What a world. Sometimes I wonder how a person can look so well on the outside and feel so awful inside. Maybe it's just another depressive state.

I've moved around most of my life, and settling down is hard to get used to. Every few years I've been torn up from my roots, and I've had to forge new relationships. It hurts to let the old ones go. I try to stay in touch by phone, but eventually that falls through. It's bad enough having to move on to a new life and leave friends behind. People come and people go, but what happens when a best friend turns against you? How much damage can that cause? How much can one person destroy the relationship between mutual friends for a third party?

I've changed a lot in the last ten years. I'm doing some of the things now that I did eight or nine years ago. I go to the flea market. I enjoy the same games, but they are classic now. I sit in front of a DVD, and soon I will be hitting the theme parks again. I go out the same days that I used to.

Now I'm hunting up the same friends. I just wonder how it is a couple of folks can click as friends. I wonder what it means sometimes, and why best friends can become so important to a person.

I have "lifeline friends" that mean a lot to me. I can trust them with nearly anything, and they won't bite me in the butt with it. In my lifetime, many of those friendships have faded, and one was purposely destroyed.

Maybe it's memories. I've been triggering memories of my past a lot recently as my game collection swells to include what it used to, and my hobbies move toward the same ones I used to have. I spent a lot of time in Hampton Roads, and part of me wants to move back. On second thought, though, maybe if I move cross country, I should go to San Diego instead. It's my favorite city, and I could skirt around the very painful stuff that I may find in HR.

Sometimes I wonder if I don't dig myself deeper, though. I wonder if I should just drop everything and everyone from the past and move along. Taking that to the very extreme would mean dropping everyone from the day of my birth up to the day that decision is made. It would mean breaking contact with everyone I know now, and include closing my account here, too. I don't think I'm capable of such a decision, but perhaps a date at some point in the past could be chosen as the cutoff, say, a date that was a few years ago.

I want stability, and I want to be able to forge friendships that aren't going to fall apart within five years. It's not just one thing I am worried about, it's a number of things:

I hope my old friends will recognize me now. As Linkin Park says "Things aren't the way they were before. You wouldn't even recognize me anymore. Not that cha knew me back then but it all comes back to me in the end." I got a letter from my lawyer today, and I need to re-examine a few things. Even if they aren't going to change, I want to make sure they are set up correctly. I know the first time I step foot in Frontier City, it's going to bring back memories of Busch Gardens Williamsburg, and I will probably come home in tears, hurting from the loss again. Don't get me wrong, I'll enjoy the day, but I wonder if maybe that's why I haven't put forth more effort to get the season tickets. I'm not going to let such a thing bar me from the park totally (I've been to two of the sister parks, Elitch's and White Water Bay both since my ex wife left).

May 2002:

I set foot into the gate, wondering what Elitch's held in store for me. I had seen the ads and I was curious. I rode all the coasters save for the inverted one that they hadn't finished yet. I sat down alone and ate dinner, then rode the giant drop ride again. It was fun, but the whole day I felt this emptiness. I realized that in a crowd I was totally alone.

It's just not the same anymore, though. Even with my second wife and her curiosity toward things, it's just not the same. It is difficult adjusting to her sometimes. It's not as frustrating as you might think, it just takes patience and effort. What I can't understand is why I am still unable to completely unlearn the habits I developed in three years of marriage, especially since it's been twice that long since that marriage fell apart. For the last four years I have known my current wife, and I wonder how it is that even over that time, I still could not unlearn some things. Maybe what I'm trying to change goes deeper than just a few years of my life--maybe it has been with me all along.

I feel like I'm trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I can't trim down the peg to fit, so I have to reshape the hole instead. My life is the hole, and the peg is...

I'll be fine after a while. Such is my life, going up and down like the rides in a theme park. I have slowly put it back together after a series of events wrecked it in 2002, and again in 2004. It is very important to remember that this is not the result of any one person's actions. The only common denominator throughout that time frame is me. That's right, just me alone.

I'm probably trippin' over nuthin'. But if there's anything going on with my ex that doesn't affect me or my daughter, I really don't want to know about it. It hurts too much, even now.