I’m going home.

They say home is where your heart is, and that’s exactly right. My heart is with my family, and they aren’t here. They’re in my house in Dacula, Georgia, just northeast of Atlanta. Me? Well, for the last two and a half years, on and off, I’ve been in Sydney Australia, working. My family came over for some of that time, but left in July of last year… they just weren’t adjusting to things here very well, and missed their friends and extended family. Because of my work and contractual obligations, I stayed.

And those obligations have come to an end.

I won’t discuss the details of the project I have been working on here, except to say it has been like all big projects: a series of peaks and valleys. Some days I was standing on top of high peaks, and others I was in deep valleys. It’s what happens. I can’t cast blame nor can I issue credit… it is what it is. Did I learn from the experience? You bet your ass I did. I learned how to be a better designer, presenter, leader, writer, person, and friend. I was not standing in place. I was challenged, and those challenges made me a better me.

While I’m happy to be going home, it’s still hard. You don’t work with people for months and months on end without developing affinities and friendships. I have lost count of how many people I have worked with and met while I have been here, and I daresay that almost every single encounter I have had here has been kind, professional and absolutely honest. Maybe I got lucky, and didn’t have to deal with many assholes. Or maybe, like the Beatles wrote and sang, “the love you get is equal to the love you make”.

I have repeatedly stated that my religion is kindness, and I try and live my life that way. Maybe because of that, people responded in kind. Maybe people here are just nicer than Americans. Who knows?

At any rate, I made friends… lots of them. I won’t name names, because it could make those casual acquaintances I also made here feel slighted. But the people who I worked with most, those I shared the most stress, laughs and drinks with at the local pubs… you know who you are. You are absolutely dear to me, and I love you all.

Writing this is harder than I thought it would be, because something I constantly remind people is that Everything Ends. Life is like that, and the only reason we don’t see the continuing and constant endings is that we are too busy to notice them, too busy living and doing. Businesses, marriages, lives, relationships, families, projects… everthing ends. While I lived here, three people who were dear to me died back in the states, and now that I’ve reached the age in life that I will be losing more friends and family that way… Again, a hard reminder that Everything Ends.

Acknowledging this, and knowing it’s this is an absolute truth… well, it helps me appreciate things more. Little moments. Making friends laugh. A wry, flirting smile from a beautiful woman. A good solid cup of coffee. A great movie. Writing something that matters… like this.

This is an obituary to a time in my life that is ending, and I think people should note such things for the record. Life is gone before we notice it. We need to write some of it down. For posterity.

Another thing that upsets me as I write this is knowing that, when this ends in less that a week… that’s it. I won’t see these people anymore, I won’t work with them, I won’t joke and laugh with them and it’s gonna leave a hole in my heart and my life. That hole will eventually be filled, and that’s the thing that makes me sad… we all say “we’ll stay in touch” and “I’m on skype” and “connect with me” and it’s… false. We won’t be able to stay in touch, because we’ll very quickly have things that come up and get in the way. Distractions and to-dos and projects and family matters and vacations and suddenly…. you realize that you haven’t talked to your friends in Sydney in AGES.

And you won’t call, or write… because you’re too busy. Maybe later, you think to yourself.

And then… well, you know what happens.

So, I’m not fooling myself. This is a true ending. I will never be as close to these people again. I’ll be available, always… through my site, through twitter… heck, just google my name, and you can find a way to reach me. And I’ll try my level best to keep in touch… but, as I said… we’re half a world away from each other, and that makes it hard.

lt’s been a heck of a ride, and I will probably never have such an opportunity again. I think back to how it all started and I still go, “How the hell did THAT happen?” My dad, before he passed away, was dismissive of the opportunity that this project presented to me. “Aww, it’ll never work out,” he told my brother-in-law.

That’s my dad, it’s who he was. He could never be positive about what I was doing, almost unhappy that his son could surpass him in any way, and he was just… well, unkind. He’s gone now… but if he was here I’d tell him this:

“Yeah, there was a lots of problems, and there were tough times… but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Because I worked with some of the best people I have ever known.”

I’ll use two pop culture metaphors, to close: I’m a big fan of the classic sitcom MASH, and I’ve been rewatching some of the early episodes as they are rebroadcast on Australian TV. While I would hardly consider anything I have gone through here as bad as the Korean War, the one thing that I noticed is that my team has a lot in common with those people stationed at the 4077th. Like Hawkeye and the rest, we were thrown into a crazy situation and asked to do our best… in sometimes very bad conditions. When everyone said their goodbyes on the show, they had obviously grown into a family.

It’s like that, here, too. I cherish these people. They’re my family.

Second pop culture reference: Like Kirk at the end of Star Trek II, I will have to come back to Sydney someday… to see what I started and worked on here ends up becoming. Something good, I hope.

And, like Kirk at the end of that seminal film, I feel… young. And ready for the next challenge that life brings me.

Bring it on.

I had a very emotional day this week when I found out an old friend of mine had passed away over a year ago. I was upset, and angry at mutual friends who already knew and hadn’t reach out to tell me. But more than that… I was sad that my friend was gone, and that feeling still lingers.

I noticed something as I frantically searched through search results to try and piece together what happened (I’m on the other side of the world so I didn’t want to call people in the middle of the night). My friend was still on the Internet. She was still updating her Facebook page.

Well, SHE wasn’t… but because friends had taken over her Farmville account, everytime they did something to her virtual garden her wall showed an update. “Marilyn planted flowers.” “Marilyn bought seeds.” Also, her profile hadn’t changed. You’d have to look very close and read between the lines of her Facebook page to “get” that she had died. And many were just like me – they didn’t know. Old friends were still posting “Hey, call me!” messages on her wall.

This is wrong.

I understand the reasons why they want to keep her “presence” alive on the Internet. I totally appreciate the gesture. I just think it’s profoundly wrong, and it does a disservice to her and the people who loved her. It’s wrong because it’s misleading… and she would never mislead anybody. She wasn’t that type of person. Now, obviously, I’m not a member of her family and wasn’t even in her immediate circle of friends when she passed away, so it’s not my call. But I still can react to it, and as you can read my reaction is not at all a positove one.

The thing is, besides her Facebook page… she didn’t leave much of a presence behind. She wasn’t tech savvy, and didn’t blog or write. If you wanted to know who she was, you could entered the walled garden of Facebook and get a lot of detail about her life… but only if you were a friend or family member. Other than that, she had a LinkedIn page. And an obituary. That’s it. And in two years, or three? Maybe not even that.

I searched the Internet for my Dad’s name after he died in November of 2010… and it was even worse. I could find the name of his company, and his obituary… and that was it. He never even set up a website for his business. It wasn’t that Google or Bing or Yahoo couldn’t find anything… it was that there was nothing to be found.

The main reason I wrote up my post on my dad, and spent the time writing up some words about my friend Marilyn this past weekend, is because I needed to express my thoughts and feelings about them… but I also knew that someone needed to be “on the record” about them. Someone needed to write it up. I guess it’s a side-effect from my days as a journalist, but I had to do it. Mark Evanier, a television and comics writer, has a similar compulsion… if he doesn’t write about the passing of some obsure actor or comic book writer or artist, no one else would.

I look at myself and my own “presence” on the web, and I don’t have the same problem. Search for “Joseph Dickerson” and you’ll be hard pressed to find a result that ISN’T related to me. I am a “power user” of the web, and have been for years… not to mention a prolific blogger/writer/content creator. I feel sorry for a writer I just read about, also named Joseph Dickerson, who just published his first book. He’s older, with a new website and twitter feed, and has an uphill climb to get “noticed” by the search engine algorithms compared to where I am with the same moniker.

But that’s now… what happens when I’m gone too? What will I leave behind? I’ve talked about “web presence” and other buzz-words here, but I now know that in the end, what we leave behind is… random. Fragments of a life.

On the web, we are ephemera. A comment on a message board, a set of photos on flickr… captured moments and random thoughts. It’s a great reflection of ourselves… but it isn’t us.

I can’t hug a web page, or a scanned photo. But I could hug Marilyn. And my dad.

And I can’t do that anymore.

Ignorance is definitely bliss.

After a lovely, leisurely lunch with some friends today, I grew nostalgic. I thought back to my college days, to when I was doing college radio. I thought about the friends I made when I worked at Jefferson State Community radio, and one in particular: Marilyn Daniel. I hadn’t heard from her in several months, and the last message I had gotten from her was a drunken ramble about who-knows-what.

So I googled her (married) name.

And was frozen in shock.

Marilyn died.

Exactly one year ago, today.

I was at an absolute loss for words for a few moments. She was always… Well, alive. Full of passion, with a large laugh and a kind heart and…

Again… I was dumbstruck.

I frantically looked on the Internet for any additional information, for anything I could find out. Nothing. The official obituary was vague to the point of frustration. How did she die? Apparently she had a congenital heart defect that no one knew about – she was found unresponsive by her husband and she died in hospital two days later.

She wanted to be on stage, but she also was absolutely terrified of being on stage… Which is why she loved radio. She could hide behind the mike.

She was deeply insecure. And she had no reason to be.

Marilyn was beautiful. She was tall – really tall. Over six feet tall. It made her insecure. She shouldn’t have been. She was also very very smart – smarter than the men she chased after in our early college years. She was also blonde, and she played up that stereotype to get what she wanted…. Hiding her true intellect.

It was the early 90s. It’s what a lot of women did… What a lot of women STILL do.

She and I were good friends, but more than that… I had a deep and profound crush on her. Not the dumb blonde she pretended to be to get the guys she wanted… The passionate, smart Marilyn with ambition. THAT one. But I was not her type… Unfortunately.

I wish I could go back in time, with the communication skills I have now, to talk to her then. I would have been much more encouraging, much more direct… And I would have been able to tell her some of the things that I am putting into words here, now.

Marilyn was someone with whom I shared a lot of time in,.. Time that helped me evolve from a horny teenager to a respectful man, someone who listened and cared and spent the time to do what all of us should do: be kind. Marilyn was a lovely, kind person. Knowing her made me a better me.

And knowing that she is gone, now… Especially finding out a year after the fact… Well, it hurts. It hurts so goddamn much.

(I note with sad irony that a favorite show of both of ours, Twin Peaks, featured a self-destructive blonde… And that part of the reason I wanted to get back in touch with her was to reminisce about that very show.)

I have photos of Marilyn, photos I took way back in the halls of that college radio station in 1988. I’d post one here, but unfortunately they are half-a-world away, in a closet in my house in America. In less than three weeks I return there and one of the first things I do when I get back is scan as many pictures as I can to post on the Internet. Because, as I found as I frantically searched to find out what happened to her, there’s only one picture of her online… And it’s not a very flattering one. (UPDATE: I uploaded the one photo I have of Marilyn to flickr – it’s the one displayed above).

Which will simply not do. She was beautiful. She was my friend. And I’ll miss her deeply.

Rest in peace Marilyn.

I’ve always wanted to visit Kennedy Space Center and I finally got around to crossing that particular item off my “bucket list” this past weekend. Even better, I was able to tour the Vehicle Assembly Building, where all the Saturn V rockets made for the Apollo program was constructed… and I got really close to the just-retired Endeavor space shuttle, being prepped for retirement. Here’s lots of pictures:

I’m burned out.

I’ve been working on one project for over two years now, and I’m over it. I have a hard time getting motivated, and find it difficult to care about what I’m doing. I look at my inbox with dread every morning.

As I realize this, I also identify that I hate not caring. I love what is do, and I never think of design as “just a job”… Correct that. Until recently, I hadn’t.

I don’t look at the two years I have spent on this project as wasted… But I also don’t look at it as successful, either. I have made great friends and done good work but the project has drained me, caused personal problems for myself and my family and resulted in a lot of stress and, frankly, unhappiness.

It wasn’t worth it.

It’s time for a change.

So, as I look at the past as prologue, I look forward. To a break over the holidays, and then a quick two-month wrap up to my work on this project. Then…

Then what?

I’m in a moment of transition, methinks. I’m 42 years old, and have had many successes. I’ve achieved much… But I still aspire to achieve much more. There’s things I’ve started thinking about, things that can radically changed life if I commit to them.

Changes. Potentially big… And risky… Ones. The only question is whether I will step out of my comfort zone and make such changes happen. And yes, I’m being intentionally vague.

Stay tuned.

Here’s some photos taken from a “walkabout” this past weekend in the Ophir Reserve in NSW, Australia:

It’s been a heck of a year. Highs and lows, peaks and valleys. If you had told me a year ago that I would be moving to Australia, to build a team to work on a huge, high profile project for my company… Well, I would have laughed at you.

If you had told me my father would affectively commit suicide by bottle in 2010… Well, that would have been unexpected, too.

The theme of this past year for me, and I think for many others, is Letting Go.

I see in in our movies and our television… Toy Story 3, Inception, and LOST all had the obvious denouement around walking away from the past, that the protagonists need to move on.

I see that in our news, with a great many Americans giving up on the idea of some One who can fix the world… And this past year I have seen many people take it upon themselves to speak up and make their voices heard. They have given up on the current model of government and governing – they want better. Whether they will get it… Well, time will tell.

I see that in my work, where I have to walk away from the detailed work and attempt, in my own limited way, to persuade, direct and lead. I can’t do it all, and I need to stop trying.

And I see that most obviously and closely in my own personal life… Where an easy trap of accusation and anger and comfortable inaction is a very tempting thing when it comes to things… Especially and specifically when it comes to my father.

I could go there… Or I could let go. And love my family, and do my best, and walk away from recrimination and blame.

Some have a word for that. They call it grace.

So, I welcome the new year with a glad and open head and heart… And hope that whatever comes to pass, obstacles or triumphs, makes me someone better than I am today.

Onward.

The human being also known as Paul Douglas Dickerson ended his conscious existence and life sometime during the day of November 5th 2010. He was alone, in his bedroom, in Moody Alabama.

He was also my father.

The reason I state, “ended his conscious existence” was because he was committing slow-motion suicide for several months, if not several years, before the culmination of his actions finished things once and for all.

Additionally, the reason why I am writing the aforementioned sentences in a somewhat clinical unemotional manner will become obvious if you read on.

My dad was smart. Very smart. Mom often joked that he was an alien, which explained his many brilliant actions and observations. He was a businessman, and owned his own company. His specialty was refurbishing and repairing welding machines for companies across America. He had very rare knowledge of this domain, and this information made him a lot of money over the years.

My dad started his company after he was laid off when I was about 11 – no, correct that, he was fired, because he thought he could run the company better than the people he worked for – and he was arrogant enough to tell them that. For anyone else such a situation would be a humbling experience. Not Dad. He started his own business, and the worse thing that could have happened did so.

He was successful. Incredibly so.

What happens when a situation gives a somewhat arrogant person the idea that they could succeed without anyone’s help? You get a much more arrogant person. Not a good thing – it was, in fact, made him all the more certain how absolutely right he was… always.

Dad was… well, really really good at everything. Just ask him, he could have told you so. He tried to instruct everyone on EVERYTHING. He was never wrong. People who didn’t do what he was told were stupid and needed to listen to him. I clearly remember a moment where he tried to teach me how to play pool – I was 38 at the time – and I nodded, listening to his instruction – and then proceeded to beat him at 8-ball. He was as angry as I had ever seen him.

I never heard him say he was wrong and apologize. Ever.

My brother-in-law went to work for him – after 15 years of doing so, he looks 10 years older than me. We’re the same age.

About four months ago Paul Douglas Dickerson started going crazy. This is not a casual statement: he really did start to go mad. He kicked my mother out of the house they had lived in for over 22 years. He threatened her life. She commenced divorce proceedings. He started walking around his house brandishing a gun. He lost 80 pounds of weight and drank hard liquor from dusk till dawn: vodka and grapefruit juice. His drink of choice, for as long as I knew him.

Dad became Jack Torrance, from The Shining – with a little bit of Howard Hughes.

I was on the periphery of all this, because I had decided a long time ago to focus my time and attention on my own family – my wife and three sons. I had made that decision as the result of a trip to see them a few summers ago, on Memorial Day weekend. Throughout the past few years I had tried to become closer to Dad, with limited success. This time I offered to take him out to dinner, along with my three sons.

“Go out with you and those crazy little bastards of yours? Hell no.”

That was Dad, always a charmer.

I decided, at that exact moment, to do better by my sons than what had done to me. I wasn’t going to expose them to my father any more. If he did not want to be with them, I would not inflict them upon them – or he on them.

It has made their life a happier, healthier one.

In the end, what is the measure of a man? I think it’s what he leaves behind. What my dad left behind was a mess. An emotional mess, a physical mess, and a rapidly decomposing body. He was found two days after he died.

A friend of his stole the money out of his wallet. Who you are is a reflection of the company you keep, as the saying goes.

We had a service – he was cremated, because we could not have an open casket – and I comforted Mom and my two sisters. One of them is angry and resentful; the other is sad and wishes we had done more to help him.

I’m somewhat in the middle.

I owe Dad a lot – my smarts, for one thing. But that is genetics, not upbringing. I get my work ethic from him, I think – He always worked hard, providing for his family. I try and do that, too.

I also have some regrets. I tried to get closer to him, but didn’t try hard. More than anything else, I regret that he never could express his “soft” feelings well. Anger, he expressed quite effectively… but love, compassion… not so much. He was never comfortable loving, or being loved. He came from cold parents and his emotional landscape was the clear result of such an upbringing. An example:

One of my most vivid memories is winning the AP computers award for “Best student” when I was a senior in high school. I was called to the stage, I got my award, and I looked out to the audience and saw, in the very back of the auditorium, Dad.

He didn’t smile, he didn’t clap.

But he was there.

And then, before I could get off the stage, he was gone.

Goodbye, Dad.

More details.