Over the course of six long years, we had finally established a comfortable life for ourselves in Chicago. We had a wonderful home. We had a core group of amazing friends to spend our time with. We had a city teeming with endless offerings of entertainment and culture. We had (sadly past tense) a life.

We’ve now been in NJ since November, and we’re still struggling to assemble and/or find the next incarnation of our life. We left one behind in Chicago, but have yet to discover its replacement here. My previous job was a big obstacle in the way of that – I was traveling so much that when I was home, my energy was mainly spent recuperating from the last trip… and then blending seamlessly into preparing (creatively, psychologically, emotionally) for the next one.

In the meantime, my parents’ needs got greater and greater, and Fran was in the unenviable position of taking point with them. She was constantly “on call” and it never got easy. It was harder on her than me, because she had the daily reality of life in NJ – which consisted of my parents and little else – while I was only actually in town about half the time.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. I lost my job back in June, and Fran has traded in her caregiver name-tag to one that reads “bread-winner.” She went right out and nailed a plum position, and I am now the official hausfrau. She has a bitch of a commute – I know because I drop her off at the train early each morning and pick her up every night. But, like everything else, she’s rolling with it amazingly well, and doing everything she can to adjust.

As a result, we’re spending a lot of energy these days searching for the balance that we never really established here from the get-go. Socially (with the exception of my oldest friend from childhood and his wonderful family) we’re walking by ourselves down a deserted street. We don’t really know anyone locally and haven’t had the opportunity to meet anyone that might expand our social circle. Did I say expand? I meant establish.

A substantial part of the reason for that is my fault – I’m from the area, so I should have a pre-vetted social circle to fall into, right? Not as easy as it sounds – we’ve been moving all over the country for nearly the past 20 years, and I was never really good about keeping in touch. A bunch of people I was friends with years ago no longer live in the area. A good number of old friends are still around, however… but, for the past nine months, the chaotic job that I had made it nearly impossible to make plans or connections of any sort.

Add to this the fact that we happen to be childless by choice – most everyone our age has children, who are fantastic catalysts for social interaction, especially among parents. Over the years, we’ve noticed that friends who are parents tend to spend the majority of their social time with other parents. Not that there’s anything wrong with that in the slightest – as a parent, your children become the sole focus of your energy, attention and time. This becomes a means of socializing while still never drifting too far from your kids.

Color this with the facts that we are both liberal, we don’t attend church, and we’re rapidly discovering that the sociopolitical mood in the area is to the right of where we stand… not exactly the greatest recipe for meeting new people around these here parts. That’s quite different from what we had become accustomed to in Chicago, where the vast majority of our friends (not to mention friends of friends, and beyond) were a lot like us. Here? We’re still looking for our tribe. And they are definitely well-concealed in the underbrush.

But, as I said earlier, we’re still actively searching for balance. We’re getting out more and more, and we’ve been pretty active, more so than at any point in the past 10 years. We’re constantly going out for walks, jogs and – when we’re feeling crazy – walk/jogs. We try to challenge ourselves more and more all the time, and we’ll only end up feeling better about ourselves as a result.

We’re meeting more people through the friends that we do have, and I’m sure that sooner or later we’ll find some peeps that we click with. We recently got together with my cousin (who, since childhood, was like the brother I never had) and his wife and a splendid time was had by all, with a lot more to come.

We’re both determined to meet people who pursue similar interests as we do – I’m looking into a few different writers’ groups, and Fran is researching running groups. We need to each do some solo recon of our own, and then report back to base with our findings. And we’re going to do that.

We’re always on the lookout for cool cultural events, too… but that’s another area where Chicago really spoiled us in a big way. We used to be able to travel 15 minutes via the El train to a major concert, not worry about parking, have a great time and get home as easy as we got there. Now any concert or show we wanna see is a major production – we’ve got to drive everywhere, and nothing is close. But we remain hopeful.

We’re working on it. All of it. We’re going to get there. Our life is stretching out in front of us – we just need to put on our special glasses so that we can see it, aim toward it, find it, take advantage of it and enjoy it.

I find it interesting to note that my original intention as I started writing this post was to bitch about being unable to find a cool, comfortable independent local coffee shop w/free wi-fi where I could set up shop for a few hours to do some reading and writing. Needless to say, I’m writing this in a Starbucks – not exactly what I had in mind. But the wi-fi is free, the refills are only four bits, and the seat is comfy.

Maybe I’ll have better luck another time and find exactly the type of place I’m looking for… but for the moment, this seems to be working out okay for me.

EATING

It’s been months since I’ve had any meat beyond fish.  My wife (Fran) went vegan a while back, which helped me become a lot more conscious as to my food choices.  I was already leaning away from heavily processed foods — trying to stay away from chain restaurants as much as possible and avoiding fast food like the plague — just looking for healthier options in general.

Read this book.

That was when I read “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer (who wrote “Everything is Illuminated”).  It was a beautifully written explanation for why he chooses to eat vegetarian, and it enthralled me from start to finish.  As a novelist first and foremost, Foer expressed and constructed his views in conjunction with wonderfully evocative stories of his family’s relationship with food.  At the same time, he would simply enumerate many facts about the food we eat today:

• How factory farming has changed our food supply for the absolute worst in countless ways, while making up a huge, unavoidable percentage of the food available to us
• How the conditions under which our meat is processed is more horrifying (and less appetizing) than what one might find themselves greeted with upon entering a remote roadside gas station’s restroom
• How factory farming causes unfathomable damage to the environment — the depletion of resources, the sheer amount of animal waste and sewage being pumped into our streams and literally sprayed straight into the air to dissipate all over the surrounding areas, sickening entire towns.
• How the animals we eat endure lives of endless torture, merely to become our meals

The last bullet point was the one that hit me the hardest.  We all have the bucolic image of the barnyard filled with happy, anthropomorphic animals, living blissful lives under the blue sky.  Well, the meat we eat isn’t as much “Charlotte’s Web” as it is “The Matrix.”  These animals are bred, raised in cramped, confined spaces, enduring endless days of agony, illness and suffering (sometimes madness, too).  When they go to slaughter, it is bad enough when all goes smoothly… but it is frequently inefficient and botched, resulting in gut-churning horrific final moments for these creatures.

All so that we can have plentiful, cheap meat.  Well, there ain’t no such thing — there’s a huge price being paid.

(Even farms that go out of their way to ensure humane or better conditions for their animals still have to bring their animals to be processed at the same slaughter facilities as other farms.  Same slaughter, same conditions, same horrors.)

The horrible “sanitary” conditions of the factory farm meat, both before and after slaughter, would be enough to turn most people off to it.  But what got me is the suffering.  I simply don’t want to eat suffering and misery. To me, the five minutes of pleasure I’ll get from a piece of meat on my plate isn’t worth the lifetime of suffering the animal endured.

When I finished the book, it wasn’t as if  I had been thunderstruck.  It wasn’t The Blues Brothers and James Brown wasn’t shouting to me from the altar, “Do you see the light?” causing me to do back-flips down the aisle and join the congregation in ecstatic dance of vegetarian fanaticism.  When I finally put the book down, I merely realized that I simply had no desire to eat meat any more. It was an underwhelming realization by sheer dint of its seeming lack of histrionics — I just kind of shrugged and said to myself, “I guess I don’t wanna eat that stuff any more.”  And I’ve stuck to it for over three months now.

Now, all that aside, I’m far from perfect.  I’m not usually on a soap box, and I understand that there are many who won’t agree with me.  That’s cool.  I feel that some people feel that we, as humans, have dominion over all other creatures on the planet, and that we have every right to do whatever we want with/to them.  Others might not give it that much thought, but there is an inherent disconnect that’s been programmed into them by the food producers (and society in general), whereby they know that they don’t want to know where their meat comes from, so they scrupulously avoid that information.

I simply chose to not eat meat… but even with this decision, I’m flawed.  I still eat fish, even though I know that fish are subject to similar existences as their land-dwelling brethren.  So why do I do it?  Two reasons:

• I still crave meat in my diet — I enjoy it too much.  The taste, the texture, the aroma… eating fish allows me the illusion that I still have meat in my diet
• I have allowed myself a willful ignorance.  Because fish dwell in the sea and not on the land, I allow myself to believe that they are some race of alien creatures.  I can not personally relate to the creatures the same way I could relate to, say, a pig with its behavior and personality.  As a result, I’m exemplifying the same behavior as I noted above — I really don’t want to know about how a sea creature feels suffering, and I’m not dwelling on it.  Not yet, anyway.

WAY too freakin' cute to be an alien. Or dinner, IMHO.

Fran has been incredibly helpful in this process, too.  She’s encouraged me to not dwell upon what I’m not doing (i.e. still eating fish) , but rather to embrace the good I am doing.

(By the by, I wanted to make mention of one thing.  I’ve heard the term “pescatarian” to describe someone who chooses fish as the only type of meat they will eat.  I just want to say that, even though I sometimes use the word to describe myself when talking with people, I only do so in the interest of expedience.  Personally, I feel it’s a lame term that sounds more like a fringe religious cult, but it’s easier than saying “The only meat I eat is fish,” especially if no one is talking about fish to begin with.  Also, so many people don’t consider fish to be ‘meat’ that it’s scary.)

Now that it’s been more than three months without any barnyard flesh for me, however, I find I’m having a harder and harder time.  I miss the flavor and taste of different foods I no longer eat.  I find myself thinking about cheesesteak and fried chicken on a regular basis.  But, I still feel the way I do — I don’t want to dine on suffering and misery.  Will I be able to stay the course forever?  I’m sure that I’ll stray at some point… but I’m also sure that it won’t be mindlessly, and my overall principles will stay on the side of avoiding meat.

I’m working through it all, trying to find the balance in all aspects of my life.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything.  Anything of substance, I mean.

I’ve spent the past nine+ months “writing” scripts, formats and promos for the wrestling company I was working for… but, to my mind, that wasn’t writing.  It was typing.

Prior to that, I had expended the vast majority of my energy working with my students.  I was so busy teaching them to write and doing everything that I could to inspire their creativity that I ended up turning my back on my own muse.  I didn’t make the time for myself.

I didn’t make time for myself because I chose to not make the time for myself.  I simply wasn’t motivated enough.  At the end (or the beginning) of each day, I was too uninspired to do my own work, knowing that I had other work to do.

This isn’t a “poor me” post, though.  This is me actually doing for myself for the first time in years.

This is me grabbing the bull by the balls, and forcing myself to sit down and actually pour my thoughts into the keyboard, instead of letting them simply flit away as they have for years now.  This is me getting back into the groove… getting back to doing what I do — putting words on the page.  And the more I do this, the better my words will become.

I’m not sure what I’ll be putting on here… which is the kiss of death for a blog, right?  No focus, no raison d’être?  Well, I could wait and plan and calculate and prepare for the next thousand Sundays, making sure everything is simply perfect before hitting the “Publish” button.  Or I could just dive in and see what I come up with…

Splash.