My Dreams

I have never been a very materialistic person. It has never bothered me that I dont have the extra money to get clothes and would have to strap myself financially if I had no choice but to buy new pants or a shirt. Other people will get new phones and have all the gadgets and toys on them. I wish I had a phone with a 3MP camera and the ability to make calls, text and send pics.  People drive around in newer cars and I wish I had a half way decent junker for no other reason than so my wife didnt have to drive me to work and pick me up.

Would I have liked all the new toys, newer cars and nice clothes? Of course. Who wouldnt? But it has never been important to me. At least not until lately.

Now I dream daily of making it as an author. Seeing enough people buy my books that I can quit my job and write full time. I dream of my new spider blog, The Spider Guide, suddenly being found in Google and Bing searches. That thousands of people across the United States would use it to look up the spiders they find in their homes or in their gardens. That I would make enough money from that to let me leave my job in the automotive engineering field and write full time, while answering emails to identify spiders for people. Why do I dream of this every day and night? For selfish reasons!

I am just so sick of knowing I have failed my wife. That she always needs to worry about if we can pay our bills every month or not. I am sick of her driving a nine year old car with a cracked windshield every day. I am tired of knowing she has to drive 45 minutes to work (one way) and still has to drive me to work and come pick me up. I am torn up inside because I know she has lost her love and her faith in me because of all of the financial hardships we have faced and I have been able to offer her so little.

I am sick of not sleeping well, having to get up early and get home late, just to do it all over again for nothing more than to barely survive.I have failed relationships, I have failed friendships. I have failed in my career, my marriage, my family, my health, my God, and any other aspect of life I can think of. And I am tired of it.

Now I want! I want to know my wife doesnt have to worry about finances anymore. I want to be able to give my mother a better life before she gets too old to enjoy it. I want to look out and see a nice Camaro or Challenger in my driveway and know for once in my life, I am driving a car I actually wanted. I want a house that I can spend time working on. With extra rooms so I can have a man-cave where I can watch the Lions play without having to take the livingroom TV over from my wife.I want to wake up naturally at 8am rather than 6am and not have to worry about getting to work when I feel like crap just to keep a job that gives me no hope for ever retiring. I want to make my living through my writing or my spider sites. I want to look at myself in the mirror ans be able to tell myself that I have actually succeeded for once in my life and not be lying about it.

I want to work from home so I can get a puppy. I want to train it to do tricks and know that I wont lose it when my step-kid moves out.

I know these are big dreams. Too lavishing for someone like me to wish for. Maybe I dont deserve these things. I still want them. Because if I succeed in my writing or through my spider sites, I will know I finally succeeded, and that will mean two things above all else. I finally did right by my wife, and that God actually cared enough about me to give me those things.

I dont mean this to sound like I hate life and am bitter towards Gof for never being there for me or anything like that. I am just saying that I am tired now. I am to be 48 years old in the near future and I have never known good times. I have never even known average times. I dont want to fail anymore. I dont want my wife, step-kids or anyone else to look at me and see a failure anymore. If I had the choice of living only five more years but being successful in that time, or living another thirty years like I do now, I would take the five. No hesitation. Because I know my wife will go on living whether I am gone or not, and I would rather her have a better life without me than a lousy life with me.

I am not writing this to sound as if I am complaining to everyone. I do not wish for pity or for anyone to try and cheer me up. I wrote this for one reason. For people to know me better. For people to not see me and see the failure I have been, but to know the way I feel inside. I do want to succeed. Though some of my dreams are materialistic sounding, like wishing I had a shiny black Camaro, most of my wishes are not for myself, but because it would mean better for someone else. I have failed others so much in my life, I just want to do right by those I love for once.

My Story

When I graduated high school, I made a choice. I decided to skip the idea of going to college and took a job as a draftsman in the automotive engineering field. After all, why spend years learning to do the same thing I was already going to get paid to do? I was young. I did not understand how powerful that little piece of paper called a degree would be. Today I have hit my limit in the field. I have been told straight out that there is not much I can do to improve my position in the field. I watch young men half my age come and rise up above me while I can barely pay my bills, all the while knowing they will continue to move up the ladder and I will continue to watch my wife stress out over financial struggles.

I have come to accept that I have no future in the engineering field. I continue to go to my job and work 50 to 60 hours a week, but my heart is no longer in it. I do it strictly for the pay check and with no hope of getting ahead. During my lunches I write. Every day! In the evenings, in the few hours after my wife goes to bed, I promote my books, work on adding friends to twitter and sometimes write some more. My only goal now is to get to the point where I have a career in Writing.

There is another thing that soaks up my hours in the warmer months. Spiders. I never saw it coming and never would have believed it would happen, but spiders have become a huge part of my life. It started in 2009 when I found a spider in my living room and wanted to know what kind it was. My entire life, people have told me what kinds of spiders were what and often the same names came up for different spiders. So I decided to go on-line and look it up. It took me hours to search through the bad info as well as the good and figure out which was which. The thing that bothered me was that I could not find anything about what spiders were here in Michigan. So I decided I would start making a guide on my own for others who would be curious as I was.

After only a few years of it, my blog, Michigan Spiders has become a solid guide for information on Spiders in Michigan. In the summer, I get anywhere from 800 to 2000 visitors a day and upwards to ten emails every day from people sending me pictures, asking me to help identify spiders. Michigan Spiders has been a part of getting an extremely rare Brown Recluse infestation officially confirmed and has helped hundreds feel at ease that the spiders they have in their homes are not dangerous. Yet the greatest moment is still the message I received from a woman letting me know how much Michigan Spiders played a part in her children getting over their fears of spiders. They were terrified of them and she didnt know where it came from, so when they saw a spider, she caught it and got them to look it up on-line and found Michigan Spiders. THeir fears were soon replaced with the intrigue of finding spiders and looking them up together.

As large a part of my life as Michigan Spiders has become, it is still not my love. My love is in writing. Allowing my imagination to run free. The day I can leave my job with the satisfaction of knowing my writing will pay our bills and we, for once, do not have to worry about if our bills will get paid, that is when I have seen my dream come true. I will never stop helping others with spiders, but my God, would it be great to give up the engineering world.

Recently I have expanded my position in the spider world by adding a new blog. The Spider Guide will be to help people from all states in America and not just Michigan. It is in its early stages and it needs your help. I need others to help me spread word of the site, and get people to click the google+1 button.