Rant #3,137: Forget

With everything going on, something passed me by that shouldn’t have, but did.

On May 4, the Ranting and Raving Blog celebrated its 14th anniversary.

I don’t know how it got past me, but it did.

For 14 years, this blog has been a constant.

Where other blogs have started off with grand ambitions and have quickly fallen by the wayside, this blog has continued, never losing its focus, and is always there to provide you with my thoughts and opinions.

It has been a fun ride, and I can’t see it stopping anytime soon.

It is just so much fun to have a forum to talk about anything I want to talk about, and you don’t have to agree with me on anything I believe in.

This is my perfect format for telling you stories, for venting, and for allowing me to write about what I want to write about.

So, for 14 years, I have allowed you get into my head.

Sometimes I tell you the full story, and sometimes I hold back things that I don’t think are relevant to the discussion.

But whatever we are talking about, I never pull any punches, even if my thoughts are not popular ones or are at the very least controversial.

And it is all done in fun.

Another anniversary that recently passed that I did not mention was the ninth anniversary of my bad car accident, which happened on May 10, 2014.

It is an anniversary that I really don’t want to remember, but I am almost forced to remember due to the circumstances.

Some kid T-boned my car on a rainy day, flipped myself and my family over in the car, and we all somehow escaped with very minor injuries.

It could have been so much worse.

A few weeks later, I got my new car, the car I am still driving, and that car just hit 97,000 miles as I push it to the magic 100,000-mile mark.

It has been a great car, but I just wish that I wasn’t forced into buying it when I did, but that seems to be the story of my life, being forced to do things that I don’t want to do but have to do.

It will be four years in October—October 10 to be exact—when the company I was employed by for more than 20 years went belly-up.

Again, I was thrown to the curb by this action, and eventually, without any light at the end of the tunnel, I was forced to retire against my will.

I finally got something where I could bring some money into my wallet, but let’s be honest about it, it is nothing but a cash Band-Aid, and it is not the way I wanted to go out.

And I went out not on my own terms, which makes the situation all the more horrible.

Another anniversary that I did not bring up here was the one I had on May 15, when it was the 35th anniversary of me becoming a father.

What that translates to is that my daughter turned 35 on that day eight days ago, and believe me, I don’t get any rush from it at this point in my life.

As you know, I rarely see my daughter, that is her choice, and I have come to live with that reality.

All the fight I put into being part of her life when she was younger is pretty much in the rear view mirror, and there is really very little I can do about it.

So while I wished her “Happy Birthday,” I did it in a text, because on the celebration of my own birthday, she kind of let me down, but again, what else is new?

I have learned, and I have learned the hard way, that you can only do so much.

So while some of these anniversaries are kind of depressing, the 14th anniversary of this blog is not one of those.

It is fun to do this, and the fun isn’t stopping in the foreseeable future.

Why stop?

I am having too much fun here, and with fun at a premium in my life, I am not going to stop doing something that I enjoy doing.

So here is to another year of the Ranting and Raving Blog, and many more years to come!