Don’t get me wrong. I explicitly asked for this. I don’t pray, but I do communicate my intentions to the universe.

Yeah, I’m a dirty hippie. Last thing my ex-wife would have expected. And she’s pissed. She’s a nudist hippie, and I was a good corporate shill while we were together.

“Why the fuck couldn’t you have gotten here while we were together? We’d have been set for life!”

Well, now I’m further pissing her off by having been invited to join a commune that’s starting up. I don’t quite understand the animosity, but had she chosen to go raver, I’d have been a bit miffed.

Thing is: Hippie + Raver == Burner.

We all talk about PLUR.

She was just pissed about the music I listened to and uninterested in understanding why I sometimes don’t like lyrics to tear me out of my zone. “Childish music,” she said of trance.

What she’s really pissed about is that I found my way here by way of supportive people and a fair amount of serendipity. Could she have broken me of the corporate ideology? It’s possible, but she was at the time draining my limited funds, and I was still caring about paying bills.

So she was not the correct vessel. This was going to take a village that didn’t include her.

And, indeed, after attempting to make things work for seven years, we fucking hated each other for some eight years. It was only last fall that we started talking like adults, a decade after the divorce.

She’s fucking pissed that she had who I’d become but played it wrong. Expecting me to pay for your prior decisions to have kids is not going to nudge me to hippie.

It was rather inevitable. Working in journalism for decades exposes you to the bullshit. I just had to get there for myself by being broken down by the system. When “work hard and you’ll get ahead” is demonstrably false, well, now you need a new worldview.

There’s part of me that really wishes I could have learned life’s lessons thus far in a linear manner. Thing is, I’ll be up there in the next couple of weeks. She’ll do my laundry, buy me food and cuddle against me in bed.

I’m not an asshole, but for a staunch feminist, she’s oddly interested in playing tradwife. And in no world is she straight.