This used to be a website. Now it's just a harbor of old memories.

It had been going so well and then I broke my eggshell.

The first time I saw my Mother throw her wedding ring at my Father during a fight is when I realized my childhood was a weird one. I knew what rent was at around age eight. I knew of bills, repossessions from not paying your bills, dodging the landlord, bouncing checks and I lived with the stress my parents transferred onto my brother and myself. What kid needs to live in perpetual fear of being evicted from your home? It made me grow up entirely way too fast and I've increasingly resented it over time.

My parents weren't bad people, but often times they were bad parents. My Mother was a habitual drug user, my Father full of regret his life didn't go in a different direction. They say they love each other after 35 years of being together, but I often wonder if it was out of convenience more than anything else. I love them both dearly, but I harbor a lot of internal trauma to this day which stemmed from them.

I want to say I learned something valuable today, alas my murdered remains are incapable of learning anything.

My time with Lena was an exhausting one. 

I met her on an online message board in July 2000 back when the internet was new and fun. It was the wild west. I could download some illegal music, see lewd photos in Yahoo chat rooms from guys pretending to be lesbians and see your occasional beheading video. It was the norm back then.

Over the next few years, I remained friendly with Lena and learned more about her. She was a sheltered Armenian who had no interest in dating/marrying within her race and she had a thing for white guys with wild hair. Hey! I was a white guy with wild hair. We were hooked on each other and although we were about an hour drive apart, we communicated with each other daily through AOL Instant Messenger. This eventually turned into trading of amateur porn videos back and forth and I realized her sheltered nature turned her into a nympho. She was crazy horny and willing to do anything on video for me, which was a bad combination for someone still a virgin and rampant imagination. It was great. 

My first red flag with Lena was the time she confided in me that her Mother was often physically abusive with her. When I had relayed this information to my parents, they coordinated a plan to get her out of her home when she turned 18 and move her in with us. That plan went off without a hitch, and once she had finally settled in, my Mom casually brought up the topic that she thought it was terrible that her parents could be abusive to their own daughter. "I never said that", Lena quipped back. This immediately painted me as the liar and I was dumbfounded how someone could be as deceitful as this. It was only the beginning. 

Lena and I eventually moved back to California in with her strict Armenian family yet somehow they had allowed me to live in their household in a spare bedroom. This is completely uncommon for this race and my staying there was kept a secret for the entirety of my time there. Whenever they had parties, or people over visiting, the excuse was that "I was just visiting" . I felt like a secret embarrassment and it never sat well with me. I swallowed it for the free rent. 

I was eventually cheated on mid-2006. Lena had begun to develop a relationship with one of my friends at the time and was sneaking behind my back to do a myriad of scandalous things with him. They had hours long disgusting, sexual conversations. She sent him lewd photos which I had took of her. She was talking to him on the phone, making plans to meet up and even was preparing to buy him things with my money. I eventually found out when I was informed of all of this by my former friend, with him sending me months of evidence collected into a zip file. I was mortified by what I was seeing/reading and knew I had to better myself to escape from the situation. I'd work on saving more money, buy a car, get my driver's license and then I'd jump the fucking ship. It's exactly what I did. 

Lena had a bit of a complex where she felt like she didn't have to work and would rather be supported financially by those around her. I never really had room to interject as I was living with her parents rent free, so I literally felt trapped and "between a rock and a hard place". She would guilt trip me about me spending my own money to the point where she'd use my money on birthday presents for me, basically classifying them as a guilt free purchase. Who the fuck does that? 

The sex with Lena was one of the only redeeming qualities I found. As mentioned previously, she wanted sex all the time. We'd have it everywhere. Hotel rooms, cars, outside, in her parent's room, at my former boss' house, Vegas hotel rooms in front of another couple. Once she had a drink or two inside of her, she was up for everything and anything. She'd let me record it as well, so I ended up amassing a large collection of videos toward the end of our relationship. That became a double edged sword because I grew to expect that from my future relationships and I know that's a tough ask. Not every woman is into that. 

I eventually broke things off with Lena due to the massive disrespect. I took the brunt of her dipshittery for years because I didn't know any better but I was growing tired. Toward mid-2009, the lease was up on her car and her options were either to pay it off or turn it back in. Her parents had initiated this entire car loan, and was paying her payments, so I had no involvement in this at all. The payoff due was $10,000, which she expected me to pay. I explained that I did not have that sort of cash on me and that I was driving a crappy used car myself. "You want me to drive a shitty car like you?", she said without hesitation. We argued back and forth and eventually agreed that her brother and myself would go 50/50 on the payoff, paying $5,000 each.

The car was paid off and she finally shut up. I was annoyed but it was another wound of mine I had to lick. A few days pass and once she calms down, she has the audacity to say to me "You know you didn't have to pay it, right?" 

Shocked, I shot back "What do you mean? You rode my ass about it for weeks".

Her reply to that was something I still cannot wrap my head around and was the final nail in the coffin.

"I can't help it if you're that weak".

And we were done. I smiled, swallowed my anger toward her and set up my escape plan. I let her and her family know that I wanted to find an apartment of my own just for some independence and assured her and her Mom that we weren't breaking up, I just wanted to get out on my own. I found a place and once the dust settled, I broke it off with her.

She ended up telling her family that I cheated on her and that's why we broke up. She played the victim the entire time and actually called me saying her parents were pissed I was "leaving her with nothing". They wanted me to give her $4,000 to which I laughed and hung up. 

Fuck her. 

I don't miss her at all. 

If you're gonna scream, scream with me. Moments like this never last.

Coming off of my escape plan from Lena, I quickly learned how fantastic a parental free life could be. I had my own apartment, my own car, a bit of money saved and I was finally free of the weight of my first relationship. As curious as fate always is, Yolande was someone who recently got hired at the company I worked for. She was insanely pretty and had an infectious laugh. She was French and had an amazing body, but you could tell she had an aura of intense loneliness surrounding of her. I was immediately curious. I spoke a language only lonely girls have heard.

Getting her attention didn't take long. With the power of newfound freedom and my already existing random wittiness, I was firing on all cylinders. I felt great and hanging out with her felt great. The sex felt even better. I had always wondered what sex felt like outside of the only person I had ever had it with and I was finally discovering sometimes the grass is greener on the other side. I was drunk off of the chase and our hangouts become a nearly weekly thing. Sex was always implied, too. "You can sleep on my couch if you're too drunk to drive home" , would be a disclaimer she'd often give me midway through our nights but we both knew we were both immediately getting undressed and jumping into her bed as soon as we got into her apartment. 

She was one of the most beautiful people I had ever met and she was into me. For the first time in my life, I was getting attention from someone who I felt was way out of my league. I found her fascinating. I found her fun. I just hated that she worked at the same company as I did, but I tried not to let that overcomplicate things.

She had some definite emotional baggage and trauma that I was not equipped to handle at the time. Her Mother was dead, she didn't know her biological Father and her Stepdad was abusive. I learned this fact after trying to rub the back of her neck and she cringed a bit. When I asked what was wrong, she casually let out a "it just reminds me of when my step dad would choke me."  I didn't have any words. I can barely handle my own shit at twenty four yet alone someone else's. 

We had our ups and downs. She was very moody and very fickle, changing her plans at a moment's notice. However, she was the only woman that has kissed my hands while spooning in bed. I'll never forget that sort of affection as I definitely hadn't had it before or since. During this whole courting phase, I had my ex-girlfriend trying to fuck me all the time while also gaining interest in Sarah.  I did not want to continue juggling multiple women at the same time and asked Yolande what she felt we were. Her reply was, "Are you really asking me this right now?"  I couldn't pull an answer from her other than "I don't want to move onto my number 10" . That number being the number of guys she had slept with. I broke up with her over Facebook Messenger. I'll forever be an idiot that one. She deserved better than that current version of me. 

All told, we hung out over the course of four months. She'd continue to text me randomly over the years, with such statements such as, "I wonder what you and I would have become if we had made it. You were a jerk though."  She's right, I was a hot mess candle burning at both ends but I still had to ask her to stop sending me such things. I haven't heard from her since.

I miss her, a lot. 

Stop hitching with the monster man. It was a bad plan but I had to get to town. 

New Years Eve 2009

I was originally set on spending some time with Yolande but she had texted me saying she wasn't feeling too well and she was just going to stay in for the night. In hindsight, I should have visited her anyways as a supportive gesture but I was intent on not staying in for the night. My ex girlfriend invited me over to her parent's house for a backyard bonfire gathering which I reluctantly agreed to do while I tried to find alternative plans. While sitting by said bonfire, I was furiously texting anyone and everyone I knew to see what their New Years' plans were that night. I managed to get a successful hit with one of my friends I hadn't seen in over a decade so I found that was the perfect opportunity to excuse myself from my current location. 

I jumped into my shitty 1998 Toyota Corolla and started my venture. It started to rain, furiously, during my hour drive there. I almost turned back twice but I continued to persevere through the storm. Once I arrived, I dried myself off a bit and my old friend lead me inside his parent's house. That's when I met Sarah. At a party I should have never been at.

I was immediately taken aback by her, and when I asked my friend who she was, he filled me in that she was his younger brother's girlfriend. I have no interest pursuing taken individuals, as Mama didn't raise no homewrecker, so I filed the information into the back of my mind and moved on with my night. Toward the end of the night the group was preparing some sort of game in the living room and I was finding a place to sit. The only spot available as a small wedge of space between Sarah and the arm of the couch. She had initially saved this for her boyfriend, but he was being his usual douchebag self and had no interest of sitting by her. I think they were fighting that night but I shrugged it off and squeezed myself into the spot. After noticing her jacket and mine were getting stuck to each other by static electricity, I made some crappy joke how our jackets should get a room to make baby jackets. I immediately cringed when these words came out of my mouth but apparently she found it endearing and that's what sparked her interest into me. Who knew?

I kept in touch with her on and off through Facebook and when I found out her boyfriend had dumped her, I made myself just a little more available to talk to her. She eventually invited me over to her birthday party at her dorm room. I bought her a DVD box set of Spaced. She said things like, "I could just pin you down on the bed right now". I was hooked. 

This relationship lasted just shy of five years and still holds ramifications over my life today. She entirely fucked me up in more ways than I'd care to admit and I still hold bitterness towards her and how it ended. With a six year difference between us, everyone would tell me the same thing. "She's too young for you". "You two are going to want different things". These are all things I should have given heavy consideration into but it's hard to have your cooler head prevail when you're banging a newly turned nineteen year old. 

She was fun.
She was funny.
She had nice boobs. 

We were into the same things. Movies, music, video games - I instantly was head over heels for her. She was ditzy at times and definitely more book smart than street smart and came from a pretty well-off family. Her mother was lesbian and her father was gay, which really grew a lot of insecurities into her life. "What if I wake up one morning and I'm lesbian?", she asked me one time. I didn't have an answer. This is a discussion you should have had with your parents many years ago and not 7am on a Sunday when we're about drive to an IHOP to eat. (And I'd pay for, as usual.

Year over year, we continued to grow apart and it's a painful feeling when you can feel a relationship starting to wrap up and you can't do anything about it. She'd make plans and forget to include me. She'd regularly find more and more reasons to be away from me to the point where my own friends asked me why she was never there with me during hangouts. I knew we were breaking and I didn't know how to fix it.

She asked me one night, crying in bed, to name things I actually liked about her. I was in so much rage from a fight right before that I couldn't come up with an answer. That still bothers me to this day. 

I'm by no means perfect but I really do expect a two-way relationship when it comes to handling things. If you can't afford to split things 50/50 monetary wise, then show me you care for me in other ways. It's not hard but that seems impossible concept for some young women to grasp. I ended up growing complacent and stopped trying. She ended up drifting more and more away from me and eventually left me out on curb with the police while she tore her stuff out of my apartment for four hours with no prior warning.

She got in a relationship with a former classmate friend of hers within a month. Engaged in a year. Married in two. They have a kid now. Congrats, I guess.

I'd occasionally get texts and even phone calls from her post-breakup, with such things as phone calls from an IHOP, boyfriend across from her, telling me how cool the concert was they went to. That was our thing. That was our routine. It reminded me of a line from a Killers song,

"And someone will drive her around down the same streets that I did"

My last text from her asked if we could still be friends and affirming that her "boyfriend was okay with it". She then asked me for video game recommendations and told me I was always into the coolest things. I don't think you quite grasp how this works. You can't have it both ways and you don't get those kinds of things from me anymore. I kicked back a large rebuttal text with the closing line stating, "my greatest demon is that all the things you're into will forever be associated with me".

Kind of cruel. 

I miss her, sometimes.

The first time I did coke it felt like shaking hands with a friend I’d known for my whole life. 

As my friend and I pulled into a parking spot outside of a bar to meet up for a mutual friend's birthday, he pulled out a small baggie from his pocket containing a bit of cocaine. I had known this friend for years and would ultimately be the best man at his wedding, but I had never seen this side of him before. The way he nonchalantly pulled it out without hesitation really struck me with surprise at the time as I had a naiveite that he even partook in this sort of stuff. 

"I can't share, as I'd feel guilty for getting you into it", he remarked as he dipped his car key into the bag and then to his nose and inhaled. I could respect that, I suppose. I don't recall being frustrated at the time. We headed into the bar and didn't mention the incident again.

Fast forward a couple weeks and I find myself in the back of a car with this same friend after a night of Oktoberfest drinking. Some of our mutual co-workers at the time were up front driving and my friend, as he usually tended to do, had a bit too much to drink and was heavily inebriated. Once again, without hesitation, he whips out the same bag and partakes in a quick key whiff without alerting our drivers. Once finished, his head still hanging low, he swings the bag over to my direction. This was it. Shit or get off the pot.

I liked it and wish I hadn't. It felt exhilarating. 

Over the course of our hangouts over the next weeks, months, years, this became a common party member in attendance. We thought we were being slick by taking turns going into Yard House bathrooms to get high but in hindsight, I don't think we were fooling anyone. To this day, I still can't walk into a Yard House without feeling a hint of nostalgia.

Growing up, I never really partook in any sort of drug or alcohol use. The first time I got drunk was at my boss' house when I turned twenty one. I smoked pot at her place a few years later, probably when I was twenty three or so. I never really liked it as I didn't like the way it made me feel. Who wants to feel sluggish and stupid all the time? I never understood the hype.  My parents always told my brother and I to stay away from drugs but being drug addicts themselves, it was never really explained why.  I could feel the "do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy at a young age. It made me grow up entirely way too fast.

Eventually my friend slowly grew out of the usage of the stuff and although I've never considered myself addicted, I've still continued to carry intermittent dabbling behavior over the next decade. I introduced it to friend I had at the time who ended up using it as a crutch for his anger issues. He introduced it to a friend I have currently. I can definitely feel the guilt association one carries when others can't "handle their shit" as well as I can. I can use the stuff and go cold turkey over the next year without any drawbacks. I've never had an addictive personality.

Or maybe that's what I tell myself to normalize this type of behavior into something I can live with. Sarah would chastise my usage of it, and once she broke things off with me, I find out she eventually started to dabble in snorting ketamine and liked it. "I always was interested in trying it", she once told me. 

Thanks for that, hypocrite. 

Every dream has a dark side, no matter how hard you try.

Liliana was a wild Latina which loved to have sex. We had it everywhere. Her car, my car, on top of parking structures, the beach, bathrooms, her best friend's bed, outside. If the sky was blue, Liliana was down for some random sex. It was fantastic and was my first foray into 'no strings attached' sex, or so I thought. 

She quickly grew fond of me and I could tell she wanted a relationship out of me. I let her know up front that I just had a particularly nasty breakup with Sarah and I was not mentally prepared for another long term relationship at that time. She said she understood but deep down I feel she thought she could change me. I've learned over time that most women are like that.

We had a lot of fun and random adventures but I could still feel she wasn't someone I could 'bring home to Mom'. She was a wild child, she was a loose cannon. She was someone who would drive five hours to San Francisco for lunch and then turn right back around. I loved that side of her as I'm horribly spontaneous myself but I felt she was unreliable as well. I took her to a concert one night to go see The Toasters & Mustard Plug down in San Diego and my suspicions were confirmed.

Her drink of choice was Jameson. During this concert, she had wandered off to get us a couple of Jameson shots from the bar and I didn't see her for the thirty minutes. Annoyed, I started to look around the club and realized she was no longer there at all. I asked the bouncer out front if he had seen a woman with long, wild hair and his response was, "Oh yeah, I kicked her out a while ago. She was out of her mind". Fuck, now I'm roaming the streets of San Diego looking for her while I'm missing the band I came down here for in the first place. She did not have her phone on her as she had left it in my car, so I had no way of contacting her. I proceeded to search for her for the next two hours before I finally found her in a parking structure, completely covered in soot / tire grease. She was extremely drunk and had no recollection of where she was, where she'd been or why she was covered in shit. I told her to get in the car and I drove her home. We argued and she called me her ex's name. Classy.

It was at that point I knew I couldn't fully trust her. Wild women and alcohol don't mix and I knew this is just the way she was. Any interest I had in making our relationship official went out that night and I doubled down on just being friends with benefits. This continued through the year until I met another woman named Evelyn who caught my attention. Liliana hated Evelyn and I'm sure the feeling was mutual. 

The last time I hung out with Liliana was at her friend's house, where she was housesitting while her friend was out of town. We had sex twice on her friend's bed and once I left, I knew that was the grand finale. 

We're shockingly still on talking terms to this day. I don't hold any ill will toward her. 

I miss the sex.

Who are you to me? Who am I supposed to be? Not exactly sure anymore.

How does one deal with the culmination weight of a five year relationship ending, your brother giving you a call during work to let you know that he's HIV positive, losing two roommates changing which'll change your rent from $650/month to $2,200 all while recovering from gall bladder removal surgery? One doesn't, in my case. I tried to hang myself with my belt December 2014 and was unsuccessful. 

Sometimes I think I was successful and this version of myself doesn't really exist.

Life is boring. Life is bland. I'm in a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to fall.