As I said in a previous post women love love. I know there is a lot to such a statement and I want to be as fair and open as possible. I don’t mean it necassarily as a negative or anything against women. I’m simply attempting to clarify something I’ve observed. This post is more than just ranting about a busted marriage or hard-ass career women. The world is up-side-down, nothing is right and the people falling through the cracks must, at the least, be allowed to speak. I ask of nothing more. Does anyone mind? Can I get a… “boo-who” from someone?
After losing probably the last real job I would ever have in the year A.D. 2001 my wife threw me out. I can’t blame her really because I failed at living her life. But the thing that finalized her throwing me out was when I asked her for some help. It went something like this (roughly translated to English for the hearing impaired):
-Honey, I said. I’m too old and have no academic credentials. All I have to offer employers is experience but that doesn’t matter anymore in a world where nothing really gets done anyway. You have a great job because you followed all the rules and for that I commend you. I gave up something when we married because I thought I should, I thought it was the right thing to do both for love and for our future child. I made a mistake. Will you help me as I try to right this mistake? I’m still relatively young. I still have ambition. Will you help me go after my dream?
-No!, she barked.
It took about two years to come full circle. The final stages where two people clamour at each other in confusion – perhaps not unlike when it all begins. But falling out of love is something we never prepare ourselves for. Maybe that’s why we’re all so stupid in the way we live. Anywho. One day in spring she drove me to the train station after commanding that I pack my things. Yeah, the best punch I ever recieved was when I was already down. She actually drove me to the train station with luggage and wishes of luck. My son was sitting in the back seat. He was very confused. I will never forget how she drove that car that day. She was so at ease. She was so, just as everyone else who walks through the good side of western life, machine-like, without remorse, as though we never said… in good times and bad. She had taken all I could give and when there was no more… See ya ’round sometime.
Before I continue, please refrain from pity. Who knows, this may very well end up being a wondrous Cinderella story…
As I was saying, after that last real job I would ever have I spent a lot of time “unemployed” between 2002 and 2004 contemplating. Luckily I never really sulked over being discarded from the job market (I hate careerism anyway), nor did I sulk about being discarded by my wife. Instead I worked my butt off writing and producing two original plays (The Good Criminal and Blush). It was a friggin’ dream come true. But it was without my partner. And that’s a real shame.
That’s right. Without the bitchin’ and naggin’ of a “wife” I went about my business as a man. I did what I wanted to do. If she got in the way then I kept doing it all the same. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t make her invisible. She made herself invisible. Suddenly, in a time of (relationship) turmoil, she forgot who I was when we started down this path. Perhaps I forgot who she was as well. And so the story goes…
You see, in the mid 90s I got married. I married right in the middle of trying to become a “writer”. She liked that, I tell you. Because there I was commanding the words, the actors, the scenery. I made theater – out of nothing and it was good. But… What a mistake! Neither one of us had married before and we were both pushing mid thirties and we both were blinded and… You know how that works. To add to the flame, things were ok in Germany, economically speaking. When things are good economically, as we now know from the exuberance of the nineties, most important things regarding life get swept under shinny new rugs. Of course the reality was the so-called Wirtschaftswunder was coming around full swing and about to go head-to-head with globalization. How can a country like Germany see that coming when all it collectively worries about is where it goes on its next vacation? And I was living in the middle of it…
-Mein Schatz, do we go to Mallorca or Ibiza?
-Oh, Liebling, let’s go to both.
Oh, to play the games people play. Marriage mixed us among other Germans reaping the benefits of the Wirtschaftswunder. I lapped it all up with a perverted kind of pleasure looking back at the Germans wondering if any of them had a clue how things really were in this world. As an Ausländer (foreigner) that could speak the language getting a job was fairly easy in the beginning. And got them, I did. I ran through jobs like most people go through drive-in windows. I hated every single one of them. The only thing that kept me going was getting off work and going home and working on a new play. But the jobs kept coming. I got lazy in marriage. Finally I landed a high paying job that included a nice company car (new Audi with leather interior – whoopee) and business travel all around the world and stays in lavish hotels (I stayed in the Waldorf Astoria twice in NY – over-sized whoopee). Every night while alone in those lavish hotels I was hacking on a laptop a novel or a new play. (Mega-whoopee.)
Now I don’t want to sound too arrogant here. But I knew what was coming. One of the things that most creative people can do is see the future. I’m not talking clairvoyance here. Creative people simply have a knack for seeing what’s coming – that’s part of what makes them creative. By 1998 I saw that Germany was about to face some serious realities. I tried to tell my German wife what was coming but she just said that life was great and she had a job and that I should finally find something that would make me happy and where do we go on our next vacation…
-Ok, but, can I go back to producing plays? I asked with humility pouring from my nostrils.
-No!, she barked.
The reality bomb hit Germany around the end of 1999. I could see and feel it in management. People were freaking out. Export figures and unemployment were finally entering beer table discussions of people under forty. When 2001 came around I lost any chance of acquiring any gainful employment in pseudo-socialist Germany and decided to finally pursue my dream with or without wife’s blessing. As an Ausländer I was on my own – the legal marriage the only way of securing a visa. Top that off with the fact that I had a child I loved so deeply that only for him would I give up my dreams – if that was actually asked of me. Talk about dead-end!
There were two walls I had to face. One was woman. Two was Germany – a country fortified to the hilt with the emancipated feminine – see my play Blush.
Just look at unemployment in Germany. This is a joke. The alternatives for me to make a living as an Ausländer in Germany are not pretty. Anyone who knows the German system knows what I’m talking about. I can work at a stinking’ temp agency or McDonalds in my own country – but that would mean losing contact with my son – who is not even ten years old yet. Can you say, between a rock and a hard place?
So what is marriage to me? Asking a wife for help and she, categorically, saying NO. Can you believe that? She dumped me – just like a girlfriend would. My friends, we are born alone and we all leave this world alone. That is reality.
Having ranted all that, I feel as though I’ve I stood up against something. I’m glad my marriage didn’t fail because of womanizing or whoring or abuse. I am sorry for my son, though. I not only failed in marriage but also in breaking the cycle of broken families that I have only known growing up in suburban hell of America. As naive as this sounds, I honestly hoped that moving to Europe would help me break from that evil cycle. I was wrong.
And before I forget, this whole thing also helped me meet my girlfriend – she caught me as I was falling. I love her for it and thank her with all my heart.
Rant on, tgs, worstwriter
February 22, 2009 at 5:15 am |
LOL, you’ll be ranting about that GF in a few years! ;)
February 25, 2009 at 4:06 am |
I’m actually envious of you.
April 1, 2009 at 11:09 pm |
Don’t ever get married because women what your money.
Second off it’s fuckin fairy tale and I don’t believe
in luck.