2009

The year has come to an end, or it soon will. It's time to recap.

From the outside looking in it might look like a terrible year for me. I started the year having just broke off my engagement to LeAnn and moving out of a beautiful house into a dingy mother in law basement apartment in the country. And then the new year started and within a week I found myself out of work.

So there I was, broke, out of work, and out of love. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, alone (except for the Schnoodle). I suppose I should have been devastated, but yet somehow ending up at point zero seemed like a massive improvement. For the first time in my life there were no demands on me. I was in essence off the grid, except for the unemployment check deposited into my account every week. Peace finally had a chance.

Something I had always wanted to do was to live alone. Maybe not forever but at least for a while. I just wanted a chance to manage my own space and time. I think there is something grounding about having the whole thing and finding ways that work just for you. And it takes time. A year is certainly not even long enough, but it was nice. And so live alone I did. The only real problem with it is that I really like it. I'm not sure I want to ever change it. And so what does that do about the prospects of romance. "yeah, I love you but get the hell out of my house", just doesn't seem like a relationship builder. Anyway, the chance to live alone really gave me an opportunity to find what i like to do. So what did I find.

Outside of American Idol and a few selected sports things I found i really didn't like TV. I've always thought that but was always surrounded by them because of the people I lived with who insisted that TV background noise was not only acceptable but deeply desired. And so once I lived alone the TV never went on except when Maggie came to visit. Luckily that only meant that i got to watch Family Guy which might be the best show on TV, so it wasn't all bad. But when I was alone, the TV was off. Oliver the Schnoodle doesn't miss it either.

So that's the start to my year, alone and no TV. And so I had an empty slate. But what to do with it. At first I had no real way of passing time. I hadn't been reading, or playing guitar, or writing. So I needed something interesting to pass the time. Thus I discovered the wonderful world of online Texas Hold-em.

Back before I was unemployed gainfully working in the mind numbing world of fireplace sales in a construction led recession, i deposited a hundred bucks into an online account. The thinking was that I would play the free games (the $100 was required to open the account). I had never played the game except at a party once and the online is interactive with the other players and so I thought the interaction would be good for me. Poker players are mostly dicks, and so I was wrong about that, but i found the game fascinating. Every now and then I'd play a money game and lose. But I was learning. Eventually I dwindled the money down to nothing but i felt like I had finally learned enough to hold my own. And so I threw in another fifty bucks. And I did hold my own but the account slowly sank. Then after i had lost my job and figured that when the money was gone I was done with real money play i got down to my last of the money I had.

Up to this point I had been playing in ring games. This is the word for a traditional format like we're accustomed to where upon a bunch of guys are sitting around a table and play until they run out of money or have to go home. But I though before I ran out of money it would be fun to play in a tournament. And so I entered one. I had no idea about it. There were 36 people in this tourney and it showed some small winnings for a few places but the first place just showed entry. I thought it was a data entry error and they just forgot to put in the amount. Well it turned out in my very first tourney I won!! Now that was exciting. So I looked to see how much money i had won and my account hadn't gone up at all. So I played another tourney and asked some of the people about it. It turned out 'entry' was not a data error but it meant that I had won an entry into a larger tournament. Well alot of good that did me. Here I was hoping for some cash to keep playing these one and two dollar tournaments and all I had was an entry to a twenty-six dollar tournament that I'd likely not make any money on. Meanwhile my account dwindled to nothing and so all I had was this entry.

As fate would have it, a close person to the family had died and the wake and funeral were conflicting with the date of the tourney. So there i was with only an entry to a big tournament left of my poker career and I wouldn't even be able to play it. So i did a little checking and lo and behold, I didn't have to play it. I could withdraw from the tournament and get the entry money credited back to may account. Thus I had twenty six bucks to work with.

By this point I had learned enough to be OK. Not great but I could hold my own and didn't get abused by the better players too much. Thus the little bit of money I had left has sustained me for the entire year. As of today i have about fifty in the account. It's been as high as Eight hundred and as low as twelve bucks, but I've never run out. It's a funny game, every time I learn something new i lose. It takes me a while to learn how to apply the new techniques. Eventually I think I'll learn enough to actually make money at it. We'll see. For now it's good entertainment.

So that is how i passed my time. I went through periods when I did not play, I don't think I played at all between March and July. I've been through periods where I played seemingly 24/7, like in August when I ran my account up to the eight hundred mark and all the way down again. In the meantime when I was not playing poker or scouring the want ads for a job, i was slowly learning what I liked to do. Finding out what I had passions for.

The first thing I did was to start playing guitar again and writing. It came back a little slowly but it came back. I've always like creative processes, and so it was the first thing that I sought. As a part of my year of discovery I shucked off notions of what kind of music i should be writing and just let the music and lyrics write themselves. It's been a year long process to fully grasp this and let go of old ways but I think my inner voice is now in control of my writing process. And it's so much more talented than the outer one. Out of this my good overly opinionated friend Troy gave me a nice book of lyric writing. This spawned a rebirth of a discarded passion I once had.

I began writing poetry again. At first I was a bit reluctant as I'm not a big fan or poetry, but soon I found myself doing more and more of it until now I'm at the point I enjoy it quite a bit. It's a similar journey trying to get my outer self out of the way of the more talented inner voice, but I'm making progress. And liking it.

The next thing that happened is that I decided that I'd try to revisit another old passion i had and that was coaching. At one point in time after high school I started coaching. I did this for five years. I gave it up when my budding music career got in the way. And then jobs were always interfering. It's rather tough to have employment that leaves you free from 2-5P everyday. And so i took complete advantage of my unemployed status and volunteered at the local high school. For any of you who might be concerned, the unemployment rules allow for fifteen hours a week of volunteer work before it needs to be reported. Anyway, I loved it. I still found I had a passion for it and was good at it.

The next thing that happened was a rebirth of my book hoarding passion. I have always loved books. Not so much the reading of them as much as the thing of them. Maybe because when I was a kid a library was a sacred place you only got to go to on special days. There was no library in my elementary school. Instead we got field trips to the main in town school to go to the library. It was almost as special as stopping at the Dairy Queen but not quite to that level. So anyway I developed this weird love of all things pulpy, dusty, and musty. So I thought i might try my hand at buying and selling used books. I first tried this a couple of years ago but it freaked out my then fiance so bad I stopped. She had visions of stacks of books everywhere. And they were well founded fears as I now have over three thousand books stacked everywhere.

Out of this hobby, and I am trying to keep this at the hobby status, I learned much about what makes a book valuable and what doesn't. I also found a way to sell some of them. I have one spot in an antique store. I've only had it a few months and only one of those months has been profitable. I think I'm actually paying to sell my books. But i think I'm learning what will sell and what won't, so hopefully it'll be cash positive in time.

So there you have it. 2009 all wrapped up nicely. I came into the year with a clean slate and ill defined. I finished the year as a poker playing, book hoarding, track coaching, song writing poet.

And now for 2010.