Week 1 of 52 in the rebuilding of Ben Quam

Wednesday, August 18^th 2010

4:26pm

“Wife’s gone, Favre’s back”

As I moved the last of our things out of our old apartment in Minneapolis and into her house in St. Paul, I had our local talk radio KFAN on. I’ve been swimming in my head a little too much lately, and the relentless banter on both sides of the Brett Favre circus has helped me realize that we sometimes seek dysfunction whether we like it or not.

I love the Favre circus. Love it. It shows how banal our lives are around here, and how even when one fifth of Pakistan is under water from flooding, all I can see is helicopters following the Favre caravan. But as soon as I try making fun of it, I realize that my life has been the same over the last few weeks. My dad lost his job and is still unemployed, one friend is moving to London to write a novel, another is topping the charts musically right now, and all I want to talk about is how much it sucks having your wife of 5 months leave you. No kids, no house, just a beautiful dog and a lot of stuff we shared.

These are fleeting, first world problems. Does it hurt? Of course. But is there even a shred of thought that thinks I may not survive this? No.

I had a very, very distant brush with mortality on Monday, and it’s been sitting with me since. I had a .360 Magnum backfire and cover me with shrapnel. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it sounded, but I ended up bleeding from 5 different places and scared the Bette Midler out of the woman in the lane next to us. I was shaken up to say the least after that, but my friends helped me laugh the adrenaline away and keep shooting.

The funny part was, that night when I was curled up on the couch (read: taking every inch of it up because things my size don’t curl too well) that night, it wasn’t the horror of not having kids or the loss of the love of my life due to a healthy diet of apathy and neglect to the gentle creature that was “us,” but that I realized that if I had died, it would have been all talk.

Look, I think I tell a great story, and I have (in my humble opinion) fantastic ideas, but they’re all talk. All the amazing things I’ve done have only resulted in smiles, laughs, and OMGs, which while wonderful are as ethereal and impossible to grab as the morning fog. The silver lining in this divorce, according to many friends and family members, is that there’s no child, no house, no joint Roth IRAs. Yes, that’s nice, but I’m 31. If I didn’t have these things I should have been working on something palpable, not more stories I tell off the top of my head and never write down.

So in the interest of NOT having my life turning out as pointless as Favreapalooza, I’m also going to use this blog to post short stories, ideas for short films, and other memories that need writing. Feel free to write back, comment, insult, compliment or anything else that falls under the header, “Feedback.”

Here are my goals for the next 365, as I begin this ridiculously self-indulgent writing and living experiment:

1. Lose weight.
2. Write more than I have in the last 5 years combined.
3. Find a place to live that feels like home
4. Make more short films
5. Find a way to accept affection into my heart again.

Sound good? I don’t know if anyone out there will actually read this, much less make it to the end of this year with me, but I think it’ll be fun…even if it’s just for me. That kind of selfishness does a body good.

Oh, and Skol Vikes. Forever.