Thing about being a writer is that it requires more solitude and introspection than most guys can handle constructively. The point is to use it as a source, a kind of mine you can dig out raw ore and refine it into something either beautiful or useful. Mostly, the process of writing is pan handling for flecks of gold in a river of shit.

While you are doing it, there is a lot of other stuff that comes out. Melancholy, like alcohol, drugs or porn, is a vice that provides a kind of intensity that distracts us from our weaknesses and fears, so we accept it as a cheap substitute for living. Like any vice, without moderation it is contemptible and degenerate, unworthy.

I'm sure there is a joke in there about contemplating your reflection in a river of shit, but I can't find it right now.

It's right and good to leave the past behind. I don't always achieve that. Rehashing the past and trying to reconcile it with the idea of yourself as the person you have fundamental love for can be really fucking hard.

The job of our ego is to defend its interests (not always you) and it is constantly running in the background, reconciling dissonance, reframing events, retelling stories, acting out hypotheticals, like a demented schizophrenic lawyer fabricating whatever narrative it can to defend the innocence and perfection of its client, you - except it is both entirely self interested and insane. I call mine The Prosecution, but for the rest of you, it's probably your mother. From the Prosecution flows the river of shit.

Reflecting on an old LTR, (I heard from friends we just missed each other by a few hours in a place that is a big part of my own life, and conspicuously not much a part of hers) I was looking for something honest about the memory, some fact I might not have admitted back then, but would now accept for what it was.

As the shit sieved itself out, I saw the glint of a lost mental artifact. The way I treated her, and that LTR, was life or death. We might call it putting pussy on a pedestal here, but it was more subtle than that. When as a child your home and family as you know it comes apart, it changes you. Her family was whole, with living married parents and present grandparents, something people who have can take for granted.

Even if they appreciate their families, what they don't know is the loss. Good on them for having it, but if your family split, to people who have intact families, it is something distant and abstract. They can sympathize, but there is a blind spot in their ability to understand and apprehend what it means.

Divorce is so common (and lately inevitable) it's hard to place it as relevant on the spectrum of tragedy. But the effect of divorce on boys, or one at least in particular, is an intense over-commitment to ensure that this loss never, ever happens again.

When you intimately know the alternative to a whole family and home, on a formative emotional level, you could likely approach relationships with women with the belief that there can be no alternative. No doubt you would (as I would have) accept death, or worse, a crippled and compromised life to prevent someone you loved from having to experience what you perceived as a child.

Such is love that we bring to bear the force of will and perseverance that god gave to men so that we might ensure the survival of our families. But to someone who doesn't see the threat, it seems like a weird preoccupation with something they take for granted.

It's like making good money and wondering why your girlfriend who grew up poor is so cheap and nervous about money. You may even take it as a cynical control tactic, instead of the consequence of her formative experiences.

When I indulge in the vice of looking back on that LTR (on a rest between chest and leg day, after a 50guage cigar with the boys, a whiskey from a private distillery collection, and before a plate 2/3 my age arrives) the thing that shines through is, yeah, I tried too hard, and without the experience of what family collapse means, it was too much to ask that she understand why - or to respect the effort that to her must have seemed like too much.

From a TRP perspective, it's accepting a beta role because of an injury, but that's what I did. I was a kid, I didn't know, now I do.