But They Gave You A Hat! (The Great Birthday Bust, x2)

This is one of a series of vignettes I am publishing as part of “The Boundary Project”: the process I am undergoing in which I develop personal boundaries. This is the incident where in writing about it many years after it occurred, I finally at long last connected the dots on why this — and a lot of other shit — happened…and more odd bits of recovered personal history. 

 

Shut the F%*@ Up…PLEASE!

Getting taken hostage by “talkaholics” is a recurring theme in my life, and as part of the Boundary Project I am learning to identify these types and not let myself get within striking range, and in the event that I inadvertently do end up getting captured, work out a method to jailbreak myself and a protocol for avoiding getting trapped again. 

 

The Battle For The Living Room

This is “Case Zero” in which I began to enforce the new boundaries I am building. Chi was now getting zapped as if running into electric fencing where there had been nothing before, as I got more and more committed to clearly setting my intentions and asserting my newly-developing boundaries. 

 

The Boundary Project

As a first step in my recovery from surviving and extricating myself from an abusive, toxic marriage, I immediately set about finding an answer to the pressing question of “How in the f*ck did I let that happen to me?!”, and its logical follow-on of “How do I stop this shit from ever happening again?”. 

 

“Raining, Crying” and “Lullaby For Terrorists”

The agonizing situation persisted with the tug-of-war of priorities between my need to have Chi out of my house and out of my immediate personal life, and the big-picture need to get as much of our vast repertoire recorded at broadcast quality; with the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head as to whether the Hawaii thing would actually come through, or if Chi’s criminal record for abusing me would send that sword crashing down on my head as my financial situation got more dire by the day thanks to Chi’s continued occupation of my balance sheet and concurrent failure to secure any sustainable employment. 

 

Music and Me? Now What?

As I mentally distance myself more and more from the toxic marriage and consciously project the reality of ending it, I explore the topic of my relationship to music sans Chi.  

 

The Holding Pattern

The strong, stable creative phase that Chi had been in since around May 2013 was still ongoing, and this put me in the untenable position of being trapped between wanting to complete the process of preserving the creative output that we had produced up until now while developing and recording the new material he was continuously composing; and wondering how much more damage and stress I could withstand. Is this even worth doing at all, given that I am trying to do it with the human equivalent of antimatter? 

 

A Crossroads

I finally “get it”…

 

First Strike and the Missing Link

I was still at the steep end of the infinitely frustrating, crazymaking learning curve trying to figure out audio engineering and then added insult to injury with another maddening ordeal of learning how to do drum programming while Chi kept on inundating me with more new and increasingly complex music he was composing. This was also the point where it became clear that there was a vitally important missing link that would enable me to overcome some major technical issues that were making progress unnecessarily difficult. 

 

One More Reason Why He Has To Go

Chi has been behaving exceptionally well recently.  There are occasional flare-ups, but they are brief and resolve quickly. Nevertheless, he still has to go, and this is why…