Yup.
Keep your chin up Ric.
I still care about you and Theresa. Always

I am here as the who's all cried.

An optimist. Wow. Rare species these days. You go, bro.
R

It's all about runs of luck, you know? I can remember more bad luck then good and I wonder sometimes if this is normal? I mean, is it normal to have shitty luck.. is it more normal to have shitty luck than not?
Here I am.. waiting for my ship to come in.

I once asked my ten-year-old son if he knew he was loved. He looked at me like I'd grown a second head, and said, "Of course I do!"

Some of us parent ourselves through parenting our children. I didn't know I was one who did that until my children died and I had to parent myself all alone.

Go read Patrick Frank's "Prose-Poems 1 and 2...." He captures a lonely childhood too.

That's sad... I do think we all have an ideal (culturally specific) in our minds of how things should be (and may even actually be for some lucky souls), but that having shitty luck, as you say, is more normal than not. Degrees of shitty luck, of course, and you have had more than your 'share'... But reading OS, which at the very least is a slice of a more thoughtful demo than perhaps the average, seems to indicate that shitty luck is something of a norm. Yet we persevere, because it's either that or stop eating & die.

CHEERFUL THOUGHTS FOR A SUNNY MORNING - THANKS A LOT! (And I do hope for a big fat shiny lump of wonderfulness to crash thru your ceiling...)

Well Gina, I used to have stretches of good luck/high paying jobs. The best one was when I was a steel worker for 5 years. 1980 and I made $800.00 a week after taxes. My apartment rent was only $150.00 a month. Hell for that matter in 1973 I had a Union job and was making $3.00 an hour. Don't sound like much now but in 1973 min., wage was One Dollar and sixty five cents an hour.

Flash forwards all these eons later and I am.. struggling.

If it wasn't for my wife, things would be not so nice. I hate it.

Compound it all with a case of depression and it turns out to be a big hunk of silly putty with a ball of hair smushed in between.

Amen!!

:-(