Avid Weekly: Fill & Download for Free

My uncle, a 60-year-old man and an avid smoker underwent heart surgery a year ago. Unfortunately his heart was too weak to work with his body and so one by one his organs began to fail.He was induced in a coma.A day passed.A week passed.A month passed.Everyday we sat by his bedside and spoke to him about politics and sports, his two favourite topics. Despite knowing that he could not respond, we strongly believed in the research that coma induced patients can possibly process events from the environment.Six weeks passed and his heart was finally strong enough.Upon waking the first thing he said was,“Can't you people ever stop crying?”We looked at him in disbelief.Not a day went by without a family member sobbing into his sheets and my uncle recalls hearing these cry sounds clearly.

OK, I have a real life story to answer this. I am a white middle aged man, in very good shape.In 2013 I was looking for some part time work between projects. I asked my buddy who owned a landscape maintenance company if I could work for him for the first half of the Summer. I knew it was hard work, long hours and during the heat of a Salt Lake City Summer. I would be the only hombre working with all Mexican crews. However, I wanted to work hard! The owner and I were friends from the Marathon running world. We were avid mountain runners and I was an active Ultra Marathon racer at the time. I had won 4-Ultra Marathons by this time, one at each distance, 50Km, 50-Mile, 100Km, 100-Mile. I was strong, fit, good in the heat and motivated.Week 1 at the job: I worked as hard and fast as I could and still, the entire Mexican crew was at least 30% faster and better than I was at mowing big lawns fast. I was CRUSHED every day after work that first week.Week 2, I was only 20% slower, and still damn tired every day after our 10-hour work days,Week 3, I was still 10% slower and it was very hard to run or train at all after work. My body was getting accustomed to the long hard work, but it was very hard.Weeks 4 to 8, I was almost as fast as the others, and I knew this was a short term deal. I did get mostly used to the hard labor, but was still more tired than my Southern Peers. As a whole, they were much stronger and tougher than me at these manual labor jobs.It was a very real and cognizant challenge on my part to try this. I was curious to see if I could succeed and work side by side with these ‘laborers’. Just barely for me, and I have been working or training hard since I was 16-years old, over 30-years ago by this time.It is safe to say that this job, or most like it, would break me in time. And for the record, I am MUCH tougher than most 16–25 year old american men!Long answer, NO the Americans could not replace them.

Yes, I have. I love my children, unconditionally, however, I don’t have to essentially like them.I have two children, a son, and a daughter. They are 13-months apart in age. Neither one of my children can stand each other.My son is very successful in his career. It may not seem like much, he is a tattoo artist in Las Vegas, NV. I’m not being prejudiced, he is good at what he does. However, he and I have never had much of a relationship. I never wanted this division to happen. It’s hard for me, I was shoved away by my adopted father because I never fit in, and now I have been shoved away by my own son. He doesn’t want me in his life, or his children’s lives since his mother died in 2015. I have not seen my grandsons since 2012. That was the last time my son saw his mother alive. She would die almost 3 years later. He never came to the viewing or the memorial after she was cremated.My daughter, well, she is a drama queen. Everything around her is chaos, and when it all goes to shit, it is everyone else's fault and not her own. She gave my wife and me our first grandchild and grandson. When he was diagnosed with autism, at 2, she gave her mother and me, “powers-of-attorney” over him while she decided to move to Washington state from Missouri.Five years later, after a series of ear infections, it was discovered the reason he was non-verbal autistic was he was deaf. He was 7. She decided she did not want the responsibility of a deaf/autistic child and had started to make plans to give him to her friend who was fluent in ASL. Her mother and I said, NO, and we would fight her on it. She gave us full guardianship of him, and we have had him ever since. My daughter would marry, cheat on her husband, get pregnant by the guy she was having the affair with, divorce her husband and marry the father of her 2nd child, followed by the only granddaughter. My daughter and her husband are both overly dramatic, yet very damn lazy. Both of their children are in foster care because they are too damn lazy to get jobs and stop thinking about themselves first instead of the kids first.I love my kids, and my daughter has been there to help when her mother was so sick, however, as much as her mom and I bitched at them to get jobs and make their own wages to buy diapers and etc. for the kids, they chose to live off welfare, and blow any money they earned on themselves, instead of their children.At this point, it has been since Feb. 3, 2015, when my wife died and I have been a widower and single parent to the oldest grandson. He is now 18, and an adult. Because he has an IEP for school, he will attend until he is 22. With him being deaf and autistic, none of the schools he has attended in the past ever did a damn thing with him, just passed him on to the next grade.He and I moved to Southern California where I got him enrolled in the California School for the Deaf-Riverside. This school was tasked with not only teaching him ASL, they had to teach him everything none of the other schools had taught him. He was going into 10th grade illiterate of anything. In these past 3 years, he has gone from 0 in ASL to 90% fluency. He has gone from reading 1st-grade books to high school books. He is an avid reader, especially history. He is an amazing young man. I not only love him, I like him as well. He has asked me to adopt him when he turns 21. I cried, and said, Yes.My 2 older children? As I said, I love them beyond anything, they are a part of me and their mother. My son has become a narcissist, very demanding, intimidating, and disrespectful to me, even in public. I walk away from him when he does it. I will not repeat the words he has said to me. The last time he pulled that, I said to him, “I may turn and walk away, however that does not mean you have won. What it means is, I have gotten tired of your abuse and I don’t have time for your shit.” He did not like that. Oh, Well!!My daughter, I love her, yet she tries to drag me into her drama, and many times using it to get money out of me. I’m not rich and I live on a fixed income, however, I am not being taken advantage of. I have told her and her husband, their life is up to them. I may not like it, yet it is their choice. I stay away.