18

 For those of us who revel in working in a dead or dying medium in the post truth era the lounge has managed to survive another year... or more correctly the sole proprietor of said lounge has managed to survive another year and given his rather checkered history it's almost like a second birthday or something, not exactly celebratory but something to be recognized before moving on to more important things like clipping my toe nails or trimming nose hairs or any other number of vastly important tasks needed to be done... looking back to those bygone years of Dubya when the lounge opened, the years when we thought it could get no worse than Cheney and Rumsfeld seems almost quaint these days... going back through the archives can be a bit like looking at old middle school or high school pictures and wondering aloud, what the fuck was i thinking? i believe the first post ever was a few sentences ripped off stating that if you don't believe aliens exist take a look at your co-workers... the early stages of the lounge were much like a toddler taking his first steps and i can honestly say most of it is crap, (and honestly the same argument i'm sure could be made for the current iteration of the lounge as well) but it's baby steps, what creative writing teachers call "finding your voice" or some other such bullshit... i'd wager it took roughly four years before anything remotely resembling quality writing (and really what the fuck does that mean?) began to pop up, sometime around the time Disaster was born... in fact i remember a comment from a certain Australian nurse stating that double fatherhood had done something to the writing due to some of the things churned out in the early aughts, 2010 seemed to be a productive year for a guy with a mild pill habit but let's not get ahead of ourselves as we take a stroll down memory lane while we pull up a seat and order a club soda, put a few coins in the jukebox and ponder the lounge much like i do the graffiti on men's room walls at my favorite dives... 

From a personal standpoint the amount of upheaval, for lack of a better word, is a bit mind blowing to yours truly... or one could call it life... shit doesn't stop and that arbitrary thing known as time keeps rolling right along... i was a young man of 36 when this shit started, trying to figure out how to be a father while simultaneously trying to adjust to a lifestyle predicated on domestic type shit after a lifetime spent running the streets, not to mention trying to kick the remnants of a coke habit that had crept up on me due to circumstances relating back a couple years but as we can see i somehow managed to get through the early stages... granted it didn't take me long to jump from one sinking ship to another and while working at the Big World Bank Machine i decided it would be better to get into those lovely little sweeties known as opiates... yes one could never accuse me of being the brightest bulb on the tree but in those early years of the lounge my favorite pastime would be to pop a sweetie in the evening and then walk down Liberty Ave. to the local coffeeshop where i'd buy myself a steamer, one of those steamed milk concoctions with a little flavoring added, hazelnut being my favorite, then walking back to the place and sitting down and typing away... the blogosphere was a weird place back then with conferences and career type shit happening, every wannabe would be "author" coughing up content on a damn near daily basis and waiting to be discovered... it mainly ended up being a bunch of people fawning over each other and the shit writing in hopes that driving up the numbers on their site would lead to something more lucrative... i'll be honest i didn't know fuck all about any of that and still have only a minimal knowledge of it mainly because i don't fucking care, as previously stated i don't do this shit for money i do so i can make sense of this mortal coil in my own fucked up mind... 

And so for eighteen years, with a bit of ebb and flow, i've signed in to the same place to write out whatever happened to be in that mind... granted the esteemed Gulfboot Johnson set this up so i would stop emailing him stories and i'm sure boring him to tears, now i had an outlet and might even discover that people enjoyed or could relate to the shit i wrote, remember of course this was the late aughts early teens when the blog thing was all the rage... now it's more like a sad haven for the lonely who refuse to walk around with their cell phone creating "content" for Tik Tok and Instagram... as stated a dying medium for a species becoming more incapable by the day of paying attention for more than a few minutes and those few minutes better be taken up with faux outrage over whatever is distracting the populace this week... for the most part this has been nothing more that a shitty diary of an ex-hood turned the world's hairiest soccer mom with hopefully some quality stories tossed in every so often... the truth is the Wilderness Years were always the goal and as we can see it's only taken me 18 fucking years to get around to almost finishing it... slow and steady wins the race huh? 

So what has happened in those 18 years since the lounge opened? back to the beginning... when the first post was put up the I-mac was just over six months old, in the next year after it's inception the BW would lose her mother, we'd lose my sweet girl Sylvia and then the cat of the people Pablo.... i could actually trace out a timeline off the lounge through a history of my cats... Sylvia was a kitten when i got her in March of 1994 and Pablo was roughly four months old when we got him in October of 94... both would move around for the next 13 years until finally passing once we moved to the little house in Bloomfield, they lived at Podunk U.,  Ocean City, four different places in the Burgh, including weekend trips way back when the BW would come down to see me from Podunk, yes she'd bring the cats, they traveled well, no carrier just sitting in the windows of the car watching the world go by... it was during the Kingpin Years that we'd adopt Claudia aka Little Butt, a sweet little girl who would live to be 19, she would live in four of the aforementioned places including the house we live in now, she was not one for moving and would usually spend a few days hiding under a bed until she adjusted... one might get the opinion that i'm a crazy cat lady if one didn't know better... 

It was after the BW's mom passed that Disaster was born, 2009, and subsequently i'd hit a run of posts that might have been the height of the lounge's readership... if the I-mac was the difficult baby (one could say not much has changed in the difficulty department) Disaster was the mellow one, back then the old house was so small that Disaster and i slept downstairs, he in his porta-crib and me on the couch (call it foreshadowing) in order not to wake the I-mac or his mama, it was some of the most enjoyable times of my life, i'd sit in the dark and when my son stirred i'd watch him to see if he was going to wake up, i'd make a bottle and wait and then we'd sit on the couch while he took his bottle, i'd burp him and change him and put him back to bed, sometimes i'd go back to sleep and sometimes i'd just listen to him breathe, the beauty was i could always catch up on sleep at work... call it the charmed life, well sorta... i'd be remiss not to mention that after Pablo passed and Disaster was born Pedro was adopted, another brown and black tabby like the brother he never knew Pedro would also be a cat of the people... friendly and good natured and sweet, in his golden years he liked to lay on the deck in the sun, raising his head now and then to sniff the breeze before going back to relaxing... 

After that the BW lost her grandmother, a brilliant woman to whom i wrote one of my favorite pieces titled Goodnight Rose, a few years later her grandfather would follow but not before recording his first hole in one as a golfer at the age of 92... in the world of cat's we'd welcome Louis Garcia Shinoba Diego Rivera Marquez (i named him) aka Louie... the first cat to choose me as he kept putting his paw out and tapping my shoulder, he was rescue at a pet store back when the pet stores used to let the shelters put cats there... we had actually had our eye on another cat but Louie convinced me that we should adopt him and so we did and he became one of my best friends... it was somewhere around this time i believe the lounge slowed to a crawl to the point i actually thought about canning it all together, sporadic posts of drivel and questioning what the point was but as we can see i and it is still here so i must have thought better of it at some point... or i just didn't have anything else constructive to do and figured what the fuck, might as well keep it going.. 

Let me state that the chronology on this post may not be exactly "correct" in strict timeline terms, the gorgeous thing is though that i can go back through the archives and verify the actual years things happened and it's interesting to see where i was in the world... looking back i discovered i'm coming up on the tenth aniversary of losing Louie, 2015... after which came Little Baby Kitty aka Sydney aka Syd... smitten from day one she would be my Little Baby Kitty for the next seven years, a tiny little ragdoll with big blue eyes, she was my girl, i could call her from anywhere in the house and she'd come scampering in... maybe therein lies the beauty of the lounge... my personal history of cats... the days and years i spent with them, yes the people and places too but seeing as my cats have always been my sweethearts... and before Syd there was Zuko, named by my boy Disaster and adopted from the shelter due to the fact we only had three cats at the time and Disaster thought he needed one too... a pretty easy sell to the BW and so we went down and old Zuko, now the senior member of the clan at 12 years old, a black and white tuxedo cat, another cat of the people whose favorite spot is where anyone might be laying... it was after our girl Claudia passed that we were once again back to the shelter to adopt Maya,  one of those Russian blues as they're called, who swiftly became the BW's cat... 

In fact, to remain on the cat theme, we became a four cat house, then Syd passed unexpectedly, a day that still fucking hurts... i didn't even know if i wanted another cat... and then i found Paco... or more correctly he found me and we've been inseparable ever since, a big old brown and black tabby who still thinks he's a kitten when he plops all 19lbs on my chest... then came Korra, a rescue from Kuwait followed shortly after by Archie, another rescue from Kuwait... which brings the total to five... both are sweet and friendly and gorgeous and Archie and Paco have become best friends, brothers, and Archie has helped Pacito come out of his shell a bit and be more adventurous... 

On the human side i lost the best dude i ever knew, Pops, something well documented here... then his older brother who i developed a great relationship with before he passed... but really... fucking eighteen years... the shit that has happened in that time amazes me, the I-mac went from a baby to a college student, Disaster was born and is now in high school, i went from being Big World Bank Machine grunt to the Big Hairy Carol Brady to Gig Economy Serf... i've been to Costa Rica, Mexico, St. Lucia, Jamaica (my favorite), the Dominican Republic (easily my least favorite place), Aruba, Curacao and Grenada... traveled all over the place for club soccer with the I-mac and AAU basketball with Disaster, spent that glorious month in Cleveland with my dad, took up swimming (twice), survived a pandemic wherein i didn't touch a drop of alcohol for over a year, have moved into a downstairs room to sleep alone, rediscovered my penchant for psychedelics, got my medical cannabis card, developed a smoothie habit and in general tried to be a bit healthier on the back end of this living thing... and in between carved out some time to sit down at the typer and peck away the stories and tales that have popped into my head... not always consistently, not always of the highest quality, but here nonetheless... for anyone who has stumbled upon this i dusty and quiet corner of the interweb i truly appreciate you taking the time to read this shit, my hope is that maybe someone somewhere has gotten something out of this, made them laugh or cry or think... something far more valuable to the writer than monetary gain... i know i've fucking enjoyed it... and really what else have i got to do?