Places, part II

1995: OJ Simpson's Trial Ended With His Acquittal Of All Murder Charges
In 1995, I was in my first year of middle school at South Jr. High School (later to be, sort of ironically, changed to "South Middle School" when they moved the 9th graders up to the high school). The day the OJ trial verdict was announced, we watched it live in my 7th grade science class -- and being smart and wise even in my younger years, when two of the asshole rich kids in the class tried to get me to take a $20 bet that OJ would get off, I gladly took it. I was, of course, taking a risk, but I wasn't stupid; I knew he'd be acquitted, and I knew those asshole rich kids were, well, asshole rich kids. When I was proven right and tried to collect, they of course said they wouldn't pay up. If I'd beaten the fuck out of them like a mafia boss, my reputation in school would've been much different for the following two years I remained a student there, and I probably would've been left alone a lot more, and wouldn't have been so bullied by the rest of the rich kids for the remainder of middle school.

1995 was a very formative year overall. I turned 13 in 1995, and I was a fairly troubled kid. I wasn't a fan of authority (something that continues to this day), but 1995 marked my really rebellious streak's beginnings. Truth be told, I was a terrible kid during this time -- I treated my mother horrifically, I got caught trying to shoplift Sega Genesis games from a local department store, and I didn't give a single flying fuck about school or about rules. I was fairly uncontrollable, and truthfully I don't know if my mother knew what to do with me, so after the shoplifting incident, she put me into therapy; it was the first of several times I'd consult with a therapist throughout my life. It's not like I was crazy or anything, but I was a typical rebellious teenager with really bad luck -- meaning every time I tried to get away with something, I never could or was caught. I remember it frustrating me terribly because I kept watching other kids my age actually get away with pretty much anything they wanted. It also didn't help that all of the rich kids at my school would talk about their new video games or show off all of their new comic books and sneakers and clothes, and I had none of those things. My mother and I were better off than we had been six or seven years before, but we were still lower-middle-class and far from rich. I was wearing clothes from Gabriel Brothers, the local discount store that sold one-offs and irregular clothing (at the time) when everyone else was wearing high-end designer shit. I didn't have name-brand shoes, I had whatever Gabes or Kmart sold on clearance (Walmart was just beginning to get a presence in Morgantown at this time, but it wasn't what we see Walmart as today -- it was very different back in the day and wasn't yet the super-mega-congolmerate that we're all now used to). Target didn't have a store in Morgantown until I was in college, so it was either Kmart, Gabes, or nothing for the poors. Maybe Goodwill, if you wanted even lower-rent clothing.

As an aside, I still have some stuff I purchased from Kmart and Gabes in the 90s. Very little, of course, but some. Mainly a few pairs of socks, a shirt or two, and some underwear.

Anyway, I was a troubled child. I was losing my grip on myself, was going through puberty and it wasn't working out well -- my always-straight, dirty blonde/light brown hair turned a darker brown and developed a lot of waviness and natural curl (inherited from my father, no doubt) that I hated. I hated my curly hair and couldn't get rid of it; meanwhile, everyone in my family told me how much they envied it because they thought it looked great. My voice cracked, but only cracked halfway -- I had to consciously force myself to talk in a deeper voice to mask it until my voice finished changing and became how it naturally sounded. This took a good year or so of fully controlled, metered conversations with everything I ever said to anyone for any reason. This was not pleasant. I felt like a monster in my own body. I'm sure a lot of people feel like this as they enter their teenage years, but I was burdened with being smarter than most other people I knew, so beginning to see how the world actually worked and how much it was stacked against people like me threw me into a deep, crippling depression for the first time in my life. I didn't know exactly how to deal with it because I'd never experienced it before and never knew what it really was.

The reason I went to South Middle School was because in the spring of 1995, when I was still attending North Elementary in 6th grade, my mother bought a house for us on the other side of town. It was a good house, and the wife and I drove past it upon my visit back home to West Virginia in 2017 to take pictures -- it looks completely different now, sadly. Anyway, for the rest of the 94-95 school year, I still attended North, because it would've been a major pain in the ass to switch school districts for two months. So we basically just faked it and said I was living at my old address until the end of the school year, and started anew at yet another new school at South in the fall that year.

The Morgantown house was a 3 bedroom, one bath house with a garage, massive laundry room, and underground family room. It was all brick and had been built in the 60s. I don't know how many people had owned it before us, but it was the perfect-sized house for the two of us. I started out in the larger of the two bedrooms, but would later move to the smaller of the two (more on the reasons for this later). The downstairs family room was never used, even though it was completely furnished and carpeted -- we put old spare furniture in there and I'm not sure we ever used the fireplace once. Big wolf spiders loved the downstairs of that house, at least in the family room area and the stairwell -- I don't think I ever saw one in the laundry room -- but my mother and I finally had a place we could really call our own. Not rented or leased, but purchased and owned. We hated mowing the grass and doing the gardening, but I laugh at that now that I own my own home with my wife, and in the summer that takes me like two hours a week to take care of. We purchased two old, heavy touring bikes (probably from the 70s) from the neighbors who were selling them at their yard sale, and my mother and I rode those bikes every once in a while. Even in all of the turmoil in my personal life, puberty, troubled youth and depression, those are the things I remember about 1995. I may have been almost failing out of school, I may have hated myself and felt like a monster, but I still remember some of the good.

So in the summer of 1995, I knew nobody around me. I knew nobody in my neighborhood, I knew no friends, I was too young to have a car (obviously) or a job, and I had no money, goals, or direction in life. I had low-rent, mid-90s non-digital cable television, I had comic books, and I had my own mind. I began writing, mostly in notebooks and on discarded sheets of printer paper. I began writing letters to Marvel and DC, trying to sell them on some half-brained storyline idea or pitch a new character (complete with sketches). I spent weekends (mostly alone) watching USA Up All Night, or getting up early in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays to tape episodes of syndicated Sailor Moon or the original Voltron and Speed Racer series which ran at 5AM on some of the local channels. I was just beginning to get into anime, even though I really didn't even know what it was at the time. That would come later.



1996: Dolly The Sheep Was The First Mammal To Be Successfully Cloned
When Dolly was cloned, the news was announced on a cold, frosty morning on my way to school. I first heard it on my headphones on the morning school bus, on the radio of my Walkman (the radio used far less battery than the actual cassette player did, so I generally listened to it on the bus ride so that people would leave me alone and I wouldn't be left with my thoughts).

While I had started playing intramural stuff in 1995, in 1996 I was playing on what was basically the jr. varsity (they didn't call it that; I can't remember what they called it) football team, defensive line. At my school, the jr. varsity team was basically training and a lot of practice for the actual team -- it was a loose team of what amounted to 3rd and 4th stringers, and as such we didn't play actual games for or on an actual team; if someone got hurt or they needed to fill a position because someone had gone out of town on vacation or got the flu or something, they'd call in one of us. Our job was to be trained up and ready to jump in when the actual "varsity" team needed it. Well, as defensive line, that didn't really happen for me, as I was one of the super-low-demand positions. So while I practiced a lot, and while I was ready to be called up, it didn't happen. I got to keep the jersey, though (I was probably supposed to give it back, but fuck 'em); my number was 15. I was wearing my jersey that year in my school ID picture, which I found and showed the wife a few months back. Some early snowstorms ended the football season a bit prematurely, as well as canceled our holiday choir concert -- something I was infinitely grateful for.

I turned 14 in 1996, and as such I was left to my own devices a lot around the house. My dad, who by this time had been in a relationship with my mother for a little over two years, lived conveniently about 1/4 mile from our new house, close enough to walk to if necessary with no real issue. My dad was (well, is to this day to some extent) a musician, and his band played shows every weekend around town at bars, resorts, and restaurants. My mother, of course, attended these shows without fail, and would generally spend the night "across the street" as I used to call it, at my dad's place at the end of the night. This was fine; it's not like I didn't know where she was and it's not like I wasn't taken care of. The band generally played 8-12, or 9-1, something like that -- meaning they'd take an hour or two to tear down and pack up afterwards, and that meant that my parents wouldn't get home until 2-4 in the morning (depending on venue). While I could've gone to see the band play at pretty much any time or place for these events -- I had the equivalent of a "backstage pass" so so speak, since I was "with the band," I didn't usually do so until I was much older, and only then very infrequently (probably less than ten times over the course of six or seven years).

Despite that, 1996 was the year I started paying attention to music and actually caring about it, and that was spurred on mainly by two things -- the first being the group of friends I fell in with, and the second being the internet. Because our middle school was full of trash people, I became friends with the outcasts, the people who didn't fit into any of the other cliques around the school -- because there were a lot of those. There were the rich kids/the preps, the thugs and troublemakers, the band geeks, the stoners, the poors, the untouchably gorgeous, the teachers' pets, the military brats, the jocks, etc -- I could go on, but most schools had the same sorts of cliques and groups -- mine was no different than the usual. My group of friends came from all walks of life and sort of reminds me now of the kids from Stranger Things, just the 90s version. We called ourselves, self-deprecating as it was, the Freaks.

There were a decent number of us in our core group. There was me, then Carl, who claimed he had a metal plate in his head; Adam, the muscle and sort of the de-facto leader of the group; Anthony, a sort of shaggy and mostly quiet nerd; Ron, the token black guy who was intimidating to outsiders but friendly and soft-spoken with friends; Ahmed, who drew some of the most beautiful comic art I'd ever seen; Paul, the class clown with a troubled home life; Heather, the nerd girl; John, the other end of the muscle -- a big nerd who had been a bully (ironically) to keep other people from bullying him; Stephen, a music and comic nerd whose sister was one of the most attractive girls in the school; and, finally, Chris -- the jock nerd who played on the football team but also loved playing Magic: The Gathering. Most of us were from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks, most of us came from low-income households, and all of us had pretty much been outcast or otherwise didn't fit in with anyone else in the school. We kept to ourselves and played Magic, D&D, and the Palladium tabletop games (primarily Rifts and Robotech) to keep outside of the attention of others.

Almost 25 years later I am still in contact with most of these folks, or rekindled contact with them after a number of years -- Adam, Carl, and Chris are all happily married with children. Carl has six kids, and I did not find out until two months ago that he does not, in fact, have a metal plate in his head. Chris became a high school football star and eventually ended up playing for WVU before settling down with a wife and child. Anthony is in Hawaii and is about to marry an acquaintance of mine, and Ron is still Ron. However, a good number of these people I would fall out of contact with either in high school or shortly afterwards. Paul I didn't see again until college, when he told me he was an electrician. Heather got in some trouble with the law, and sort of fell off our radar; the next time I saw her, I was most of the way through college and she was working at the deli counter of a local grocery store. Ahmed went into computer engineering and dropped off the face of the internet after around 2005 or so, and I've not been in contact with him since. Stephen went into the military at some point, and I lost contact with him around that time -- but his hot sister became a stripper. Finally, on a more sad note, a year or so after I left Morgantown, John committed suicide.

But I'm getting off track.

As mentioned, 1996 was the year I started really paying attention to music, and not just the stuff that was on the radio. Having a dad who was a musician -- in a band full of musicians we were family friends with --opened me up to a lot of stuff I would have otherwise never known about -- Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Tower of Power, Rush, Steely Dan, Genesis, Chicago -- etc. My brother (my dad's son) opened me up to more alternative, punk, metal, and industrial music, as well -- Front Line Assembly, Soundgarden, Ministry, NOFX, and the Misfits. My neighbor Stuart was a goth kid, two years older than me, and he introduced me to KMFDM, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and Depeche Mode. I branched out and began forming my own musical tastes as well based on what my friends were listening to -- I finally discovered bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Green Day, and suddenly I had an escape. Suddenly I could disappear into music, I could let my problems and boredom melt away. I soon found myself listening to the local college radio station at all hours, writing down the names of songs and artists I really liked on scratch paper when they mentioned them. This is how I discovered R.E.M., Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Echo and the Bunnymen. When I found someone I really liked, I would look them up and read all about them on...the internet.

Ah yes, the internet.

Words cannot describe here what the internet did for me as a teenager, or as a person in general, really. As a Black Friday deal in 1996, for $999 at Walmart, my mother purchased my very first computer for me. I remember it like yesterday -- it was an AST Advantage 575, the very model pictured below:

It ran Windows 95 first edition, had 8MB RAM, a 600MB hard drive, an 8X CD-ROM drive, a 3.5 floppy, and had a blistering fast 75mhz Pentium 1 processor. Oh, and a 14.4 modem.

Yes folks, that's how old I am -- my first computer had a 14.4 modem. Not a 28.8 or a 56k, but a piddly 14.4.

It also came with a printer that very quickly ran out of ink, and even in the 90s the ink cartridges cost $50.

The computer was purchased for me (primarily) so that I could type up papers and do other schoolwork on it, and very shortly after buying it (less than a month) my mother got me an internet account -- $14.95 a month for 30 hours per month of dial-up access via WVNET, a local company that, as you can see, still exists in some form back home. 30 hours per month! Can you imagine being that limited?

For those of you who are too young to remember, or who didn't have internet access at home until later in life, 1996 was literally the infancy of the internet. HTML would crash webpages. Pictures were a novelty and took forever to load on a dial-up connection -- the vast majority of the internet was mostly text-only with the occasional fancy background or weblink thrown in. There was no Google. There was no Youtube. There was no online gaming. Chatrooms were a completely new thing. There were few forums and no Reddit, only Usenet and newsgroups. MP3s and streaming did not exist. Jeff Bezos had just founded Amazon and nobody knew what it was yet. My web browser was Netscape 1.1. It was a new age that had just started, and finally I was (sort of) a leg up on most other people I knew -- I knew almost nobody who had internet at home, and I knew very few people who even had computers at home. Mind you, this was the mid-90s in rural West Virginia; a computer was some fancy rich people shit that at the time, appeared to be wholly unnecessary for home life.

To me, it was another escape. Online, I could be anybody, I could do anything. I had almost any information I wanted at a keystroke, and who cared if it took five minutes to boot the computer, another three or four to fire up telnet and manually dial into the internet with my modem, watching the text-only prompts on the screen saying "connected" only to be booted offline if someone called the house phone (or if my mother in the other room wanted to make a call).

The computer was set up on an end table in what, at that time, was the spare bedroom that nobody used -- it was set up there because there was already a phone jack in the wall there, when there wasn't one in my bedroom. Slowly, over the course of a few weeks and months, I moved into the smaller bedroom with my computer in it. It became my Batcave, my Fortress of Solitude. Through the CD-ROM drive I could finally play games and listen to music that I liked, and because of the internet I had enough distractions to where I no longer felt completely alone in the world.

1996 ended gracefully enough, and things were starting to look better, despite some of the events going on in the world. One of those nights when I was off school in the summer, up late watching TV and drawing some comic book art, I watched the Atlanta Olympics bombing on live television. I remember waking my mother up to tell her. She was less than enthused. I remember Christmas 1996 being filled with peace and settling down into a groove that would dominate the next two years or so for the most part, and thinking back on it now, I can't tell you what I'd give to have those times back, to be able to relive that year knowing what I know now. Things were so much simpler, so much easier.



1997: Princess Diana Died In A Car Accident While Being Chased By Paparazzi
The night Princess Diana died, in August 1997, my mother and I were watching live coverage on CNN. I remember it being a school night, and that I was up very late -- 1 or 2am -- when they made the official announcement. My mother always had, I felt, a connection of sorts to the royals -- she and my father got married shortly before Diana and Charles had, and Diana had given birth to Prince William while she was pregnant with me. They were almost the same age (Diana was about a year or so younger than my mother) and my mother even looked quite a bit like Diana -- blonde, usually short-haired, with piercing blue eyes. Diana may have been the closest figure my mother had to a true role model, and Diana's death upset her. I, of course, knew who Princess Diana was but knew little else about the family or about the royals in general.

The mid to late '90s were a weird time, friends. I was beginning to slowly come of age, beginning to realize the events of the world around me, and I was finally becoming what one might call "a normal teenager." With the internet to occupy me and help me out, my grades in school drastically improved; by the end of my 8th grade year I was back to my old ways of A's and B's. With music, I could center myself, and when I wasn't in school, I had hobbies -- I was starting to deeply get into anime, I played Magic: The Gathering, and I was, ahem, starting to notice girls. I mean, I'd always noticed girls before, but puberty was over at this point and I had become the quintessential horny teenager. I was 14, almost 15, and I wanted to date. I wanted to feel a connection with someone. I wanted to feel romance and passion and sex.

Precisely none of these things happened.  I was still the fat geek who collected comic books, played Magic with the rest of the Freaks at school and watched anime on a 20-inch tube TV with a VCR balanced precariously on top of it. But, thanks to a Sailor Moon fan website chatroom (I know, I know) I did connect with a girl my age in New York named Cathy. We became very close and began an online, long-distance relationship. She is, to this day, probably my oldest friend -- we are still in sporadic contact, we are friends on Facebook, and she remains in New York, married with a son who at this point has to almost be a teenager himself.

Cathy took up a lot of my time. This was not a bad thing; I was able to, through my relationship with her, learn how to interact with the opposite sex. I apparently had a natural charm -- I could woo almost any woman with my words -- and I began to learn how to hone that craft. Cathy and I would be on again, off again for several years, up to and throughout all of our high school years. To this day, we have never met in person and I am sure 22 years later, I am little more than an afterthought or a footnote in her relationship history. But, I'm sure, I could call her at any given moment and we'd pick our friendship back up like nothing had changed.

Diana's death was a big news story for me, but it wasn't the biggest that year -- the biggest and most historically significant event I experienced in 1997 was the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet. It could be seen in 1996, of course, and it was up there and people were talking about it, but in 1997 it exploded across the sky and was very brightly visible for several months -- it was, to this day, one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen. For those of you who weren't alive or are too young to remember, this comet was a big deal. As soon as it started to get dark at night, it became the brightest thing in the sky and your eyes were immediately drawn to it. I remember many nights outside, and probably many mosquito bites obtained, while staring at this comet. It was Hale-Bopp that got me more into science, more into wanting to know what was out there and why. When the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves over it, the comet became even more intriguing -- and when it began fading from view and eventually disappeared, I felt a wave of abject sadness slowly set in.

1997 gave me my first job and my first real, well, spending money. My neighbor in the house behind me, Jacob, was the local paperboy. His parents also went away on vacation in the summer for two months straight, and he went with them -- meaning they needed to find someone who could deliver newspapers in the area. I was that somebody. I was paid $75 a month -- half upon them leaving and half upon them getting back -- and to me, who came from nothing, that was a hell of a lot of money.

The papers were dropped off at the house between 2 and 3AM every night. Me, being primarily nocturnal in the hot West Virginia summers when I was out of school, went to pick them up upon dropoff, looked at the daily instruction sheet (this would tell me whether I was to hold some people's papers for them or wouldn't be delivering them that day or what-have-you), then I would assemble them, wrap them, place them all into my super-oversized canvas messenger bag, and be out the door between 4:30 and 5. There were about 45 houses I delivered to, give or take, and that number increased to 65 or so on Sundays (which were, admittedly, awful to deal with). The route carried me around about four or five blocks, and was circular. After the first few days I figured out how to do it in the fastest and most efficient way, and could almost time myself to the minute when I'd get home based on when I left. Generally, I would get home right as my mother was getting up for the day, and if she hadn't already done so, I would make the morning coffee.

Walking the neighborhood on those early mornings wasn't just great exercise for me, who was at the time still a fat nerd, but it was peaceful. I got to see some beautiful meteors with long trails extending across the sky, would run into the occasional wildlife (usually deer, possum, or raccoon, though they never came after me or anything) and I wore out my tape of the Rocky Horror Show (stage recording) soundtrack by listening to it over and over on my walks. This is partially why I remember every lyric to every song to this day.

With the money I received from the paper route, at least some of it went towards getting a tie-dyed Millennium Falcon t-shirt and a pair of John Lennon round sunglasses. I wore the shirt for years until it fell apart in the mid-2000s, and the sunglasses I wore at least until I was in college, when they got bent up and the lens popped out of them.

The other milestone of 1997 for me was that I got my first black trench coat. This was before Columbine, mind you -- and I was one of the Freaks who also fit in with the goth kids and metalheads quite well. The coat became a second skin, and I was almost never seen without it (with the exception of the really hot summer months, anyway). Even after I got another one, a gray one, a year later, the black one was a staple of my wardrobe until after I graduated from college (mind you, I was in 8th grade when it was purchased) -- by then, it had developed large rips and wear holes (constant use plus, well, teenage growth spurts) and outdoor exposure had faded the black to a dark brown in many places. I finally parted with it sometime around 2006, and was sad to see it go.

Places, part I

What was the biggest news story of the year you were born? [link]


Well, I mean, I was only born once, but for the years of my life I've been alive, I can at least tell you folks where I was and what I was doing when all of these other things happened. I was reading through this list a few nights ago, and that's what came to my mind as I was going through them -- where I was both physically and mentally, what was going on in my life, etc. So, as a writing exercise and to get my mind off of everything else going on in this godawful world right now, let's dive in.


1970-1981: I was, um, not alive yet.


1982: The Falklands War Between Argentina and the UK Began and Ended
Well okay then. I was born this year, and remember reading about this/hearing about this as a child, but it mattered little to me as a kid and, even as an adult, is sort of a historical footnote even now.


1983: Soviets Shot Down a South Korea Commercial Airliner, Igniting Controversy
I didn't know anything about this, but in 1983 I was still a baby, living with my parents in West Virginia in a small house about 20 miles west of Morgantown (where my actual father still lives to this day, honestly). Also, sometime in the spring of this year, my mother saw a UFO -- the story of her sighting is for another time, but it is historically significant to the person I would become as I got older (more on this later). I promise my memories of these things will get more interesting as these go on.


1984: Apple Macintosh Went On Sale With the Iconic "1984" Commercial
I sort of refuse to believe this was the biggest news story of 1984. I mean, Ghostbusters came out in 1984, and the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles had a guy with a legit fucking jetpack flying around, and the biggest story is that Apple put out the Mac? Wasn't there a presidential election in 1984, where Reagan got re-elected? 1984 is the first year I remember having real memories that I can recall even now. I went to Virginia Beach for the first time in summer 1984 -- with my parents, my aunt (who had just graduated high school), and my aunt's friend Polly -- it rained most of the time we were there, and I remember watching it rain in the streetlights of the boardwalk there. I grabbed a clam shell off the beach, which my mother still has to this day; it is filled with marbles and is a display piece on the back of the toilet in my parents' house.


1985: Mikhail Gorbachev Became The Last Leader Of The Soviet Union, And Initiated Glasnost And Perestroika
Okay, so I suppose this is a real news story with historical significance. As a child I didn't really have any idea what a Soviet was, nor did I know about the Cold War or anything else. In 1985, Back to the Future came out, and it cemented my love of the DeLorean from that point forward. 1985 also marks the milestone of me being able to remember stuff I watched on television of a child -- I was a big fan of Transformers, Knight Rider (in its 3rd season at this point, and the theme of my birthday cake that year), and was the year I can remember I started paying attention to the pop-culture things that would later shape my life -- movies, music, and so on. I remember HBO in 1985, seeing movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman for the first time, even if they were a few years old at that point. I remember summer nights, trips to Idlewild Park, birthday parties for my cousins, and my mother's 1984 silver Pontiac Grand Am.  Jesus that car was a piece of shit, but it was better than the rustbucket Malaise-era Dodge Aspen she was driving before that. My father, doing well enough in his job to be able to afford an actual vehicle, bought a brand new Jeep Cherokee, getting rid of his Ford Ranger that constantly had problems.


1986: The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Occurred, And The Radiation Affected Thousands
Agreed, probably the biggest news story of the year, and around this time my life began to get more interesting. In January 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger exploded -- I watched this happen live on television with my grandmother, who took care of me in the daytime hours when my parents were at work. I remember watching Donahue with my uncle, who lived with my grandmother at the time, and I remember weekend grocery shopping trips with the two of them to Waynesburg, PA. I remember Muppet Babies, He-Man, and Top Gun, and remember how excited I was to get toys from The Real Ghostbusters, which premiered that year -- my mother got me the Slimer figure, while my grandmother got me Ecto-1 (I had to wait for this for a while, because I remember it was $20, and that was a lot of money back in the '80s). I spent the year collecting the individual Ghostbusters one by one until I had the full set. I remember my father, who worked in the coal mines, went on strike that year -- and began selling Kirby vacuums door-to-door (it was, of course, a time before the internet). I would, occasionally, accompany him on his journeys. It was also around this time when I began to be cognizant of some, ahem, problems between my parents, as well. For my birthday that year, my mother bought me my very first cat -- a smoke Persian I named, interestingly enough, Priscilla.


1987: On Black Monday, Wall Street And Worldwide Stocks Crashed, Changing Trading Techniques For Everyone
Yeah, this happened, of course -- but 1987 was a very formative year for me in many ways. 1987 would be the year that began to shape who I was for the rest of my life. For one, my parents divorced in 1987 -- I chose to live with my mother, and we moved into an apartment in the small town in which she (and I, to a certain extent) grew up. I was mathematically too young for Kindergarten -- I was born in December, and the cutoff was September -- but I was put into a "head start" class that year, and was given an IQ test that said I was a certifiable genius, to the point where my parents were called at work to be given the news. Even at that young of an age, I was reading and understanding (thanks to my grandmother basically teaching me how) and I knew I wanted to become a creator of things -- for some reason I was always drawn to comic books and superheroes and sci-fi concepts. I remember a lot of weird times, things that don't really make sense as an adult -- such as, why did I spend so much time with my grandmother and my uncle, all sorts of overnights and almost every day spent at my grandmother's house to the point where it seemed almost 24/7? My mother was working at a dentist's office in Morgantown at the time, my father still in the mines and living (mostly) alone with the cat -- I understand I was in Head Start for a lot of it, but there aren't a lot of memories from that time that involve being at home. Looking back on it now, it seems like my grandmother and uncle basically raised me for a good chunk of my childhood's younger years, not my parents. Winter 1987 also marks a cornerstone moment in my life -- when I had my first major close encounter with a UFO, also witnessed by my two cousins, their mother (my aunt), and my grandmother. That is, of course, a story for another time, but it is one of my life's only events that cannot be rationally explained away, and something that (I believe) helped shape me into an atheist/scientist years later -- there's not a "god" out there, but something is out there somewhere. Also of note -- 1987 is the year of my first and so far only major surgery, when I had my adenoids removed and had tubes put in my ears in an attempt to stop my chronic ear infections (which to this day, I still have some pretty significant hearing loss from). I can pinpoint it to 1987 because we were still living in the apartment at the time...which was right next to the volunteer fire station. The fire siren going off caused me extreme pain because all sounds are amplified when your eardrums are literally being held open by tubes.


1988: Alleged Terrorists Bombed A Pan Am 747 Above Scotland, Killing 270
Well, here it is -- the first event on this list where I can tell you exactly where I was when it happened: I was being babysat after Kindergarten that day by our former neighbors, Josephine and Frank (both of whom are probably dead now, sadly -- our family didn't keep in contact with them that closely after the 80s) and was downstairs in their basement playing with their kids (Shawn and Angel) and their toys, and I remember it being right before Christmas (a date search confirms this; the Lockerbie bombing was December 21, 1988) because all of their decorations/tree was up. I remember it being talked about on the news and I remember Josephine discussing it with my mother, though I don't remember why she was babysitting me -- she only watched me a few times, and my mother and I were living in Morgantown by that time in a trailer park, where our neighbor Nancy watched me after I would get off school for the day -- perhaps Nancy and/or her family were out of town or something, who knows.  I had just turned six, and that weekend my mother would hold a birthday party for me that nobody would attend, not one single person. She made me a chocolate-frosted cake with red gel lettering on it, and nobody came to eat it. This was also the year that we had the long-talked-about "Christmas bush," as our tree was short and fat, and looked like, well, a bush.
I was in Kindergarten in two places in 1988 -- Wadestown Elementary for the start of it, as we were still not living in Morgantown at that time, and I remember being there during the 1988 presidential election where the school had an "election day" thing going on where all of us kids would "vote" (I remember voting for Dukakis) and then, after moving to Morgantown -- apparently sometime between election day and my birthday -- I would attend Woodland "elementary," which was a one-room school for Kindergarten only, on its last year of being open, for the rest of 1988 and the first half of 1989. Also of note -- 1988 is the year I saw my first two movies in the theater, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with my mother and The Land Before Time with my father, and it is the year my wife was born, the young whippersnapper she is. My mother also began working part time for a car dealership and was able to upgrade from her shitty Grand Am (I really hope that thing hit a crusher shortly thereafter) to a beautiful, ocean blue 1988 Cavalier Z24 -- still my favorite vehicle my mother has ever owned:

Hot damn that was a cool, fast car, and damn me for not appreciating it until much later in life.


1989: The Berlin Wall Fell, Changing Germany's Political And Physical Landscape
On November 9, 1989, I was in Mrs. Arnett's first grade class at Easton Elementary (another school which no longer exists and was torn town a few years back) and watched this event live on television during the school day. They brought large televisions out on carts into the school's common areas and we watched the wall fall. Thirteen years later, when I was in college, an acquaintance had a brick-sized chunk of the wall (with a certificate of authentation and everything) and broke pieces of it off for some of us to keep. I still have my piece of the Berlin Wall, flecked with spraypaint from the graffiti on it, and it is one of my most prized possessions -- it is a literal piece of history. At the time, I knew the wall coming down was a significant event, but I didn't know why or for what reasons. 1989 was a weird year -- we moved into our second trailer in the same park, and we were struggling financially. My mother never made a big deal about it (she really never said a word about it to me, and I wouldn't really have understood anyway), but it was evident. My clothes were ratty and worn out, and we were barely making ends meet -- still, every Friday night she took me to McDonald's for a Happy Meal as a treat, and she did everything she could to give me a relatively normal life. She flew down to Bradenton, Florida that year for a job interview -- the only time to my knowledge that my mother has ever flown anywhere -- and, while I've written about it before, I can't imagine how much my life would be different if she'd gotten/accepted that job. For those of you who remember, 1989 was the first real year of the back-to-back summer blockbuster movies, and one of the greatest years in summer movie history -- Ghostbusters II, Batman, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade all came out within mere weeks of one another. I was a huge Ghostbusters fan, and my mother took me to see Ghostbusters II in the theater during opening week -- I remember how hot it was that week, and I remember I was wearing my $2-discount-store Ghostbusters II t-shirt to the movie. My father remarried, and I was in the wedding as the ring bearer, my rented tuxedo ill-fitting and uncomfortable. I would see Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in the theater with my daycare's Summer Program -- the same daycare I would hunker down in a week after my father's wedding with two other kids and the staff as Hurricane Hugo rolled its way up the coast and plowed into West Virginia pretty hard on its path:

That was fun.

I remember cuddling up with my mother on hand-me-down furniture in our trailer in the winter, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on WPTT-22 out of Pittsburgh. I remember the winter was cold and wet.


1990: The Gulf War Started, And Coalition Forces Moved To Defend Kuwait From Iraq
1990 was weird, man. Most of the 90s were. 1990 was the beginning of a new decade and a new way of thinking for a lot of the country. I remember a lot of day-glo clothing and parachute pants, I remember COPS and America's Most Wanted on Fox -- which, through Fox 53 out of Pittsburgh, was just beginning to reach people in West Virginia. I do not remember the day the Gulf War started, but I do remember talking about it in my 2nd grade class with Mr. Steel. I remember spending time in the tiny library at my school, reading ghost stories and stories about UFOs (I told you, my experiences really began to shape my life, and this was the beginning of it). In the summer of that year, while I was spending the weekend with my grandmother and uncle (another recurring theme of my life, as you may have noticed at this point) my mother eloped and married her second husband -- this was a mistake all around, which she and I would both pay for many times over for the next four years. I did not like this man. I did not like the way he treated me or my mother over those years, and the less said about him, the better. I did have one of the better pictures taken of me in 1990, though:

Yeah, I know. I was cute once. I have no idea what the hell happened.


1991: South Africa Officially Repealed The Racist Apartheid Policy
I am not sure this is the biggest news story of 1991, as in backwoods West Virginia, South Africa was not really at the forefront of most people's social consciousnesses. Rather, for me, 1991 was a big year of big changes -- the Gulf War ending in February meant that my elementary school, at the bottom of the hill that the city airport sat on top of, got to see the massive C-130s flying in bringing the troops home, and seeing some of those returned troops come down to the school to see their children shortly after landing was a big deal. 1991 saw my first summer with the National Youth Sports Program (NYSP), which always gave me something to do and helped me remain active, and my mother and stepfather bought a house in the rich-white-people part of Morgantown known as Cheat Lake -- where I would live for three more years in a room wallpapered with ice-cream cones and hearts (simply because it was much bigger than the other, spare bedroom).

With a move to a new house came a move to a new school, Oak Grove Elementary -- another school on its last year of life while the newer, larger Cheat Lake Elementary was being built. My teacher was a wonderful, very large woman named Mrs. Weber, who even long after I was her student she would stay in contact with me and my family. She also liked to put bright red lipstick on and kiss her students' papers and cheeks, leaving a big kiss print (imagine a teacher in 2019 doing that without getting fired). I really liked her -- she had passion, she cared about her students. She was one of the best teachers I've ever had.

My mother began working at WVU in 1991, where I would myself begin working and attend college ten years later. In March, my stepmother gave birth to my oldest sister, and I was there in the hospital with her and my father that night when she was born. I watched my Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup versus the (at the time) Minnesota North Stars. In June, I would accompany my stepfather's parents on a cross-country vacation all the way out to South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and finally Idaho, where my stepfather's brother's family lived. On that trip I would see many things for the first time -- massive herds of pronghorn, Devil's Tower, Mount Rushmore, and Yellowstone National Park, amongst other things. I would spend two weeks in Twin Falls, Idaho, where I was able to see Shoshone Falls and go over the Perrine Bridge -- I took many photos of all of these things on a little red 110-film camera (yeah, this was a long time ago, folks) which were developed and later lost to history. I wish I still had those photos.

Also of note, during that trip I came the closest I've actually physically been to a tornado, ironically enough, in Nebraska -- while traveling. It was crossing a field next to the road (I'm guessing I-80) and was about 1/4 mile from the car as we were driving. Even after living in the midwest for thirteen years and in Nebraska for five, I have never been as close to a tornado since.


1992: Riots Erupted In Los Angeles, CA, After Footage Showed Police Mercilessly Beating Rodney King
1992 was a really strange time. Grunge was beginning to take hold, as was hip-hop, and glitzy pop acts and hair metal bands were disappearing from the radio to be replaced with that type of music as well as what is now considered modern alternative. I also began to really get into comic books -- drawing as well as reading/collecting them, thanks to (again) weekend shopping trips with my uncle and his spending $10-15 on me every time I went so I could get the latest Marvel and DC books -- this would continue for the next five or six years, really. I remember the L.A. riots and watching them on television, not knowing that they'd be the first of many or that they would signal the beginning of the downfall of our society over the next 25 years or so. I was, again, a white kid in West Virginia, one of the poor kids living in a rich white school district, and there were maybe fifteen black kids in my entire 1500-or-so school. I remember my first school dances where I was not afraid or nervous to dance with girls in my class as well as some older/younger ones, and I remember seeing my Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup again, this time against the Chicago Blackhawks. I later saw Batman Returns in the theater that summer, by myself (it may have been the first movie I ever saw in a theater by myself, actually), and watched a father and son down the aisle spending quality time together, the father showering upon the son Batman-themed gifts and shirts and all sorts of things. I remember, while watching that, how I wished my father actually gave a damn about me and did stuff like that for me. I was already retreating inward into myself by this time -- I was fat and was getting bullied for it quite a bit, I never really fit in at the rich-white-kids-school, and with his new daughter taking up a lot of his time and energy, I began to see my father less and less. Around Christmas of that year I was told upon my visit to my father's house that I would need to take with me whatever I wanted to keep, because none of it would be left there the next time I came back -- and she was right; whatever I had left behind had been thrown away by the time I returned to visit the next summer.


1993: The Waco Siege Of Branch Davidian Cultists Ended In Bloodshed
This is easily the biggest news story of 1993 at least on a national level, but during the almost two-month siege on Koresh's compound in Texas, the two biggest events of 1993 for me happened one after the other. The first one was the birth of my second sister, in early March. This time I was not present at the hospital -- my father didn't even call me to let me know until the next day or the day after, and it was postulated by my asshole former stepfather at the time that it was because of how little I mattered to my father because he now had two new kids to care about (something that, really, seemed to end up being true the more time went on). The second biggest event of the year for me happened a week and a half later, roughly -- the Blizzard of 1993. They called it the "Storm of the Century" and it dumped over three feet of snow on my part of West Virginia. Roads were impassable, if you could even tell where they were. Power was out in many places. Home doors were snowed shut and people were trapped in their houses. Almost everything completely shut down -- water mains had broken, so even if there was water, it had to be boiled before use. I was out of school for almost three full weeks. This was a time before the internet -- I didn't even own a computer -- there was very little to do. I had never seen weather like this, had never seen snow this bad. When schools reopened and stuff started getting back to normal in West Virginia, the raid on the Waco compound was but a blip on the radar.

At home, there was a lot going on in 1993. My mother and stepfather decided to take a beach vacation to Myrtle Beach, and I went with; it was the only time I'd ever been to Myrtle Beach and I have not returned since. I remember it was very, very hot and I got a particularly awful sunburn. I also remember someone getting killed on one of the roller coasters at the amusement park down there when we were there, and being knocked down either by a large fish or a small shark in waist-deep water shortly before the beach lifeguards ordered everyone out of the water as sharks had been spotted. I got a t-shirt from one of the surf shops on the beach for $5, and wore it for many years afterwards until it completely fell apart. I also didn't know it at the time, but my mother and stepfather were on the outs with one another, and that summer began what seemed like a year-long sliding scale downward into the end of their marriage. Thankfully. By the end of the year, my mother and I would be (mostly) living alone, as my stepfather had left the house by that time.

The month of August 1993 was the last time I would spend any time with my father, and it was a turning point in my life. The mines were on strike again, a long, drawn-out strike this time, and I always spent several weeks with my father in August. This time around he seemed like a completely different person -- mostly distant and angered by his job (or lack of one, really, during the strike); he'd picked up smoking, something he'd never done before -- Salem menthols, which I remember because later, when I was a smoker, Salems were always my own menthols of choice -- and my presence seemed to be fairly bothersome a lot of the time I was there. Consequently, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house (again, recurring theme of my childhood). As the new baby had come, I no longer had a room in my father's house -- that's why my stepmother had told me to take everything with me upon my previous visit, but never said why -- my bedroom had been gutted and made into my oldest sister's room, with her old room now being the baby's room. As such, I literally spent those weeks sleeping on the couch in the living room with what few belongings I had shoved into the corner. When I had a severe allergic reaction to something in the house and broke out in horrifying hives and a skin rash, as well as the soles of my feet cracking and bleeding, my father took me to the doctor to get some foot salve and once more dumped me on my grandmother to deal with.

That summer, my grandmother's 20-year-old cat died, and lightning struck down the massive sugar maple tree about 100 yards from the house. The day the cat died, we had one of the worst thunderstorms I've ever seen in my life, and it marked the last time I would ever see my father for more than five minutes until I was an adult. I would never spend any time with either of my sisters in person again, either -- to this day.


1994: Nelson Mandela Was Elected President Of South Africa After Decades Of Imprisonment
This is NOT the biggest news story of 1994. By 1994, my life was in its first of many downward spirals. I was failing 5th grade (I had just stopped caring about school, and while I still went, it was primarily to trade comic books with my few friends and kill time the rest of the day). I don't know there was a single class I passed that year, but because of West Virginia's glorious school system, I was pushed along to 6th grade anyway for the fall. I was having a lot of emotional problems that I mostly kept to myself, and had a hard time opening up to anyone.

The first biggest news event I can recall is on a cold morning in January -- I had walked home that morning after spending the night at the home of a family friend, since my mother had been out late the night before, to turn on the news and find that the 1994 Northridge earthquake had struck Los Angeles. I did not have to go to school that morning -- a quick date search tells me that it was apparently Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that year -- and I remember laying in bed with my mother on that cold, gray morning, watching the news coverage.

A few short months later, on April 9, I had spent the night at my grandmother's (yes, I know) and went down to the road to get the morning paper. Unfolding it as I walked back up to the house, I was greeted with the news of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I knew of Nirvana at the time, of course, but really only in passing. Truthfully I was a little too young for the target demographic of grunge, and in the early 90s I wasn't paying close attention to music, really -- I hated country music (which is what the majority of West Virginia listened to) and if I had the radio on, it was on WVAQ, Morgantown's pop/top 40 station. Even then I didn't pay much attention to what it played. So, upon his death, I didn't really know who Cobain was, and wouldn't really discover his music for a few more years until I was exiting middle school and entering high school.

In the spring, my stepfather (who had been out of the picture for some time by that point anyway) would officially divorce my mother; when it was done, it was done -- I remember, from my own experience, that it was a very cordial, businesslike transaction. In the settlement he kept the house in Cheat Lake, and my mother and I moved across town to a large apartment building five minutes from her office; he and his friends even helped us move into said building. After that, he was gone from our lives, and I never saw him again (thankfully). With the move came a move to yet another new school for my 6th grade year only -- North Elementary. With that move also came new freedoms; I was eleven that summer, and was used to being on my own a lot of the time -- I was also too young for a job, so 1994 was my final year of the NYSP summer camp; I eventually just stopped going completely as I'd lost interest in it -- even though I was physically closer to it than ever. During this time, my mother met and began her relationship with the man I have referred to as my "dad" ever since, and while they are still together to this day, they have never married. I personally always thought that was because they didn't want to jinx it. He is, and has been ever since they've been together, the most consistent positive male role model in my life.

The mid-90s are weird for me because a lot of things blend together within them. I was, sort of, a latchkey kid left to my own devices for a lot of those years. I'd get up, go to school in the morning, come home while my mother was still at work, eat and watch TV, and go to bed a few hours afterwards. I really didn't have friends or any true social life, and until my birthday in 1994 I didn't even have any video games or anything to really occupy me -- that was the year that my mother bought me a Sega Genesis. Consequently, a lot of my memories of that time are of television and late-run movies when I couldn't sleep -- I watched the entire run of Gilligan's Island at least twice as it always seemed to be on TBS or TNT back in the 90s. I was a big fan of the Fox X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons, but that was also because I was a comic nerd. The original Power Rangers series was big around this time, and I was really into it -- I had a lot of the toys and several t-shirts, a bedding set, and various other odds-and-ends. I remember seeing Halloween and Halloween 2 for the first time on TNT's MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs, and remember how even he made fun of the overdubbed dialogue to make the movies TV-friendly. I saw the Star Wars trilogy for the first time when USA Network started running the films back-to-back on rainy weekends. On September 8, 1994, I was sitting down to watch that night's episode of Roseanne on WTAE-4 out of Pittsburgh when the programming was pre-empted by the news of USAir Flight 427 literally crashing in, well, Pittsburgh. 

During the summer of 1994, once we were settled into our new apartment and had a newfound sense of freedom away from my former stepfather, my mother decided she wanted to do a road trip. This was sort of out of character for her, even then -- my mother has never really been the adventurous type, nor did she usually want to set out on any kinds of vacations (she was, after all, once more a single mother recently divorced, and we didn't have a ton of money to throw around -- that apartment we had was expensive). She decided she wanted to see Gettysburg and Amish country, bed and breakfasts and the like, through rural Pennsylvania. Okay, I thought, this could be interesting. So she took time off on a long weekend, we loaded some bags into her shiny, new, less-than-a-year-old 1993 Ford Probe and went to Gettysburg. While there, while walking the battlefields, my mother started feeling really weird -- unsettled, filled with dread, overcome with emotions of grief, panic, and fear. She'd later brush it off as heat exhaustion or being tired/dehydrated and didn't want to talk about it anymore -- indeed, the day was over 100 degrees and the car had nearly overheated during our drive at least once. After staying two nights at two different, unremarkable bed-and-breakfasts, we returned home, and the trip was rarely talked about afterwards.

Getting Fit, the Brandon Way

March 2019.

We've now lived in the house for almost exactly six months, and in that time a lot has happened. I myself haven't updated this blog here since Thanksgiving week, so let's do a quick recap of some major events since then:

1. My job will eventually disappear.
I haven't really spoken much about my job as of late, but in the past six months or so I've lost a lot of the stability and security I had with it. My firm was bought out by an Indian-owned outsourcing company whose overall goal is to cut costs in any and every way possible. As such, the contract that myself and my employees work under -- as well as everyone else in our firm -- has a hard out at the end of this year. Hard out meaning end of the line, full stop, the job will still exist but it won't be us in America doing it anymore, hit the bricks pal. Many employees have already left, including some close friends, and many more are looking to get out before the endgame. I am of the latter; I'm still there, but I know the end is coming and as such have been looking and applying for other forms of gainful employment since around Christmas or so. Current projections have my team lasting at least until the end of summer or so, but anything past that is a mystery. It also doesn't help in the present that said job has become a miserable slog of stress almost every single night I'm there, to the point where I'm pretty sure it's regularly negatively affecting my health. One night a few months ago, my heart rate dropped to something like 40 beats a minute over the span of about five minutes and I came very close to passing out. To this day I have no idea why.


2. The health kick continues.
I mentioned here before that I became vegetarian shortly before we purchased this house (late August, something like that) and that remains a thing. My weight loss stalled out quite a bit over the holidays, and I put a little bit of weight back on, but right now I've lost a net total of about 40 pounds since January 2018. It's not so much the vegetarianism as it is just being mindful of what I eat and how much of it I eat. I also don't think I could ever go full vegan -- I love cheese far, far too much to ever go without it. It is a necessary evil for me. I also don't know if I'll remain vegetarian indefinitely or what have you; it's not so much a life philosophy for me as it is for others. I just want to be healthier, and any diet and exercise plan has to be live-able. If I come to a time where I need to do something else, or I need to make a change, I'll address that when I come to it.


3. This winter has fucking sucked.
We're out of winter and into spring now, of course, but for the record, I've lived in the midwest almost 13 years now and I've seen a lot of nasty weather, from tornadoes and tennis-ball-sized hail to 18-inch snowstorms and high temperatures of -15. I'm not sure I've seen a winter as nasty as the one we just had since I was living in West Virginia in the 90s and early 2000s. Adding insult to injury, when you own your own home in Omaha, you have to shovel your own driveway and sidewalks. If you don't, even if you have nowhere to go and you're snowed in and the like, the city issues you a steep fine.


4. The flooding.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Nebraska flooding, which a few weeks ago was one of the biggest stories in the country. Because of all of the snow and all of the rain, once it got warmer everything here flooded. Like, a lot. Entire towns underwater, bridges and roads washed out, etc. Some of them will not reopen for many months or until they are rebuilt (many are still closed now). Several of my coworkers and employees were uprooted and/or made completely homeless by the flooding, and the wife and I did what we could to help out via donations and gift cards and by organizing/working with local charities. The wife worked with some charity groups to get one of my employees put up in a hotel for a week for no cost to them, as well. Suffice it to say, though, it's bad. However, we are lucky enough to live in a part of town that's not been affected by any of the flooding, and I have seen very little, if any, of it firsthand. I have fielded many questions about it from friends and family out of state, though.


5. The new Brandon mentality
Jumping a bit off #2, the wife and I have purchased a Planet Fitness membership, and goddamn do we ever use it. I've been hitting the gym for 60-90 minute workout sessions generally 3x a week. I had to start slow (because it hurt after not really working out in about ten years) but now I'm doing 2-3 miles cardio per session as well as weights and abs pretty much every time I'm there. I sweat, I burn calories, I take muscle-supporting supplements (BCAAs and B-vitamins) and every time I'm there it gets easier than the last. My goal is to get swole, or as I put it on Facebook, #getswole. I'll let everyone know how it goes, of course, but I want to look like a bodybuilder with nicely-defined muscles by the end of the year.

The Winds of November

Thanksgiving week, 2018.

Thanksgiving has always held a small, special place in a dark corner of my dead little heart. I don't know exactly why. Perhaps it's because, for many years, it was time spent with my family, back when my grandmother was still alive, back when the entire family got along and wasn't embroiled in one spat or another (some of which have now gone on so long that most of my extended family members no longer speak to one another).

Perhaps it's because I have fond memories of waking up to watch the Macy's parade, a tradition I still continue as I slowly lurch my way into middle age. This year, I took off the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving specifically so I can sleep and get up early to watch the parade.

Perhaps it's because during my formative years, it was always a week I had off school (depending on whatever school district I was part of at the time, it was either the full week or a partial week), a week I could mostly detach from the world.

Perhaps it's because Thanksgiving, and the Black Friday that always follows, ushers in the beginning of the Christmas season.

There were several years in a row, even during times where I didn't have much money, that I went to bed early on the night of Thanksgiving, getting up at 3AM to go Black Friday shopping in the cold darkness either by myself or with my ex and her mother, the latter of whom was absolutely thrilled by the hunt of the chase. My Dirt Devil stick vac, which I used in four different residences in three different states until I tossed it upon moving into this house, was a $12 Black Friday deal at Target in 2007 or '08. I'm sure there are a few other notable Black Friday purchases around the house still -- my Blu-ray player was one of them, for example, a $50 impulse buy from Walmart in Kansas when I went to pick up cigarettes at 2AM one year after Black Friday had ended.

At age 35, while I am still to some extent a consumer whore, I haven't the slightest interest in Black Friday shopping.

"Wife," I said to Daisy, "just in case you were interested or had any plans..." I began, even though I already knew she didn't, "...there's only one item in any Black Friday ad I've seen that I'm remotely interested in."

"Oh?"

"Walmart has the newest, best Roku for $49," I said. "That's half off."

"Okay," she said, not really looking up from whatever she was doing.

And that was the extent of our Christmas shopping discussion.

As for Daisy, I'm done shopping for her already; the last of her gifts arrive here this week.

It doesn't really matter anyhow. I told her that she didn't need to get me anything, but if she wanted to, the only stuff I wanted was that aforementioned Roku and two more pairs of the jeans I like from Duluth Trading Company. I have Amazon Prime -- believe me, if there's anything I can't live without, I order it and it gets here in two days, with the delivery drivers texting me a picture of it sitting on my doorstep when it arrives.

What a glorious new century we live in.

As you all know, Christmas has always been far from my favorite time of year, at least since I've been an adult. I've had some good ones, yes, and I've also had some awful ones. My birthday falling five days beforehand doesn't usually help much either. I've pretty much stopped trying to celebrate my birthday much as of late over the past few years. About the most I do these days is try to make it the first day I take off over the course of the holidays when I burn the most PTO possible to not have to enter the building between my birthday and after Christmas. Winter in Nebraska sucks, there's still three months of it to deal with after Christmas is over, and as most of you know, I'm an atheist, so there's not much spiritual comfort I get out of the holidays.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Thanksgiving this year will be just us and Daisy's parents, with maybe a longtime family friend joining us. I'm okay with this; I'm looking forward to the downtime more than anything else. I never get any real time with Daisy or her parents anymore, and that time has lessened more that we've moved into this new house, since there's always something else to be done when it comes to upkeep or cleaning,

It also isn't lost on me that it was 12 years ago this week that I moved to the midwest and my, shall we say, independent life started. I lived with my ex and/or her family for the first five years of that, and for the past seven I've either lived on my own or with my wife. There are bits and pieces of that time and all of the places I've lived scattered around the house, from furniture of different sorts to more sentimental items like clothing or small electronics. There is very little I brought out here with me from West Virginia in that initial move that has still survived -- less than ten items of clothing, an engraved lighter my mother gave me as a college graduation gift, an old laptop (that still works, by the way), a knife or two, etc. I do still have my old cell phone I bought 12 years ago this month, an old Nokia prepaid phone, just in the event that I might need it in an emergency, even though I probably never will.

As I mentioned in my last post, I sold my truck.

I wasn't exactly sorry to see it go, but I wasn't exactly not sorry either. I got something like $880 out of it, I can't remember the exact number. The entire experience was miserable, to be honest with you. They sent the people to pick it up at the wrong time on the wrong day, said people thought I was donating and not selling it (so they had to cut me a check on the spot), and I had no tools readily available to remove the plates, so we had to call and make an appointment to go to the junkyard I'd sold it to after the fact and get the plates the next day -- thankfully the wife and her parents did that, and I am grateful they did so.

Apparently I can turn in the plates to the DMV with my registration and get a small refund on the registration. At some point. I don't exactly know how it works and I've been too fried and exhausted to research it. Also, it's not like I could do it on my own, because, well, no vehicle. Except for weekends, whenever I'm home, I'm either asleep or the wife is at work...with the car.

I'll get something new to drive eventually. I was telling Daisy tonight how I may hold out for the new 2020 Bronco, as it looks beautiful.

Here's hoping they keep the removable cap.

Work continues, both in and out of the house. With the new door on the closet now, Daisy's new project is to paint the inside of the closet before we put our clothing in there. So yes, for the past two months now, I've been living out of clothing boxes and tubs with no free access to my actual clothing. To be fair, boxes still fill a good chunk of the house -- boxes of the wife's clothing line the bedroom and boxes of books and other office things line her office. There are still three small boxes in the kitchen, and probably 20 or more in the garage of stuff that needs to be put away, with six or seven more in the living room. I don't know where all of this stuff is going to go, to be honest with you. I got rid of most of my worldly possessions when we moved into this house, simply so I could sell it for cash and so I wouldn't have to move it -- the wife did not. She got rid of some stuff, yes, but not nearly the amount I did. My mother has asked me repeatedly for pictures of the interior of the house, but well, until everything's put the fuck away and unpacked properly I can't really snap any, as it's not really attractive photography to have boxes scattered everywhere.

The cats have adjusted well to their new home; they seem to enjoy having all the new extra space and new hiding spots/new places to sleep, and overall seem to be getting along better. I purchased a new water fountain for them when we moved in, and set that up a few weeks ago -- to them I think it's a calming piece of home, an anchor that lets them know they're safe and this is where they belong.

As for us, well, it's felt like home since we settled in, but I'm still getting used to owning a house instead of writing someone a rent check every month. It'll take a bit more getting used to, I'm sure, before everything feels completely normal. Once we're all unpacked and settle in over the winter months, it'll be more comforting instead of alien and strange, or like a hotel we're just occupying. We'll see.

Homeward Bound, Part II

We are in the new house.

The past ten days have been frantic and not very relaxing, to put it mildly. For many of them I have just wanted to sleep, to sit, to collapse into my overstuffed chair and be done with the world and house stuff and anything else for a good long time. Both the wife and I have spent far more time awake than asleep as of late, napping here and there when we can and when we can't, not sleeping for 24-30 hour stretches.

But, we are in the house.

And we are still in the apartment. Sort of.

Our last day of our lease is October 5 -- that's this coming Friday (as I write this, anyhow) -- a mere six days away. Today is Sunday, and we moved into the house on Tuesday. Since Tuesday we have been spending many hours every day gutting and cleaning the old place out. It is 3:30 in the morning now and Daisy and I just returned home from yet another cleaning run about two hours ago. The vast majority of everything is done now -- we've already taken care of the hardest stuff, so to speak, and what's left is just ancillary for the most part.

I have burned through every hour of PTO I had available for work, and will now need to rebuild and rack up some time between now and the holidays in order to get my birthday off and the like. While I am looking to move on from that job in telecom hell sooner rather than later, it is a job, and it is something I need to be able to keep for as long as I can, especially now that a mortgage rides on it.

We have a mortgage. We are homeowners. The actual processing of the past ten days' events hasn't really sunk in yet.

I suppose I should start from the beginning with a brief recap of events.

Hi, my name is Brandon. You might remember me from blogs such as the one you're reading. I'm a vegetarian atheist with three cats and a punk rock haircut, and I work as a contractor for the largest telecommunications corporation on the planet. My younger-than-me vegan wife holds a reasonably secure and upward-mobile position in the finance industry and is the brains and cogs of our entire marriage. Welcome to my world. We bought a house.

Now that you're up to speed, here's what happened.

On Monday night we did our final walkthrough of the house with the sellers present. They made sure we had spare keys and knew how everything worked, and said they'd be out by the morning to start on their own next big adventure in life.

Truth be told, they were -- we signed all of the closing documents and paperwork in our realtor's office at 8AM on Tuesday morning in the midst of a raging fall thunderstorm, then came back to the apartment -- new keys in hand, to wait for the movers. Our movers came, they loaded everything up, and by around 4PM they were done, paid, and we were in a house full of boxes with very little actual furniture to speak of.

By 5PM we were at the furniture store picking out our new living room furniture and purchasing rugs and the like. We got a giant sectional sofa set that cost more than four times what I paid for my first car (my Monte Carlo, if you folks remember that from back in the day) scheduled to be delivered Thursday. We got pizza for dinner and ended our very, very long day by passing out in different places -- me in my overstuffed chair in my new office, and the wife on the bed, which was at that time the only piece of furniture that could be slept on.

Well, I mean, I guess a person could sleep on a dining room table if they really wanted to, but who wants that?

Anyway.

Truthfully, the days all run together. Once in the house, we still spent a large number of hours over at the apartment, packing and cleaning what was left. Because of our jobs and our offset schedules (the wife works dayshift, I work overnights), packing and cleaning together wasn't exactly something we could really do as a team that well.  As a result, the entire kitchen and both bathrooms in the apartment were left to deal with later, and we focused on the movers taking all the boxes and the large items we couldn't move ourselves. Tonight we finished the cleaning of the most difficult rooms -- the laundry room and the back bathroom -- and we're still nowhere near done, even though the apartment looks pretty flawless in most ways. We didn't get our TV moved over here until last night, and it wasn't until tonight that I actually brought my truck over here. This leads to amusing conversations such as this one:

Side note -- yes, I own two of the expensive, exquisitely-detailed Black Series lightsabers. One is Luke's, one is Vader's.

So, anyway, on Thursday our furniture arrived. Fully wrapped and unassembled. The house has French doors, so we swung those open and with great pains both spiritual and physical, we got all six pieces of this massive sectional sofa into the house...only to find that to screw on the legs, we needed power tools.

A quick drive to Lowe's later, we had those tools and the wife and I spent hours unwrapping the furniture, setting it up, and screwing on leg after leg after leg. Do you know how many legs a six-piece sectional sofa has? The answer is 24. Yes, twenty-four. The power drill/electric screwdriver we got had its battery die about 2/3 into the workload, and...


***intermission***


It is now a week later and I can tell you without shame that I fell the fuck asleep while writing the above, which is why it stopped abruptly.

Work still continues in the house, though we are now completely out of the apartment -- keys turned in, final walkthrough done, no need to ever darken the door of that place again. The wife cried because of all of the memories we'd made there, but in the end she was just as happy as I was to never have to go back. Onward and upward -- we own a house now.

The building manager did a sixty-second walkthrough and called it good, and said we'd be getting a deposit check back in a few weeks -- didn't say for how much, if we'd be getting the full deposit back or what, but truthfully I don't exactly care at this point. I'm happy to wash my hands of that place after all the maintenance problems we had in it within the past eighteen months or so.

When I say "work continues" at the new house, I actually mean that. We're getting a closet door installed sometime this week by the aforementioned folks at Lowe's, and the door plus installation was only about $200, so we have that going for us. We also haven't unpacked everything yet -- there are still probably 30 boxes in the garage and at least that within all the rooms of the house as well. Without a door on the closet in the master bedroom, we can't unpack our clothing as we can't keep the cats out of the closet without using the boxes of clothing to block it off. As such, we've both had to go in there a few times, moving the boxes and the wife's dresser we're currently using to block the door, to grab whatever clothing we need for the week before we have to block it back off.

I worked all of last week but took tonight off as I haven't had a true day off in several weeks now. Doing so puts me negative into PTO, but I don't exactly care at this point -- I also spent two hours tonight looking for and applying to other jobs. My goal is to be doing something else somewhere else by Thanksgiving. While that may not be possible I at least am trying my best. This house is closer to my job than ever before, yet I just...I can't keep doing it anymore. The stress and responsibility levels are too great, and the job itself never gets any easier -- ever. Unrealistic expectations abound, my team is unhappy with the direction the job is going, I am more unhappy than they are, my leadership is ambivalent at best on a good day and unhappy more and more by the day on the bad ones, and the smart people who have a way out are leaving like rats from a sinking ship -- making me the leader of the idiots, the lazy, the desperate, and the otherwise unemployable masses. I can't do that anymore. I have a Master's degree. My wife was able to get out, so I don't know why I can't.

I told the wife my dream is for her to get a promotion and get pregnant so I can be a stay-at-home-dad. Well, it's not really a dream per se, but something that would be nice. It's not like I wouldn't work; I'd just work on what I want to do (writing/editing/web stuff) versus needing to go into an office every day for ten hour shifts on overnights. There was once a time where I would've killed for an office job -- not anymore. I've done it for too long now and my real goal is to not have to wear pants while I work. Ever.

But alas, I do have to work. We have a mortgage now. It's a bit more expensive than the rent on the apartment was. And we're responsible for any problems the house has, obviously -- things like plumbing or roofing or putting a door on the closet. In hindsight, that last one really should've been something we asked the previous owners to do, because it's a pain in the dick.

My own office doesn't have a closet -- where the closet would be is where the previous owners put the washer and dryer. So I have my office in the laundry room, or vice versa -- which is nice and what I wanted -- but no storage space. It's fine, though. It is what it is. I'll be sharing the master bedroom closet with the wife, once the door is on it. And it's big enough.

In other news, I'm selling my truck.

Truth be told, the truck has sat in the driveway -- both here and at the apartment complex -- for months, only rarely being driven. It sucks gas like crazy, the tires are bald, it needs some new spark plugs and an oil change, and it's rusting out from underneath me. I don't have the time or money to give it the TLC it needs, so I'm selling it for about $800 -- which is close to what the tires alone would cost to replace, not to mention everything else -- and a decent deal for a seventeen-year-old truck. The buyers are one of those online "sell your vehicles to us" outfits, and they'll come to pick it up for free and haul it away. I'm setting up the appointment in the morning (or afternoon) when I wake up.

The goal in the next few months or so -- though realistically probably not until Spring -- is to get me a smaller subcompact four-door hatchback. I just need something cheap and reliable with an automatic transmission that will get me to and from work, wherever to and from work may be. It has to be four-door because if we do ever have kids, I need to be able to put the car seat(s) in the back seat. Rear-facing, of course. I can't tell you what model of vehicle I want, though I've had my eye on a few different ones. For example, I've always liked the styling of the Mitsubishi Mirage:

Just something small, economical, and point-A-to-point-B.

But I digress.

I mentioned above, briefly, that I have become a vegetarian. This wasn't a joke.

For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you know that I have been on the path to betterment and wellness for some time now. Since January 1st of this year, I have now lost forty pounds. This isn't a massive accomplishment, of course, but it's a lot better than many others could do, so I'm counting it as a win.

Part of the weight loss has been thanks to the keto diet, which I was on for several months. However, there's so much meat and fat in the keto diet, and it didn't seem to help my metabolism or energy levels that much. The variety (or the ability to have some variety) was at first thrilling, but began to wear on me after a few months. I can only eat so many high-protein beef or turkey sticks or low-carb tortillas with my steamed vegetables before I snap and want a pizza, or Chinese food with fried rice, or some fucking french fries. I know there are people who stay on keto for years with great results, and more power to them, because I don't want to be chained to a diet for the rest of my life.

So, I slowly began adding carbs back into my diet once I had lost over 25 pounds, and with that, slowly began cutting back on the meats and cheeses almost subconsciously. It wasn't necessarily something I had planned, but I slowly leaned more and more towards vegetarianism.

And a funny thing happened -- I continued to lose weight. More slowly, of course, but pounds kept dropping. Within a month I had basically become vegetarian without even really noticing it. After a month I decided fuck it, let's see where this vegetarian thing goes. As such, I have not had any meat since...late August? Something like that. I didn't really keep track.

However, I want to make something very clear -- I am not vegan. My wife is. I am not. Foods containing dairy and eggs and the like are very much a continued part of my diet -- cheese is a large part of my life. I will get the fried rice with egg from the Chinese delivery place and not bat an eye, and I eat at least five sticks of string cheese pretty much every day. When available and if I'm in the mood, I'll put real milk in my coffee or real butter on my bagel. I do not plan to go vegan, but I will tell you that I do not eat meat anymore.

Friends have already asked me what this means for Gravy Season, and I told them it means nothing whatsoever. Gravy doesn't count in my book, for one, and for two, I don't particularly care. Gravy to me is the same as eating egg or dairy. I wouldn't be opposed to beef or chicken broth either, because I'm not eating an actual animal. Just juices from said animal. Look, my logic is complicated, and I simplify it by saying I don't eat meat. The whole "I don't eat anything with a face" or "I don't eat anything that had a mother" sort of thing applies here.

Besides, the wife makes a fantastic vegan gravy. She's like an alchemist in the kitchen.

I will say that my choice to go vegetarian is more health-based than it is morality-based, but obviously morals play into it quite a bit. I am now sort of disgusted by exactly how much meat-eating plays into our culture, and how much meat is actually out there and being consumed every day. Not that it was outwardly spoken or made a mantra or anything, but growing up, it was sort of an unwritten rule that it wasn't a meal unless meat was involved somewhere -- anything else was just a snack. I think a lot of people have that mindset, and until I stopped eating meat I didn't realize how pervasive it was in society.

This doesn't mean I'll be a vegetarian forever, or even 100% vegetarian all the time. If there's something with meat in it that I absolutely want, I'm not going to deny myself just because of some whim of ideology. And truth be told, in a few months I may hate being a vegetarian and everything it entails, and if that's the case, so be it. But, in the interim, I'm gonna let it ride and see what happens -- specifically, see if I keep losing weight.

Anyway, that's about all for now. This post is long enough. I'll keep everyone updated on the adventures with the new house and with my job searching, all in good time.

Homeward, Bound: Part I

We're moving.

The wife and I have had an offer accepted to purchase a home.

There's no need for a long intro here, nor is there a need for fanfare and victory celebrations or anything like that just yet -- it is what it is. We made an offer on a house we wanted, the seller accepted the offer, and our anticipated closing date is in about a week and a half.

Everything paperwork-wise is done at this point, and everything's wrapped up figuratively with a pretty little bow. We'll go sign the closing agreement, wire over the down payment, get the keys, and we'll be done. Two hours after that we move out of the apartment with hired movers that we're also paying a great deal of money to just to get it all done quickly and same-day. That evening, we'll be purchasing new furniture for next-day delivery. Over the course of the next week afterwards, we'll be scrubbing down this apartment and (thankfully) leaving it as a memory. Deuces, bitches. 

The house itself is gorgeous, about 40 years old, and in a decent neighborhood. It's closer to my job and slightly further away from the wife's job. My upstairs "office" houses the washer/dryer as well as contains ample room for my stuff, including my favorite overstuffed chair that's currently in the living room of our apartment -- it's the only piece of our living room furniture we're keeping aside from the storage ottoman, which will also be in there. The wife has her own craft room/office as well, and our master bedroom has a walk-in closet almost the size of our current kitchen. We're quite happy with the place.

With this comes a lot of work and tasks both large and small. Large tasks are the moving itself, as well as all of the cleaning and packing (which we haven't done a lot of yet, and will monopolize pretty much all of our free time for the next three weeks, roughly. The smaller tasks are numerous and time-consuming as well, such as getting all of the utilities transferred to the new place, figuring out logistics of address changes and the like for official documents like driver's licenses, bank accounts, credit cards, etc etc, and actually setting up the new place once moved in.

To those ends, for the past few weeks (read: since we knew the house was ours), we've been gutting this apartment as much as possible -- a trend that we know will continue on a more amped-up scale now that our timeframe for the move shortens more by the day. I've been especially brutal with my own gutting of this place in getting rid of everything I own that I don't actually need to keep. I have to be brutal to myself because I own a lot of shit. When I first moved to Omaha from Kansas, I took so many things with me that I thought I would want to keep forever, only to find them in boxes years later and look at them like "what the fuck was I thinking?"

This time around I'm not doing that.

With a very everything must go mentality, I have systematically been going through my possessions and sorting them out -- keep, sell, donate. As such, I have sold almost my entire comic collection, almost every video game and/or system I've had or collected in the past 25 years, and every book, CD, tape, movie (DVD and VHS), and magazine that isn't essential. For the essentials I have purchased four 100-CD wallets and stored them all, tossing the cases and therefore saving an ungodly amount of storage space.

Tomorrow will mark the fourth (and hopefully, final) Saturday trip to Half Price Books, who has purchased the bulk of my stuff from me. It will also make our second and final trip to Gamers, the used and vintage games shop here in town, to sell the remaining game stuff I will be parting with.

In these trips over the past few weeks, I've made $400 or so in cold hard cash, bills-in-wallet cash, money that has gone to groceries and some other essentials so that we can save as much of our paychecks as we can. A down payment for a house is no fucking joke, friends -- it'll basically bleed us dry for a bit, and if it makes it easier for us in some small (or large) fashion, I don't mind selling most of my stuff to get it out of this place and make it less to move.

Plus, 95% of this stuff has literally been sitting in the apartment in boxes, whether in closets or in corners or on shelves.

"I don't want you to sell anything you'll regret," Daisy told me last weekend, very seriously.

"It's fine," I told her. "I don't think I'll regret any of this. It's all just stuff. It's things I've collected that I have no more use for whatsoever. I've been an adult for half my life, but I've never really been a grown up. We've been married for going on five years now and we've bought a house. It's time to grow up."

My entire adult life has consisted of moving from place to place, living alone or with someone else, dragging along all of these physical mementos of my past with me to each one. Aside from a few very important sentimental items here and there, all of it can be sold, donated to charity, or otherwise disposed of at this point. I'm turning 36 this year. I've worked in a corporate job for over four years, and have been married for almost five (as mentioned above). There's no longer much of anything I own that I can't part with if necessary. For example, there's a lot of clothing I've had for ten-plus years that I only wear occasionally, if ever, and that's only if I still fit into it. That all went to the purge, as I call it, for donations to the Salvation Army.

As an aside, I've probably mentioned here before in the past that I'm not a huge fan of the Salvation Army for a number of reasons -- for one, they aren't the kindest to our gay friends and family members, and the wife and I have a lot of those. For two, their very church-based, Jesus-y mission statement doesn't mesh well with me, a lifelong atheist. But, and here's the thing -- they do a lot of good charitable work to help people, regardless of whatever agendas they have...and they will come to my home to pick up donations. Any donations. That's a big plus.

As an additional aside, the Disabled American Veterans (DAV) doesn't do pickups here in Omaha. I checked. Those people have been my go-to charity for many years now, but they just don't really have a presence up here like they do in Missouri and Kansas. That is unfortunate, really.

So, over the course of the past two years or so, every few months I've scheduled a pickup appointment with the Salvation Army for donations, in order to get rid of a lot of useless stuff around the house, stuff that I should've gotten rid of when I moved up here from Kansas, but y'know, hindsight 20-20 and all that. Each time I've gotten a tax receipt, which the wife may or may not use when I provide it to her for when she does the taxes (I'll never know, she handles that). However, in the past six months or so, they've been here three or four times, as I have donated about 2/3 of my wardrobe to them. I'm encouraging Daisy to do the same during this move, as we'll be trying to get rid of all we can, and truthfully she wears the same 25-30 outfits for work anyway and not much else. How do I know this? I do the laundry. This is why I was thrilled to have the washer/dryer in my new office in the new house.

"I want to get everything but the essentials all packed up this weekend," she told me.

I looked at her and tried not to roll my eyes, as doing this would mean she'd not sleep at all, and neither would I. Like, at all. For a guy who's constantly sleep deprived anyway this personally sounds like absolute hell. I love Daisy very much, but I've also been awake since 7:30 last night (it's almost 1PM now), and have packed/assembled maybe five or six boxes today. I haven't showered, I have eaten one meal, and I'll have to sleep at some point tonight too, of course. Tomorrow is my last day off of my "weekend," as I have to work Sunday overnight, which means I'll be sleeping all day Sunday. My work schedule is not a good one for an undertaking such as this.

Still, we moved everything out of my house in Kansas in the span of about 36 hours, and that was by ourselves packing up a U-Haul. Granted, we both had fewer things then, but the house was larger than this apartment and we were doing it all with just the two of us (we had no choice). But at the time, I was also unemployed and had all the figurative time in the world as I had just finished teaching for the semester and was leaving the state.

This is part of why I'm trying to purge everything possible from this apartment. Screw it, if we don't use it, it goes. Despite that I am sure Daisy will find ways to not part with a lot of stuff, as she is much more sentimental than I. Some of it I can understand, of course -- I have two t-shirts I've owned for over twenty years, purchased from a long-closed head shop in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware on a beach trip there back in the 90s. One is an Iron Maiden shirt and the other is a KMFDM shirt. I will never get rid of either one. Here's a picture of me wearing the KMFDM shirt last week:

Also pictured: cat, chair, Grateful Dead tapestry, and my punk rock haircut.

Yeah, last weekend I got my hair done in a sort of wide mohawk style, completely shaved on the sides all the way up to the long part on top. It sort of makes me look like a pineapple, but fuck it. Even in September, it's still 90 degrees in Nebraska.

Now that I've said that, of course, it'll be in the 40s next week -- you watch.

Anyway, that's about where my sentimental attachment to certain items ends. I sold my Sega Genesis, which was my first game system I got as a Christmas present in 1994, and thought nearly nothing of it aside from a "well buddy, it was a good run, go have a game with another friend."

So yeah, we're moving and stuff has to go. And truthfully I can't wait to really dive in and start getting rid of stuff. Part of it will end up being replaced by newer, more exciting stuff. I am big on, ahem, as they say, retail therapy. Meaning, as much as I hate being a consumer whore, few things make me feel better than getting rid of a bunch of old stuff and replacing some of those things with newly purchased upgrades. My wardrobe is a good example of that; I've replaced a good chunk of the stuff I've donated with new stuff that fits better and I enjoy more. Mind you, a lot of it is still nerdy t-shirts and a bunch of hoodies, but again, fuck it.

We have to think logistically about a lot of stuff we take with us -- we have a much larger kitchen in the new place, but the bathroom doesn't have as much storage, there aren't as many closets, there's not a basement, etc. We have a garage, but it's small and won't have much more room for anything aside from the wife's car (my truck won't fit in it comfortably, for example, and we'll need room for a lawn mower and stuff like that too, etc). I'm not sure my office has a large closet aside from the washer/dryer area, and am not entirely sure it has a second closet at all, though I think it does. Getting all the stuff we have and want to keep over to the new house is one thing -- having somewhere to put it once we get it there is quite another.

While all of this is going on, I should note that Hurricane Florence is pounding the Carolinas right now, and my parents have been forced to evacuate back home to WV until it all subsides -- who knows if their beach house will remain standing when they return. Living in the midwest with the threat of tornado season is one thing -- hurricanes are quite another.

Mind you, we haven't really had any tornadoes to speak of in the Omaha area for a few years now; oh sure, we'll have the occasional watch or warning when one gets fairly close, but truthfully they talk big game about tornado season up here and rarely anything exciting happens. Same went for when I was living in Kansas for five years; nothing came closer than about 20 miles or so from my house. I experienced much worse weather living in Missouri -- hell, I experienced worse weather in West Virginia when I was living there.

A little over a year ago -- almost a year exactly, in fact -- Daisy and I visited West Virginia to see friends and family, including my grandmother, who was at the time in her last three months of life. We didn't know that then, of course, but we knew it would be the last time we saw her alive.

While cleaning, I found the birthday card she sent me last year. She sent it to me less than three weeks before she died, and it is the last written anything I received from her, or would receive from her.

I haven't really written about my grandmother's death here because I'm not sure I've really processed it yet. She died in January, on a cold Sunday morning shortly before I went to bed. She had turned 90 four months before, so it's not like she was young. She left me her newspaper clipping collection in her will, which I told my extended family and estate executors they could do what they wanted with; there was no need to send them to me out here in Nebraska. I do not regret this decision, really. Instead, I asked them to send me my grandfather's prosthetic leg if they could find it while cleaning out her belongings.

I'm weird like that.

Regardless, my aunt told me if they could find it, it was all mine.

She was buried on the hill in the town cemetery next to my grandfather, who had been laid to rest there in 1982. I did not attend the funeral. The family understood. I'm not sure my parents did, but the rest of the family did.

So yes, I'm still processing it somewhat. I now have no living grandparents. My parents are both rapidly aging as well, as are Daisy's. At age 35, I'm finally buying a house with my wife. I guess this means I am indeed a grown up now. Which I think, really, is the entire point of this post overall.

Next up after the house is to sell my truck and to get a new(er), reliable vehicle and to get a job working on dayshift, something that's far, far different from what I do now (so I don't end up eventually hanging myself).

As I've mentioned in the past, this year has been a year of self-betterment for me. I've lost close to 40 pounds since the beginning of the year, and I have begun the transition to an entirely, or mostly, vegetarian diet. Not vegan, mind you, but vegetarian. I want myself to be healthy, I want more energy, and I want to be able to live for a long time.

Heh, imagine that, me saying that I want to live. Clearly there's something wrong with me.

As I told Daisy, if you would've told me ten years ago that at age 35, I'd be a vegetarian with a mohawk who sold almost all of his comic books and video games, well...


More to come.

"Weirdo"

Over the past week I've been going through my personal archives of CDs and CD-Rs and slowly digitizing them one by one.

It was an ungodly painstaking, time-consuming process.

I have been collecting data and burning it onto CD-R literally since January 2002, when I purchased my first computer with a CD-R drive (it was a Hewlett-Packard, 128mb RAM, Windows XP machine, and it literally died in two years -- but the hard drive and CD drive are still in my possession to this day as I put them both into my next machine).

I had, approximately, 800 discs.

Most of them were music and/or backup discs from computers long past -- when my whopping 10GB HD would get too full of pictures or podcasts or music, I'd back up that stuff on a CD-R (or a few of them) and delete. Every three months or so I would back up everything in order to make sure I had it on file in the event I needed it.

Now that my archiving work has completed, I have about 75 discs, almost all of them commercially purchased music CDs (which yes, I backed up digitally as well).

The remaining 725 or so were only part of my collection -- I know I have more, spindles upon spindles more somewhere in this apartment in a box or tub stuffed into a closet. Half of my music collection is missing, for one, and I know I didn't get rid of it. I paid good money for those albums; they're still here somewhere.

However, that's not the reason I came here to post this entry.

What I found on some of those discs was actually rather shocking to me, in a lot of ways. Pictures of friends I haven't seen in many, many years -- some of whom I can't even remember their names -- as well as chat transcripts from AIM (remember AIM?), tax forms, news articles I'd saved, obituaries of people I'd gone to high school or college with, letters I'd written but never sent, music from bands and artists I'd completely forgotten about, podcasts from 2003-07, multiple creative projects I thought were a good idea at the time until I realized they were actual work, etc. All of it a snapshot of time, frozen like Walt Disney's head.

Yes, I know Walt Disney's head was never frozen. Still.

I went through each CD one by one, pulled off the stuff I wanted to keep into some files on my current, two-terabyte hard drive, and if there was any personal info on said CD, put it directly into my powerful, $100 I-can-shred-a-book-if-I-want crosscut shredder as soon as I'd recovered the data I wanted. If there was nothing personal on it or it was just music backups or games or pictures downloaded off of image boards or the like, it just went into the trash after my plundering.

All in all, I recovered about 50GB of pure data. Some of the discs were so old that they were becoming unreadable -- disc rot is a thing -- but I was able to recover the vast majority of what I wanted.

Including some of my writing.

Church abhors me like nature abhors a vacuum. When I was a kid, the preacher of the church I attended asked me if I knew what Lent was. I told him it was the fuzz that comes out of the trap in the dryer. The room erupted in laughter, mother hid her face in shame, and we never again returned to church after that.


That's a true story, by the way.



If you’re at all internet-literate, then by now you’ve probably heard of (and probably use) some sort of instant messenger. Most of these programs have a feature which will let other users know when you’re away from the desk or currently unavailable. They’re called “status messages” or “away messages.” Here is a short list of some of my more memorable away messages:


Currently masturbating


Holy Crap Batman! He’s away from the desk!


Thinking about you naked


Getting naked and wet (for I’m in the shower)


All dressed up and no one to hang out with


All dressed up and no one to kill


Napping! Leeme ‘lone!


Would somebody please kill me so that I don’t have to go to college anymore?


Ever blow your nose and your nose vibrates really fast because so much air is being rapidly forced out BUT there are only 3 drops of snot on the tissue?



Yeahhh….umm, and I wonder why nobody talks to me when I’m online.



This is also true.

I'm slowly realizing that fifteen years ago, I was a whiny, attention-whore douchebag who either played the victim an awful lot or was just weird for weird's sake.

Here's a snippet of an actual resume I put together probably around my junior year of college. Junior year of college, folks.

So yeah, I was a weirdo. Hindsight is 20:20 and all that.

I did have a blog at the time, long since deleted and scrubbed from the internet now. It was called The Criminally Goofy, which sums up in a nutshell the person I was between 2002 and 2005, when I closed it down due to acquiring a stalker (yeah, that happened, it was weird and not fun). I actually have most, if not all, of the posts from that blog saved and archived in a few places, including on some of the CDs I just digitally archived this week.

And hoo boy is some of that shit embarrassing.

Like, I realize that 2003 is fifteen years ago and that people grow and mature. I used to think that I hadn't changed much, that fundamentally I am still the person I was back then, the same person I've "always been," so they say. Boy, was I wrong. Brandon at age 20 was whiny, phony, slightly psychotic, manipulative, suffered from "poor me" syndrome as well as the aforementioned perpetual victim complex, and I cannot for the life of me understand how any of my friends tolerated me during that several-year span. I was so stunned in reading some of the stuff I blogged about during that time that I had to send an email to one of my close personal friends to ask her how she put up with me.

No, I'm not putting any of that writing here, because college is a span of my life I'd really rather forget most of for many reasons, but it's also a span of my life where a lot of things happened that I flat out don't remember. I must've gotten into a lot of fights with my friends, as three or four of the posts I dredged up made reference to these fights and/or even transcribed some of them. I have no recollection of these things. Maybe that's my mind going in my old age, or maybe I blocked it out (like repressed memories or something) or maybe I was just too plain swamped by life to be able to remember every little thing that happened.

I whined about my relationship with my parents. I whined about being a virgin a lot (until, well, I wasn't one anymore, so that eventually stopped). I whined about how nobody truly understood me. I whined about being fat and unattractive -- even though back then I was about 20 pounds lighter than I am now and far more stylish in my appearance. Maybe a lot of those topics are universal and are part of growing up, but in my reading I noticed a very thick underlying immaturity to all of it -- writing done by someone who thought he'd experienced the world but in reality didn't have any fucking clue of what it was honestly like.

In 2005, after shutting that journal down, due to the fact that I'd obtained a stalker -- and not the fun kind, the blackmailin' kind -- I took a two year hiatus from active blogging/writing until I opened this blog in August 2007. I turned the first two years of this blog into a book, as some of you know (the manuscript needs a heavy re-editing job done to it before I can actually make it publication-ready again, and who knows if that will ever happen).

Anyway.

Archiving all this stuff -- going through it piece by piece -- makes me feel in some small way that I am being productive, doing something that somewhat means something or that I can feel good about. This doesn't happen much in my life anymore, honestly. My work (neither job, if I'm going to be completely honest about it) doesn't feel meaningful to me, doesn't feel like I'm bettering myself or the world. At home, when I'm off work, I do the same chores every week (when I have the energy to do so) just to keep the house maintained. I take no joy in it, it just is what it is. It is treading water, a concept I've mentioned here numerous times in the past.

But, there is excitement in nostalgia. There is excitement in finding what was once lost, excitement in remembrance and reminiscence.

As mentioned, there are many more CDs to find. The vast majority of my music collection is among them, as well as so many comedy albums, movies, and otherwise "lost data" yet to be reclaimed. I will find them here and there, bit by bit, as I slowly gut this room and decide what stays and what goes.