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Well, I'm a week late in posting this latest installment here in my obscure virtual forum. As I said last week, there's been a big change in my life, and I've been trying to decide just how to make the announcement.

I couldn't think of an eloquent way to put it so I'll just say it strait. Brace yourself. Julie, my wife of ten years, and I have decided to separate. I wish I could give you a simple reason for it, but I can't. It's complicated and personal, and their's no one to blame; we will always be best friends and we still love each other -- always will. She will always be a part of my life, and I hers.

It was fortunate that last week was spring break. I wouldn't have been able to concentrate on my classes while grappling with the implications rippling through my future, anyway. I didn't think about my schoolwork all week. Instead, I through myself into my music.

As I said in a previous column, my band has been getting more active again, and the timing couldn't be better. Nothing like a good distraction to avoid real life. Me and the boys have been playing, and I think we've found the sound. KONTRA rocked Rock's Bar on 3rd Avenue in Wausau Thursday and Friday nights. I've heard before that music soothes the soul, and that's especially true when you're right in the middle of it. Believe me, when one drummer's late and even though you have another drummer, he (the first drummer) also knows how to set up the sound system, it takes your mind off everything else. But, like all dreams, in the morning you wake.

Our plans, hopes and dreams for life don't always -- probably rarely -- work out. All we can do is keep trying. These days, divorce is all too common -- a "right of passage" -- and I, like most others, thought we'd be the exception; but life goes on, and I will remain stoic.

Then go into the great personage boldly and remember these things; and you will see what a youth is who has studied these things when he is among men who have not studied them. I indeed imagine that you will have such thoughts as these: "Why do we make so great and so many preparations for nothing? Is this the thing which men name power? Is this the antechamber? this the men of the bedchamber? this the armed guards? Is it for this that I listened to so many discourses? All this is nothing: but I have been preparing myself for something great."

--Epictetus: Discourses (book 2)