2024-07-31 (Wednesday) — Can I Adopt You?

I was supposed to get up early… 🙃

I didn’t.

I was tired, and bordering on depressed, and just wanting to sleep, so I was a bit slow going.

I didn’t eat breakfast.

I don’t think?

Instead of getting out and starting stuff for the day, I wrote my journal entry for yesterday. I’m better than I used to be, but I’m still not getting them written before I go to bed every night like I used to. But hey, progress.

I spent a little more time looking at and planning storage bins to move. But as I was looking at my Civic and thinking about loading it with bins (for some reason it hadn’t yet entered my mind that I could stick them in Loaf), I just decided that I wasn’t going to work on any of that today.

July 31st… Last day of the month… Meant I could go ahead and submit my sales tax info for the month. Also, tomorrow being August, my accountant told me that I have to have 2023 info to her a lot earlier than last year because she’s going on a month-long vacation right at the end of the Tax season, so I told her I’d get her all the tax info for 2023 by the first week of August.

With a little bit of motivation to actually work on my taxes showing its head, I decided that I had better take advantage of that and do tax work. So I dug out my receipt bins for 2023 and everything so far in 2024 and I headed over to Pea Ridge where I dropped off a battery to be charged at AutoZone, and then parked my little butt in Wendy’s, ordering their little $5 biggie bag.

I spent the next 3 hours, or so, filling out and submitting everything for my July sales tax submission and going through all of my 2024 receipts, getting everything squared away and recorded properly for 2024 thus far.

Having discovered several receipts for things where I wasn’t properly charged tax that needed to be charged because it was for things that weren’t going to be resold, I drove back two stores over, got the results on the battery, and had them refund and rebill probably 8 or 10 different invoices.

I actually ended up losing about $30 because things cost more now and because they had given me like a $20 discount on one part that I didn’t get on the rebill person doing it didn’t know about the discount, and I didn’t think about it when it was getting rebilled.

Oh well.

From there, I went over to the neighborhood market across the street, remembering that my mom didn’t have any of those little foam dispensing soap dealies for her bathroom, so I went and grabbed some food for later later, two of those foaming soap dispensers, and headed over to my mom’s house.

I stopped briefly at the house of somebody along the way, someone I’ve noticed who has the same Van as I do (ET), And I thought maybe they might have the 3600 lb axles instead of the 4000 lb axles, so maybe the extra ball joints that I have that I bought improperly might work for them, but unfortunately, they weren’t home, so I headed over to my mom’s place.

I gave my mom foaming soap dispensers, complete with Dawn soap already inside, and I helped her load up some stuff that’s going to get donated to the Samaritan Shop. We also planned a spot where I could keep a handful of my storage bins for when I go out of town on my walkabout.

I finally got some things worked out with my car insurance people. It took being very firm with the people on the phone saying that I wanted someone to help me now because they had removed insurance coverage from one of my vehicles and had to kept telling me they were going to get back to me but weren’t actually getting back to me.

So I said something to the effect of, “I’ve been told since Friday, multiple times, that someone was going to call me back, and no one has called me back. Is there no one you can give me to right now who can actually get me taken care of today?”

Apparently, the next person I spoke with was the office manager, and she got the ball moving forward. 🥳

She needed pictures of the van, the VIN number and just a picture of the van itself, so I drove home, mailed her the pictures, and then headed over to McDonald’s. I figured Wendy’s probably didn’t want me in there for another 3 hours as I kept working on my taxes, but McDonald’s didn’t have a self-serve refilling drink machine.

So… I went back to Wendy’s 🙃

I think I was there for probably, yes, another 3 hours or so… going back through a whole bunch of 2023 information, and making some pretty good progress, I think.

It was good for me to be away from all the other stuff working on taxes today. Even though I don’t like doing taxes, a change is as good as a break, as the saying goes, And though I don’t think it’s a good use of my time, it does feel less like wasting time because it’s something that’s got to get done anyway that there really isn’t any better way to do because nobody can do the kind of work that needs to be done because I’m the only one who has the information necessary to understand how to handle everything. A bookkeeper would have to keep asking me question after question after question in order to properly know where to categorize things.

Unfortunately, so much of the information that’s necessary is in my head. In the future, with my next venture, I’m going to make sure that everything can be taken care of by bookkeepers and accountants, And it’s not just Stephen’s little brain that holds all the information.

While I was at Wendy’s, one of the workers there called my name and motioned me over. It took me a minute to realize that I actually knew him. I hadn’t seen him in years.

Really good kid. He’s married now, early twenties, I think, with three kids. And it looks like he’s had a really hard life these last years. He’s got what looks like some meth tooth rot on his upper two front teeth. 😞

And he and his wife and three kids are all living in their car. 😞

And perhaps worst of all, their youngest looks like he’s starving to death. I hope it’s just some sort of condition, but his thighs were about the same thickness as his calves. He looks malnourished. 😞

I’m not sure what to do… If I should do anything. In talking to him and his wife, seems like if meth has been in the picture, maybe it’s in the previous picture. They didn’t look like they were current users, if that makes sense.

The way they spoke and carried themselves, they just seemed all there and completely normal, Not jonesing or coming down or anything like that.

Breaks the heart, though, to see the circumstances.

Their two oldest are twins, and one of their little twin girls absolutely melted my heart. She came over and hung out at my table talking to me and wanting to just press the buttons on my computer keyboard.

Her shorts were wet… I don’t know if from sweat from sitting in a roasting car or pee. 😞

She smelled. 😞

But she was all smiles and chatty and wanting to interact with me and play with my computer.

Cute little thing, with a handful of little brown freckles.

It’s moments like those when I think about having wanted to be a dad.

😞

I think mostly my desire to be a dad is rooted in my desire to be there for children… to love them and love them and love them and lift and support and teach and encourage and give them my whole heart and my everything.

I want them to feel and to have that endless encouraging love, and I want to help them learn about and explore and hopefully be excited about the world and to provide them as many opportunities to learn and grow and experience The diversity and beauties and challenges and everything in this world.

Hopes and dreams.

These days, I don’t much think about the possibility of being a dad anymore. These days, anything on the dad front would just be more me trying to come to grips with and accept that that dream of mine is likely never going to be.

I had three big dreams, my deepest desires for my life:

#1. Marry someone who, soul deep, wanted to be love and to spend her life lifting the world in every way she could.

#2. Have as big of a family as I could financially support and be the kind of Dad i just described.

#3. Spend my life being, as best as I can, like the woman I’m looking for in #1.

#1… my hopes fade.

#2… my hopes are approaching acceptance that it likely never will be and that I’m in no shape right now anyway.

#3… This one, is still open to me. It’s always open to me. The one of the three that I’ve had the greatest control over. Number three is why I feel like I’ve wasted my life. I feel like I had the capacity to do so much more than what I’ve done, but I’ve just been… surviving. Number three is the reason, the main reason, I feel like my life is a failure.

I hope to rectify that.

I hope that somehow the last years of my life can make up for the failure of the first 42 years. Not that it was all a failure. It wasn’t. I tried so hard. I tried and tried and tried and tried some more.

But somehow, I screw so much up.

So much waste and so much failure and so much lost.

So much life time lost.

Lessons learned too late. Weakness that still destroys my ability to be who I want to be and do what I want to do.

Here’s hoping that I can make up for what feels like a failed life to this point.

I know I’ve done a lot of good. I know people will disagree and say I’ve lived a good life. If life is measured by how much I tried, then I think that’s true. But it’s so hard to look at life and see what could have been had I just made different choices…

But anyway… that brings me back to Wendy’s and that person I once saw regularly and the little family in such awful circumstances.

That little girl the melted my heart.

I wanted to help, but there are circumstances that make knowing what help is best to give a bit challenging.

I might write more about that another time.

And that little boy, I don’t want to assume that he’s malnourished. The little girls look like they’re doing really well. At least, physically, they look healthy. It’s just the little boy who looks terrible. 😞

Maybe it’s a medical condition.

And my little heart couldn’t help but think about a year from now when that little girl, both of them, go to kindergarten for the first time.

If things continue as they are, those little girls will be bullied and ostracized, and won’t have friends. They’ll be the “smelly kids.”

😞

Right now, they don’t know any different. They don’t know any better. They’re just living without any concern.

Which is so beautiful.

But so sad to know what’s waiting for them in this world of cruelty if their circumstances don’t change.

😞

After catching up a bit, I bid my farewells and headed home.

Mike was using my excavator, and so I went up and grabbed it. He originally had said he only needed it for an hour, but he’s been using it for 2 days, and I noticed that it’s squeaking badly, which means it’s metal on metal, which means it’s not greased properly. I don’t think I’ve greased it since I’ve gotten it. 😬

But this is also the first time that I’ve noticed it squeak from lack of lubrication. I don’t know when it started squeaking, because I don’t recall it squeaking while I was using it, but clearly it’s been squeaking while Mike’s been using it, and I hope it hasn’t done a whole lot of damage.

I brought it back and started working with it to dig up a stump, which is when I realized that it was squeaking.

😕

I tried to grease it, but not all of the ports would take grease.

No good. 😬

Some of the pins may need to come out in order to get them to take grease. Be removed, cleaned up, and then greased.

Ugh.

I’m trying not to worry a lot like I usually do.

I can’t really tell whether I’m just stuffing the feelings or pushing the fear away.

Going to try and get my taxes done tomorrow. That might be a little ambitious, but I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that it’s possible.

That will be the main priority. Second to that, I’m going to Go buy new zirk fittings for the excavator so that I can clean it out and grease it up properly.

Here’s to a hopefully productive tomorrow. 🤞

My mom was in the area after having dropped somebody off after a church activity, so I told her to swing by and get a hug since I was on her way home.

She did, we actually ended up chatting for quite a while about my experience at Wendy’s with the young man that I had known fairly well years ago.

It’s just hard to know what to do.

I’m working on it.

There is a lot of poverty here. It’s interesting to have it juxtaposed with the massive wealth of Bentonville. We have The Walmart billionaires and the gazillions of what I believe are vendor millionaires who sell things to Walmart.

Anyway, there’s a heck of a lot of money in Bentonville and the surrounding areas. But there’s a lot of poverty as well if you go just a tiny bit further.

It’s not starving-children-in-third-world-countries-with-dirt-floors-and-eating-out-of-garbage-dumps poverty, but still…

Well, that’s all I’m going to write today.

Lift the world.

~ stephen