Well, I effed *that* up.

Sooo… Cowboy is free again. Come get some sugar, ladies!
Apparently standing up for myself (something I’m not very good at to begin with) was the wrong thing to do in this situation. On the other hand, if standing up for myself and setting ground rules was a problem for her, I think she probably wasn’t for me after all. So, moving on…

Hey girl-who-I-was-dating-when-I-was-a-teenager, remember that time you ripped my heart out and stomped on it and crushed my will to live? Ah, good times…

The divorce is final, and me and my children have been officially buttfucked by the state of Kansas. What, you were expecting something else? There’s one upside to this whole fucking mess, my kids are going back to school. I can’t pretend I don’t have mixed feelings about this… School is a brutal place. Bullies abound, many teachers are jaded, some just suck, and the religious fucktards are out in force trying to destroy what little value the public school system has left. But until America starts taking education seriously and starts fixing the schools and giving it adequate funding, it’s the best option I’ve got. Homeschooling by a religious fucktard with a high school education is just not an option.

So now I find myself a single guy at 41 with a tiny apartment and six cats. Where did the six cats come from? I got sort of blindsided there. I adopted a stray cat who was hanging around my apartment. She turned out to be pregnant. Now I have six cats to get shots for, and spay and neuter. This while I’m struggling to find money to eat on. The good times just keep coming.

So I find myself back in the dating world. I’ve actually been there for a little bit. I’ve been through one girlfriend, another… I don’t know what the fuck that one was… and finally settled on what I thought was a fairly normal relationship.

I’m pretty easy to keep. I don’t have very many rules. I was thinking about this (online via Twitter) and I think they boil down to the following:

1. Don’t be batshit crazy.
2. Don’t be controlling.
3. Don’t violate my trust.
4. Don’t blow me off.

1. Don’t be batshit crazy.

You would think this one would be pretty simple, but my wife of 17 years couldn’t seem to get the swing of this one. To this day I don’t think she recognizes anything she’s done as in any way shape or form abnormal. I gave up trying to explain it to her years ago. In hindsight, I should have filed for divorce at the same time, but I waited another 7 years or so. My bad.

Everybody has crazy. Everybody. I have more than my fair share. Many of us recognize our own crazy and try to keep it in check. Mentally I think of it as having a mask I show to the outside world. I have a face everybody gets to see. It looks fairly normal, geeky, intelligent, and frequently a bit grumpy. I have the mask I show here. It’s filtered mainly to outrage about religious fucktards and right wing nutjobs trying to fuck us all over. Sometimes I let a little of my spiritual musings out here. Not as much lately. Dr. Cowboy is a mask. I’m anonymous for a reason. It’s also a persona. Don’t take it personally, I have a persona for everybody. The only person who knows what it’s really like in my head is me. I keep hoping I’ll find somebody who wants to find out what it’s like in here, but realistically, not gonna happen.

2. Don’t be controlling.

The ex also had an issue with this, and this rule is largely because of her. She has a spider like need to have this web of control over everything in her life. I’m guessing it has something to do with her dad leaving the family. Daddy issues. I think a lot of that came out at me. I tried to be supportive and helpful for years, but I finally had to give up. The crazy just got too thick and it was affecting my kids. Still is now, but I can no longer do anything about it. Actually I couldn’t do anything about it before, but at least now I have the legal backing to get my kids in school. That was about my only win.

My wife also exerted control over who my friends could and couldn’t be. I was a pussy and let her. I lost many good friends over the years. So earlier this year when a friend needed help and my girlfriend at the time had a problem with it, the relationship more or less ended. There were other factors, but that was a big one.

3. Don’t violate my trust.

This has happened twice so far since being separated. I won’t go into details, but it’s a big deal breaker for me. If I’m with you I will trust you to the ends of the Earth (figuratively speaking) until you give me a good reason not to. Revealing personal details you were privy to that others weren’t is a biggie. Twice now it’s happened and twice now it ended relationships. My ex did it in smaller ways, and for many years I let it go. I can’t do that anymore. I haven’t been cheated on that I’m aware of, at least not for 20 years or so, but if it happened, that would fall under this rule. Cowboy don’t play that game either.

4. Don’t blow me off.

This one was almost an afterthought. The situation I find myself in is largely because of this. My current girlfriend hasn’t—to the best of my knowledge—violated rules 1, 2, or 3. That’s why I’ve spent the last three weeks or so feeling really frustrated. The relationship started out really great, nothing held back, we were good together. Something changed along the way. I think it’s largely a result of a friend who violated my trust, but I can’t be sure. At any rate, that ended the friendship, but the damage is done.

I reached the point that despite how I felt about my girlfriend, despite the fact that I’ve known her for 11 years and been attracted to her on both a physical and intellectual level for that entire time, besides the fact that she seems to be in almost every way my perfect woman, I was ready to end it. Then she finally talked to me. I found out that there was damage as a result of my friend’s violation of my trust. Understandable, completely. But now she wants to be “casual” and “see where it goes”. What? What the fuck? What the fuck does that even mean?

I’ve been out of the dating game for a long, long time, so I get confused on terminology these days. If I were to hazard a guess, I would think that means that  we’re now no longer in a relationship, but we can go on dates occasionally, but we’re not exclusive. Exclusive implies relationship to me. Casual implies not a relationship. I put the question out in the twitterverse and the twitterverse seems to agree with me: my relationship is basically over.

But I went on a date with her last night. See, this confuses me. If she wants a bud, that’s fine, but let’s call it what it is. I’ll stop hoping for any kind of intimacy. I can look elsewhere. If we’re dating casually, then it’s largely the same as buds except I can hope for sex.

If I can’t date other people, then it’s a relationship. Relationships have rules. I don’t know what any of them are anymore, and it’s still frustrating the fuck out of me, and I can’t seem to nail her down on what her definition of our relationship is, other than we’re “dating casually” and “seeing where it goes”. Well whoop de fucking do. That’s a fucking cop out. That’s “I’m not really committed to making anything work, and if I get tired of you or find something I like better in that moment I’m gone.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that attitude, except it’s not for me. I’m 41, I’m at least halfway through my life, and I have less time left to live than I’ve already lived. My health is already going downhill, and I’ve fucked up the first half of my life pretty good. I’d like to get the second half right, and fucking around like that doesn’t seem like the way to do it. But then again… it’s HER…

I’m going to try to nail her down on some definitions later today, and hopefully find out if I’m free to look around or not. But for the record, I don’t really want to look around. I would like things to go back to how they were before, when we were in love. Yes, love. Or at least something that felt a lot like love. Then again, maybe I don’t really know what the hell love is. Look who I stayed married for almost 2 decades?

Dr. Cowboy on Facebook (again…)

So on a whim I created a Facebook page (again). As much as people who go “like me on Facebook puhleez!” annoy me, I would sort of like to get at least one like.

http://www.facebook.com/DrCowboyBlog

Will you be happy in heaven when your family and friends are being tortured for eternity?

I’ve been a little quiet lately. There will probably be an update on the reasons for this later… well, maybe. Anyway, Mr. Deity has put out a new Way of the Mister video, and this one is a smidge more blatant than most of his stuff, but very poignant.

It never fails to amaze me how the actions attributed to God are excused. We don’t understand his ways, blah blah blah. Why are the rules by which we judge God different than the way in which we would judge another human? The things God supposedly does would be considered crimes of the most horrendous nature if perpetrated by a human, yet we (figuratively) call it “Love”. I call bullshit. If God is real, he’s a bastard fucker and I’m gonna punch him in the teeth.

The search keywords continue to amuse me.

Not many people find this blog, but it’s interesting how some of them do.

The Gospel of Jeshua Cottontail, Savior of all Animalkind.

Happy Easter my friends.

The Great Big Gig in the Sky

And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes…

I look out of my window, and everything is in grey. I look for things I once I once enjoyed and I’m not interested. I wander around looking for something to fill the void, but there’s nothing, I just walk back and forth. Eventually I just sit down, and stare. Everything went sideways, everything I had made was destroyed. Everything I had hoped for was dashed. Everything I loved was taken.

There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.

The voice in my head tells me the hard truth. It’s not the world, it’s not them, it’s not her, it’s not him, it’s not supernatural. It’s me. It was always me.

Got amazing powers of observation…

Slowly I realize the lies I’ve been told. Lies I’ve told myself. Lies others have told me. Lies woven into the very fabric of society. Lies built into the nature of reality. In a brittle, desperate moment of clarity, I see through them all. No darling, I’m not. I can’t do anything. I can’t even do something. I break everything. That’s what I do. I think it might be what we all do. But I do have a talent: I fuck things up.

You shout and no one seems to hear.

I feel that desperate feeling deep down inside, that feeling “I need someone to know me. I need someone to understand me. I need someone to see all the way to the bottom of this cesspit of a psyche I have and know and understand what’s driven me my whole life, and what I truly need at the end of it all.”

And I got a strong urge to fly, but I got nowhere to fly to…

This is the danger moment. This is that moment when some turn to religion to fill this desperate emptiness inside. There’s a ready made solution to an age old human weakness, an imaginary friend who loves you, understands you, is always there for you, protects you, and will never hurt you.

The Lunatic is my head…

But no thanks darling, I’ve already got an imaginary friend. The difference between me and you is that I know he’s imaginary. Mine says some mean things, but not as mean as yours my dear. Mine doesn’t take those I love from me, but he will smack me out of my rut sometimes and set me straight. Fix me. It hurts sometimes, but he knows how to fix me, darling. He’s the only one who does.

I don’t need no arms around me…

I’m not alone in my weakness, the need to have someone understand me. The fact that I know when I’m gone, that this consciousness, this being whom I know more closely than any other, will someday be irretrievably lost wears on me. It makes me desperate for someone else to know what it’s like to be me. But you hurt me darling, you have to go now. You won’t make it to the bottom. Nobody has yet, only me.

And I don’t need no drugs to calm me.

So close… so close… so close… but it’s gone now. Floating away on a spring breeze, into the sky, never to be found again. I was so close…

Don’t think I need anything at all…

And now it turns out I was laying here the whole time, staring at the ceiling. Was it real? Was it all my head? Did any of that really happen to me at all, or was it someone else? Was there someone else driving the bus while rode shotgun? What is here and now is painfully clear, but what was and what could have been grows fuzzy and dim. I reach for the bottle in the drawer.

You rearrange me ‘till I’m sane…

And finally he comes again. He shouts this time. You idiot. You fucking moron. What did you think would happen? Why do you do this to yourself over and over and over? Did you really not see it coming? That was not for you. This is, darling, this is. My head leans back, and the pain begins. Such lovely, deep pain. I finally feel real, and the clarity returns.

Why I don't buy lottery tickets

It's like a cosmic lesson in probability. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/kansas-lotto-player-hit-lightning-buying-mega-millions-tickets-article-1.1054086

Why don’t you believe in God?

I’ve never really addressed this before. At least I don’t think I have. Here’s a brief glimpse into to how the deranged mass of neurons I call a brain works: Weeks ago I had a very brief (something on the order of three sentences) conversation with a friend along these lines. I finished the conversation today in my head. I do that a lot: I have entire conversations with other people in my head that they didn’t actually participate in. Oh, c’mon, you know you do it too.

If you ask the average atheist why he/she does not believe in God, the answer is simple: there’s no proof for god. Basically those of us who label ourselves as skeptics have adopted the scientific method as a way of approaching life in general. It goes something like this:

Fundie: There is a god. He is the one true God and he loves you. Through him only will you find salvation and enter the kingdom of Heaven.

Skeptic: Fine. Where is your proof for said god?

Fundie: Right here! The Holy Bible! This is the sacred word of God and the path to Heaven through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Skeptic: Right. We’ll get back to this Jesus character. So you have a book that you claim was written by a supernatural deity. How do you know that it was actually written by a supernatural being and not written by people?

Fundie: Because it says so right here in the book of I Corinthians.

Skeptic: That’s circular reasoning. The bible was written by a supernatural creator of the universe because it says it was. You have failed the burden of proof. Until you have provided evidence for your claims, the null hypothesis applies, and it is unlikely that there is a supernatural being at all. Your book was most likely written by 3000 year old goat herders with nothing but oral traditions handed down over centuries borrowed from other cultures and no working knowledge of modern science.

Fundie: Infidel! You shall burn in Hell! The Lord thy God shall cast thee into the pits of Hell and watch you burn for eternity!!!

Skeptic: Bring it. By the way, you’re drooling.

The problem though, is that it’s more than this. There’s more to it than just a simple lack of proof. The entire concept of God fails any kind of logical reasoning. For instance, take this example.

Something bad happens. It doesn’t really matter what. Something bad happens and it leads to a series of events. The end result of this chain of events is that someone gets hurt, probably me or you. This has happened to all of us, each and every one. The specifics of this particular example don’t really matter, because the same pattern has happened several times in my life, and probably several times in yours. Let’s go through a couple of scenarios now.

Scenario 1: God fucked up.

Let’s start with the following assumptions:

1. God exists.
2. God knows everything that is happening (Omniscient)
3. God does not see the future.
4. God controls everything (Omnipotent)

In this example, God started a chain of events. Possibly God thought that something positive would come of it all down the road (e.g. he meant well). However, things did not turn out the way he intended. Basically, God fucked with my life and screwed everything up. God is incompetent. He fucked up. Everything would have been better if he just stayed the fuck out of everything.

Scenario 2: God is an asshole.

Let’s start with these assumptions now:

1. God exists.
2. God knows everything that is happening (Omniscient)
3. God can see the future (Prescient)
4. God controls everything (Omnipotent)

Let’s forget the logical inconsistencies of God being all of these things at the same time, and suspend disbelief just long enough to finish the example. In this example, God knew full well that the outcome of the events he set into motion would be and the disaster that occurred as a result. He knew full well the pain waiting for me (or you) at the end of these events. Why would he do that? The fundamentalist would say some dumbass thing like “God works in mysterious ways” or “He was teaching you a lesson” or some other completely inane bullshit. If he’s all powerful, couldn’t he just simply pass said knowledge along? The fundie says “but you wouldn’t learn the lesson that way”. Okay, but if he designed and made me, why would he design me that way? Why not “design” me to just simply know? There’s only one inescapable conclusion to made here no matter how many logical rabbit holes the fundie goes down, God is a complete and utter flatulating butthole.

So, we’re left with two choices, 1. God is incompetent, 2. God is an asshole. Using the bible as a guide, I think we can safely say that #2 is a gimme, but the point of the whole exercise is this: If you proved God’s existence tomorrow, I would, of course, accept the existence of God, but I would not convert back to religion even then. There is no escape from the logical conclusion that if God exists, he is not worth my time. On the other hand, if we accept the null hypothesis that God does not exist, than all of this is nothing more than random bad luck, the kind that statistically happens to everybody all the time. No supernatural explanation is required for this, and I have no reason to be angry at any supernatural entities who refuse to prove their own existence to anybody. Nice, simple, clean, and so much easier to accept and explain.

And THAT is why I’m an atheist.

Pointless, but it amuses me

I noticed today’s keywords and chuckled a little.