Crit, in However Many Words This Takes.

I got to thinking, just now, that I'm a pretty friggin' lucky guy.

Not the sort that wins the lottery, or that survives a hail of gunfire without a scratch, or walks away from a plane crash -- though, to be fair, I did certainly buck the odds when I was born three months premature, 30 years ago -- but rather the sort of lucky fella that just looks around one day and realize he's doing okay in life, all of a sudden.

I cruised through high school reading sci-fi novels instead of studying. I was the chubby kid in the back of the class that most folks just ignored, and that was fine with that. I was active in Scouts, but certainly not in school. I went, on and off, to a local college where I hung out with my friends, played Dungeons and Dragons, and made out with strange women instead of studying. Ho hum. I was just another slacker, and I was fine with being just another slacker. A couple years passed.

Then I got engaged. Then I enlisted in the Army. Then I got sent home after being diagnosed with asthma ("physically unfit for military service") withut even finishing Basic. Then I moved back into my mom's house, to make ends meet. Then I worked at a gas station, on cruddy swing-shift seconds/thirds.

I got out of my mom's spare bedroom and got my very own crummy little apartment in the closest thing to a ghetto you can find in Northern Kentucky -- my first week there, I heard eight of my neighbors beating someone down in the parking lot, not twenty feet from my bedroom window. I turned off the lights and sat in the dark with a stupid little Gerber multi-tool. Heck, not too much later, I lost that crummy job at Shell. My boss shorted me a whole bunch of hours, I protested it and said I had to pay my rent, and I got removed from the schedule entirely. Not too long after that, via AOL instant messenger, my fiance broke up with me.

You want to talk about "rock bottom," in a way that doesn't involve the dehumanization of someone due to chemical abuse? Picture someone, fired from a gas station job, rejected by the Army, tossed aside by his fiance, sitting alone in his apartment, scared to death because he hears his "neighbors" breaking a man's jaw a couple yards from his bedroom window, holding onto a Gerber multi-tool because it's the closest thing he's got to a weapon.

That was me, say, six or so years ago. College drop out. Army reject. Lost my girl. Crummy job (then no job). Ratty apartment.

Now, fast forward. Suddenly.

In a PM earlier today, AZ DBTRBL (I feel like I spell her user name wrong every single time) called me "a good man." No kiddin'! Then, a few minutes ago, I took a second to read my wife's blog (at www.fleatopia.com). I worked for a few minutes -- yeah, I'm still on third shifts, but oh well -- and then I scratched my head and realized they were, all of a sudden, both right. So, hey, why not blog about it?

My wife is happy with me, and we do have a great life with a couple adorable puppies and some big plans on the horizon. I am, suddenly a "man," I guess. I'm not a kid any more. I'm not a college drop out slacker any more. I'm not mooching off my mom. I'm not the new guy at work. I'm not a burden on any one. I know it's just an internet forum when you get right down to it, but here, on Glocktalk, I've sometimes found myself giving out advice to other people. I've found people, people I respect an awful lot, quoting me and agreeing with me. I've seen my posts about concealed carry get stickied, and had folks thank me for writing them. When the heck did I start being a respected member of a community made up of adults?! In another browser window right now, I'm hanging out on a wargaming forum, and over here on Glocktalk I've got a grown woman thanking me for a comment I made, and calling me a good man.

I've been with DHL for almost six years now (already six, if you count the months I spent there as a temp before getting hired on). Six years, holy crud! I have a real job, and this job saw me and my wife through her going to nursing school. I've got -- wow! -- a 401k plan, all of a sudden, that I'm donating a good chunk of my income towards because I'm -- wow, again! -- planning for the future. Apart from that, in fact, I own stocks. Who'd'a'thunk it?

In the last year or so, I've started getting freelance work as a writer (still Dungeons and Dragons type stuff, but so what? It's my hobby, everyone's got one). I'm the lead writer for one wargame company, I've done steady freelance work with another, I just finished a contract piece for another, and I'm in the middle of talks with another company to write a steady supply of paid serial fiction to them. I'm making money -- on the side, sure -- doing something I love to do. I'm telling cool stories and people are reading them and liking them, and someone is paying me money to do it! When did that happen?!

Last weekend, my mom and stepdad were having dinner with my wife and I at O'Charleys (we snatched up the bill, even, much to his consternation), and she said -- get this, my single mother, whose work ethic kept her in her old job for 28 years only to get let go one day for no reason at all -- she said she was proud of me. Of me, who used to crash in her guest bedroom. I'm her only son, and I'm the only one of her and her new husband's children that isn't borrowing money from them all the time. Some of his kids are fifteen years older than me, and I'm the only one that isn't bumming off of them every month to make ends meet?! They've got kids in their late teens, and I'm the one that's making ends meet without borrowing from them. Me!

I'm financially stable, and it blindsided me.

I've got a job I don't hate. I'm doing work on the side for some "fun money" doing something I've always wanted to do. My mom, with all of her German work ethic and single-parent-stubborness, is proud of me. I'm going back to college in the fall to wrap up my degree, and hope to -- once we move to Texas -- get certified as a history teacher. I have plans, and I'm saving up money for them, and everything is falling into place, and I'm doing it.

I might not be able to pin down the moment this all fell into place, but I can pin down the reason.

This autumn it'll be five years now, that my wife and I have lived together (three that we've been married, on October 2nd).

She brings out the best in me, and is so sneaky about it I don't even know she's doin' it.

I was a twenty-four year old slacker living in a dirty apartment I could barely pay for, sleeping on a futon in the living room every night. I blinked, and suddenly I'm thirty, renting a two bedroom townhome with real furniture in every room and two cute dogs and a wife that's turning out to be a great nurse, and we're making it. Together. Someday in the next few years, I'll be a teacher, she'll be an even greater nurse, we'll have a house, we'll be close to her family, and maybe -- just maybe -- we'll get down to business and start makin' babies.

When the hell did all that even pop into my fool head, huh? I blinked my eyes, and turned into someone folks just might think is respectable.

So, there's me. In however many words it took.