I appreciate that, it’s been a pretty long time ago at this point, though the breakup did really fuck my perspective of time all up.

Since you and I can probably relate on a lot of things, I’ll share a bit with you.

I definitely could have caught her cheating years earlier if I had looked, but I didn’t. I believed two things that kept me from looking. One, she was crazy about me. Two, she had a right to privacy.

If she hadn’t just been blatant about it and so comfortable lying, I might never have known and could have ended up with an sti, which she ultimately did end up with but fortunately for her it was curable. I didn’t, thank goodness. That didn’t stop her from going around telling people I gave it to her and praying that I had slept with her behind my girlfriend’s back. She really believed I started seeing my girlfriend before I left her, so I believe that she hoped we’d both have it so she’d leave me. It was nuts.

Once I caught her, I thought I could work it out, forgive her, and move on. It just opened the flood gates though. It was like I had permitted her to do whatever she wanted to do by forgiving her. She went around telling everyone that I beat her and kept her as a prisoner for all of those years. She’d disappear for days at a time leaving me and our daughter to worry about her. The first time, I didn’t panic until it was clear something was wrong and she was out beyond her normal time, so I probably traumatized our kid by driving around looking for her that night. I didn’t do that again, but our daughter was still terrified any time she didn’t come home.

When I finally left and started seeing someone seriously, that’s when shit got really, really dangerous. She started being abusive to our daughter, but because her family pulled the legal kidnapping, I had to work with her to get her back. After that, things seemed to calm down and she never did anything that would cause a court to take her away. She just constantly bombarded our kid telling her how terrible I was, how much she hated my girlfriend.

For a few years after we split she’d randomly message me and apologize for things. I’d respond, but something I’d say would spark her to attack me again. Once she got her cancer diagnosis though, holy shit.

I didn’t realize the extent of it until she died and our child came to live with me. I mean, I knew it got bad, but the girl was laying there dying a miserable death and that really complicated things.

The last conversation I ever had with her was an argument. She called our daughter a skank and I snapped. Fortunately her husband was listening in on the conversation and when I said to him, “Please, listen to me! I’m her ex. Nothing I say will ever get to her. You have to tell her that it’s not right and it has to stop. She can’t call her kid names.” He told her that it needed to stop. She actually did stop, spent the next two weeks watching movies with her and spending time with her, but that was all the time she had. I wish I had said something sooner.

I have my daughter in therapy these days. The kid has been through it. She doesn’t miss her mom, and I wish that she could have known the person I used to know. If I so much as compare her in a positive way, I end up causing her a lot of stress so I just don’t do it.

I hope that someday she can come to terms with who her mother was and get past it all.

It was a wild ride.

I’d happily read some of your story as well.

Sorry if this is a mess. I have a 4 year old making me stop typing to watch her do silly things. I can’t even proofread it, but it’s fun watching her. :p

Take care.

My ex. Jesus Christ man.

She moved in and adopted my whole personality. Naturally, her own personality was fighting to surface and a person can’t bury who they are forever.

After more than a decade, she just lost it. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced, and you’re spot on about it fucking up trust in other people. It doesn’t have to, but it does take work.

In the middle of the chaos that was the collapse of my entire life, I remember one line from a letter she wrote me. “I feel more like myself than I have in a very long time. I know that’s probably hard for you to read.”

She had BPD too, so for three years, one moment I was god, the next she was sitting up in the bed at the end of an overall great day and saying, “I’m sorry. I just don’t love you anymore.”

She wanted nothing to do with me until I found someone else. She lost her damn mind, tried to kill herself, ended up hospitalized for mental health. That got her family involved and we had to fight them for our kid in court. It’s crazy how easy it is for a family member to kidnap your child. They told the magistrate that I held my family hostage with a knife, got a restraining order, and I just had to wait until court knowing that our daughter was scared to death and living through a nightmare on top of a nightmare.

Somehow, the woman I’m with survived all of that chaos with me. I figured she’d get tired of me driving out in the middle of the night over and over again to make sure my ex didn’t actually hurt herself.

Once she got to be herself though, she was alright. She met someone more like her. She went from laying in bed all the time hating herself and her life to taking care of things that she couldn’t before. She never got a drivers license and she was finally able to do that. She never cleaned and when I worked a lot our place was trashed, but her last place was immaculate. Poor girl died of breast cancer 4 years after we split. I wish she had left me years before honestly, so she’d have had a chance to really live.

Life is a mess. Some people do make it hard to trust other people, but we have to carry on and do our best. We’ve gotta work so that problem isn’t everyone else’s problem.

I have done my best to keep from carrying all that baggage into the relationship I’m in. I do my best to encourage her to just be herself. We get one short life, and I don’t want to have a hand in ruining it for anyone. Go see your friends, go be with your family. Don’t sit here alone because I do. Keep building your life outside of me. Maintain something of the world you lived in before you moved to ours.

Sorry for the book. I guess I needed to spit it out of my head again. I could write on this topic for several years straight and I still wouldn’t run out of shit to say about it. :p

As a musician I used to say, “Leonard Cohen began his music career in his 30s. I can do this.”

I’m not Leonard Cohen in any imaginable way. Oh, and I’m past that point now too. :p

You’re just lucky. I too feel like I’ve lived through multiple lifetimes. They all went by in a flash.

I’ve been hard on my body and mind though. I’m a dumb hillbilly who started having kids when I was 16. I spent a decade as a functional heroin addict. Functional because I have family that gave a damn about me and I’m so antisocial that I had the discipline to have a week’s supply and not burn through it because the thought of dealing with people was enough to make me pause (mostly). Otherwise I would have been in the gutter with everyone else.

I’ve been through the wringer. Maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know.

Life is funny.

It’s so wild to me that Nirvana is old, that I’m old.

I heard the older folks say that I would wake up and be old one day and it would feel like barely any time has passed. “Young people will treat you like a dinosaur and you’ll still think you’re 25.”

I just can’t believe it.

Time has slipped through my fingers. Everything I put off a week ago was actually thousands of years ago now.

30-40 has been a month or so.

I have FO76 but I’ve never played past the intro.

I really hope they put out actual games eventually.

I was so excited for 76 because it takes place where I live. I’m still going to play it. Apparently it isn’t that bad these days. I just wish it had been an actual fallout game.

Yeah that describes me pretty well, but I’m not bummed. I mean, not really.

I don’t know. I could use therapy, but I must not have been honest enough because through my drug rehab program I was in therapy and they decided that I didn’t need it any more. They said that if I felt like I did, I could tell them, but I always want to just grab my meds, joke with the doctor, and get out of there.

I don’t know. If I am depressed I’m surviving. I wasn’t surviving before. I was just paralyzed and waiting for death. I felt like a living thing though without having to think about it, but I didn’t want to be a living thing. Now I do, and my life is objectively a mess but I’m doing better than I ever have, so it’s hard to say I’m depressed when I’m doing better than ever.

Life is a challenge, and that sucks because so far for me, it has flown by.

Thank you for listening to it, and definitely thank you for adding it to your library.

That’s actually how I heard of Elliott Smith. I put a couple songs on mp3.com when I was a teenager and several people compared me to him. I listened and I’ve been hooked since. It’s funny, because after I listened to him his influence poured into everything I did after.

Seriously thank you for listening. For fun, here’s one of my favorites that I ever did. Hope you like it too. I was probably 22 when I did this one.

https://mega.nz/file/E00nzD7C#DGOB4O51EalvIREhqAepIe98jvrVIeagR8jcPbmNGgk

And now I’ve shared two. :)

I just wish I had the desire to make friends or keep them. Every step we take in this world requires other people, and yet the most exhausting thing in this world to me is company. I can’t have a career of any kind because the whole idea of doing a social dance makes me want to vomit. It just isn’t in me.

I’m not depressed, at least I don’t think I am. I don’t really feel sad.

I always wanted to be a musician and I recorded a lot of songs when I was younger. I got pretty good at it even, and then I just stopped one day because I stopped feeling sad. I never shared any of it really. I still play, I just don’t take it seriously or write any more. I want to, because I put so much of myself into it. When I listen to a record I love, all I can do after is dream about making something that someone would love that much, but even if I did I’d never put it out there.

I don’t even know why I typed this out. Your comment just opened me up I guess.

Fuck it. Here’s one of those songs I wrote a thousand years ago.

https://mega.nz/file/c0lkyZiT#MrSCD8ZCK_W5QmU5hekJrhhP-J3tGKUHvpAR748MQ10

There, now I’ve shared one.

I think this is his child. You know how, like, how his running mate has a thing for his own daughter? Ol’ JD has a thing for his uncomfortable chair youngin.

My uncle can navigate windows xp with his eyes closed. It took me years to get him there. He was fine with vista and 7. When 8 hit, it was over and it has been since.

This is a religious man who I’ve only ever heard cuss twice in his life before, and they were the milder words. “What the fuck is copy as a path? I’m just trying to copy and paste a file to my Zip drive! I can’t find computer, I can’t find my computer. I can’t find copy and paste! I’m gonna throw this thing across the room! Seriously, show more options? Why not leave the options I’ve had since 1996 where they were? Do people just not copy and paste any more?”

I have given up and I just remote connect and do it for him. He tried for a few years with the “slow down and let me learn” thing but he’s almost 70 and he’s given up.

He calls his usb drives “zip drives”. He was the only person I knew who had an actual Zip drive when I was a kid and I loved it.

I had to do this today on my wife’s laptop. The settings menu just wouldn’t do it. It just sat there for a thousand years.

I second this question.

It happens to me at least once a month. I’ll yawn more than once in a row and if I’m not careful they’ll get me.

I’m scared to yawn bro. Oh my god it’s awful.

Did I ever tell you about nuclear?

Just watched this one again last night. It is absolutely among the greatest television ever made.

If I could get back all the years of my life spent walking boomers through tech problems for free…

Hey, I got thanked and told I was worth a million bucks to the boss one time though. If I had a tail I might have wagged it. :/

Oh I’m all for people doing what makes them happy. I just can’t imagine ever being driven there myself.

Reading this just reminds me how vanilla I am. Like, I’ll watch y’all get down for four minutes on video one Tuesday a month, but naaah, I’m good on the actually being there and being a part of it part.