How I'm Living Now

When I'd last posted, prior to this recent 2026 upswing in blogging activity, I was living alone in my tiny apartment. I realize I need to update my readership on the various upheavals during the four year interval. I turned 50, spent most of my birthday on a plane to Luxembourg, where I met several online friends that I'd been chatting with during the lockdown years. Went to a few Nick Cave shows, then explored Vienna before heading home. I was pretty depressed, because I'd been so happy with the people I was meeting, but didn't feel like I would feel that level of connection again. At the time I was really on TikTok, and chatting with a few people from there. I had met someone who lived a couple of hours away, and we ended up in a relationship. This lasted about two years, which is the longest relationship I've been in aside from my marriage. But we weren't on the same page about a lot of things, and I realized after a while that this wasn't going to be a forever thing.

Then something happened to really complicate things, my ex needed help, and I ended up deciding to have her and her dog move back in with me. We drove cross country for three days to my apartment in Oregon. As you can imagine, my current girlfriend was not a fan of this idea, but I didn't regard our relationship as being at the level where either of us had veto power of the decisions of the other person. That was one of the things we weren't in alignment on. For me, things were at the level of "We're exclusively dating," and she was pushing me to make a marriage proposal.

I'm painfully aware that I made a decision more or less to go back to the past, but anyone who has been reading this long enough wouldn't be surprised by that. Anyway, split up with my girlfriend, and ended up buying a house with my ex-wife. We live together as platonic friends. It isn't the same as before, because we've both changed too much in the interim and had a lot of stuff happen. I don't really know what the future holds, if we're going to continue living like this till we grow old[er] or if this is just going to be for the next 7-8 years, if we will go our separate ways after I retire [and have to sell the house because I can't afford it on what I'm going to be taking home as a retiree.]

It's nice having her here, and I am totally enamored by the dog. I know it's made a lot of things more difficult for me, but I guess it's worth it. It's not always easy. But it's been good to have someone to help me through some of the things I've been dealing with. But it's interesting that loneliness is still a thing for me, though now I feel more like I have a home to be lonely in, instead of wandering the streets like a character in the world's most boring film noir.