Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.- Matt Groening

And a torrid, brief little affair began.

Once it was determined that, while her baby girl was precious, I was in no frame of mind to be a new "Baby Daddy," I was replaced by a Frito Lay truck driver.

Good for her.

My guilt about my girls was a fog that would not lift, and the financial wagon I had hitched my sputtering star to, was in a considerable rut.

One missed paycheck...then two. Can anyone say "Karma?"

I wasn't drinking but changed the way I felt through fist fulls of Benadryl. Complete with muscle spasms in my legs, and feeling like I was sleeping in jello. The end result of yet another great idea.

The job came to an end after a particularly nasty assignment. I was through with crime scene photos, diagrams, lying clients, and dirty prosecutors.

Defending the guilty had already begun to leave a decidedly sour taste in my mouth and finally, I had enough.

The underbelly of life. With it's pale; translucent, squirmy things, always digging under rocks, uncovering dirty little secrets...it can wear you down, and it certainly had an effect on my general outlook.

Depression was settling in, and I never saw it coming.

My Father was in his last few months of life, and I decided to move in with he and my step-mom and care for him, one last time.

I wanted to connect. To let him know, that through it all, he was still my Dad.

I mowed the lawn, I cooked, cleaned the pool, and cut his toenails. I took him to medical appointments...always waiting for the right time, to have "the talk", or to let him initiate it.

Both of us were too proud. It never happened.

Before Christmas, I moved out.

Moved in with a friend who had a vacant attic. Six blocks from my Mom's house. I may have visited once.

Spent my days on unemployment; playing disc golf, smoking weed, and trying to start up a P.I. business. (i.e. delusional, grandiose, pipe dream)

The week of Christmas, I got the phone call.

My Mother was dead. She had been sober twenty years. She started to drink again on a Monday and was dead the following Saturday.

Dear readers, if any of you smoke weed on a regular basis, do not, I repeat, do not, under any circumstances attend your Mother's funeral high. I did. I thought it would help.

I forgot it was an open casket.