today i'm depressed because i did a bad thing to our one main car. i somehow failed to shut it completely after changing the battery; perhaps a battery holder prevented it from shutting completely (i'm referring to the hood). while driving the hood flew up and smashed up against the front windshield, fortunately not breaking it, but damaging the hood itself.

i lost most of a night of sleep cursing myself and wondering if the damage could be more severe than it appeared. the car had been giving me the creeps because of the appearance of electrical issues, and this was bad on that night when none of the four windows would open, though that appeared to be more because of frozen rain which did after all melt after it had run for a while. by the time i got home three our of four opened, enough to convince me that it wasn't an electrical problem, and that the car was otherwise running fine, though there were still somewhat random signals of electrical issues. don't know why a car would do random electrical blips for no apparent reason, like some fuse is coming loose.

the whole thing has left me somewhat damaged. what am i some kind of idiot? i can't relive it and "do over." it happened, now rest and let the morning sun come through the window.

two boys were fired over the last week, in unrelated situations and places, so leaving me the feeling that it was directly related to my incompetence or perhaps my adhd which i'm sure i freely contributed to them. there is nothing for it, for me, except to be here and watch as they work it out, as they have families and people depending on them. they'll have to find something and all my efforts to help will just kind of make them feel worse, besides what do i know about trying to make it in los angeles or portland. in my family we were talking about back-to-the-land, subsistance farming and my sister mentioned a place called drain oregon where they had something going. all i could think of was east jesus, a desert subsistence community out near the salton sea. move your family to one of those? i'd say, all options are on the table. i send them my prayers.

meanwhile another cold spell is coming here. my wife won't even go out in it though she'll do some minimal exercise for her dog who doesn't seem to ever get enough. way too cold for her. and getting worse.

went up to iowa to get my second cochlear implant turned on (story here), and people had no idea what i was talking about when i mentioned the "mass casualty event" of three and a half weeks earlier when cars and trucks smashed each other all apparently outside of, or not far from, scattergood school. this hopefully meant the school was not intimately involved with any of the wreckage or survivors (everyone survived though 20 ended up hospitalized), which was good. nobody in the state knew what i was talking about, it's all distant history to them.

back up, rest, take care of our own. days are getting longer, and we will get out of this, to the point where spring will arrive, and we'll see flowers.

just finished an interesting book, You and I Together, which deals with reincarnation. in brief, two souls keep reappearing together, as man and woman, in love but separated violently and dramatically, repeatedly. Finally in this current life they find each other. The psychologist is vexed; he's spent a lifetime convincing people that "regression therapy" is good for dealing with your own subconscious, not your past lives. But he too has to admit that it appears to be real.

the book was a page-turner, and that's why i went through it so quickly, but it left me with lots of questions. for the record i believe in reincarnation, and i'll also buy the theory that the five or six people we deal with most closely in this life, have been with us in different forms in other lives. we could recognize each other, if we weren't programmed not to. we could unravel a tangled web of relationships, but we have conveniently forgotten everything about the previous one.

which brings me to the first question: is it possible that there are people out there who don't forget everything about the previous one? who can, for some reason, remember all the details of a house they've never set foot in? who can identify, in another person, someone who they have known "forever?" I think it's at least possible though i won't get sidetracked into proving it, or trying.

but then, why would life make you a woman every single time, and make the same frustrating and deeply wounding experience, time after time, with the same guy? that, it seems to me, is not how it works. or, it hits you six times, separating man and woman, then voila lets you be together and have love win. that also, is not how it works. not in my opinion. it seems to me it would only come out ok if you did something karmically regenerating in the next-to-last life, and also, the only reason you would have gotten punished or tortured so severely in five lives in a row would be something very karmic, very demonstrable, something with a reason for it.

i like the idea that love can carry over from one era's circumstances to another, so that, basically, the two people have the same connection, an enduring one. damaged yes but still there. five stars for all "love wins" books. as jimi hendrix says, meet you in the next life, don't be late.

pouring down rain here. it's landing on piles of unraked leaves, muddy paths, places where the dog's been digging. it's gray, cold, wet, dismal. i'm glad to be inside, dry and warm. may i stay that way.

at one point the older of the two girls asked me what kind of new year traditions we had. i stumbled. our last two or three kids were disrespectful to our traditions to the point that we gave up trying to instill a strong sense of family tradition by doing things together. in the old days, we'd watch back to the future, all three of them, or just one or two, or whatever. and we threw in a bunch of clint eastwood and good bad & ugly, just so we'd be all movied up during the cold season. but these days i don't even want to sit by a movie. i might get one out for them, or find it, but i was eager to go back upstairs and do my writing projects.

some cultures have a tradition that making a lot of noise is good luck. lots of the traditions come to what they think is good luck: jumping from a chair, not eating chicken, etc. if so we'll be very lucky. having a nine-year-old and eight-year-old in the house has made a lot of shrieking, running, shouting, that kind of thing. and i actually like it, as long as it's innocent, which most of the time, it is. kids are cooped up, indoors. it's been a long winter, already. they have lots of energy and we'll be glad when school takes them off our hands.

it reminds me that, really, we have a clean slate. they are supposed to be with us only five months or less. nevertheless i strongly suspect that we'll see them a lot if not just keep them our last hard ten years of life while we go steadily downhill and become less mobile, less able to get around. we're already wearing out. social services can see that. yet these kids need stability and hopefully to stay in galesburg to give their dad time to be ready for them. they need to set him up and ensure he stays away from their mom who is apparently all that bad stuff.

my point is, they're kids. they're innocent. they don't know from a new-year tradition and if i give them one, they'll keep it and always have something. they are already truly loving the stability, the good cooking, the dad who is gentle but somewhat deaf - and of course they adore the dogs who seem willing to take infinite abuse just for the ability to hang around them and absorb their boundless energy. it seems good all around. the house is alive again.

toward the end of raising our adopted kids, last of ten, we got tired. they absolutely couldn't tolerate school in a way that none of our biological kids had experienced. it was either that, or it was so well worth it to us to pretend that way that that became their entire life, and they won: we let them drop out. all three of them. it was kind of over my dead body but there wasn't much i could do. i couldn't make them go to school, and couldn't set up homeschooling myself without support. i let it happen. in the dead silence aftermath i think all are sorry they didn't finish. they'll have a lifetime of explaining why they just couldn't make it through high school and all their explanations will sound hollow after a few years given the fact that they could have made it through school, except possibly the youngest one, but just didn't. they have no one to blame but themselves. and now we have to stand here biting our tongues and hoping they make it anyway. they might. it will be a miracle if they find actual jobs. but it can be done.

with these younger ones, i'm afraid our benevolent spoiling might ruin them, too, if we carry on long enough. after all it's only a matter of time before school becomes a chore and in our kids' case it's their only chore. if they beat us, they cruise. and we're easy. that's my hostility speaking. deep down i don't think we did the older ones any favor.

we have a seventeen-year-old, their older brother, who is very casual about school. in the last week he only actually went two days out of five, and whether the ride was impossible given his staying with his girlfriend, or not, didn't matter, because he just wasn't there. he is having trouble with motivation at this late stage of the game; he only has to finish two classes in his senior year but just getting there is an issue. it's obvious that having everyone: me, my wife, the social worker, his birth mother and father, and his girlfriend, all pressuring him, isn't working. the more pressure, the harder it is for him to just finish. we try to make it clear to him that being so poor in the attendance department is a red flag for the social worker and that she may have to move him to some place with better security, or at least a better track record for getting their kids to school. we tell her, if he's not home, we can't get him to school, and if he doesn't come home, there isn't much we can do about it. it's agony watching a kid go through what our kids did, knowing full well the sentence of years of explaining why you just couldn't make it looms over you, thus it could be the most important choice he makes. he's pretty good about going to work. he's not a behavior problem.

but i have doubts how long that social worker can watch him slowly drop out more and more, to the point that, well, he's 17, and he's her responsibility, and she could put him some place that actually makes sure he gets to school. away from the girlfriend of course. hoping he doesn't just run away, come back around, refuse to attend altogether. all of which could happen.

so i watch the moods of my wife and the social worker, wondering at which point they'll just say "enough."

lots of friends and family members. are critical that we could let our three just drop out as they did, ruining their own lives, etc. everybody has their own line before they cave in, give up, and say, ok if it's that torturous, you can't go, absolutely can't, then you can't. you win. you stay home.

i know our own line is pretty high, and we didn't want to do that to any of them, let them drop out. if what they were doing was acting, it was pretty slick. they were in deep pain. it'll take a few years before any of them can even revisit it.

with that kind of trauma behind us, it's hard to believe we'd take on an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old, but yes, it's time to start over, and make sure at least these two follow through and finish what they've started. so far, not so hard. galesburg schools aren't that impossible for a kid to do.