One for the record books...

That is my summation of this week. I just awoke from my fifth night in a row of rather insufficient sleep (something I normally don't suffer from) and it's 30 minutes before my alarm clock even goes off.

What do you do when someone close to you, someone who you have known longer than you haven't known them, decides they don't want you around anymore? Regardless of the reasoning, or lack thereof, it hurts a lot. The weird thing is, you have to adjust to not having that person in your life. On an intellectual and emotional level, I see it as re-training not unlike the physical training an amputee must go through.

There are routines in your life that have involved this person in one capacity or another for years and that have become second nature. An email about this, a phone call about that, the getting together to experience the other – all things you now have to say to yourself, "nope, gotta' find someone else". Now, given our society's 50% divorce rate, it is very obvious I am not the first to have to deal with something like this. But there are differences: 1) I wasn't married, 2) the other person hasn't died, 3) the decision to terminate the relationship wasn't mutual, and 4) the whole thing goes against "guy structure".

The "guy structure"? Yep. You see, it is a well known fact guys process things differently than women. Men drive a lot more from a position of intellect (or lack thereof in a lot of cases) first and emotion second and women are driven by emotion first and intellect (which is considerable in some cases) second. This is why for the most part two guys can have a huge fight, punch each other out, then find themselves laughing about it an hour later over a beer. It is very rare that we allow our emotions to guide our actions to such an extreme as to terminate a friendship. We just aren't built that way, and I have 40 years and plenty of buddies I can present as proof. The oddity here is until now, I would have also held this friendship up as proof as well. We have our share of arguments over the years, and a ton of them have been about things so trivial I honestly and truly can't remember what they were about, because once we had made up and put it behind us, it was no longer important. That's "guy structure". Of course there are extremes, and I am sure we can find examples where this isn't the case - where the fight or argument reached the point where there is no laughing and beer on the other side. But honestly, to all the male readers, how often does this happen?

I am not being sexist about this, but it is true. A friend of mine pointed out to me (and he comes from a position of dealing with his wife) that an argument from a guy's perspective is simple because it is about who is wrong and who is right. An argument from a woman's perspective is about how upset she is over the other person's wrongdoing.

So, here's where I stand – This has been a shitty week, but in that week I also had my first movie released nationally (and soon internationally), I open a show tonight that has some killer music that's going to be a lot of fun to perform for an audience, I have good friends and a loving family who stand by me always, I am not living on the street, the NFL season has started, and the fall TV schedule has enough shows worth watching that my DVR will be working overtime.
And finally, there are beautiful women in the world and we get to see them: