The First Post

It was just a little over 16 years ago that Satan, my wife of seven years, threw me out of the house.  If you want,  I could give you the exact number of days, minutes, and seconds.  I had just offered to go get a motel room and we could sort this all out.  She thought it would be better to go next door to the neighbors and call the police and tell them I'd barricaded myself in the house with a shotgun.

Ten hours later, I was out of jail on my own recognizance, sipping my favorite scotch and having a bowl of soup at my favorite downtown restaurant.  I  was celebrating. I was finally free.  That was before the 3-year divorce proceeding they still talk about.  That was before 13 years of post-decree litigation.

There were a bunch of  things that led to the genesis of this weblog.  For beginners, I can point to the fact that last year Satan dragged me back into court.  I had been out of work for seven months, but managed to keep up the child support payments.  Ostensibly she wanted me to agree to extending my eldest's son's support payments past his 19th birthday.  He's . . . well, I guess you could call him autistic, but that doesn't really cover it. In any case, he was due the money and I figured we could do a simple agreed entry and be done with it.  No.  Satan wanted something different.

When we got to court, I found out she wanted to sue me for about a quarter-million dollars in unpaid medical expenses that she claimed I had welshed on over the past 12 years. Had I seen the bills? No. Had I agreed to pay them? Well, no.  However, she said she had a case for why I should be paying all of them.

Five months later the litigation ended.  The magistrate let me off the hook for the quarter-mil.  #1 son got his child support, but my weekly payment was reduced by two thirds.  Satan didn't stop there.  I won't bog you down with all the other details. However, Satan tried to present as evidence that I had been calling her "Satan" on online forums, and produced a blog entry in which I had identified her as "My first wife, Satan."   Satan wanted unspecified redress.  The magistrate really did not know what to do with it, but excluded it from evidence nonetheless.

For a while there, I thought Satan might sue me for libel.  Of course, in libel cases, the best defense is to prove the material is true. We may get into the weeds on that issue one of these days if you like. For now, I will just leave that hellhound lie sleeping.

My Girlfriend, KYHillChick, gave me a wonderful present over the weekend as an early Valentine's gift:  a hat and a T-shirt with "My Ex-Wife Is Satan." Inscribed on the back of the shirt is one my favorite comments on the subject:  "Satan is a 300-lb Vegetarian in Birkenstocks"  A good time was had by all.  Today I registered myexissatan.com.

What really got me going on this however, had nothing directly to do with the hat, the shirt or Satan herself.  I had to take my old friend Ralph to the doctor. He's 74 and he's coughing up blood.  That's never a good sign.  While we were on our way in, I saw a young lady in scrubs outside in the 18F air gunning down a cigarette and yelling into a cell phone.  I knew something was up.  Later, I saw her on the same call as she came into the coffee shop where I'd gone to wait for Ralph to get done.  I didn't want to hear her conversation. It was just hard to miss. She was obviously talking to her lawyer.

"As long as I'm married to that bastard," she said. "I'm living in hell."

That's when I knew God was giving me a sign.  It was time to start  myexissatan. 

This is not just about me and my ex-wife.  Nor should it be wholly about bitching about ex-wives, ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, ex-inlaws, ex- . . . whatevers.  Myexisatan needs to be about those of us who are caught in the grips of the Faustian bargain.  We need to find people who understand. We need to hear that living with Satan is a controllable condition that, with proper treatment, can be reduced to just a minor annoyance like toe fungus.  We need to know that one day God will let us piss on Satan's grave.

So let me begin this all by putting out the magic words that will hopefully draw you all to this weblog:

My ex-wife is Satan.
My ex-husband is Satan.
My ex-boyfriend is Satan.
My ex-girlfriend is Satan.

Soon to come:  hats, shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, regional conventions, a cable-TV network, a worldwide mission,  U.N. recognition of us as an oppressed minority. . .

. . . okay, maybe we'll just see where where this all goes.  Please feel free to contribute