To hell with it.

I've been debating a lot of things in my life over the past few months. My motivation for things has been withering away or non existent. One of those things is the Holiday party.

Usually by this time every year, I am getting motivated to plan and throw the party. As of now, the invitations aren't even made, and they are usually sent out by now.

I've been giving a lot of serious thought on if I should even throw a party this year. And why should I?

Here's how I've been seeing a lot of things recently about my generosity and hospitality. Every time I throw a party, the people that come out, I tend to only see once until the next year or never again. The majority of them don't do anything in return.In essence, they are sponges. Not that I am doing it to buy my friends, I know that I don't have to do that. My time (usually about 2 months of planning), money(about $1500+) and stress (at wit's end) in regards to this annual event are probably better spent elsewhere.

On the eve of my 31st birthday as usual on Halloween, I have yet to receive a card, or to have someone ask me what's up for my birthday outside of my inner circle of friends. It makes me wary of entering what is supposed to be my "golden year".

At least my parents are here and we will be celebrating with a quiet dinner tomorrow night at home, as I will be working on my birthday night and they will be leaving early in the morning on Nov. 1st.

I know who my true friends are, and we invest in each other tenfold. Others however just tend to take and not re-invest in maintaining a friendship with me. Those kind of people don't call to invite me out to do anything- whether it be a movie, lunch, drinks, coffee, or just to chat. What's the worst that could happen? That I couldn't make it? They don't offer to help out with anything. They don't truly mean it when they ask how I am, let alone be concerned with my personal stresses.

How many times have I had people over to my home, welcomed them in, indulged and spoiled them, waiting on them hand and foot and then not hear anything else from them after they leave.

Do I really need to cater to that abuse any longer? Or should I take the time and money that would go to this and spend it on those people who truly matter...including myself?

Just as am trying to take stock of myself right now, those people need to do the same, and possibly realize that there is a great benefit to returning the love that is given. The outcome is a more enriching experience than just receiving.

I understand that I am not the best with correspondence, or the use of a phone in general. I hate the damn things. I'm lazy and complacent and have the ideology that people should come here since, there is a plethora of booze and entertainment in my house, for free outside of someone picking up a 6 pack or some chips and ice. The frequency of me going out is rare too. I usually just stay at home, or go out locally, stumbling distance around the block.

I know I need to make a better effort at being a friend to people, and especially to some of my closer friends. I need to write more, call more and try to do things with them more frequently and get out of the house.

I'm used to being solo, which is fine since I am so introverted. That still shouldn't be an excuse to my closer friends. At least they hopefully know what they mean to me.

Therefore, in breaking tradition over the past 10 years, the holiday party is cancelled.

I still may have my small handful of my close friends over for a small dinner on an undisclosed date to say thank you, but for the general populous, maybe next year.

Those of you that are my friends will understand, and if some of you don't, then maybe you should re-evaluate whether or not you truly are a friend of mine. I suppose I shall find out in short time.

slacker ass

Yes, I know, I've been slacking on a lot of things. Mostly because my parents have been in town for the past week and a half, and will be here through my birthday on the 31st. The trip I wanted to take them on up to Prescott that weekend is off due to the nighttime lows being too cold for them to transition from 70+ degree nites here to 38 up there.

Plan 2 was to drive out with them to San Diego to visit with my Aunt and Uncle there on Sunday and fly back to work on my birthday Wednesday, but with pretty much the entire part of Southern California being a giant charcoal briquette and my Aunt now recovering from knee replacement surgery on last Monday, that is pretty much off too. It wouldn't be a good idea for Dad to be in a smoke inundated atmosphere having basically one lung, so I think they will crash here through for another week til the air and fires clear up and my Aunt is better suited for company.

Meantime, I'll try to plan a day trip or two to somewhere interesting, that isn't cold, or too hot, or requires a lot of walking about, and suits their interests on a relative budget for all...I'll do my best. I'll try to post whatever I can in somewhat a timely fashion, but lately, I'm enjoying spending time with them and am not too worried about dictating it all promptly on the computer. Anyways, to toss in a warm and fuzzy for you, here's Dad playing with Jenny.

What hurts your soul

"You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? That it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life, a place with no memory."

Andy- The Shawshank Redemption

Many of us have a place that nobody else can understand what it means to us. Some may be in the middle of the Rockies in fall, Paris in spring, Australia in winter. Mine, as of yet-since I have yet to be at the base of the Maori on Easter Island, is Kailua beach, Oahu.

A vacation is supposed to be a way of escape, to forget what you left. This place goes above and beyond that.

If you've seen the original Men in Black, remember that cool silver flashy memory eraser doo-hickey that they used to make people forget things. Coming to this place is pretty much equal to living in a constant state of that.

Until they can find a way of bottling it or making it virtual, well, unless you have been there, you won't understand what it means to escape. We're all due for it.

what it takes to escape

What I can say that is in Arizona, I was thirty-one years old, and the things that I was choosing not to do were adding up into a whole other life I was choosing not to live.

-Adaptation by me to Steven Kolter's West of Jesus.

What is the consequence of escape? Material and interpersonal wise? I have a relative dead end job that I have been ramming my head into it's glass ceiling for the past 3 years. It's knocked me senseless and relatively unaware of my surroundings for the most part. The irony is that even if I were to work for a corporate bar or a family owned one like now, the results are exactly the same. I'd end up being a manager of some sorts, responsible for the leadership and delegation of other zombie like employees below me as I was once. Which makes me no better than they are.

As for my personal goods and immediate relations-I can always make new bonds with others. The ones that are truly meaningful to me, I know that I will always have them close to me.

Everything else is material, and can very easily be replaced.

So what is the holdup? Shack up a best friend of mine in my house? Pay off the bills in the house for the next two months, buy a laptop to pay my other immediate bills that I easily can pay online all the while doing it from some random roadstop diner in the middle of pigsknuckle Arkansas while on the way to all points east or west or north or south?

I've already delivered such speeches as per my potential plans to those closest and important to me. Consisting of finding myself and just going. They understand. The sad thing is with leaving them. If I could, I'd want to take them with me, but in reality, I know that if I did take such a journey, it would have to be one traveled by myself.

Last Friday evening, early, around 8pm, I got a visit from an old regular whom i haven't seen in almost 2 years. His name was Chris. Before he left, he was my age, and constantly wandered with a similar mask of pseudo happiness around the direct public, but you could tell that underneath the mask was a person in need of finding something that he did not have.

Two years ago he just disappeared. He went from showing up at the bar once or twice a week to nothing.

He showed up on Friday and it seemed like polar opposites. As if we were opposite mirror images of eachother. He the person that, although has been on a long journey and showed the wears of travel, seemed wiser and complacent from it, whereas I was the person that he had left years ago.

He left the valley and spent time in the seedy L.A. Underground music scene for a year and then up and packed up to Europe. Walking, hiking, hitching rides, trains, whatever...across the continent for another year and a half. Well, for 8 months at least. On that slow start to that Friday night, he and I were able to sit and talk about his travels for a good amount of time. After going through the Netherlands, Germany and the UK, he was travelling through France when he made friends with a bar patron in the middle of France. After making friends with the man and telling him of his travels, the man offered him a place to stay for dirt cheap. Turns out that this man was offering his dirt cheap abode to be nothing less than a 16th century castle in the middle of the French countryside. A whole wing of a castle to himself, with a handful of other renters living in the other wings of the fortress.

I was stoked, but when I asked him why he left, he just told me that it was time to go and move on to something new. I put him on pause for a few minutes while I helped 3 other customers, and by the time I had returned, Chris had once again disappeared.

All I know is that I am growing tired. Not tired of anything generalized for the most part, but personally. My work weeks are structured. Even my mother mentioned it as "that's the way life is dear." On our phone call today, I immediately called her out on it. " Well what if that's not the way i choose to make it work out like? What if I want to make it be different than that? Who says that it has to be that way?"

She had no response.

It's a odd feeling to have a parent, or someone that you consider to be a guiding source of life's ways to not have an answer for you. Then again, I shook off her misjudgement as that's all she's ever known from her childhood and young adult life and right through her current marriage to my father.

Depression can be a royal bitch. As if I believe in pills or therapy. Pills are just a way for my insurance rates to constantly rise and for pharmaceutical co's to get richer.

Therapy may help, for despite what my friends think, there are a plethora of events in my past that definitely affected my current psyche.

But not as much as the bitch it is to not have the self confidence to be self-assertive and do what makes you happy. It just is a big crutch now days that you can do what makes yourself happy, but you have to take into account what your actions may reflect on others, especially your family.

I cheers that a few times on Sunday for football, but strangely, I think I may have been the only one who truly meant it.

Who would think it? I remember back in the day in the living room of my man Ryan's house, that the Trizan-Ryan, Doug and I- that in all our talks and predictions, that not I were to be the one to be first to marry and start a family, but that Ryan was the first to travel and explore and marry, Doug would settle down and have the more lucrative career, and I am the one to be stuck at a impasse, not knowing where to head off to.