A New Year

As 2013 approaches, I’ve come to several realizations.

Realization #1

A lot of people think I’m fake, selfish, and immature. They’ve completely written me off. These people were once close to me. So coming to this realization means that somehow it’s my fault they got that impression.

Realization #2

I can be fake, selfish, and immature. Some times more than others. But my accusers have a valid point.

Realization #3

A lot of my friends are fake, selfish, and immature. Sounds like a double standard for me to say that, since I share those qualities, but it’s just an observation I’ve made.

Realization #4

I have no real reason to care about any of the before mentioned realizations. I know I can be fake, selfish and immature. I can admit it, and I usually apologize for it. I try to foster true relationships. To err is human, to forgive is divine, said Shakespeare. My best friend is my wife, to her I have made an eternal commitment. I will never lose that friend. I have made no commitments to any other friends, nor have they made commitments to me. So in the end, I have to expect that I don’t have friends, so when someone acts like one, hell, bonus! It probably won’t last, but in that moment, someone was there for me, so I should take it like it is instead of doing what I have always done and acting like we’re BFF’s like high school. I’m pushing 30. People have lives. I have a life. The time for buddies is over.

Realization #5

It’s sad that I’ve had to come to all these realizations. But even the circle of friends I’ve known to be together the longest have problems, they fight, they’ve got their own drama. I don’t like drama. Sometimes I think it follows me, but I know that’s not true. When people say that drama follows them, that means they ARE drama. Recently I was afraid of a situation that has historically proven to start drama. It centered around one person. My fear of this drama… created drama. It did that because I called it drama. When something is labeled drama, it then becomes drama. Right now my ex-wife is creating major drama. I just called it drama, so it is. Now, let me amend that. Right now my ex-wife is being a tool, but it’s par for the course and I get to see my friend Kaytlin tomorrow and I’m leaving this shit town in less than 24 hours. Same situation, it just stopped being drama because I laughed at it and didn’t call it drama. So 2013 will be the year of no drama. I can say that word because it’s still 2012

Realization #6

I need to summarize the point of this blog post. I’m on the market for new friends. You may already think we’re friends, but we are actually aquaintances unless you KNOW we are friends. I’m on the market for people I can talk to about stuff, that actually call or text or email from time to time to see how things are. Right now, the best friend I have is a girl I’ve never met in person (best friend other than my wife of course). She texts me just to say hi, or good morning. And no, it’s not an affair, she’s gay and one of Holly’s best friends since high school. I want people to bitch to, not bitch about. If right now you’re saying I should just stop bitching, stop and think about how many times you’ve bitched about something in the last 48 hours. We all bitch. It’s who we are as humans. That’s what I want. Friends. I will make new ones in 2013, and reconnect with old ones. That is my goal for 2013.

-Jacob

Gas Masks

I feel like I’m stalling out. I take on  projects, but to complete them, I have to have more talent than I have. It makes me start wishing I could do cool stuff, like producing records. I tried to write a trance track tonight, couldn’t do it without picking up a guitar and by the time I had a basic two chords and 90 seconds of a song, three hours had passed. And that was the easy part. I was listening to A Dubstep Christmas, and I saw a cool photo of a dude in a white chemical suit. I thought, gee, I wish I could set up my living room, maybe buy an iPad, get a fog machine, put on the old chem suit and have some fun spinning some tracks. But why? No one cares, I’ve already got a band project going, and it all takes money that I now don’t have. I don’t even have a piano, the most basic instrument I need to write any music.

Then I go through looking at old photos. Same thing there. I end up seeing people that I wish I still talked to but for whatever reason they want nothing to do with me. It reminds me that I once had time to myself and a sense of style. My sense of style now involves not wearing my work boots and putting in my gages for the weekend so my ears don’t close up. And why have style? Where do I go other than work and church? Who am I trying to impress?

Now I’m watching the property brothers. How does a skater with a stay at home girlfriend look at houses with a budget of 400,000? I make a solid 60k per year, which is a good middle-class income, and I can’t even afford a second car, I can’t even get a loan for 10k! In order to get a credit card I had to put up $5k and backed the card with a CD of my own money.

The only thing I have to look forward to is seeing my shrink tomorrow and getting more valium. That’s starting to be a hobby, sitting by myself and listening to music and watching videos and just being in my own world. It’s been two months and UNM still hasn’t even applied my credits so I can get my AA sent to me. I can’t even look forward to school. I’m going to have to find something worth pursuing and soon.  This is getting old.

J

2013

So two years ago today, Holly and I arrived in Tampa, FL, with our newborn Stella, Lucas (who had been with my parents since my divorce in 2009), and an empty tank of gas and an empty wallet, but a brand new FAA license. We found a pad in downtown Tampa, nice little pre-furnished 2bd 2bth overlooking the international airport where I worked for United Airlines. Great gig, met some great friends. Definitely different from the military.

Then the Dyncorp calls me up, asks me to work at Patrick AFB for the Department of State for an outrageous salary, when working there was my dream since my pre-military days. So I gladly took the job. Again, we found a kick ass pad right on the beach, got to spend a lot of time with Gary Watkins and my cousins. Unfortunately, six months later I read in the paper that 60,000 space shuttle employees were getting laid off, and within 24 hours of reading that in the news, I got the call that I was being laid off too. Well, when you’ve got 60,000 people with clearances willing to work for half of what you’re making, you can’t really expect to hold on to your job. That kinda shook my confidence, although I was told it was a 6-month gig. But I was getting used to living back home. We had babysitting, a church, a beach 100 paces off our front door, we had it good.

Then I get a call a day later saying there’s a job offer at NAS Whiting Field with Sikorsky Aerospace. I remembered Milton was somewhere around Pensacola so in my mind I saw it as moving back to Destin. I found I was quite mistaken. It took us an hour and a half to get to Destin from our house in Milton and we didn’t know anyone in Pensacola. The beach was too long of a drive for a weekend. However, the special trips we made to Harbor Walk, Travis’s house, Dom’s birthday party, Billy Bowlegs, and who could forget the Thanksgiving party we through when we had 15 people sleeping in the house at one time, and then the hurricane party we threw that had me, Holly, Michelle, and Ryan jumping on a trampoline at night in the pouring rain in our underwear throwing wads of shampoo and shaving cream at eachother. We had some of our best times in that house, despite the remote location.

NAS Whiting Field, working for Sikorsky, was by far the best job I have ever had, bar none. I worked with great people, met great friends, had the most kind-hearted boss I could have asked for, and an abundance of talent to learn from and willing to teach me all around. I worked there for over a year and actually loved every day I came to work. When word came down that the T-34’s were being phased out and we would be on a 90-day TDY to Corpus Christi to help them get ready for the T-6’s, I was ready to go anywhere with this company. My confidence was at an all time high.

Then we get to Corpus Christi and everything turned to shit. Everything. We had 16 people and only two rental cars. They put us in a fleabag hotel 30 miles from base and refused to reimburse gas costs. I was elected union steward for our detachment and in the first two weeks had to referee two fights (free beer at the pool for happy hour, it happens). The city was dirty, the restrooms in the hangar smelled like no one had ever flushed the toilets, ever. The planes were dirty and as I discovered the first time I hopped in one to crank it up, not maintained well at all. Pets crap on the beach and no one cleans it up, our house was in a barely decent neigborhood and we paid $200 more per month for it than the house we had in Milton that was 500 sq ft bigger. And a $200 water bill? We knew we had to go. Then we get told we are no longer on TDY, offered a job and told accept it or be laid off. Well I said hell no, I’m going back to Florida. Then they came back with a counter offer, a promotion and a CDI stamp (USAF 7-level basically). The pay was great, so I accepted. Everything went further and further downhill and has been since.

So I put a resume out. L-3 at NAS Pensacola calls, offers to match my pay and job title to come work for them on T-45s. Then General Atomics out of San Diego calls, offers to match my pay and make me a tech writer. I end up turning San Diego down only because of the high cost of living and accepted a job with L-3. My start date for L-3 is this coming Monday, the 26th. Yesterday, a month after turning General Atomics down, they call me with a counter offer, asking what it would take to hire me. I quote them some off the wall yearly salary and a moving package. They accept. So as I type this, I’m about to go in to work in the morning to out-process and bring my toolbox back home. We plan to move to Pensacola because it’s a nice steady job. But some things are tugging at me.

The job in San Diego is a jeans and button up, 9-5 job in a big city. That’s always been a dream of mine. I never clean up. In the Air Force I was made fun of for being metro, I cleaned up more in the military working long hours with little time to myself way more than I do now working steady 40-hour shifts. I have no style. For a while there I was getting tattoos, playing in bands, dating (which I don’t miss, but it was still helping me to define myself), then it all stopped when I got married. Why does that happen? I accepted a job with L-3 because I’m a decent mechanic and this is a decent job that pays enough to live comfortably. Work, come home, eat dinner, catch the news, respond to a few emails, go to bed, repeat process all over again.

I married a girl that’s just like me. We both have ambitions and we’re both young. It seems like by default married with a family means “settle”. I only need 20 more hours to get my pilot’s license. I should already have my AA and be partially through with my BS degree if UNM would hurry up and send me my degree. I’ve written an album 90% of the way and then just stopped. I find myself going around angry at who knows what, and end up either pacing around smoking and wanting to punch holes in the garage door, or I take my valium and curl up and listen to Nirvana and just think about stuff. Why is it that I always look back and see my accomplishments but wherever I am at the time I am never satisfied?

Everyone asks me when PTSD is brought up, what caused it? A doctor here in Texas didn’t even let me answer once, she just started into a sermon on how Jesus loves me and that killing in battle is not murder (yeah… I know, I’m laughing too, but I didn’t argue as she meant well). Well the truth of it is, I’m embarrassed to even admit that I have it. I have my fellow servicemen, and the great friends I’ve made at the local DAV lodges who REALLY saw some EFFED UP stuff and have PTSD from it. Art, my “big brother” as we call eachother, drinks himself to sleep at night because the last scene in Stanly Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” was a reality for him. Why do I have PTSD? Not from Iraq. I miss Iraq. I want to go back. If something broke, I fixed it. If there was a need, I filled it. Bad guys were after us and we were all on the same team. I felt like I was a part of something. When I got home, back to the states, I hated it. I started drinking constantly, trying to escape the reality of reality itself. I was married to someone I wasn’t in love with, I was scared to be a father, and to top it all off the same military that gave me a sense of family started invading my private life and generally turned me into a basket case. Nope, I have PTSD because I had my entire life taken away from me in the course of about 4 months, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Now, I reject all authority, refuse to be held down, and have a number of things that at any time can cause me to lose my freaking mind and erupt into a total mental breakdown out of nowhere. But that’s beside the point. The real point here is that I’m about to hit 30 and I think it’s about time that I shake off some dead weight and just fly. I’ve always been my worst enemy, and when I look back at the mistakes I made, they were stupid mistakes that I made that were avoidable.

So I guess moving forward, the conclusion I’ve come to is that I kinda need to back to being myself. I’m cocky, arrogant, and a complete prick. That’s why I’ve been posting so much about deleting people on Facebook lately, because I know I need to shake off dead weight, but I feel bad. Well I think my spine has been slowly growing back and I’m finding my feet again. Whiting Field showed me how things SHOULD be, and working here in Texas forced me to have to stand my ground. I think I have now come full circle and am back to being me again. As as it happens to be, since I’ve come to this conclusion, the people that matter the most to me have come back into my life right when I needed them to. So that’s a good sign.

I don’t know whether or not I’ll take the job in San Diego, I think I’m gonna give L-3 a shot first, but I think this will be my last mechanic job. I think it’s time for me to drop the chains and fly.

FAA License

So tomorrow I’m going to get my final paperwork for my FAA Airframe and Powerplant license. Monday I’m going to Nashville, TN for the course at Baker’s school of aeronautics. Then hopefully I’ll finish the course by the 20th, when I start my job at Emerald Coast Aviation, working phase dock for Hurlburt’s 130’s. Good times. I’ve been applying to civilian companies hoping to get started on my IA (inspection authorization) rating so I can do more inspecting/qa work, mainly just to get more on the civilian side.

What I find significant about all this is that the A/P course completion is the civilian equivalent to an Air Force 7-level. So in two weeks, I’ll be a 7-level, without being bound by an enlistment, without having to wear a uniform, without having to worry about my personal life being smeared all over my workplace, without having to go through ALS, without worrying about having to deploy, without ever being on 12’s, or not being paid for it at least. Needless to say, I’m excited. :-)

-Willey

Devia Noctis by Van Driessen

So I was depressed one day, and I sat down to write a song. I had two themes in mind, I wanted it to be like 20 minutes long, like an entire piece, but I could only do so much before I fell asleap and lost the mood. The recording was put together in a hurry, and eventually I will finish it. Basically, as it is, it just sort of re-creates the mood I was in at the time. I'm better with conveying emotion over music than I am with words. Anyways, here it is:

Devia Noctis by Van Driessen

I will always love you