The last several days have been… very hard for me.
Life on its own has already been overwhelming to me, for years now. I live my daily life on the ragged edge of my emotions.
I’m always on the verge of breakdown… meltdown…
I’m just so tired. Life tired.
I don’t really write about what i think and feel anymore. Just the… general summaries of events.
…
And then all this stuff happened…
I was already barely able to keep my head above water, and then… having to be out in 6 weeks… no clue where I’m going next… trying to get so much done in so little time…
I’ve been like a deer in the headlights, in a glassy-eyed stupor… And if that weren’t hard enough for me, Wednesday happened.
In the morning, I went to my doctor’s appointment to get another set of x-rays on the split bone and to have my stitches removed.
Honestly, I’d rather just remove them myself, pretty sure I’ve done that before, but I’m trying to be prudent, don’t want to mess around with any potential bone infection, however small the likelihood.
Doctor said the bone looks good. No propagation of the crack, So it’s all still the same recommendation: I can walk on it to my pain tolerance level.
After going to the doctor, I went down to look at an 80 acre parcel just south of Canehill, Arkansas. The pictures in the Zillow ad are beautiful, a little river running through the property, and long, sizable stone walls left over from long ago homesteads.
We took a side by side to get to the property, as it’s a little hairy getting there, especially since there had just been quite a bit of rain.
The winding driveway down to the property led across some beautiful wet-weather creeks that were quite full, with rushing water from two different creeks joining together right where we were crossing.
So cool. 😊
After that, we passed a Dodge truck that had been abandoned on the property. Doors locked. License plate from Oklahoma.
The truck would come with the property. 🙃
From there we had to cross the main creek, Evansville Creek, which, with the amount of rain that had fallen the previous night, was rather swollen. But my realtor was a magician with the side by side, managing to drive down into the river and up the other side without getting us stuck and without us washing away.
He also brought a side arm along with him because this is hog and bear country. 😁
Fun fun fun!
In addition to the Dodge truck, there were two probably 40,000 lb front end loaders that have also been abandoned on the property there in the river bottoms.
It was just before getting to those huge pieces of equipment that I saw it…
One of my seemingly more outlandish dreams for my own personal Haven Hill is the inclusion of a waterfall on my own property.
And there it was, cascading down the rocks in front of me.
😍
Now, to be transparent, it’s almost certainly just a wet-weather waterfall. Still, it won my heart in a moment. 😊
Having lived in Utah for so many years, it’s weird thinking of creeks and rivers and whatnot as potentially being only wet weather. In all my experience in Utah, if there’s a creek, it’s year around because, well, creeks come from snowmelt. And then the snow doesn’t melt until mid-summer, and the mountains retain enough moisture that the creeks keep flowing until the next snows fall and the cycles just repeat over and over again.
But, out here, with there being no mountains and little snow, but with hills and massive amounts of rain, there are plenty of wet weather creeks that come and go with each storm.
I love the storms here. At the moment, the thunder crashes just outside my open window as severe weather mostly misses us just to our northwest, I think.
We got rain and lightning, but not the hail and possible tornados our neighboring towns likely got.
Anyway, the property was beautiful and has massive potential. It would take a massive amount of work to realize that potential.
Being right in the middle of the foothills of the Boston Mountains (Boston bumps in my view 😅), the ground is more rock than it is soil. And without much soil and without many plants to hold the soil, the whole face of the 80 acres is covered in fieldstone.
Which field stone actually might provide a means of monetizing the property, honestly. I need to look into it, but fieldstone sells for about $235 a ton around here, and I probably have thousands of tons of fieldstone just lying around. Potentially, I could use that fieldstone to pay for the entire property.
Maybe. I need to do a little more research to see how in demand it is and to whom I could sell it reliably.
So if this is such a beautiful place, if my heart fell in love with it in part, then why was this the lead up to something so emotionally challenging for me?
That’s because it was on the way back from visiting this beautiful place that I realized that I have no place that feels like home, and that even a place that checks so many of the boxes for where my heart and soul would be at rest… isn’t home. It’s not home because I’m alone. And paradise isn’t paradise when you’re alone.
It’s just another hell.
😞
So it was that realization that I think has now removed from me the last hope I had.
There is no drive left in me. Maybe I’ve finally finished breaking. I’m tired. I’m lonely. I just want to rest, but there is no rest–ever.
I’m trying to help other people, trying to find meaning and purpose and joy in that, but it’s not working…
On the way home from looking at that piece of land, I stopped by somebody who was selling a truck for super cheap. It could have been something I could have used to help tow tiny homes back to the property for my family and help them save money, as it costs $2000-$3,000ish to move a tiny home.
But the main frame of the truck was badly bent down, and the people who had pretended to fix it, literally used chunks of steal as shims, through which they drilled holes and used super long bolts to try and make it look like the front of the truck was straight.
Good crap.
And the bed wasn’t the right bed for the truck.
And the water pump was brand new, which, given the damage to the truck, makes me think that the front end was smashed into the engine itself, which could mean damage to the engine internals.
Needless to say I didn’t buy it.
Probably just as well because It seems like every time I try and help out other people, i end up adding far more complexity to my own life.
I don’t have the bandwidth for it anymore.
At this point, I’m basically just a drone. Deer in the headlights. Dazed. Glassy eyed.
Really the only productive thing that I’m accomplishing is working for JustAnswer. I’ve spent a lot of time working for them over the last week plus.
I never knew I was as weak as I am. I thought I was stronger. I thought I could withstand the pains and struggles of life, the challenges. Guess I was wrong. I’m still here, I’m still twitching, but there’s not really much of me left.
On a positive note, I sold my BMW Z4 and managed to get a decent price out of it. People had been low-balling me for weeks, and it was really discouraging, but I finally managed to sell it, and I actually sold it for a little more than what I paid for it, but I did put quite a bit of effort and time and money into it, so overall, it’s not really a gain.
But still, it’s actually what I was hoping to get out of it, so I’m quite pleased with that. 🥳
I was also able to sell my 40-foot extension ladder, despite its imperfections, having one mildly dented rung, And despite the fact that the ladder had a bow in it.
I actually got what I was asking for, so again, I’m grateful for that. 🥳
I decided to try and work on Friday, scheduling three jobs. Though it hurts to be on my feet because of the split bone in my leg, I wanted to get out and be productive.
It’s healing well.
So I drove away from the house on Friday early in the afternoon ready to head to my first job of the day, when my work van broke down on the way to the first job.
😶
It’s got the same issue that the Extendo Twinkie has, apparently. Just dying while driving. It’s done that to me a handful of times, but it’s always started right back up. This time it didn’t. And this time, none of the gauges on the dash were registering anything, nor could the scan tool even connect.
Lovely.
You can bypass all sorts of things to make a car start, but there’s not really anything you can do if it’s a car that’s controlled by a computer, and the computer isn’t working. You’re pretty much toast.
After about 45 minutes, perhaps, of trying to find a way to get it to start, I finally managed to grab a cluster of wires that, when moved, gave power back to the dash. It’s one of the main clusters that goes to the main computer.
So I went and tried to start it, but the battery was dead from the efforts that I had been making to that point. Fortunately, my backup jump box had enough juice to crank the engine over, and this time it started.
Not wanting to risk getting stuck somewhere else, I just apologized to my customers and canceled my appointments and pointed them toward other options.
I can’t say that I was sad that the van broke down. I didn’t want to work. I don’t have anything left.
I don’t know how I’m going to make it through everything that’s going on right now. I know that I will because I always do, but I’m… pretty well done.
One thing that happened just yesterday… Sunday… Well, it actually started probably a couple weeks ago. Trying to sell that Volkswagen beetle that’s been a thorn in my side because of the title issues… Somebody was interested in it, wanting to give me $2,000 for it, and they were planning on taking it to Mexico to export. For whatever reason, I got that no from God kind of feeling.
So I was like, okay, what the heck?
So I didn’t sell it to the guy.
Over the course of the next couple weeks or so, I had two more people interested in buying it to export to Mexico. I think one offered me $1,800 in the other $1,600, something like that, and then I had somebody offer me $1,600 who just wanted it as a parts car.
But as much as I wanted to sell the Volkswagen to get it out of my hair and off my plate in this Ocean of stress that I’m drowning in, I couldn’t get myself to feel even okay about selling it. I was uncomfortable, unsettled… And by Saturday night, I was just plain pissed.
Why was I pissed?
I was pissed at God. I was pissed because I’m tired of my life having this ridiculous crap in it. I don’t want the Volkswagen. I just want it out of my hair. Logically, it makes all the sense in the world to just sell it and be done with it. The alternative would be keeping it and getting a bonded title which gives me three years of stress wondering if the previous owner will suddenly decide that they want the vehicle and come to claim it, in which case I’ll owe something like $8,500 on a car that I bought for like $300.
I don’t want the stress.
But each time I got offers to sell it, I just couldn’t feel settled about it, and the only thought that kept coming to my mind was to go ahead and register it.
Having lived my life, having experienced the things that I’ve experienced, having chosen courses I felt that God had led me down that didn’t make sense and having had those paths be the most painful, most devastating paths of my life That have left me where I am today, I was just pissed to have some stupid piece of guidance, one more stupid piece of *$#_@$# guidance that made zero sense.
I went to bed Saturday night absolutely pissed. People practically begging to buy the VW from me, and me unable to sell it because of those stupid feelings.
😡
🤬
And then what happens Sunday? The person the state says owns the car sends me an email, 4 months later, saying that she’s found the title and is going to mail it to me.
😶
And now the feelings that didn’t make any sense, the direction from God that didn’t make any sense at all… suddenly it made sense.
Part of me is humbled. Part of me looks at that experience in comparison to the much more challenging experience that I’ve been going through for years and years but has been similarly nonsensical but that I haven’t been able to walk away from or deny.
Is that path really still in process?
I don’t know…
Unfortunately, despite this recent experience with the Volkswagen, I’m afraid I’m beyond feeling at this point. It’s all just shades of lifeless grey in my mind. I’m beyond overwhelmed. I’m numb. I’m deer in the headlights. I’m broken. I’m alone, despite being surrounded by family who love me.
There is no drive left in me.
I wish there were.
A phrase that came out of my mouth a little while back is one of the better descriptors of how I feel:
“There’s not enough hope to sustain the push.”
I merely exist now. Just… numb.
…
And the joint pain that I think has returned with such vengeance because I’ve been sitting down for the better part of two weeks with my broken leg doesn’t help…
…
My soul needs rest, but there is none.
Lift the World 