You know what really sucks? This hasn’t always been the way we experienced the world. Unlike the next generation, we had a small window where things were normal, where you could leave your house and bad news could wait. You could be free to be alone and as far away from everyone as you wanted.

Maybe the average person likes being connected all the time, but it has destroyed my brain, my creativity, just everything.

I held out on getting a cell phone with constant connectivity until 2019 when my wife made me get service because we were having a baby. My magic jack (and the app that came later) were enough for me. I could leave my home and experience true freedom from the world. Everyone knew I didn’t have service so no one was upset when they couldn’t reach me. It was, “hey, call me when you get home. You really need a real phone man.”

I feel like I experience no freedom whatsoever.

The best time of my life, the most creative time of my life, the most I ever read, the most I ever accomplished, I did by refusing to have cable, internet, or a phone back when I first moved out on my own. I wrote songs, short stories, tried painting, etc.

I require hours and hours of being completely uninterrupted to do anything and that just isn’t the world I live in anymore.

And no one did a thing when they were on the verge of having them because North Korea doesn’t have anything worth taking would be my guess.

My mom’s first cousin never said anything but “colored” and she traveled to Nigeria to marry her second husband who was black and spent many years with him.

Some things I heard her say, “oh they just don’t like me because my husband is colored.” “If you see a colored man in a yellow shirt that says reading rainbow on it, tell him to get to the car or I’m leaving him here.” “I’ve never seen a white man more handsome than the ugliest colored man.”

“People of color” is also pretty much the same thing, and it’s almost universally used these days. What’s the difference between person of color and colored person?

I don’t know. Language changes and evolves, and it’s definitely falling out of fashion, I’ve never personally heard “colored” as an insult. If someone wants to be insulting they generally wear their hate on their sleeve.

I have a stamp that says, “Retarded children can be helped.” and it really isn’t that old. When it came out I doubt it shocked anyone, but when I first seen it my jaw hit the floor.

I did that for a while, and I’ll be exaggerating my uselessness but here goes.

“No, that can’t be him. See, the man who did the robbery was wearing a pair of pantyhose on his face. This guy has no such article of clothing on his face. His friend had on a ski mask, I don’t see a ski mask on this man’s face. Yeah, they’re wearing the same shoes but what about the face coverings, hmmmmm?”

As a stay at home dad, I should have time to accomplish something, but I don’t. I just clean all day and chase kids around.

Then I get insecure and have nightmares where my wife is telling me she’s moving out because she found someone else who has a good job.

I plead with her, “I’m only doing this because you told me to! I’ll go work wherever. We’ve got it good. We’re happy. Why are you doing this? I would have never quit my job without you telling me to do just that, and this is what it gets me?”

I really wish I could stop my brain from creating all of this stupid shit when I go to sleep. I at least wish I could sleep through it and forget about it.

I at least know it’s just my insecurity and I don’t make it her problem. I had an ex who would dream I cheated or that I was leaving her and she’d be pissed at me for days haha. I was all, “look babe, I didn’t fuck her, you practically just seen a drawing that your brain made of me fucking her. You can’t hold that against me!” :p

My wife’s grandmother has a ton of dogs that roam her house.

When I first went there she was cooking for me, and oh boy that scared me. Turns out that she’s damn good at cleaning.

I didn’t even get fur on my clothes like I usually would when a person only has one dog. Place is somehow immaculate with like 12 dogs running around.

I just took a trip down south in the US and obsessively monitored the weather back home and pined for it haha.

92F (33C) where I was at, 68F (20C) at home.

I don’t. Her talent doesn’t make her anything special outside of that talent. A person can do the wrong thing for the right reasons.

Also, it happened during a time when Muslims were facing torment from the outside world because of 9/11. She wasn’t the only artist to convert to Islam during that time, but most of the ones I remember reading about at least had some potential connection to the religion through their ancestry.

Some people cannot fathom a world without religion, even when they see the destruction in what they’re familiar with. If you spend your heart fighting one enemy, it’s a lot easier to miss the crimes of the enemy next door, especially if that enemy is a perceived underdog.

Edit:

2018 is when she converted apparently, but she still would have seen and felt the post 9/11 world. I don’t know much of anything so disregard everything I said if you want to or tell me why I’m an idiot if I deserve it.

I’ve been dealing with this forever.

Some issues I have that I only deal with when I’m not signed in without an adblocker:

If I try to skip back to a spot in a video, I get the loading circle and sometimes it doesn’t come back until I refresh the page. I have to make a mental note of the time and do that pretty often.

In safari and Firefox I will get a black box for about 40 seconds, no play button, and sometimes I have to refresh the page a few times just to get it to work at all.

Comments will not load sometimes until I refresh the page, sometimes more than once.

The video will sometimes stop and start “loading” while I’m watching it. The solution is always a page refresh or two.

Signed in with an adblocker, the problems drop by about 50% (pulled that number out of my ass, but I’d be willing to bet it’s close). Signed in with no adblocker on Firefox or Safari and the issues become significantly less noticeable, with exceptions from time to time. Signed in with no adblocker on chrome or edge, I experience none of this.

I believe they purposely throttle it on non chromium browsers too.

Sorry if this comment is jumbled. Woke up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache, got bored waiting for it to pass, so now I’m here and barely conscious.

BPD and NPD (narcissism) are related.

I was sure my ex was a narcissist and I wasn’t surprised at all by her diagnosis, except I expected NPD.

Funny thing, my ex never drank, but after I caught her cheating I also had to drag her out of dangerous places so intoxicated she couldn’t stand and was vomiting on herself regularly.

It’s like once that door opened, the floodgates opened with it.

I’ve always been a drinker, but I have two beers a night (10% alcohol, so almost 4 typical beers). In all the years we were together she drank only one time until those floodgates opened.

I am going to a Modest Mouse concert with my wife tomorrow, just kissed her good night and went outside the hotel for a smoke. I can’t believe I have her at all.

I hope you have amazing luck for the rest of your life. I really do.

You’re absolutely right. That bit about projection is so true. My ex was always convinced I was cheating with someone, but it never even crossed my mind. She only ever outright accused me once, but my sister said that she was always paranoid about it.

Life is crazy, isn’t it?

I don’t want to spend my life paranoid and looking for crap to explode all the time. I just want a peaceful life.

I have refused to build up walls because of my ex.

I’m glad you’re doing well too. I hope it keeps going that way for you.

I’d be willing to bet that if we talked for a few hours we’d find many parallels. My ex was diagnosed with BPD right at the end of our relationship. Of course, I “made that up” once she did some reading and realized it was the answer for everything.

Same here. Apollo stopped and I came here.

Holy shit, time flies. It was Apollo for me.

Damn.

Man, it got so crazy at the end it was unfuckingbelievable.

She went around telling people I beat and raped her, all kinds of things.

If there wasn’t something wrong with my brain I’d be terrified to ever do it again.

It caused me to seriously believe that any long lasting relationship only lasts because one of the two always has their head in the sand.

Even after all of that, I’m still who I always was. I do not spy on my wife, I respect her privacy. I never even have the desire to go digging.

I can’t help but wonder though, if I did would everything come crashing down.

As long as she’s smart enough to keep it from being blatant, I’ll never know. That’s how my ex got away with so much chaos over the years. I never once looked. She got too confident with one though, either confident or impatient. She slipped up and told easily verifiable lies. “I’m house sitting for my sister.” The only time she was ever asked to do that. Didn’t make sense. “I’m not ignoring you, I’m just watching Shameless on Netflix and I keep falling asleep.” Nothing had been played for days on Netflix.

When I caught her red handed with a guy, she told me to my face that he was a gay friend of her sister. He couldn’t even look at me. She said the car he was driving was her sister’s car. Same color, different make and model, tags from another state.

And my god, the people all around me who knew, smiled and waved, and never said a word.

It just blows my mind. It really does.

I have no idea how I managed to trust anyone enough to ever do this again.

Man, I had the complete opposite experience. I had a nervous breakdown, fought like hell to make it work, caught her cheating over and over again, lost my mind completely.

Then, when I couldn’t take anymore and had spent a night out looking for her when she failed to get back home after a concert, only for her to show up the next afternoon with a hickey on her neck, I decided enough was enough.

I went out with a girl who had been asking me out for a while, fell in love, and moved on.

She lost her damn mind and tried to get me to come back, but it was too late. She ended up committed to a hospital, then after a fight on her end to fix things she ended up with the last guy she cheated with and then died from cancer a few years later.

Fortunately he turned out to be a great guy and took care of her through it all.

It’s crazy how fast everything has gone since then. I’ve been with the girl I mentioned above for nearly a decade, we have children, and still have passion.

I felt like I had spent a thousand years with my ex. If started when I was around 18 and ended when I was around 32. We lived together for 10 years.

This last decade has gone by in a minute, and I can’t believe I will have lived with my wife for longer than I ever lived with anyone just around the corner.

I believe that I am better prepared to deal with such chaos now, but I hope I never have to again.

Man, I could write a book on the chaos that was my ex.

The first chapter would open up with the story about us just being very close friends, and her telling me that when she turned 18 she’d move in with me. Well, the day came and she did just that, packed her bags and showed up to my place in the middle of the night.

About 4 days later I got a call at work, “If you don’t bring my daughter home tonight, you will have hell to pay.”

“Oh yeah!?” I replied. “Well, she’s 18 now and she doesn’t have to be your fucking prisoner anymore, bitch! Have a good life!” click

Phone rings again, “Listen! I don’t know what my goddamn headache of a daughter has told you, but she just turned 17. My advice to you would be to call someone to come take your shift and get in your ugly little car, and bring my daughter home now or rot in jail!”

Uh oh. I did just that. She cried all the way home. Her mom told me if she ever seen my car in her driveway again, I’d go to jail. I had the apology letter my ex wrote me for years, but she burned the box of letters when we split. It went something like, “I’m really sorry I lied to you. I thought you were awesome when we met and I thought you wouldn’t talk to me if you had known my actual age. Time went by and it became more embarrassing and harder to deal with. I didn’t think my mom cared if I left. I didn’t think she’d even try to get me to come back home. I’m never there, and she never cares.”

That should have been it, but one year later she showed up with her bags again. We lived together as friends for months, slept in the same queen size bed under our own blankets. One night we moved on each other and that was all she wrote.

Man, that isn’t even the craziest story with her haha. But it was always something like that. She lied about EVERYTHING. I believed her father was a lawyer for the first 5 years of our relationship. Turns out he was a mechanic. He’s actually been a meme for the last few years, but I don’t want to dox myself. You have definitely seen the meme, I can say that much. He became a meme for something really, really dumb too.

All the years I was with her, I didn’t meet him until her funeral. I feel guilty, but I said that out loud when I shook is hand. “It’s crazy that your granddaughter is 13 and we’re meeting you for the first time at her mom’s funeral.” You could tell it hurt him, and I still lose sleep over that because I wouldn’t want someone to say something like that to my father and I doubt he’d even be at my funeral.

Sorry for the book. I’ll stop now.

You’re welcome, I guess.

Read it again, I guess.

How would a civil war even play out nowadays?

I imagine the United States fracturing into multiple independent states that form alliances with each other in some way. Will there be independent cities, landlocked, surrounded by enemies? Will forces move in to occupy and conquer lands up to and around cities? How many states will survive to have actual statehood?

“We traveled into the Carolina empire into an area once known as Southwest Virginia. Fighting continued for months, but we couldn’t make progress. The locals know these mountains better than we ever could, even with our tech, they were killing us with pellet guns and improvised explosives called, “yee haws”. So we made our way into Georgabamasippi to hide among the Cousins and regroup. I’m keeping hope alive that the United States of California will make its way east, but even the word California can get you killed in these parts. I know you’ll probably never get this message, but it’s set to send as soon as I get signal, if I ever get signal. I love you, my darling. -1337NUTZ69420”

I hope I never have to live through anything like that, but I’d love to play the video game or watch the series of movies. :p

This. As a hillbilly with no access to books growing up, with my education practically stopping at the 4th grade and no stores in sight to purchase books from, I would have never had access to the things I read without piracy.

I half believe that’s why it’s an issue in the first place.

I started my reading adventure at 640x480 on windows 98.