Well, I am packing to move again. I won't go into the whole story, but I am currently in house #16 in this lifetime, and I am preparing to go to house #17, and then house #18. #17 will be a rental for 6-12 months while I do some serious business of letting life settle down, then I will be able to pick a proper #18 and get on with things.

What is the cause of all this moving about? Well, the first 12 were because I was the child of modern-day gypsies in constant pursuit of greater opportunities, so by the time I was in high school I had already lived in a dozen places across five states. Interestingly my youngest sister (who is 33) has lived in the same house since she was eight years old. Her life was one of absolute consistency of location, quite the opposite of me, and the result of being born just seven years later than me. She does not remember all the moving she did as a youngster.

When I graduated high school I could not wait to get out on my own. I moved to a little house in the woods of Jackson, NJ, which I shared with a dude named Chris (I have not seen or heard from him in years). It was a large chicken coop that was converted into a duplex. This chick lived on the other side and the phone line was hers. If a call was for us, or she needed to use the phone she would bang on the wall. Great party house, it was in the woods behind another house with a large clearing that could fit fifty parked cars.

When I got a real job I quickly outgrew the little house in the woods. Even through I was only paying $175/month I needed more space and more privacy. So I moved into a condo on a rent to own contract paying $750/month. After three years of renting I bought the condo for $72,000 in 1993. My best friend became my roommate, renting the spare room, and it was quite a happening bachelor pad. I had my 46" TV, my Sony stereo system (including Laser Disc player which played both sides of the disks without flipping!). Four Design Acoustic DB10A speakers plus passive sub-woofer; we watched Terminator 2 one night and pictures literally fell from the walls from the sound!

Well, I guess I was not familiar with the expression "Bros before hoes" because I let a woman break up that sweet arrangement. In the summer of 1995 I fell in love, kicked out my best friend, got married and became an instant father of two fantastic little boys (they are the graduate and the slumper in the picture [if it is still my picture]).

Life comes at you really fast when you make changes like that. Responsibility doesn't take a day off. From meeting at a picnic to wedding bells was just 36 days. It is a very romantic story, and I tell it very well, but that is not the story I am telling today.

Without going into the details after three years of marriage it was already time to forgive, forget, and begin again with a clean slate. I lost my condo in bankruptcy and essentially abandoned it, moving to Colorado for a fresh start. We found a great place and rented it for three years before purchasing it in 2001. When we moved to Colorado the red-haired kid was not quite two years old. I was traveling every week for work, and that arrangement looked like it was going to continue indefinitely.

Colorado is beautiful. We lived in Fort Collins which is consistently one of the best places in America to live. We actually picked it by doing internet searches for places in America, and used my plentiful airline miles to visit for a weekend. During that weekend we found the house, left a post-dated check for the deposit with a very cool guy named Ron, and made arrangements to move in one month later. Rent was $1000/month, it had plenty of room and looked like the ideal place to raise a family. A month after moving in we got my dog, Charlie, who is still with me. We had done everything to find the American Dream.

Well, I am hear to tell you that you can live in the best neighborhood, with the kindest neighbors, and a booming economy, and 300 days of sunshine, and beautiful vistas of the mountains, and challenging career, and eager/energetic kids; but none of that changes our inner demons. We had moved to Colorado to get a clean slate, but it became clear very soon that the new slate was getting marked up very much like the old one had. So we would fight, and promises would be made, and we would make plans for keeping things in check, and erase the board again. And then history would repeat itself... again and again and again.

OK, time for a quiz. You are recovering from bankruptcy, you are in a marriage with repeating issues which has gotten you into counseling. You have discovered that much of it is caused by a newly diagnosed mental illness, and you have been told that there NEVER be any improvement in this type of behavior no matter what medications or therapies happen. You are traveling for a living and have learned to love being away because you don't have to deal with the problems at home. When you are home you are picking up the pieces of your broken life with a feigned smile and a hopeful look to a future that seems further and further away. The family has fallen into two worlds; one of "dad's home" and another of "dad's not home" with secrets being kept, except for the fact that you are responsible for doling out punishments to your kids for things they did when you were not home before you can settle in and enjoy the gentle bliss of being dad. This is your world. So what do you do? Of course! You knock up your wife and have another kid! See the little guy who is crying in the picture? I originally was going to name him "You're what?!?" including the punctuation.

During the time we lived in Colorado my in-laws periodically lived with us, as did my sister-in-law and her daughter. So our house for six was a house for ten for some time, with me as the foundation of the whole thing. This didn't do much to relieve the problems we were having (would you believe that!), but there is duty to family that mandates our fullest effort, and was always done with an open heart and open arms.

[I actually said at the beginning of this thing, "I won't go into the whole story..."]

So this brings us to the spring of 2004. I was working on getting relocated to Ohio because I was realizing that things were just too far gone, and I was not going to fix them by hiding behind the opiate that was my travel. We were already planning the move, the relocation package had already been approved when all hell broke loose at home. I will skip the details, but suffice to say it was time to change again. Another move, this time to Madison, OH. This was the first time in my life that I moved like a "rich person". Because of the relocation package from the company we were provided a mover who did all the packing. I didn't have to load a Ryder truck and drive it cross country. They not only unloaded the house, but they unpacked and setup the furniture to my specifications. A real estate agent helped me find my home. Another helped me sell my home. I moved into a brand new house in a fantastic location. But more important than all of that, I was home every night for dinner. I was there to help with homework. I was there to help with cleaning things up. I was there to look at the cuts and scrapes and to fix flat tires. To take some lucky kid with me to the Home Depot to buy drywall hangers or some other thing needed around the house. I had eliminated my excuse for life being horrible by giving my family my fullest attention.

But it was still not enough. The slate had been wiped clean yet again, but it was never quite clean anymore. I remember when I was in high school a kid wrote FUCK on the chalkboard. The teacher erased it, but you could still see it. I swear you could still see it a month later even after a hundred other things had been written and erased. That is what my life had become. The clean slate wasn't clean. It had the shadows and reminders of every fault and failing that had haunted me over the years. I could not completely suppress them from my mind; they never went away for even a moment. Faced with personal misery, concern for the developmental paths of my kids, and facing the reality that you cannot help someone who will not help them self, I decided it was time for a clean slate one more time; but this time one less person was getting a piece of chalk.

I have to tell you that it took me ten years to make this decision. I was always certain that if I worked harder I could fix things. That if I motivated people the right way it would fix things. That if I took it on the chin for someone else it would fix things. That if I glued things back together nobody would notice or care about the cracks. I didn't want to be a quitter, and I didn't want to feel like I was letting my own feelings and my own wants be more important than keeping my family whole. But the reality is that I was enabling behaviors that would never improve, and those behaviors were having side effects which made keeping the family whole seem like a moot point.

So I am selling my house. Tomorrow I will be telling my youngest two boys what is happening; the older two have known for some time. There will be sadness and tears and all the other things that made Kramer vs Kramer such a drag of a movie. And then there will be house #17.

God only knows what possesses me to write all of this. I guess it is my own form of therapy to externalize and face it rather than keeping it locked away where I don't have to deal. So if the Space Voyage and the Lunar landing have not been getting much play, and if I seem like a strange canine phantom lurking the threads but rarely posting, it is because I have other things that need attending too. Truth be told, when I stopped traveling Hypography became my new opiate for when I needed something other than real life to focus on. I have been keeping that in check, but I am far from checking out. Oh, and just because I see that I avoided the word: divorce.

Stay cool everybody. Don't worry about us, this is just life playing itself out. I'll see y'all in the threads.

Bill - "Mr Diarrhea of the fingers"