KEEP YOUR DOORS OFF MINE!

So today I made a much overdue visit, to an old friend! Not so long ago, these visits were like a ritual. I would go every other Friday, rain or shine…come hell or high water, my truck got a good top to bottom, inside & out cleaning. What can I say, the three of us were close!

So after cleaning inside and out, I get out to inspect as usual and I notice a couple of things. First, two new scratches on the passenger side doors. Ok, I am irritated, but they can be buffed out. Then I find two new dings on the same side. Of course this is from people being lazy and inconsiderate when getting out of their vehicles. This really pisses me off, let me just tell you. I always park as far away from everything as possible, just so people won’t be near it. Hell, just ask my passengers. Well, then I see SO CLEARLY, the scratches and dent in my hood. These scratches and dent were caused a couple of weeks ago, while we were driving through the French Quarter to make the Fruit Loop (a drive by the Bourbon Pub at St. Ann & Bourbon). This dumb ass little boy (someone who we had just met a weekend before) decided to run out & jump on it. I must admit that I have neglected that special relationship a little since moving to New Orleans, but a dirty truck does not scream come put your feet on me and dance around until you scratch and dent my beautiful and expensive paint! 

I have a very special relationship with my truck. This was the first “new” truck I had ever bought, not to mention this was my dream truck growing up. Plus, this was the first vehicle that I had been proud of since the only other vehicle I had ever loved was taken from me at no fault of my own. This truck is a symbol of my coming out of a very tragic time in my life. When I got to the point where I could afford to get “My Truck”, I knew that I had left so much of all that behind. It might seem silly to some but on that day, when I bought the truck, it was the happiest and most proud, day of my life.

Well this post was intended to be a rant of my driving & parking pet peeves, but it turned into this…go figure. Well, I’ll give you a good rant anyway. I’ll make it short & sweet. Use your blinkers! If I am moving faster than you, get out of the fast lane! If you can’t drive properly & speak on the phone, do one or the other! WHEN YOU PARK, PUT IT BETWEEN THE LINES EVENLY AND KEEP YOUR DOORS OFF MINE! I mean really people, it’s so easy to be curious of others. Do you like to wait on people? I don’t either, so get out of my way. Do you like to see your vehicle, damaged and destroyed by others when you work very hard for the $$$ you spend on it? I don’t either, so pay attention! I’ve never kicked anyones door in, but I sure have thought about it…what, just sayin.

See those lines, Is it really that hard?

Slow Poke, Get out of my way!!

 

 

My partner has always teased that he was getting me a ticket book, to write everyone tickets when they did things I didn’t like. I have always welcomed that book, but I am still waiting. To be honest, I use to really have a problem with my anger about these things but it is MUCH better these days. I just wanted to vent for a moment and hopefully educate those that “never notice” in a way that hopefully made you laugh. Just know, you’ve been warned…

it’s been 3 years…

My mother, one of  three children and my father, the only boy of four children had me very early in life. My mother was a beautiful nineteen-year-old young women and my father was a hot little twenty-six year old stud when I came along. Mom was known for her free spirit and mouth and dad was known for his “jack of all trade” abilities, the hot rods he drove and his love for running the roads.

I am the oldest of 3 boys, each so different you can’t even imagine. Looking in the mirror I see my father, but let me speak or react and my mother takes over. My middle brother is the exact opposite. He looks just like my mother, but he is the walking, talking image of “Tom Cat”, a common nick name for my father. The baby boy barely looks like them at all and his personality is identical to the man who raised him. So as you can see we of course share some of the same character traits we see in our progenitors but differ in many more ways.

Growing up I vividly remember my parents and their unhappiness. I was seven, the next five and the youngest of us 3 had just arrived, barely two weeks old when he left. I was not sad nor mad, if anything I worried for my brothers because they didn’t understand. They had not been around to see their discontent with one another. Sometimes people may make beautiful children together but not belong together. I won’t go into the intimate details about the good and the bad, but this was best for everyone involved in my opinion.

My mother later remarried and over time both my middle brother and I moved to our fathers, which to be honest surprised everyone on my part. Of course I wasn’t their long before moving to my aunt’s house. My father and I have never really seen eye to eye. I have many theories, but I think it had most to do with the fact that I was so much like my mother. Of course being gay definitely did not help. I was his first-born son that very early on made it clear that I would not follow in his foot steps, rather I was walking around in mom’s heels.  Even when I tried to show interest I was usually made to feel as if I didn’t belong “out here with the boys”. We fought about everything as I grew up and nothing seemed to make it better.

I decided to join the ARMY my junior year in high school to pay for college and secretly hoped to please my father by doing such a manly thing. I scored quite high on the ASVAB and was offered a job in Military Intelligence, but decided to pursue Diesel Mechanics, a passion of my fathers. Guess what, it worked too. My father and I got along better in the year before I left and the two years I was in the ARMY than ever before. But that day came. The day I came out and then the day I was discovered to be gay by the ARMY. After coming out to my family and being discharged from the military, my father and I didn’t speak for a little more than a year.

Over time and with a little work, my dad started to come around. I think his major break though was when I was almost killed in an accident. I felt a connection with my father after this event that I had never felt before. This connection was short-lived. Once my father started to see me with someone, he began to revert back to his old ways. He would make fun of us or have smart ass comments at family events. He liked to say things to us about how we should be with women and not each other. Over time, this really worn on me and my relationship with my pattern. The time came and out of respect for myself and my relationship, I brought it all to the table with my father. I made it clear to him that my life and my relationship with my partner was no different from his with his wife or the relationship my brothers had with their girlfriends. He did not feel as I did and made it clear he did not and would not respect what he saw as a choice for me.

As of Thursday, it’s been 3 years. Another fathers day has passed, he just celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday, and now thanksgiving has just passed again and we haven’t spoken. I didn’t call. He didn’t call. He never calls. He never called. I always called. I’ve stopped calling. I no longer feel the need to call. Why should I call? I reached a point in my life where I stop making myself feel bad. I realized I had started my own family and I needed to focus on that family. For more than 20 years I tried everything and it got me nowhere. It was tired of being the only one that appeared to care. That doesn’t stop me from thinking of him all the time. I often wonder will he ever come around, will he, before it’s too late, make that step? Will I get to a point where I decide to start trying again? It’s so tough sometimes, but mostly around the holidays. I ask myself if I’m making the right decisions by moving past it. I don’t know if I am. Something keeps me in this place with my decision but what do I do with it?

Hell yeah, I’m in!

Tonight, while driving back into the city, I noticed the massive Power Ball billboard sign. It said $79 million on it. Normally, I would look right over this, I mean the chances of this ever being mine is not real, but for some reason, my wheels started turning and my imagination started to fire. For a change, I was in the passenger seat, so I was able to just sit back and dream a moment.

So in true Chaseton fashion, I started to crunch numbers. What would be the best fit, take the lump sum or take a payment annually? What were the taxes going to be? What would I buy first? All these questions, and for a moment it felt like these were questions I needed real answers to. What it must be like to have money like that. I mean, I am talking something like 1.5 million dollars a year for 45 years in my case…oh what I would do with all that money.

What would I do with all that money you ask, I’ll tell you what I would do with all that money. To start, I would divide the money into appropriate groups. Forty percent would go towards investments & savings, another forty percent would be put aside for taxes & other related expenses, and the other twenty percent would be our fun money. That twenty percent is still like $340,000 a year just to play with. Hell yeah, I’m in! Of course, the next thing I would do is to make sure that all those around us felt the love if you know what I mean! With Christmas and the New Year right around the corner, we would do some major holiday shopping. We’d take a few months to travel anywhere and everywhere to live it up. After all that fun, we would return to New Orleans to regroup. I would enroll in my last few classes needed to achieve my bachelors degree and walk across that stage. We’d get started investing all that dough so it could start making us even more money! We would start that business we’ve always talked about and get started living one hell of an exciting life filled with friends, family, fun, and success!

That’s what I would do with $79 million, what would you do if you won the jackpot? Leave your interesting or creative responses in the comment section below.

Damn, I got all excited again just writing about all this…too bad it’s only a late night daydream. Makes me want to go out and buy a ticket now!

it was purple…

I thought it only appropriate to discuss the things that I am thankful for since it is Thanksgiving and all, but it’s all to easy to sit back and list a few of the infinite number of things that I have to be thankful for. So, I decided to keep it simple.

So my partner’s family always does a big ta-do about everything. I big ta-do you better be present for. If you are for some reason absent, you better have a doctor’s excuse in hand when you do show your face next, and it better be before the next ta-do. I grew up very different from this, so it took a little getting use to but it is something I have really come to enjoy and appreciate…most of the time.

So, they are Cajun, creole, southern, and crazy about their food and they way they prepare things. So it’s my first Thanksgiving with the new family and they had prepared dressing as most families do. Well this dressing was so dark it was purple. So of course I asked why. They informed me that they used chicken hearts, gizzards, and oysters. I almost fell out and then retreated. Of course I am very outspoken and for the most part they all tend to be slightly more reserved, especially since I had only been dating their son for about 2 months. When I neglected to fill my plate with their prize dressing, they asked why. I explained I could not eat that, it was purple…the entire house gasped and then fell to the floor in shock. It was like I had spit in each of their plates. I thought to myself, you really screwed that up. We finished out the day and headed home.

Christmas rolls around and I purposely avoided the kitchen this go-round, until it was time to eat of course. As I make my rounds, good ol mom is standing there with a small casserole dish filled with normal colored dressing. She says to me, “you may not enjoy our dressing but we enjoy you, so we made you your own special dressing, still done our way, minus the purple.” From that meal on, I’ve always have my own, special dressing waiting just for me.

The purple dressing...

My own special dressing...

Oh to blog…why now?

Oh to blog…for a long time I often wondered why people blogged. I never understood why so many people enjoyed reading and creating blogs. Growing up, reading was so not my favorite thing to do by a far and it was not a good thing to hate doing. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been pursuing my bachelors, all while dating one of the most intelligent men I know. These two combined put a lil pressure on me to start reading and enjoy it, at least little. Through it all, I think the two have had some influence to say the least. It seemed almost like I woke up one day and I found myself needing a little more. I started caring about things I never cared about. I started paying attention to politics, local and national, and issues that I saw in the world around me. I really started to pursue thing that I cared about.

Thanks to the internet and the digital social age, I have been able to add all those thing in my life on the go. Thanks to the internet and many news apps on my phone, I stay pretty informed. To add to it, I fell in love with the site MySpace. Later, I was introduced to Facebook which quickly pushed the MySpace out-of-the-way. Then came YouTube. I have always had a passion for photography and video making. Then came Titter and now WordPress. The crazy thing is not that I leave one for the other, rather I just add to them all. I have found that each serve to allow me a different outlet to express myself and trust me, if you knew me, you would know that I always have plenty to express about everything.

So, to blog for me now seems like it’s the next thing to do. I have wanted to try blogging for a while now, so I think it time. I just hope that since I have decided to make the committment that I stick to it. I remember each of the other outlets I started, seemed slow and un-fulfilling at first, but after sticking with them, I learned that I truly enjoy what I get from them. I plan to be personal and open here, as this will be MyOpenOutlet. I hope to grow a little, learn a lot, and enjoy myself a lot along the way.