog. In fact, there are times when I've loved it and times when I thought perhaps it had saved my life. But now I have to wish it farewell. Because try as I might I can not stomach the idea of giving Captain Jackass the slightest glimpse into my life, my mind, my heart, or my business. In fact, I'd rather stab myself in both eyes with forks. And that's some serious aversion.

(Scoot, aversion means that you really, really don't wanna.).

I just don't see any way around it and it sucks. Who knew that you could lose your personal thoughts in the divorce? (Judge "I award all your private thinking to Scooter in exchange for all of that trash you threw out that he wanted to keep and was always gonna get out of the garage some time next week." Penny "But, your Honor, those private thoughts were mine BEFORE we got married." Scooter's Attorney "Objection! Your Honor she just utilized a thought which you have already awarded the MY CLIENT! Objection!" Judge "Penny, I find you in contempt. Stop your personal thinking at once!'' Penny "But your honor!" Judge "Take her away Rusty. I am so sorry Captain Jackass, sometimes they just get so upset.")

Who the fuck knew?

Well, if I am going out I am going out with a BANG.

My whole life I have had this parentally imposed throttle restricter, instructing me that I had to be a good girl and that I am not allowed to have my own purely selfish feelings about anything. ANYTHING! Not a one. And I have always made excuses and Herculean

(Scoot, Herculean means really really strong)

efforts for the other person. For my mother, for my husband, for the Bartender. Everyone. And the truth is the only people on earth that deserve that kind of lee-way and deference are your children. So I quit. I quit trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, Scooter. I quit talking myself out of my feelings in an effort to make nice with you. I QUIT.

So, here you go:

I HATE YOU.

And your girl friend's ass is so freakin wide that by the time she's 40 you'll have to buy her two seats on the plane. Good luck with that.

Friends, I'll miss you. Be well.

A Message For Scooter

Dear Scooter,

Just because this is a public site does not give you the right to poke your prying nose into it. You were a sneaky, lying jackass when we lived together and you are worse than that now. I hope that you have garnered some satisfaction from looking where you have no right to look. I am not ashamed of a single word I wrote here, including the words about you.

Did you read the post about how I hope someone KILLS me before I am ever such a fuck as to blame my child for something I did wrong? Did you read that one?

If you do not like the way in which I care take your shit, then get it out of my garage. How many years do you expect me to trip over and live around your piles of accumulated crap?

And please, for Christ's sake, don't come to my house when I am home if you can not refrain from your stupid leaking mouth comments, your ugly threatening postures and your stomping about in front of my children.

You sicken me.

Love,

Penny

Why Is My Brain Out To Get Me? or is it...

Well Blog Monkeys and others...

I do not know who the others may be. I know there are few remaining interested cyber-friends. But I suppose that there is an entire new squadron of perusers out there. Peruse on, my friends... WELCOME!

Well, I begin, I am at the WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING ANYWAY??? stage of this relationship with My Marvin. I know this because my dreams tell me so. I have long passed the silliness of thinking that dreams mean anything cogent or FACTUAL, for christ's sake. but nevertheless I have them and they effect me on an emotional level. they are pure emotion couched in disjointed movie like pictures, poor stories designed to display and highlight the emotion. What emotion you ask? Anxiety, fear and suspicion. Yep. I am an evil emotion soup. At least when I am unconscious and my logical brain can not grasp and throttle the defective bits of me.

But dude, isn't that just the problem?

Take my "relationship" with the Bartender. ("Please!" rim-shot, polite laughter... Oh that Penny! What a card!) For example, let's examine that. You don't know, but sadly I do, how much effort I put into talking myself out of reasonable suspicions in favor of candy coated fantasies. WHY? Because at a fundamental level I am defective and I have been molded my entire life to be receptive to mental illness, selfishness and chaos. In fact, some part of me thinks that with out these things there is no love.

My rational brain can sort out the lies my emotional brain tells me.

Or so it would seem until you look at the Bartender. How many times did I experience a perfectly rational, reasonable suspicion - proved beyond a shred of a shadow of any doubt now - and DISMISS IT OUT OF HAND AS MY UNREASONABLE DEFECTIVE BRAIN GETTING IN THE WAY OF MY HAPPINESS? Do you see the conundrum?

How can I trust either assessment???

So I have resorted to looking for outside affirmation of the reasonableness of my thinking. and so far I have gotten resounding approval and that is very good news. Because kids, I gotta tell you...

I am happy happy happy with My Marvin. If I were 16 I would write sappy poetry endlessly and speak of nothing else. I would make the pact to die at the very same moment and god help anyone that risked questioning me. But I am not 16. I am 40. So I just have these stupid dreams and think these circular thoughts and wonder how one gets along in life if you can't even trust your own brain.

I am dating that guy that other men resent... for making them look bad

So, Marvin and I went Roller Skating on Sunday. I capitalized that because it was a premiere event. Out of this experience came the following observations:

1. I want shiny skates with flashing wheels, preferably in white and pink and chrome.


2. Every single solitary woman in that place wishes she was me and either secretly, or right out loud, resents her unromantic stick-in-the-mud husband/boyfriend/lover for NOT being Marvin.


3. It is good to be on my end of that equation.

I suppose that I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s a rotten way to be but how can I over come that in just a few weeks? In the mean time, ladies, resent me all you want to. I plan to go skating again on Sunday.

If You're HAPPY and You Know It, Test For CLAP

I recently went to my girly-doctor. I presented the visit this way:

“Well, I need what ever you have to get when you’ve been in a relationship with a man with questionable discretion and zero impulse control.”

She said “I see.” And the swabbing began. Gonorrhea, syphilis, Chlamydia, herpes, HIV, hepatitis (A and C, been vaccinated for B), HPV, and what other lovelies? The possibilities are endless I do not recall them all. And all are nauseating. I mean HOLY SHIT. Does anyone know what the scientific term for the fabled “clap” is? I need to ensure I’ve been appropriately examined for that business.

And what the hell do you do when you find out that something showed up? Do I even want to contemplate that???

So I sent Marvin off to get swabbed himself and he came home with a big bunch of condoms. They all say USE ME in big happy letters. Friendly letters. Maybe we should just pass them along to the Bartender in deference to his new girl.

How do I know about the new girl, you ask? Excellent question my friend, and I shall tell you. He mentioned her in the 3 am Valentine’s Day text message… as in “I know I am with someone else right now but I just think of you… blah blah blah… Valentine’s Day…blah blah ack choke (sorry I puked a little in my mouth)” Can you believe this shit???

I wanted to text him back with the words “Thank God you’ve contacted me on Valentine’s Day while your girl is sleeping. I would like to be a piece on the side. But first I HAVE TO MAKE SURE I HAVE SOME DREAD DISEASE TO PASS ON. After all, alls fair in love and casual sex. And she’s probably asking for it anyway.”

This has been a special report ~ I’M Bad Penny

Cyber-Cleaning and an Open Letter to The Bartender...

I’m cleaning cyber house. Just a little bit. Some things I’ve written were useful for a bit but now it’s time to give them the old heave-ho. Sorta like what I did with the little books and misc. dust-collecting-crap that has been on my mantle since time immemorial… or at least since Scooter lived here. Here’s a glimpse at my week end –

Penny “Hey Marvin? Should I keep these little, tiny books?”

Marvin “Do you have a little, tiny book shelf?”

Penny “No.”

Marvin “Then no.”

Gosh. It’s just that simple!

So, cyber-cleaning. Here for you edification and to remind me should I ever suffer a brain injury and forget is an open letter to the Bartender (written in response to the nice things he has said after I told him I did not want to know him any more:

Dear Dr. Swing,

(Did I mention he signed his anonymous sex solicitations with this inventive moniker?)

I will start with my response to your nice messages. I am sad and lonely, I miss my family and there are many things I miss about you. Mainly I miss the life I really thought we could have together. I am not happy about any of this, I certainly am not dating. That said, I do not miss waking up alone in the middle of the night to wonder why you are not here. Now I just wake and remember. I do not miss being woken by your text message alert. I do not miss the porn. I do not miss adult friendfinder pop ups on my computer. I so not miss wondering who Stephanie, or Candy, or Julie or who-ever is. I do not miss your suspicion, interrogation, the fear that you would take something wrong and mistreat me for it. I do not miss having to choose between meeting my responsibilities at work and upsetting you. Having to choose between preparing for or paying attention to my job and patting and reassuring you. I do not miss the way you treated me the day I got my first in class ranking, the day I graduated, the day I took my bar, the day I got my bar results, the day I got my job. I do not miss the way you treated me at those times at all. Last year this time I made plans just for you, for your birthday. I picked a restaurant to buy you steak, took you to a hotel, paid for a massage cause you were stressed out. I do not miss that either. You were singularly ungrateful and angry even with this.

I do not miss going to pee while we were at the movies and being asked if I had found a signal for my phone.

I do not miss being informed that I am the most selfish person you know.

I do not miss being cornered naked and wet in the shower while you terrorized me for displeasing you, for failing to provide you with the correct answer to yet another interrogation.

I DO NOT MISS NOT SLEEPING.

This entire situation has been very difficult for me. Not only did I involve my children in relationships over which I have no control but I became important and bonded to a child over which I have no control. Your son loves me. I know I am important to him and to his sense of stability and safety. It is very, very frustrating to be subject to the phone call from his father where I am told to just get lost. (The phone call where you start by laughing with some girl and saying “I’ll be right there” is especially cruel) I will get over the hurt that causes me. I can never get over the hurt that causes your child.

The last time I saw him, I hugged him good bye and he clung to me. This is not because you told him to be my friend, to say hello, to be polite or whatever. He loves me because on the days when he was sick I held him. On days when he was sad I cheered him up. And at night I said “I love you little man” when I put him in his bed. I gave him a name he loves to call himself.

What’s more than this, is his love and longing for my girls. And they miss him. So I tossed three children into a blender and now I have to be responsible for the chaos we’ve caused them. All of this makes it harder to take it when you suggest that I just make arbitrary decisions. When you suggest that I am interested in some other person and so I dumped my entire life in the toilet, smashed the crap out of three children and turned your life upside down. Just cause I like someone else. To suspect that is paranoid and crazy. To accuse me of it and then behave as though it is true is insane. Yet here we are.

So what can I do? Seriously. I am a kind hearted person and I have cared very deeply for you, for your son and for our family. And I cry myself to sleep every single night. But I also must care for myself, and I must care for and protect my children. I love and adore your son’s mother. So no matter how much I may want to answer the phone or to express my sympathy for you, I can’t. Because until you DO something to repair the damage you have caused to the most important relationships in your life I can not trust you.

You are vicious when you are mad. And you dismiss this with the simple statement that you were angry so you lash out. You do not fight fair. I have tried to tell you that you bruise and wound me, even when you are only half serious. When you are truly serious you go for the throat. You do not hesitate. You pull out your biggest gun and you fire, point blank. And then we just bleed. It is a horrible use of the intimacy and knowledge you have gained from other’s care for you. And you do it on purpose.

Your boy’s mother tried to tell you how you’ve hurt her. You responded by threatening her relationship with her son and by informing her that you have recruited her own parents to assist you in doing it. This is something you just can not take back. You’ve done the same thing to me. You have threatened me with child protective services, you threaten to call Scooter and help him to hurt me. You call me a wrinkled up old bitch. You tell me to go to cougar bars, fuck greasy internet boys. You are hateful in your anger.

This is not normal and healthy. You should feel ashamed and wish only to some how fix what you’ve broken. But no matter how heartfelt the apology is, it is ALWAYS followed by the next below-the-belt attack. Because my response to your “I’m sorry” was not forthcoming, or because you all of a sudden felt angry again and so lashed out. Again.

The sad part is that I used to think that the apologetic and contrite Bartender was the real Bartender. But now I think that the apologetic and contrite Bartender is a manipulation and the lethal Bartender is the real you. The Bartender that pitched some girl’s life out the window on the freeway and left her abandoned in a bar, with no keys and no money and no credit cards and no ID… cause you were mad. The Bartender that laughed when he told me the story. After all, she deserved it. Just like I deserved it and your x-wife deserves it.

So I cannot accept your apology and I can not reach my hand out to you to comfort you, even though I might want to. Because I can no longer allow myself to be wounded by you.

I am not writing this because you need me to tell you these things. You’ve either figured this out by now or you never will. I am writing this to remind you what the correct course to take would be. If you are truly sorry and you truly desire to repair what you’ve broken, then you will find a counselor and you will start the process. Instead you say you wish you could go back in time. This is a futile wish. You know you can not and you never will. But waiting for next week will make this week impossible to change as well. HOWEVER, from where you stand right this minute tomorrow is all up to you. You could take tomorrow and DO SOMETHING TO REPAIR WHAT YOU’VE BROKEN.

I honestly wish that you would. I don’t know if it is possible for me to ever trust you intimately. But I would like to be able to be your friend because I love your boy. And I would be very happy to see you creating respect and love and comfort with his mother, so that you can both be good for him. He is a wonderful sweet loving and smart little boy. This chaos is damaging him. No matter how hurt you are, no matter how right you are, no matter what your justification, you are the adult and it is your sacred responsibility to protect and nurture your child. And in order to be good for him and to help him grow into a happy and healthy man, you should love and respect his mother. She is a good girl and she has been nothing but a good friend to you, even after you’ve been horrid to her. She does not deserve to have to shield herself from you for the rest of your son’s childhood.

And your precious son does not deserve to have to divide his loyalty between the two people who mean the most to him.

SO. Now I can trash the damned thing. Yay cyber-cleaning.

Recognition

Here I float in the deep sea of “Hey I know you” with Marvin. I’ll tell you why I call him Marvin. Later, I will tell you why the recognition scares the life out of me.

I call him Marvin because I have been trying, valiantly, to resist him since the moment he sent me the first email proclaiming that he adores me. I say “trying” because there was no actual resisting going on, just a lot of trying. And one night in the dark womb of my bed with the sleepy penny baby ear pressed near to the low speaker phone, I am doing the “you hang up, no you hang up” thing without saying the words when he said something to me that caused an actual physical TUG in my body. How can words spoken by someone 80 plus miles away over the phone operate as a biological magnet to tug your body one little smidge closer to theirs?

I made a noise. (Do you know that little sound you make when you start to fall from the top of the rollercoaster? That was it. I made the “I’m falling” noise). Apparently, it was an ambiguous noise. He is concerned. Do I laugh at him? Do I mock him? What’s with the noise!?! So, in an effort to reassure him because god-please-do-not-go-away I say “You’re Marvin.”

You know that little Martian from the cartoons?

“Resistance is futile.”

The Doctor is in...

Right this very moment in life I struggle with the question: How do you ever trust yourself again? I know that I am susceptible to some purty dark shit. Apparently you can lie in my face and I smile. And I have this history of filling up my lonely bits with the wrong people.

WRONG PEOPLE.

So, I suppose I shouldn’t trust me any father than I can throw me cause I suck at this.

But what if I SHOULD trust me? What if what this new suitor – let’s call him Marvin, I will explain later – is offering me, in gilded phrases and wide open adoration, is just what the doctor ordered? (He calls me doctor sometimes. Is it vanity that allows me to just smile and say “Yes?”).

This Marvin rang my door bell and said “Come out to play, Penny, I think you’re SWELL.” That’s good, huh? Ack. I need a bullshit detector.

UP DATE! (do not become ill)

At the behest of a long lost friend I am asked to blog again. Yikes. It’s not that I don’t miss you guys, cause I do. It’s just that I am loath to open up old wounds. Truth is I sat here reading much of this and it made me cry. Some of it because it reminded me of things that were painful (the baby and all my married lover bullshit) and some because it was just bittersweet (tweeting number three and the noodle dog).

I do not think I have the time nor the inclination to get all the way back. Maybe just part way. Here goes:

I had to end it with the Bartender. It is sad to say had to like there was any hesitance but there was. I am puzzling it out still. I cringe when I write this because one of the many things he did to me was to take away all of my private places and thrust me into the blazing sun with out even the shade of an occasional “Whaz up??” from you guys. One of those private places is here. Does he stalk my Penny Blog still? Who knows. But there is a teeny part of me that flinches a bit because that’s what happens when you are repetitively smacked (emotionally) down. Wince.

I don’t want to catalog the whole thing but I will tell you that my boundaries went all to hell and I lost myself. Lost. Myself.

Do you remember all the work I did on my project? All the painful looking and tweeking and working and making myself “Hot When Naked Writer Chick?” In a fit (little infantile baby piss fit of pique) he called me a wrinkled up old bitch. And it deflated me. All the work flushed down the toilet of his selfish, purulent snit. I was lost. But now I’m found.

But in this effort to stay found I suppose I best admit some stuff. Like the fact that I did not put him out after he followed me into the locked bathroom and ripped the curtain down and screamed at me wet and naked and small and cornered and crying so hard the snot runs down my chin. He does not consider this abuse. After all, I EARNED it by being bad. I don’t recall what the bad thing I did was but clearly it was bad. How about the countless nights where the lights were kept on and the interrogation did not cease and when I hid my head under the blankets he ripped them from the bed and demanded I attend to him NOW.

How about the day he sat in my office across my desk from me and pointed out that my hair clearly indicated I had been fucking someone at work that day.

And how about the day I saw the email he sent to 20 random women on MySpace looking for a girl to fuck him AND some girl from work without waking me, asleep on the other side of the wall, grateful that I was not being subjected to the interrogation? This one I do not have to admit because that was the day I put him out.

But why, you might wonder, did it take so god damned long?

I suspect that I was punishing myself. He was brutal about the affair. He twisted my soul apart and I let him because I AGREED WITH HIM. I had done a hateful, ugly thing and I deserved to be punished for it.

That’s my best answer. What do you think?