Our first first wedding in 1979. Still in college, still had hair. Now, despite not seeing each other for twenty years, we are still in love. Too cool.

2/11/06 Saturday
I’m doing good this morning. As you can see from yesterdays entry it got rough towards the end of the day. Cherie fixed some scrambled eggs and English muffins this morning. I took my pill about an hour ago and now am slowing down and getting tired. This is a pattern, my slowing down an hour after taking the seizure medicine. The other day when I was awake and the mind was alert all night I had forgotten to take the evening pill. It makes me wonder if I would be better off without it but there is the fear of another grand mal seizure. I so enjoy and desire the times of clarity when this brain operates at it’s former (before the accident) level I almost want to risk not taking this medicine. The first pill the gave me (Delantin) zombied me out so they switched me to this. Perhaps there is something else. I don’t see the neurologist till April or May. I think I will lay down and rest. It’s only 9:00 in the morning, this sucks.

It is 1:42 already. I said down for about two hours and got up when I heard Cherie being distressed. She was having the chest pains again and the anxiety that goes with it. The last time this cost us $2000 because I insisted she go to the hospital and we had no insurance. There we were told she had nothing serious going wrong. I worked to cheer her up and eventually she did and the pain left with that.
We loved each other as we do every day and I tell her how beautiful she is. Last night I had a thought as I sat on the toilet (Where I do some of my best thinking) Yelling out from the bathroom I said “Do you know what a symbiotic relationship is?”. “No” she answered “What is it”. “It’s where two life forms need each other and help each other survive. You know it’s like the bacteria you have in your stomach. Without it you can’t digest some food and without us it can’t survive.” (How romantic is that!) “That’s us” she said and it is true. I was wandering lost with this brain injury that incapacitated me because stress freezes my brain up and Cherie had given up on having a life, damaged by twenty years of pain that began with our divorce.
Now we support each other and have life. There is allot of meaning to be found in the word “Life”. We have joy, we are complete, we are one, and if we didn’t have each other we would just be empty shells existing day to day. Cherie just left to do laundry and hearing her keys I did what has become a routine. Rushing up I spread my arms wide and said “Kiss”. She laughed and gave me that smile that just moves my heart. As I held her face, looking at her eyes and everything, I told her again how much I loved her and how I was still amazed to hold her in my arms after twenty years of absence. I started to cry again and she said “Now you better stop cause I’m going to cry too”. “You know Cherie, we’ve been married for two years now and it’s like the first day. I’ve known couples who’s marriage has become just two people existing together. I think we will be like this forever.” I told her.

I am struggling again to do things. It is a constant battle to remember what I did and didn’t get done. I know I registered the Walked with Angels blog with Blogflux and think I did so with the What about Bob blog but don’t know. This is normal confusion for me. I think I will break and do some of the carving I have neglected for so long. Besides, sitting at this computer is painful after a while.
2:52 - I am slowing down a little. Some of these are a result of the mental fatigue that comes with this injury. That is why I must take naps during the day. It’s not all days just some. I detect the beginnings of a headache. If I am lucky it will be just an everyday headache like normal people get. We’ll see.
4:54 – This is hard. I got the blanket spread out, lights set up, and got out my tools to carve. This is something I love, something that reduces my stress, something I am good at. But I couldn’t. Not even simple cuts. I am down to a 3 on the Bob scale. Had a hard time spelling the words in this paragraph. It’s not a fatigue slow down. It’s another partial seizure. How can I stay positive. Time to hide in bed. Probably won’t even watch TV.

7:45 – I’m better now. On top of everything I’m kinda depressed. It is hard to continue to see what little I had left at River East still being stolen and not be able to do a thing about it. The top of the mahogany table I had been making for the attorney, James Adray, is gone now. The hand carved legs are still tucked in the back. His other mahogany furniture that I had stripped to refinish to match the table are still there. I had hoped to complete this job despite it being five years now. For me it is a matter of honor and part of the list of wrongs I am trying to correct.
They had Don Monroe, the director of River East on TV today, announcing he will be heading up the Marina District project. This just brings it home. I still grate at him calling me a thief. All he knows is what he was told and that was from his employees who were stealing my stuff and had set me up for the felony I was convicted of. I know we will be moving to Texas and I will probably never see them again but I still would like to clear my name. I know I was a nut case from the severe depression, a fall that knocked me out resulting in a drastic personality change (A sure sign of brain injury) and the subsequent extreme drug use, but I never stole. Hell, I had a warehouse full of computers, some of the remains are still up there, and they said I stole one. That’s a part of the story I will need to publish because I know this is confusing to many reading the blog.
Here is a thumbnail of these events. I fell fifteen feet from my pallet racking in the warehouse, knocking myself out and breaking two ribs. This was when I became angry and irrational, making poor business decisions. I caught my second wife having sex in the parking lot of the mall she worked at. I caught an employee stealing and when I filed charges and fired him his wife and dad went to the police with a computer they claimed to have purchased from me. That computer had been stolen from a business in my building a few weeks prior. Then that employees friend, the maintenance man in my building, just happened to go visit him. Despite this computer looking like all computers with no outside identifying marks he “recognized it” as being the one that was stolen. By then I was a mess anyway and the court appointed attorney lied to me and sold me out resulting in this conviction.
Now this former employee and his friend are fine upstanding citizens, right? Melvin, the employee, was in the news a couple of years ago when two people stormed into his house firing shots into the ceiling. Kinda sounds like a drug thing. Joe, the maintenance man, was convicted and put on probation for possession of cocaine and multiple drunk driving offenses. But I’m the bad guy. I’m the one Don Monroe calls a thief. This is the real short version of things. I’ll have the full story written sometime. It’s hard to get done with my disability but I’m working on it.
Nuff said for tonight. The Olympics are on and I am tired.