Me too. My favorite memories come from Unreal Tournament on Dreamcast. I had this terrible, ancient LCD projector that overheated and turned off over and over again. It had to be opened, so to block the light I stuck a black sheet over it and stuck a fan in the window.

We had a huge screen that honestly was probably barely visible, and we had a blast.

God I miss my job.

More than 20 years of peace and I took it for granted. When the boss started talking about selling the place I thought, “Who would buy this outdated hole in the ground that makes no real money and is surrounded by competition?”

What bums me out the most though is that when I was 16 he said, “Come work for me. In 10 years I intend to retire and I’ll lease one of these places out to you and you’ll take over when I die.”

I knew it wasn’t happening at the 11 year mark.

Don’t be loyal. Jump around. Don’t throw your life and time away. Everyone I know who has ever made any money did so by selling their skills to the highest bidder.

I helped someone else get everything they ever wanted and I got nothing but promises.

Don’t do that. Seriously.

(I should have made this its own comment but yours is the one that moved me to write it. The speech is directed mostly at OP and anyone else who stumbles onto it.)

Let me know if it’s any good. I’ll totally eat the next one if it is.

Awww man you just unlocked a memory of mine. I had several of those.

Also, like the other person who replied to you, I had He-Man toys that did that. I’m like 90% sure it was Skeletor and He-Man.

Bro, the Counter-Strike devs put porn in the game. I’m surprised they were all able to get away with it.

Huh? Oh no, dude it’s easy. Hold alt and press f4 and it brings it up. Then just browse it with the s and d keys.

Bahahaha! Half the lobby is gone!

There was a point in my childhood where every shirt I owned was a Stone Cold Steve Austin shirt.

I mean, he did say so.

Just seeing the pic, I could hear the sound.

I didn’t. It was a gift. It has been an amazing car though.

I had nothing but bad luck all if my life, buying beaters that barely moved, weren’t safe, and left me stranded constantly. I walked to work and begged for rides constantly. I had to walk 4 hours down a mountain on the way, 4 hours up a mountain on the way back. Most of the time I’d get lucky and someone would pick me up once I got around the 2 hour mark and walked into civilization.

I’m dirt poor. I’ve spent a lot of years in that struggle.

Would you believe that I haven’t paid a penny for any of the vehicles I own right now? I just had a pile of good luck. Some of it was good luck that came from bad things, like a friend of mine passing away and leaving me his car.

I will say though. I absolutely love the X5. It has been the most reliable and most comfortable car I’ve ever owned.

Less shit to work on with the 1991. I have a 2003 BMW X5 and holy shit it blows my mind how many crazy computer parts it has. It’s the base model with the manual transmission too.

It just recently started falling apart on me after many years of driving it. All at once the heat and AC stopped working, the windows fell down into the doors (no shit, all of them in just a few weeks).

It’s been a damn good car though, and I might get 10 more good years out of it once I fix all of this stuff.

I don’t know what they do differently at BMW, but that car is parked on the grass (for at least 5 years this coming February) and still has the original exhaust. Isn’t that crazy?

Yeah, that’s why you get six of them. When you have a problem, you just pull a part out of another one.

Until recently, I had three jeep liberties, but somebody stole one of them. Oh well. Now I have two.

Ok Hector!

lol, it’s like saying, “Nuh uh! Bundy didn’t kill anyone. He said so himself!” (pre-confession).

How funny!

I feel you. I pretty much exclusively play 80s and 90s games.

You want some fun that is modern, somehow ancient, and beautiful? Oh, and challenging, but if you persist it is very rewarding?

Cuphead. I fucking love that game. I play it and replay it and play it some more. I have waaaaaay too many hours in that game on Steam and on Switch. I think it’s the only game I ever got all achievements on.

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

My god the world needs people like your wife. Man. Tell her that I said she’s amazing.

Damn, his kid is a writer too?

Eh, he’s a millionaire. Must be something to it. He’s 68 now and has started selling his stuff off. The new owners have been calling me for months because I’m the only person who knows how to deal with it other than him.

He truly is a genius. Like anyone else, he has his flaws, but I’m telling you, he’s brilliant and his work is brilliant.

In all of the years he has ran his businesses he never called an outsider in. He learned to program machines that people are paid hundreds of dollars an hour to program and repair despite being functionally illiterate. I’d say there’s virtue in his work.

On top of all of that, has taken care of his employees. He isn’t perfect, but if someone works for him and their car breaks down, it gets repaired on his account. If it can’t be repaired, he goes to a car auction and buys them a car on his own time after inspecting it from top to bottom to make sure it’s good enough.

I’ve had my problems with him AND his work over the years, but overall I definitely think that his skill is the virtue that I think it is. I envy him, in a positive way.

Don’t work when you smoke weed.

I rarely smoke it (haven’t in at least 4 years), but when I do and sex happens, I can’t breathe and I end up totally stopped up for at least an hour.

I have allergies too though.