My ex-wife worked for five years mastering a perfect sequence of insults that she knew would egg me into the fight that she craved.

Your defenses are useless when your opponent doesn't have any allegiance to reality.

This short Asian women that I used to love would start off by saying, "You don't focus."

She always started on volume 3/10 and with a slight sweetness in her tone. Like she was a kindergarten teacher trying to get a student to admit he was the one who has been peeing on the toilet seat.

I would reply with a specific example that proves I can focus. "No, I got a perfect score on my Korean language test. That is two three hour blocks of testing, six hours, I gotta be locked in. No, I can focus just fine."

Next, she would spin my answer with her next cut down, "Yeah, and that didn't ever amount to anything. You wasted your Korean scores because you never finish anything."

My retort, something like, "No, I finished my master's degree."

My ex-wife didn't know the true nature of my work. She didn't care either so if someone wanted to point to the secrecy of my work life as a reason we got a divorce. Nope. Not even close. Some people like to say 'there are two sides to every story' and they use this phrase to try to get all sides involved to take an even share for the blame. But nope, my wife holds most of the responsibility for the divorce. Like 70 percent. And my ex-step son holds like 15 percent of the blame. Hell, there are times I miss them, and even now, I try to replay it and see where I went wrong, how I could have done things differently and not gotten a divorce. But nope, I did my best.

Anyways, after my wife said I can't focus or finish stuff, next she would say, "Yup, and you can't stay employed because you screw everything up."

My response, "I pay our bills. I get a pay check even when I am not on a deployment or going to an office everyday because my qualifications keep my employer loyal to me."

Next, she would say, "I can't trust you because you can't focus. You never finish anything. And you screw everything up."

Here's where I would be the first one to raise the volume in the conversation, to the level where someone on the subway would start noticing our conversation. Or where family friends at the Christmas party would notice there was a marital fight brewing.

With people looking, my wife loved to start this fight in public, I would say, "Wait, wait a second here. No, I focus just fine."

Blah blah blah. Me defending my ego. Her attacking it. We would go through this until I was out of examples. She would poke me in the ribs to try to turn me into a monster so she could be a public victim. But I never fell for that. A few times she got me to scream at her; however, thank God, my training armed me with meditative breathing exercises so I mostly walked away from her once I could see she wasn't going to stop until she felt satisfied.

There was the time in downtown Seoul. It was supposed to be a date. It was raining outside. We were sharing an umbrella. She started to say her sequence. I gave her the umbrella and started walking away. She ran a few steps at me and grabbed my arm. When I pulled my arm away in anger, she screamed and everyone in the streets stopped to see this little Asian woman screaming in fear, ha, fear, and me, a six foot three two hundred pound white guy with his arm pulled back, but in this moment, it looks like my arm is cocked back. And the look of anger, frustration on my face.

She was a master at scoring these public victim points.

I saw there were patterns that could warn me that she was going to try to get one of these fights. During her periods of manic productivity, when she wasn't sleeping but maybe two hours a night for a month long writing project, at peak productivity, she was too focused to bother coming at me. And she would actually be kind of sweet to everyone. Then after she finished a project, she would need two weeks of sleeping all day and eating junk food all night. During this phase, she was so happy. Waking me up some night with her blasts of laughter at some late night TV show gag. Then, when the results of her manic productivity came out, it was always someone else's fault that she didn't get enough praise, or God forbid, her effort led to a failure.

For the first ten years of our marriage, my wife slowly became more and more bipolar. The water got hot so slowly that I didn't jump out the pot before it boiled me up. Then for last five years, she was a bipolar narcissist. Scary thing, she is an actual genius with some very real big time accomplishments. Three master's degrees, a Ph.D, several books published, fluent in multiple languages. However, she can't do real science because she refuses to believe data that doesn't confirm her hypothesis. So many of her publications are actually dog shit because she fudged the data and ram rodded her papers through the system before anyone could expose her.

And I say this divorce was not really my fault. Ha. Yup. Not my fault.

I left agency work in 2019. For a ton of reasons, one of them, I wanted to fix my marriage full time. Another reason, all the agency mandated therapy helped me see my basic issues and that I didn't need to be a slave to my trauma anymore. The therapy they gave me to keep me in the secret world helped me see that I didn't need to use that work anymore to solve my issues.

Without anymore deployments or missions, I was at home all the time. The fights got worse and worse and she came at me more and more frequently. I demanded my wife and I get couple's therapy. She was talking to a divorce lawyer behind my back. When we went to therapy, she demanded that we pay for the sessions separately.

We were living in Korea when she filed for divorce. They don't respect your medical privacy as much as in the US. She turned in all of my therapy records, service records. She destroyed the paper evidence of her attendance at the couples sessions. She claimed that I was a secret agent who lost his mind. She went as far as telling the police that I was secretly plotting to kill her. Lol. Yup.

You might think the movie Inception is too far fetched. Of course there might not be some secret government technology for going into someone else's dreams, but the relationship dynamics between Cobb and Moll, truth is always stranger than fiction when it comes to the shit that goes on in some marriages.

Once I mastered walking away from my wife, she just redirected her skills to getting a fight out of her son. And he wouldn't ever listen to me or come with me when I asked him to walk away from the fight. He would come at her hard core and shout her out of the room, until I came to her defense and told him to stand down. Then he would shout me out of the room.

Funny thing, after both of them got all their venomous screaming out, they would go to bed and sleep so peacefully. I would be the only one not able to sleep, needing to run ten miles or so, or go to the bath house to soak it out before I could sleep.

Everyone in my neighborhood in Seoul recognized me as the big white guy with the big red beard who was out running around the block at ten oclock at night. Even the local police station guys often saw me at the local bath house doing wild man breathing exercises in the tub next to them.

You can imagine how hard it was for me to clear my name when my wife accused me of being a violent psychopath.

This chapter is a ramble. I know, but I don't care.

In fact, I don't care about much anymore.

I wrote a book and my former employer found it. "Don't Go There!" by Charles A. Rothbard.

The reached out to me. They offered me a new contract, something easy, anything to bring me back in and get me to stop writing.

I responded with an email that turned down the job and probably is making them consider killing me.

Without saying it, I told them that I am going to reverse engineer their training program and use it for my own personal, private initiatives.

Like, what if, instead of training people to access optimal states to do secret missions, you trained people to use their peak performance to produce creative works.

Naturally, the agency probably assumes I want to reverse engineer the training program and use it to do some political shit.

They can't fathom that I don't care about that shit anymore.

I'm not afraid of them, or my ex-wife's accusations, or whatever, because I don't care? No, because I know you're never stuck when you believe, when you know there is always another new creative way to approaching the problem and solving it artistically.

So yeah. Maybe this is the last chapter in this book. Who knows. Right?