12 March 1955 - 14 March 2008

Please know that the only reason I am writing a blog about this is to simply get information out and no other purpose. Hope it helps. My stepdads life was taken outside of his house on the morning of March 14th. My Family and Friends are invited to attend services for Mark. Traditional Catholic Rosary to be held Monday, March 24th. Visitation is from 6:00pm to 8:00pm With a Rosary starting at 7:00pm at Darling-Fisher Chapel of the Hills located at 615 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos, CA. Funeral services will be held the following day, Tuesday, March 25th at 10:00 a.m. at Saint Mary's in Los Gatos with a Life Celebration party to follow at C.B. Hannegan's Restaurant in Los Gatos. Mark expressed a strong desire to have a fun funeral, so please honor him by avoiding boring black clothes and come ready to celebrate his life. In lieu of flowers, a fund has been established for my little sister. Donations can be made to the Alexandra Achilli Scholarship Fund for the benefit at Bank of the West In Los Gatos.

Daft Punk and Diamonds.

The best birthday present I think I have ever given. The first was not a surprise: Daft Punk at the Greek theatre. Quite an audio/visual experience. The best part is that I experienced it with my fiance. That is the second present I gave: myself via a diamond ring. I proposed to Cait on thursday july 26th and now we are getting married. The funny part of that present is that it's not so much a present for her but more like if you were to give your girlfriend a nintendo for her birthday. Sure it's a gift for her but really you gave it so you could play.

I didn't like the other title so now it's just called thinking

In this whole mix mash of life that is happening within me, part of my journey has included shaking my understanding of God. Let me put it this way...I feel as though I am learning for the first time to have a relationship with God through Jesus as opposed to being part of the Christians. I feel like I have to learn how to believe. Part of my panic lately has included a sense of nothingness. Doubt and fear have really come up a lot lately and I feel as though my thoughts have given me a glimpse of what it would be like if God didn't exist. Simple to write, probably meaningless to others, but for me, it is one of the worst things I could imagine. Along side this timeline of change in my life, coincides a timeline of breaking down to the fundamentals of my beliefs. Follow me here. In this last year, along with my life changes, I have really begun to get into the depths of what I really believe in. Conversations on God and community and spirituality over this last year have really reached deep into my mind and heart and raised a lot of important questions of understanding for me in terms of God and I. So here we have again another foundation that is being broken down and even shaken. Something that is new for me and breeds thought that is not only important for maturity, but also thoughts filled with doubt and fear about if I truly believe. It's hard to admit but it is in me. The reason why I am writing right now though is because I just had a thought and I want to play it out and see where it goes. I was just freaking out again about my beliefs and if I truly believe. I have thought a lot lately about the bible and God's purpose for it. The more I study and discuss, the more I am realizing how God lives through it. Overall I am beginning to see how maybe God gave us the bible for the same reasons he gave us each other...in order that we might walk with him as we search for him together. This is cool, but a hard realization as well. Along with this realization has come this fear that maybe we made it all up. When I was younger (like 16 years old) and first started to believe, I thought that the bible was a piece of mystical writing that God magically came down and wrote for us, and if we read the bible and said we would do everything in it, then we would win the prize in the end. That's a poor depiction but the idea is that I had a very innocent idea about what it meant to be a Christian. And i liked the comfort in it. It was easy. This whole philosophical journey is making it so much harder. But here is where I feel as though I veered: I have spent so much time thinking about God the deity and his role in the universe and his almighty power that I think I forgot about Jesus. Furthermore, I think I may have robbed myself of an intimate knowing of Jesus through things like getting to know the scriptures. Now, I make mention of the scriptures not because we as Christians are supposed to read the bible, or that if I read the scriptures that I'll be doing my duty; I now see that there is an opportunity to learn more and grow a relationship with Jesus by reading about him and getting to know him through those who walked with him. Man how I forgot about Jesus. Here it is...imagine trying to fathom true nothingness. Seriously try. It's hard. Almost impossible. But what little we can gain is scary (at least for me). That's what i think has been happening with my search to understand the big God. Like...Creator God. That is a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around. In the end I don't think that human minds can really ever truly understand entirely the idea of nothingness. But we have been afforded the ability of partial understanding, which is enough to feel a bit of its weight. That weight is heavy for me. The same goes for God. I have been working hard to wrap my mind around God the deity. God the concept. I don't think that I can ever truly get it. The tricky part though, is that in my attempt, I have mistaken my lack of understanding as the possibility of it not existing at all. What I think I forgot is that God afforded us Jesus so that we could fully get the picture. Seems simple yes but it hits heavy when it hits deep understanding. My realization now is that in order to start understanding God, I will need to work towards knowing Jesus really. I mean seriously and intimately knowing Jesus.

Foundation cont'd...

I was at this wedding yesterday and at one part they were talking about that old cliche thing where they say that your first image/impression of God is through your Dad. Never really had much of a Dad example growing up so that is shot. But I did have other family that served as a good foundation and I felt sort of made up for anything that was missing. Now I feel like I am going on a journey of my own and that It's time I grow apart from my family in sort of a healthy way. I think that's where the problem is though. I feel scared and lost and alone and I feel like I can't just run home to mom to make it all better. And I am struggling with God right now because I feel like he is pushing me to move forward and I feel sort of distant. So my days as of late are mixed with so much that is waring on me. When I feel good I feel good. But i haven't had a day in a while where I felt good all day. I feel like I am always on edge looking for the next moment that I am going to just feel bad. The whole thing is tricky though because what constitutes good and bad. I spent so much time being only happy funny Dave that I never learned how to really feel sorrow or mellow or comfortable to sit in my own skin. I think someone can only do that for so long. When i start to feel something other than happy I guess I feel that something is bad. But for me its really hard to pinpoint what's inside of me so I end up feeling like everything is bad and that I might go crazy or lose my mind. So let me go through what's going on in my head right now:
I have a headache right now and I feel sort of edgy and I don't really know why. I feel sad that I feel this way. This is a new job for me and the shift I am on is dead slow. This is my third 24 hour shift without a single call. I feel a bit lethargic. I used to love it when I was in school and working and playing music and busy. I used to feel so productive and active. Now things have slowed down and I think it makes me feel this way. So at the same time that I am sitting here feeling a little bored and wasting my time away, I am stressed about everything that is going on with me, with life transitions, with doing well in my actual new career, with doing well with the new fire position i just got, with balancing it all and taking care of Cait, and a million other little things. And all these things are going on all at the same time in my brain and as I sit here and let them all come up i feel crazy. My brain just won't slow down and it is so tiring. So my body is just sitting here doing nothing for the past 9 hours and my mind is racing this whole time. Multiply that times the past few weeks and here I am.
I don't know how to do things to change and I feel alone and scared and overwhelmed. Overwhelmed. My honest prayer is God please grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

hope this works

So I have heard from a few people now that this helps so here I am. I have never really been one to journal or write my thoughts down. I think the closest I have come is music. But as of late i feel like things in my brain are changing. I used to be known as happy Dave who is always smiling and joking and for a while now i don't feel the same. Basically my life is changing and I am growing up. It doesn't mean that when you grow up that everything get's bad and negative, but for me, in this process there are some key elements that as I uncover, things are getting hard for me. There have been some more recent discoveries about my life that have really been tearing me up. I got a few panic attacks and recently I had one that was really hard to get past. I felt like everything was bad in the world and that i was just going to die and fade into nothingness. Turns out I didn't die, but my body was bringing out some stuff. So here is the stuff that I am having a hard time with:
In this whole crazy process I realized that as I am growing into adulthood, the things that served as foundations were not as permanent as I thought they might be. As i looked towards these foundations, I began to have expectations. Now as things are changing for me and my expectations are not turning out, i feel confused. I feel like these things are not actually foundations which is creating two things in my mind. One is that I am growing into a more mature foundation which is a good thing I think. The second is that this transition is really hard. I am in a weird middle ground where i feel like i don't really have any foundations right now and I feel lost. I feel really edgy all the time, i have anxiety about things going sour even in the smallest situations, and I feel nervous all the time. It sucks. I feel like i didn't even know that this would ever happen or else I would have tried my hardest to change a lot earlier. BUt here I am.
So think how I really feel is this weird sense of being alone. Sure logically I know that God is here and that I have Cait and friends and family who love me...but deep down it doesn't satisfy the foundation part. I think my biggest struggle here is with God.

time for music.

so this thursday will mark the official beginning of the first official greenisgreen album. Mike and I have absolutely no limits on how long it will take or be, but we know that we are going to take our time and do things out of our norm. What if it ended up sounding like the dixie chicks meets devo. I suppose that would be out of our norm.


p.s. i forgot to mention on my last post that i also hung out with bob barker on national tv and he gave me two ugly gold watches that cost me 300 dollars in taxes and are the ugliest things. Ahh the price of fame.

time

So in the last year i have graduated college, figured out a career choice, taken a break from music, rejoined playing music, gotten my EMT license and hopefully a job with AMR ambulance company (status pending), traveled outside the u.s. to nine other countries, faced the hardest issues i never wanted to face, left a church, found a new church, learned to surf again, let my debt grow to uncomfortable proportions, began applying to every fire department i can possibly find openings to, lived in 3 different zip codes, lost weight and then gained most of it back, got salmonella, received news that there will be a new member of my family (compliments of Liza and Mr. Julio), laughed the hardest laughs ever, and managed to stay sane enough to share it all with someone who reaches the depths of me. If that is the 24th/25th year of my life, then what the heck is 25/26 gonna hold?

photos

I will now be posting photos on flickr. check out the link on the right....or click here:

PHOTOS that I made

A final thought.

This will be my last post from Europe. After i wrote last, I did end up having some chocolate and it was not enough to change my thoughts on Brussels. I would be happy if i never visited that place again. It was the most dirty, boring, male-filled city i have been in. They did have some good brews though and the downtown area was nice. I think it was just the part of town we stayed in. We went to London yesterday and that was nice. We hit up Camden town, did some shopping, and then went to TATE. Last night we went and saw Amber sing in The Black Peter Group! It was her roommates birthday and we went to the party in a tiny little pub in Soho with all her fashion friends. Today Cait and I ventured on our own back up to manchester to fly home in the morning. Her cousin met us down here and now we are going to find a pub to watch england play in the world cup. So that is that. Amazing trip, amazing places. See you in the states.