A Grateful Thank You

The Family Turkey...Yum!

How was everyone’s Thanksgiving Holiday? I do hope you had a peaceful day, perhaps spending time with family or friends, perhaps reflection alone and offering gratitude to the cosmos…however it went, I hope it was a good one for you and yours. The Family Chalmers had a very mellow Thanksgiving on The Farmhouse Estate. It was going to be just the four of us but we had a couple of  "refugees", a friend of our son who has no family in California joined us as well as a lost, stray beautiful pit bull that wandered onto the property! Since we made a well cooked 12 pound turkey with cornbread dressing, cranberries, pomegranates, potatoes, biscuits with pumpkin and blueberry pies, we had a bountiful to share! It was a family effort to cook the feast, each of us preparing something unique. I made the turkey, basting it with butter, garlic and sage. The kids made potatoes and salads, my wife is a master baker, she made the pie! We set forth our family feast on the rarely used dining room table, we used real dishes too! The house was toasty and smelly so good, the music was groovy and the mood was an easy, relaxed vibe. At last when we ate, it was hearty and with good appetites! The turkey so juicy, the potatoes so creamy, the fruit and salad and the wine so sweet…it was a treat to share it with those I love most often, at home, the four of us, plus a couple of visitors, all gave thanks.

Maggie with the stray visitor...

There have been other great Thanksgiving celebrations in my life, some not too wonderful ones too. Holidays have that potential to bring out the best or the worst, depending on the time, the place, the people…I have selected a few of my favorites which I romance in my memories, Thanksgivings so wonderful they’ll forever live as glorious moments in my life.

A Perfect Thanksgiving in 1998, Arkansas

 I have let go of the ghost of those not so great holidays too, those painful Thanksgivings are like the rotted carcass of the turkey we ate long ago, they’re meaningless and irrelevant to the present holiday. I like this tradition we’re starting, since relocating to California, I like the notion of it being just the four of us (although I wish my older son was here too)…and as the kids grow older, as they start families and relationships, let’s keep the holiday here at our home. Maybe. Maybe not, there’s something to be said for arriving to a house clean and smelling good…being treated as a guest, helping if I can, eating like a prince, cleaning up the table and then…we get to leave and don’t have to clean up the big mess! Maybe we’ll alternate, that seems fair, right?

Thankful For My G+ Community...

As this Thanksgiving holiday passes and I reflect upon that which I am thankful for in my life over this past year, one of the elements I am most Grateful for is having this community to support, exchange ideas and feelings and otherwise get to know…it’s been a great year for meeting new folks on-line and some of you I suspect will be friends to me for a long time to come. I only hope that I too can be a good friend to you as well. I came to this platform as something of a refugee from Facebook, I don’t care for that site and since Zuckerberg hates my guts, it’s best I’m not around those parts, right? I adore the Google philosophies, I think their products/services are quite nifty and there are so many great individuals and communities here, so much potential for change (for better or worse) and all in all, for me it’s been a grand experiment in social networking with mostly positive results. Since relocating back to California, for the better part of more than a year, I had an excellent time promoting my book, making friends, helping others, finding help for myself…and I even fell in love too!

The Farmhouse on Thanksgiving Morning 2015...

In conclusion, with this Thanksgiving weekend upon us, as the mad shoppers shop and the football fan get fanatical, I’m simply taking it easy…listening to music, playing with the kids and eating left-overs is a day well spent in my book. I’m getting a lot of work done, by the way, I’m finally making some positive progress with the audio production (although my voice is cashed) and I hope to have the audio files ready by mid-December; either way, they’ll be done and that will be that, right? Again, I wish to extend my most humble, Grateful appreciation for your friendship, your support and interaction over the last so many moments…as we slide towards the end of another year, as things change and the future holds we sometimes desire, things we sometimes fear…I’m here and you’re there, so be it, my friend, be in peace.

Jump Into The Fire

Valerie Anne and her daddy...11/18/1983

I had several ideas for what I was going to write about this week, for today’s blog article but none of those ideas came together as I like them to…one article is about “Life Before The Internet” and the other one “Life During Wartime” were both chock full of anger…but it wasn’t anger for the right reasons. In the former article, about life before the on-line realm, my anger was misdirected at this strange media apparatus of the Internet and the latter article was wrongly angered with the state of our culture and society during these troubling times we are living through. The anger inside, the driving force for these articles is my still livid pain for the murder of my oldest daughter. It happened a long time ago, in 2001 and this past week, on Tuesday the 18th of November, was her birthday; she would have been 32 years old if she wasn’t dead since she was only 17 years old; one might hope that after 14 years, I would have moved past this most awful event. I expected me to get over it, but I haven’t, not really, not entirely. I feel selfish too, there are so many others who suffer worse…there are so many very positive things in my life despite this horrendous pain…here I am feeling sorry, a little…but mostly, I’m fucking pissed off!

In therapy over the years I‘ve identified and worked on the sources of this rage, this intense anger I have…I was pissed off at the fucking kids who gave my daughter the date rape drugs, seven doses of GHB which paralyzed and eventually killed her. Those fucking kids then left her alone in a bath tub, they cleaned up their mess and ran off into the night, one of them making a random call to 911. I was pissed at the fuck-head who allowed the condo unit to be rented to under age kids using stolen identifications. I was livid with the cops and their lack of concern, the half assed investigation that revealed nothing. I was done with the whole fucking lot of them when the lame prosecutor slapped the condo owner with a fine…a $250 fine for death of my daughter. That’s a lot of rage, that’s a lot of pissed off feeling…my poor girl never got justice, we never got justice, just ice and heart break. Over time, however, this anger started to feel like a hot coal I was holding, my intention was to throw it somehow, hurt them like I was hurting, punish them for what they had done…but in the end, with nobody to throw the hot coal at, I was the only one who was getting burned. I learned to let that hateful anger go and I know better now.

The Family Chalmers, Thanksgiving, 1998

In subsequent years, after I untwisted the macabre ball of fury I had for those involved in the murder, my anger turned closer…to my daughter’s mother. I harbored such hate, such disgust and contempt for this woman who I saw as pure evil…she had fucked with Valerie’s life since the day she was born. This psycho chick used our daughter as a decoy in drug deals, she exposed her to an awful lifestyle of drugs, sex and wild, most inappropriate behavior. My daughter’s mother prevented my daughter and I from seeing one another from my daughter’s 2nd birthday until her 15th birthday, telling my daughter all sorts of lies about me…I was in prison, I joined a cult in Nevada, even that I was dead! None of it was true, none of it was real but my daughter, just being a child, didn’t know any better. I was so pissed at her mother for allowing our daughter t go to South Carolina with a bunch of kids our daughter didn’t really know…her mother never even met them once, she didn’t even have a phone number for them! I was beyond livid when, after our daughter was murdered, her mother wanted a $1,000 from my family for the ashes…aside from the fact I had paid for the transportation of her remains back to North Carolina, the cremation process, the memorial service and then was told that I would not allowed to be in attendance at the ceremony in North Carolina. Indeed, this was a volcano of rage that fumed, boiled and exploded from my soul every so often…it was difficult to get it under control.

Eventually, and oddly enough, my anger for her mother started to wane when I started having this reoccurring dream about my daughter coming to me in tears…she was pleading with me, I had to try to save her mother, I had to help Valerie save her mother and so I started looking for her…not easy to do after 8 years, especially when one is looking for somebody who has lived “off the grid”, survived on false identities and moved around every six months or less…I looked for almost a year, searching from North Carolina to Atlanta to Michigan even back to Chicago…she was, at some point, in all those places but I didn’t find her until about 3 years ago; I sent a letter, a letter of peace and love to another random address and unlike almost all the other letters, this one didn’t come back. I thought it was thrown away, I imagined it was another bogus address but not six weeks later, again in a seemingly random way, I ran into a very old mutual friend of ours who recently saw this psycho chick of a mother; she was living in a halfway house for recovering addicts and ex-cons in Richmond, Virginia. The story was she had an awful fight with her lesbian lover of 20 years and one of them ended up dead; the other was in the rehab center. I never heard back from her, but I stopped having the reoccurring dreams too. I also found that my rage, my pissed off anger had dissipated…evaporated when I wasn’t really looking. I felt sympathy, empathy for this woman so evil, I felt sorry for this psycho chick because she was the only other person on Earth who knew exactly what it’s like to lose this particular child. My anger subsided and though I still consider her accountable for her actions (or inaction), I also know she is simply a frail human being with a fucked up life of her own…let the hate go, burn the anger like a candle until the wax of hate is all but gone…when I think of this woman now, it’s with both a tender empathy and a little appreciation even; she did give birth to our amazing child and that’s something I will always be Grateful.

Valerie, Cassidy & Julian, July, 1999

Thinking I had tamed these demons, I shackled these angry monsters to the dungeon in my mind but when this time of year rolled around, only a few years ago, right there next to the intense sadness and remorse, there was that anger and rage again. I tried to ignore it at first, I thought it was ghost remnants from past years but it was as real as the sadness, it felt as dangerous as the pain. I was no longer seeing a traditional therapist, I started to visit with a Zen master at a nearby temple so I shared this personal event with him. He smiled and said the one I was angry with was not outside myself. That hit like a ton of bricks, it was so dead spot on it nearly crushed me. As angry as I was with the cops for not getting her justice or with the kids who put my daughter in this situation, it was nothing next to this rage. Despite my long time hate, mistrust and painful dealings with my daughter’s psycho mother, she is, after all, a mentally ill person and who am I to call the kettle black? This last stream, this deepest river of disgusting anger was all mine. It was for me, I was pissed at myself for allowing any of this, for allowing ALL of this to happen. It was my fault that I didn’t find this child when she was young, it was my fault that I didn’t just take her when we did at least find one another. It was my fault that I didn’t know enough about her life when she was going away to South Carolina, had I known I would have changed her mind. I was pissed that even in her death I let her fucking mother manipulate the matter, I was so filled with rage that I couldn’t change matters, even in the slightest way, to change the outcome. That anger was bubbling, molten and a hot burning realization that I failed as a father, I couldn’t protect my little girl. I couldn’t live with this, between the sad, painful tragic emotions of the loss and these sharp, bloody, explosive angry feelings of rage, it was too much for me to handle. Four years ago (2011) it got so bad that I almost did myself in, I almost gave up but I didn’t…because my dearly departed daughter would not let me, I averted disaster.

The Pain & Sorrow Still Gets Me...

That anger is the most difficult to let go, the rage I have for myself is unrelenting and strikes when I least expect it…like when I sleep. In a dream, where I don’t have full control, these demons lash out still and it keeps me on my toes, it keeps me angry too. I wake up and I’m angry. Angry and sad. I walk through the day, doing things the typical way but I’m furious inside, my brown eyes red with rage. The best recourse I have is avoiding others and all things, isolation is a good form of protection and preservation. That’s what I’ve been doing, to the best of my ability both on-line and in my real life, I’ve been avoiding most everyone, everything I can…I don’t want to let my accidental anger explode on them, nor myself for that matter…so I am spending time by myself…but I’m not doing much. Not vey productive, no motivation for even domestic chores or watching the silly NetFlix. I try to read and my mind wanders, I catch up on the news and my rage flares so I go for long walks alone and take more naps than normal. This will pass, it always does and I know from both experience and that which I’ve been told…nothing lasts, cloud burst don’t last all day, the night is always followed by the sun and I know this…but while I’m wallowing, it’s like throwing salt on a forest fire. I’ll be better, soon and someday, I’ll feel better and when I do I’ll be sure to let you know…but in the meanwhile, it’s probably best everyone just take a step back and fuck off!

Mozzie the one-eyed Rat Dog and Me...11/18/2014

These days, however, as I remember her birthday…the 14th one without her, my anger and rage is more under control. I know what to expect and I work to minimize the impact on those around me (and myself) as well, the period for these feelings is getting shorter. I used to feel this way for weeks, now it’s a matter of days. I don’t expect it to ever really vanish, however, nor would I want it to go away; sometimes it’s good to keep a little anger in the belly, one never knows when it might become useful for some reason.  I have been hanging out on my own, laying low from everything except that which is directly in front of me and I anticipate this mood to continue a little while longer. It’s finally the weekend and the family is planning a trip up to “Sac-City” (Sacramento, California); my wife is scoping a potential job opportunity up there and we’re going to explore the area. I look forward to relocating from this farmhouse estate, we really don’t like the “greater” Modesto area but it’s not time for us to make the exodus to the mountains yet…a larger city, with more culture and accouterments would be a better fit for our family. In the meanwhile, it’s just me here all alone, wishing I had somebody to get stoned with, cry a little and perhaps have wild abandon sex for while. Alas, it’s the pet animals, house plants and me…big party, eh? I thank you for taking the time to read this pithy article, it’s not all that insightful, but it’s the honest truth about where I am, what I’m feeling…take it or leave it, it’s all I am today.

When I Paint My Masterpiece

When I Paint My Masterpiece

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble

Ancient footprints are everywhere

You can almost think that you’re seein’ double

On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room

Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece

She promised that she’d be right there with me

When I paint my masterpiece

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum

Dodging lions and wastin’ time

Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ’em

Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb

Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory

When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese

Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody

When I paint my masterpiece

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola

Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

I left Rome and landed in Brussels

On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried

Clergymen in uniform and young girls pullin’ muscles

Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside

Newspapermen eating candy

Had to be held down by big police

Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent

When I paint my masterpiece

Bob Dylan, 1971

Bob Dylan circa 1963...

That old Bob Dylan song is one I’ve been hearing much of my life…The Grateful Dead used to play it regularly and that’s version I like most (Bob Weir sings it with such passion) but any version is good if you ask me because it’s one of those tunes that frames something about me, something about my life…it’s a song, like so many others, that I strongly identify with and one that has changed its meaning over the years. It used to be about goals, about where I saw myself in 10, 20 years…when I was 20 years old, it’s the song that I thought described where and what my life will be when I’m 40 years old. I was wrong, life turned out completely different for me. Yet this song remains a rally cry of sorts, something I tell me when the chips are down, when I struggle to win but fail miserably…this song offers hope, redemption for me…someday everything is going to be different, when I paint my masterpiece.


The difference for me now is that I’ve come to realize that my life, perhaps a little like Van Gogh, Poe, Kafka or Thoreau has been spent, for the most part, in relatively obscurity. I am not famous nor do I have oodles of money, I have created hundreds of artistic things over the last 40+ years, alas none of it has amounted to very much. Yet as I pass the halfway mark in my life expectancy, I have a better understanding of what I need to do to obtain happiness and truthfully, it has absolutely nothing to do with painting my masterpiece.

My first book...my masterpiece?

 For all I really know perhaps I’ve already created that masterpiece…it could be the music I wrote in the 1980s, maybe some of the wild, infamous events I organized and operated during the 1990s…maybe it was my first novella (“SCHLEP”) or my most recent book (“My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On”)…but I suspect my best work is not a work at all, but something I did, something I am still doing…being a great father, a passionate partner, a good son, a decent friend…that is most likely my greatest contribution to humanity. I know and understand that I’ve changed the lives of others, for the better for the most part and even more importantly, I’ve tamed and slayed my own demons which is far more significant than something I created artistically. Perhaps, like those other famous artistic losers, my work will be appreciated when I’m dead but in the meanwhile, I’m not banking on it for my happiness, dig?


In a strange way I hope I die before I know what is my masterpiece…I don’t want to be there when or more likely, IF my work is ever gauged by what is good and what is not and what is masterpiece piece and what is shit…it’s very much all the same to me, in the now, when I’m doing the work it’s simply an expression of what I’m feeling or thinking or imagining…to declare anything better than anything else for me is like saying one emotion is better than the other…while that might seem true too, it’s not.

A recent sketch I made...a masterpiece?

 The hate or loss is not as pleasant as love or compassion, but all of those emotions are elements in my landscape, they are all responsible for shaping me and guiding me or blocking, hindering my progress…I don’t know if it’s true for everybody, but for me it is…I need to validate and honor every single of my emotions if I am to truly feel whole; this means the negative, painful stuff and the happy, feeling good stuff, ALL of the emotions count. It can certainly be argued that one particular idea might be executed with a better technique than another, I may write something more clearly than something else, a photo might be less effective than a painting to capture a feelings sometimes…this much is true and I suppose a masterpiece could be gauged in that way too…but for me, as the artist, there’s not much difference because, like I said, it all starts with my heart, the heart of my art is my complex emotional landscape.

Sitting in my redesigned office/studio today...

Lastly, as this dismal month trudges onward we have an out-of-town guest this weekend…my wife’s mother (my favorite mother-in-law) is here in California to help celebrate my wife’s 40th birthday…which is today, the 13th of November…indeed, my wife has now been with me more than half of her life! We are planning a day trip for tomorrow (Saturday), the final destination is still unknown but I think she’s leaning towards a trip to Santa Cruz over a visit to Petaluma…either way, it’s sure to be a splendid time. I am not having an easy time with the production of the audio book, it’s going much slower than I anticipated. Without getting into details, it’s simply been a series of interruptions followed by poorly executed sessions that yield far less results than expected. I have hope next week will be better, now that I’ve redesigned my home office/studio to better encourage creative productivity. Either way I have both motivation and ambition for this project, I’m quite enjoying the recording of spoken words. This work reminds me of the great Ken Nordine and his iconic audio show “Word Jazz” which is fueling my thoughts about producing a podcast program, one that ties into the new book to help promote the title; without giving it away, it’s got a lot to do with music, spirituality and mental illness, it’s a work of fiction and it comes out on 11 August 2016…I can say no more! 

In conclusion, dear readers, as this blog series starts to draw to it’s inevitable close, I want to ask you to please subscribe to this blog, my YouTube channel or click here to send an email and join “On The Margin”, a quarterly newsletter from my publisher, The Intrepid Editor Press Ltd.

Looking to the future?

I am not sure what the future holds, but I will be going dark after the new year so that I can finish the book and other projects; when I return to this on-line community (and I always do…so far), I’m not sure what platform I’ll be utilizing (for sure not Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat, probably not G+ or LinkedIn either…so, stay in touch)! In the meanwhile, as the rain continues to fall in the San Joaquin and the air is chilly, cool, damp and winter crisp with steely gray and white clouds glowing in the always setting fat and lazy sun, I wish you each very well, please do take care of you and yours, stay safe and we’ll see you next week!

It’s Getting Dark, Too Dark To See…

This time change thing is stupid and it sucks and it serves no good…it’s like cutting off six inches of a blanket at one end and sewing it onto the other end with expectations of somehow making the blanket longer but it changes nothing! A leftover from agriculture days, perhaps, but more like a manipulation for the convenience of keeping people inside, isolated, glued to their televisions or computers or smartphones…because, after all, it’s dark out earlier, that means scary things, fear keeps us inside, lock the doors and draw the curtains! I don’t need the fucking time changing to make me do that, to make me feel those feelings…this time of year, they seem to come naturally for me. November, November, November...despite it being my wife’s birth month (on the 13th), it’s one of the worst months of the year for me; next to April, November is the most painful month for me. It has been for many years, all my adult life, since my first child, a daughter was born on the 18th of November in ’83, I get to feeling morose, maudlin, sad and just blah…I think Depression resides in November.

The Family Chalmers. Thanksgiving 2014

I know Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday, setting aside the bullshit myth it’s based upon, it’s a nice idea for offering gratitude, sharing food and wine with family and friends, starting the final weeks of the year together is a nice concept. Naturally in practice, all too often, it’s complicated with family drama, with bad feelings and sad memories. It makes no difference if we went to my wife's family gathering or my family's gathering (we tried to swap years), there was always discomfort, ill feelings and stress. A lot of stress. I have a better time when we host the event. I enjoy the cooking, the eating, the games and the music. In 20 years together my wife and I hosted only one Thanksgiving gathering in 2013 and both our families were there...it went better, it was fun and we'll never do it again! Last year, like this year, however, it’s only the four of us…the wife, our two kids and me…and that’s even better. I still don’t like the other days, these short dark days of November. I get off my sleep routine, I get mixed up by the shorter daytime hours, I lose track of when it is and there's so many emotions blowing through me in November. We live in California now, so there’s a better climate, I don’t feel shut in by the colder weather and I smile more because there a fewer cloudy days (we get so much sunshine, that simple clouds, especially those that drop rain, are a welcome sight)! But even the change of latitude adjustment of my attitude fails me many days during November…it just hurts, November just hurts my heart.

I get by with an increased focus on my core foundations…my family, my work, my well being and my dreams. The family is elemental, it is what grounds me and keeps me moving forward. The devotion I have to my children, more than any other factor, inspires hope and a will to thrive, a reason to live sometimes. My work is my personal definition of blissful activity, it’s doing what I love most to do and getting into it deeply, so deep I lose myself and become a part of the work. My well being, my body and temple, the carbon based plasma unit that carries my soul around is very important to me. I need it to last a very long time, in the best possible condition and to that aim, I find a sense of peace in caring for my body, in exercise and meditation, in good eating, solid rest and mindful living.

 My dreams are who I am and all that I’ll ever be so I dream big, bold and go for the golden road of devotion every time; I have lived a life by making my dreams into reality and I’m not about to stop dreaming now…if anything, I dream more, I dream better and my dreams are more rewarding than ever before…I use these dreams to carry me, to lift my heart like a kite, sail beyond the tall trees of confusion, the dark forest of pain and lift me away to feel better again, it’s getting better again every day.

This is how I cope, how I manage to get by during these increasingly darker days over the next few months…I’ll bob up and down with my emotions, I always do and I know this, I expect this…I’ll feel better between my birthday and New Year’s, the start of another year is always inspirational and motivates me to get things accomplished. I’ll feel better again towards the end of February and into March, when it’s noticeable the weather is shifting, when the spring starts to spring it puts a little more spring in my step too. After April, which sometimes can last until June, I’ll re-enter my favorite part of the year (June-October) and next year (2016) is going to be a busy, active year with the next book out in August, we hope to break ground on the colony project, I believe The Chicago Cubs will dominate baseball perhaps into post-season play and even the election cycle can be stimulating! However, between then and now there’s still a lot of shit to get through and so that’s what this all about…getting through the shit of life.

This past week or so, however, the shit of life has not been too bad, truthfully, I cannot complain about the progress I’ve made with the production of the audio book, the release of the Kindle edition (on 01 November 2015) and healing the wounds and rifts I’ve felt with a few of my loved ones recently. I’m taking this positive wave and riding it for as long as I can, perhaps it will help carry me until my birthday! I know there’s going to be bumpy parts of the path over the next so many weeks, I know I’ve been through them before so I have reason to believe I’ll make it through them well enough this time too but I still hate November. I still hate the time change switch-a-roo and I’ll feel a lot better when this time of year is finally over so I can get on with easy smiles and breezy miles of good feelings without effort. Working to find a smile, digging deeply to find happiness sometimes sucks…but I do it, we all do it because it helps us stay sane. Still, that doesn’t mean we have to like it, does it?

Yeah, I hate the sun being gone by the 17th hour and not rising until almost 8th hour…stupid fat lazy fucking winter Sun.

Thanks for reading, be well and take care!