solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I really didn't know before I lived with him. Like, I've been average Amerifat on and off (have gained and lost the same 30ish pounds several times since being the fat kid who lost the weight after high school) but morbid obesity is a different game. Like, I've seen him take down a 14 inch stuffed crust pizza with a quart of milk in 20 minutes. I hear obvious bullshit like "I haven't eaten in days". (I have gone days without eating because stressed out me loses all appetite and when that happens I lose weight fast even while guzzling full sugar soda and alcoholic beverages.) or "This pizza is the first bad thing I've eaten in two weeks, so my diet shouldn't be causing my joint problems" (Again, bullshit. You told me that you went to the Chinese buffet last week, I've never seen you cook or eat a vegetable, I see the junk food wrappers/boxes in the trash, and you forgot to mention the full order of cheezy bread that you took down with that pizza.) and don't even have a response. At least every drunk I've known doesn't pretend that their hangover came from nowhere.
One of my siblings is living her 400lb life and it's fucking depressing.
I don't know if addiction causes people to lose their tolerance for discomfort or if the low tolerance for discomfort causes the addiction in the first place, but having been around enough of it you run into ridiculous shit like my roommate complaining about the heat during a power outage 30 minutes after the power went out (Yeah, it got humid and a bit stuffy, but it was during the night, below 80 degrees outside, and dark. It didn't get hot.) or a buddy's pillhead girlfriend requiring controlled substances to treat a headache.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
One of the oddities of my company (which is a subcontractor for distributors, of which one of the two that comprise most of my route is presently breaking up such that we're essentially losing the contract to a competitor) is that they emphasize Cicerone certifications, which from my uninformed opinion seem aimed more at the serving/bartending end than the back end/dispensing side of it. I don't think that I want to pursue the beer industry long term, but I'll check out competing distributors/line contractors for what opportunities they have.
My mechanical background is primarily automotive (mostly picked up from fixing my own cars or other delivery drivers' cars), so my diagnostic approach sort of follows (how to find a leak in a gas line, for example), but IMO my training was lengthy but spent far too much time on easy stuff and too little time in coolers such that I had to learn how to do things like read kegs on my own, I have little idea how fobs work or why (just when to bypass them), why beer pumps are necessary, etc. If a problem is more complex than I can diagnose in five minutes I'm supposed to tell the account to call the 800 number and send out a service tech (who is booked at least a week in advance and whose fee is likely too high for a probably simple issue).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I believe that you're absolutely right, and I do credit the bar gig for leveling up my social skills in relatively short order (such that my boss there remarked that it made him feel good to watch me "emerge from my shell"; I did discover that I'm actually an extrovert or at least an ambivert and genuinely enjoy talking to people instead of being afraid of them) to the point that I would heartily recommend that any young man with lousy social skills take a bar gig for six months to a year. If I had gone that route at 21 instead of 31 I suspect that I would be vastly better off, but I didn't know any better at the time. As things are, I did light prep for the interview (The first job interview where I didn't already have the job before I walked in that I've done in 10 years.) and the feedback I got was that it had been "the most impressive he'd ever heard" (So much for the "can't interview well" excuse that I told myself for years).
One of the reasons I don't see much of a future at my present company is that it's more of an overgrown small business with bad financials than a large company with limited opportunities for advancement (My current supervisor did my job for six years before she got promoted, and she really did go above and beyond. I really hope she gets the promotion she just applied for/seems to have been groomed for because she's done far more than just put in her dues. As for me, I don't have six years to waste.). I'm currently looking at manufacturing because my father did the same sort of thing in that field, I have a knack for vocational/technical stuff, and he swears up and down that industry is begging for people like me.
I'm not terribly pessimistic for my long term, but this last few months have been rough and if it makes sense I find the act of typing out my irritation to be therapeutic. Getting feedback from smart and usually successful people (You've always been one of my favorites from the old days, BTW.) is a pleasant and appreciated bonus.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
The Roommate
Continuing on the previous monster comment, by 2021 I wound up with two non-paying roommates. The first (and subject of this comment) is flat out my fault. I made a drunken promise to move in with this guy (and replace the last sucker that was letting him live more or less for free), felt bound by honor to do so in spite of knowing that it was a terrible idea, and did so. He’s not an awful roommate (lazy and useless, sure, but not all that difficult or disruptive aside from his annoying chihuahua that isn’t housebroken), but the place I moved into was as close to a third world slum as you’re going to find in an American metro area, complete with idiot upstairs neighbors doing laundry in the bathtub upstairs and leaking water everywhere (causing water to leak in and eventually collapse my bathroom ceiling, which took ages to get the slumlord to half-assedly repair), a junkie adjacent neighbor with the nastiest, most roach infested apartment I’ve ever seen (which meant that we all had an unkillable roach infestation), zero sound insulation or insulation at all (This made for obscene electric bills during the winter and I was still cold.), and everything was just so old and rundown that it was impossible to clean/keep clean; even the air perpetually felt dirty and humid (probably because of all the mold and because it was located in a swampy area; I suspect that the whole place and surrounding roachboxes have only been spared from demolition because the owner would have to spend a considerable sum improving the ground before constructing the three over ones favored by developers here), and a non-functioning stove. But hey, at $400/month for a two bedroom in a fairly nice neighborhood close to campus you get what you pay for, and I didn’t spend enough. I left and kept paying the rent rather than keep living there, the roommate inherited some money and paid me for a year up front, and all was fine until that money ran out, at which point I didn’t have the heart to kick him out because he makes basically zero income and has nowhere else to go (His parents are gone, he has no siblings, etc.). It was easier to eat the rent and utilities than to provoke the drama storm that kicking him out would be.
The second roommate (another friend of mine; I’ll never entangle myself financially with a friend again) had just broken up with her boyfriend, I got her a job at University to Go (She really was good and made the most money she’d ever made in her life doing it, but just couldn’t make herself wake up on time and show up when she said she would such that she burned the bridge with dispatch.), and for the first few months she paid her share and everything was great even though the apartment we moved into was a bit spendy for my tastes at the time ($900/month when I’d never paid more than $475 in my life. Three years later, that now $950/month is actually a pretty nice deal relative to what’s out there now such that it isn’t worth the costs of moving to downgrade.) until she just quit working/paying. I was already stuck with the lease so I just dealt with it and let her run up a tab that’s now over $10K in back rent that I’ll never get because she’ll never have it unless she wins the lottery. She did eventually find herself a rich boyfriend (a screwup/slacker whose daddy owns a coal mine) and moved in with him, so it was relatively low effort to kick her out, and now that the lease is ending at the shithole I moved roommate number one into my current place (As annoying as he may be, the marginal cost of moving him into an empty room is basically zero, vastly cheaper than paying for him to live in a shithole and have to hear about it every time something breaks.), so enter the current situation:
Last time I mentioned that he was in bad health (morbidly obese, congestive heart failure, takes more pills than your average 80 year old, etc.) and it hasn’t gotten any better. For reasons I don’t understand he was denied for disability, but the heart failure is probably sufficiently advanced (a high-end stage 2 to low-end stage 3 I would guess) that he really should be getting it (and food stamps, etc.). His condition is his fault (You can be 400lbs or a cocaine addict, but both are not sustainable, and his CHF would be vastly less problematic if he were a compliant patient and heaven forbid drop some weight. I have 70+ year old relatives with CHF, big people at that and one also suffers from COPD, who get around better than he does.), and at times its hard to tell malingering (wearing a fucking CPAP while awake watching TV; for fuck’s sake the oxygen concentrator, aka. smoker machine that he got during covid is less noisy/creepy and if he really can’t breathe sitting still in his gigantic recliner that takes up a third of my living room then he should start looking for nursing homes or call his drug dealers and beg for the strongest hit of fent that they have. Curiously, he doesn’t need that stuff when sitting on a barstool.), but he really is fucked and while I get mad when I see pizza boxes pile up by the trashcan (I guess he makes enough bumming off other friends/selling off his Xannies and whatnot that he can afford fast food and his phone bill.) I don’t have an answer.
My apartment is on the second floor and itself is a two story unit so the stairs (which mutual friends have told me that he bitches about incessantly) may correct this issue in a short time. Either he’ll get fed up and find another friend to crash with or that aortic aneurysm will blow up, he’ll be dead in 30 seconds, and he’ll finally get his wish (I’ve heard more than I care to about his suicidal ideation.). He’s recently developed a mysterious gout-like (but not gout; he has that too and this is allegedly different, some variety of autoimmune disorder he thinks/claims) illness in his knees that renders him nearly bedridden (or, more properly, recliner-ridden; the bedrooms are upstairs). At the rate he’s going he’s going to be immobile soon (One would think that watching his dad die 500lbs and bedridden would dissuade him from following the same path, but I guess not.) and if that happens I swear that I’m gonna call adult protective services or whatever and have him tossed into a nursing home before he can blink because I’m not a nurse and don’t plan on becoming one. I have the local social worker who deals with that stuff’s number saved in my phone.
The only thing I’ll say in my defense (and I really should be defending myself for being so spineless/conflict averse that I let these situations fester, even though the truth is that I don’t have a good enough excuse) is that I don’t hate him; I hate the situation but it can be hard not to conflate the two. I want to toss his stupid fucking yap dog (He does the fake “service dog” thing with it at that.) that he carries to bars to curry attention from women into a woodchipper/off the balcony (I promise that I won’t actually do that because in fact I’m touchy about animal cruelty.) but it’s not the dog’s fault that it was raised by a shitty owner. I swear that he was a much less shitty friend before the heart failure (why I feel obligated to help him, and I’m not the only one) and I remember the man he used to be (a fuckup self-sabotaging train wreck, but he at least worked and would drop anything to help a friend).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
My new job and my personal vibecession
This is an update to an ancient (back in the Reddit days) comment concerning being financially drowned by deadbeat roommates. I’m not trying to get too culture war about the economy, just remarking on my local, personal situation. I am well aware that I am a fuckup who spent most of his time/effort in college, his early 20s, and beyond drinking and delivering pizza instead of figuring out a career. Many of my problems are my own fault. That said, here goes:
Long story short, until recently I worked (I still do, a few dinner shifts a week, but it’s summer and they’re apocalyptically dead right now so I’m averaging 2 nights a week.) at a locally owned Doodash-style (We were around first, so not a clone.) food delivery company in an SEC college town (We’ll call it University to Go.), and did so for 8 years. Averaging $20/hr to drive in circles during the mid/late 2010s was crazy money for the low cost of living in my area at the time (I was paying less than $500/month in rent, for perspective.), better pay than a lot of “real” jobs. Sure, 1099 taxes suck and I became a part-time auto mechanic due to running my car into the ground for the job, but it was easy, genuinely fun, and it’s hard to beat being a small business owner’s favorite crony. In short, it was easy to stay comfortable, say “Fuck it, one more semester.”, and keep going.
Over time (Covid bought us a few years.) Doordash and Uber Eats ate us alive (It’s hard to convert students who enter town having already used one or the other for years, are already sunk in with subscriptions to Dashpass, etc.) while post-Covid inflation/labor shortages hit us from every angle (Anything to do with buying or running a car was hit especially hard, a lot of our restaurants went under or quit offering delivery due to short-staffed kitchens, and a lot of our customer base ran out of money quickly once the stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment ran out.) such that we’re more expensive and have a worse selection (In particular, the sort of fast-casual restaurants that used to be our bread and butter have nearly gone extinct.) than we used to (Still cheaper than Doordash, but we don’t deliver fast.). Stagnant income in a low-inflation environment was one thing, but this town is a lot more expensive to live in than it used to be (A process that was occurring throughout the 2010s, but Covid put it into overdrive.).
During 2020-21 (because I have no backbone, make bad decisions, and apparently acquired a friend group filled with terrible people during my 20s) I managed to acquire not one but two roommates that don’t pay their bills (I’ll get to one of them in the second comment.) and wound up paying for two apartments while going through a string of more bad decisions/luck with vehicles. Needless to say, my easy existence with plenty of spare cash transformed itself into an endless grind of working seven day weeks, picking up a second job as a barback and later bartender, and still being broke. Adding fuel to the fire, the bottom seems to have fallen out at University to Go and my potential as a bartender is not unlimited (I kind of hate bartending, have zero passion for cocktails, and am not a woman, so I’m going to be stuck working mediocre gigs or barbacking.), so I needed another job
In comes an old friend of mine with a job she’d just been promoted out of and thought I’d be a perfect fit for. How convenient, right? It seemed so, like a bit of a pay cut but survivable, more stable, and without the hassle of 1099 taxes and maybe I’d open some doors in a new field (alcohol distribution) that seemed like a logical step from bartending. I mean, I had to complete a 90 minute harassment training from HR, so this is a real job, right? Enter, being a draft quality technician, aka. beer line cleaner.
The Job
Pros: The hiring process was quick and relatively straightforward, management is relatively relaxed and hands-off so long as you do your job, and in 10 weeks with the company I’ve lost 25lbs (and wasn’t obese to start with, but was getting closer to that than I was happy with). Weekends off are nice, and I’m finally catching up on the backlog of stuff I have to do at home (My car is now fixed and has a radio installed that had been sitting in the closet for 6 months, the roommate’s car has a new fender installed, my apartment is passably clean, etc. Now I just need to get moving on getting my inoperative vehicles running so I can sell them.).
Things that annoy me about the job: The company phone and carrier get worse reception than my T-mobile ghetto android (and now every time I hear an iphone notification I think I’m getting a message from my boss) and the company app we use for logging tasks is glitchy and has to be babysat to make sure it doesn’t miss a stop that you actually cleaned. Bad cooler and line management are as rampant in food and beverage as bad cable management is in IT and there are few things as fun as wrestling the coupler off a keg in a tight space that was installed by a barback with the grip of Thor showing off his gains at the gym, having to move a bunch of produce stacked on the kegs, or coolers so nasty that I gag every time I walk in them (Thankfully the latter is rare.). The job is not technically challenging (If you can change your own oil, you can do this.), but it is boring, tedious, and heavy on details. The equipment we have to carry is heavy and unwieldy (~100lbs if my water and chemical tanks are full; you quickly learn to fill them all the way only when necessary to save your back) and the line cleaner is a lye-based caustic that makes gloves mandatory and will burn thin skin if not quickly neutralized by dumping beer on it.
Route management is the actual challenge of this job (Much of the technical stuff I thought I would be doing was omitted from my job title, training above what it takes to clean the lines was minimal, and I don’t carry anything more than a coupler and faucet, so even if I were to correctly diagnose a problem in a system I probably can’t fix it, and not being able to fix things drives me nuts.). In theory there’s a fair amount of flexibility as to which stop you hit when, but in reality you’re very much captive to time windows (Big places need to be done before 11AM as a rule, some spots have narrow time windows, and I have four days every two week cycle that involve driving an hour or more out of town because the local area doesn’t have enough taps to make a full route.) such that the workload is uneven (Some days are a cakewalk and others an ugly grind that leave me beaten down by the end of the shift.) and it’s hard to switch from racing the clock (In particular, I have one heavy day where I I could get one of my first three stops to show up before 8AM it would be easy, but that isn’t the case so I’m always behind on that day.) and feeling like you’re always 30-60 minutes behind to needing to slow-walk it and milk the clock for hours just to get 40 a week.
I don’t like this job, but the real dealbreaker is the pay. It’s $17/hr plus a $2/hr bonus for completing 100% of the route, and vehicle compensation that was supposed to be $500/month plus a mileage reimbursement that covers fuel (This sounded pretty generous so I asked several times about it during the hiring process. On the other hand the position used to come with company cars for everyone and $500/month is presumably less than what they would spend to lease and insure a car, so I believed it.) but is actually “in the neighborhood of $500/month” with fixed compensation plus mileage. The difference is about $200/month and I’m driving about 1800 miles a month for this job so much of that is eaten up in gas, let alone tires, commercial insurance, etc. The completion bonus should be consistently achievable moving forward but is easy to miss (I got docked last cycle because of places that were closed on Memorial Day in spite of taking pictures of closed signs and apping them as instructed in the meeting the week before. I was the only new guy at the meeting so I guess it was just taken for granted that I would know that I needed to make them up later, in which case I don’t see the point of taking pictures.). Before being hired I was told that they don’t care about overtime (and every other hourly job I’ve worked since college meant 45-50 hours a week, not 40). Welp, turns out they initiated an overtime crackdown and that if you get more than either 42 or 44 (I don’t recall which.) hours in a week you’re ineligible for the bonus. Including the fact that company policy is to clock out an hour after you left home and an hour before you get home on out of town days (which makes for 7 hours of unpaid driving every two weeks) and I’m struggling to hit 40 hours a week. I can’t afford the health insurance anyway, but it’s of the malicious compliance variety with a carrier that has no network in my local area in addition to being vastly more expensive than what I had through Obamacare. Adding to the suck factor, from what I’ve learned the jobs within the company I could gun for getting promoted into don’t pay much better than my current position (I’d get a company car, but that doesn’t pay my other bills and leveraging my mechanical skills to run a car cheap is something I’ve been doing for over 10 years at this point so I’d prefer even the mediocre vehicle reimbursement I’m getting.)
In short, adjusted for inflation this is worse money than I made delivering pizza for Papa John’s in the early 2010s (and my rent is twice what it was then), and dinner shifts at University to Go have been a bust because it’s the slowest part of the year in addition to the usual issues with them dying. I’ve picked up a few bartending shifts (As weird as it sounds, right as I put in my notice something “clicked” and I don’t hate bartending as much. I’ll never have the passion, but I play a character and it works well enough.). I’ve cut pretty much all of the lifestyle inflation fat I can cut, and I’m still going to be broke. I’m not going to starve, and if I have to tough this job out for a while I can, but I feel tired, defeated and like all the enormity of the mistakes I’ve made in my adult life are hitting me at once. I feel poor, afraid, and frankly angry and resentful. I’ve made my peace with the fact that this job isn’t going to work, have my backup plan in place (Go back to my old jobs; with my reduced expenses I can start getting ahead again and I think I can squeeze one last school year out of University to Go.) and am looking for better work (I have precious few friends who aren’t stuck in the service industry, but one I’ve helped in the past recommended a manufacturing plant and told me to use him as a reference to get over the “we want plant experience” hump.). It’s one thing to work a dead end job if it pays well (University to Go) or is stupid easy (barbacking and later bartending at the place I was a regular at and was probably going to be at that night anyway), and a different story for a rough grind with benefits that are worse than what I already had. I’m going to break my supervisor’s heart when I quit, but I’m trying to quit being a codependent/martyr in my personal life and damned sure can’t afford to do it with a job (because I have to pay for doing it in my personal life).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
War tends to be good for the incumbent, historically speaking.
Is this true? WWI is tricky because the Democrats winning 1910-12 was out of the norm for that era, but the Democrats did nothing but lose in subsequent elections and by 1920 the GOP had the Presidency and a massive Congressional majority thanks to running against Wilson's internationalism. WWII also gets tricky because the FDR coalition was so insanely dominant, but winning the war didn't save the Democrats from getting crushed in 1946. The Korean War likewise resurrected the GOP from the dead, with them winning a trifecta in 1952 (They wouldn't win the House again until 1994.). The Vietnam War arguably scuttled LBJ's Presidency and even winning the Gulf War in spectacular fashion didn't save H.W. Bush in '92. The W. era GOP performed unusually well in '02 and '04, but were dead in the water by '06. IIRC Biden's approval nosediving had to do with the ugly optics of the withdraw from Afghanistan.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I was about to comment the same thing. With that, having lived in a really shitty apartment (I underestimated how bad it would be; the difference was between "crappy, but manageable" and "total shithole".), it was profoundly depressing in a way that's hard to explain.
The building was old, and in a swampy area, so the inside air was permanently humid irrespective of AC use. There was plenty of mold, but I don't think that was the particular issue. My problem was that it was impossible to clean/keep clean for any length of time due to old floors, counters, etc. Pest control was nonexistent/ineffective aggravated by an especially nasty next door neighbor, so the place was overrun by roaches, mice, and ants. The neighbors were loud, and sound insulation nonexistent. My upstairs neighbors would do laundry in the bathtub and spill water all over the place, leading to water leaks in my unit and eventually the ceiling collapsing in the bathroom. Rent was cheap, but I spent tons of money in bars just trying to stay away from home, and it was poorly insulated so power bills during winter were insane while I still froze. It felt like living in a slum. I didn't develop chronic pain but became badly depressed.
I wound up moving elsewhere and paying the remainder of the lease just to spare myself the misery of living there.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
Speaking for myself, with a caveat: Option two, massive. Not quite Treblinka, but I want skulls, family fortunes confiscated/destroyed, any resistance killed or imprisoned along with anyone they care about. Imagine Putin, but a lot more oligarchs falling out of windows.
The caveat is that this has to be done competently, and I don't think Trump or his hires have it in them.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
Shoes. I work on my feet in and out of restaurants, and the difference between shit or slippery shoes and a decent pair of non-slips is night and day, especially as the week drags on. My feet/ankles hurting for no good reason is a total mood killer.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
IIRC most of the reduction in US fertility has just been the result of a very successful campaign to reduce teen fertility. Nobody wants to be a trashy mom trapped with a loser boyfriend like on 16 and Pregnant.
Arizona, for example, had their teen fertility drop by nearly 75% from 2005-2021. Texas had theirs drop by 2/3rds. Alabama today has a lower teen pregnancy rate than New York did in 2005.
The catch, it seems, is that it's hard to turn off that "You're fucked if you have kids before you're ready" propaganda merely by reaching one's early 20s. It doesn't help that young adults are spending more time in school than ever before.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
It's probably not everything, but it doesn't help that we've gotten a lot fatter and older on average.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
FWIW, I was given IV morphine before surgery for a broken arm as a kid and still remember how amazing it made me feel. They could've marched a firing squad in there with my death warrant and I wouldn't have cared in the slightest.
OTOH, from a very small sample size it appears that I'm allergic to hydrocodone. I got some of those after having wisdom teeth yanked out and they just made me feel sick and unpleasantly intoxicated.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I don't exactly disagree with you, nor am I a big fan of weed culture.
I was just pointing out that there were places that did take drug enforcement seriously (sort of...this was the height of the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of narcotics prescriptions such that pills were everywhere), to the point of alienating the sort of nice white collar folks whose support is needed.
Personally, I wonder how much of the drug stuff is just a byproduct of the explosion in prescribing children drugs such as stimulants and antidepressants along with the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of doctors dishing out benzos and oxys like candy. I joke that I've never cared for cocaine because it just feels like Ritalin on steroids but IMO it's kind of fucked that I was simultaneously on Ritalin and Zoloft at the age of nine years old (Mom doctor-shopped psychiatrists until she found one who would diagnose me with OCD because I was sad about losing everything in a house fire and vigilant about checking lint filters in dryers after that; the story was that our dryer had caught fire and burned our house down.). Meanwhile, back in the early 2010s I got a script for some variety of opioid after a very minor surgery (more than I got years later for getting all four wisdom teeth yanked out) without asking, much to my confusion as the procedure had completely fixed my pain problem. I wound up selling them to a coworker for beer money for his pill head girlfriend's "headaches".
I just don't see how you keep taboos over drugs when they're so commonly prescribed. I hear so many people talking about being on this or that psych drug that I feel like I'm the only one in the room who isn't on anything. Even the druggies I know still hold the stigma over meth and crack, but that didn't seem to stop meth from taking over much of rural America. Overdoses seem to be a fairly straightforward problem of opiates and especially fentanyl having an extremely low margin for user error, but supply interdiction seems to totally failed there as well. At the same time, while we could probably kill the market for that stuff by mass-legalizing safer stuff (as with alcohol; most people don't drink rotgut vodka but something like Bud Light or Whiteclaws), but we don't exactly want a mass opiate culture, do we?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
FWIW, back in my youth in a deep Southern college town in the early 2010s the local cops still took the War on Drugs pretty seriously and weed was still very much illegal. I had multiple otherwise law-abiding friends get raided by the local narcotics task force and/or go to jail for simple possession. I myself had my apartment get raided by five undercover cops (aka. roided up thugs) because one of my retarded roommates sold a few Xanax pills to a confidential informant (I didn't go to jail because I didn't have anything illegal but it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.).
Amusingly, aside from the driver's license impacts, the conditions to get a possession charge dismissed are virtually identical to those for a first offense DUI, aka. having to go through the local drug court's CLEAN program (at the cost of several grand). My buddy who'd been caught with a gram of weed and maybe drinks a six pack of beer a year was having to attend AA meetings.
The drug task force had their Pickett's Charge moment when they did a big raid on campus. They must've arrested a fed's kid or something because the FBI very quickly busted the former head of the force for embezzling seized funds and wound up throwing him in prison for a year.
A decade later and you can legally buy Delta 8 gummies that are vastly stronger than weed used to be (I don't habitually smoke weed, but the last time I took some of those gummies I was too fucked up to drive 14 hours later.), so I guess the cops gave up on weed enforcement, judging by how nonchalant the normies I know these days are about having it in their vehicles/on their person. Hell, one of the former cops who frequents the bar I work at usually has a weed vape on him.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I'm bordering on shitposting here, but it amuses me to think about Woodrow Wilson the son of Southern Confederates getting his revenge on stalwart Republican Germans.
The (arguable) long-term realignment of both sides of the Civil War into the Trump coalition is something to behold. I say this as an upper Southerner whose classmates frequently wore Confederate flag T-shirts while being blissfully unaware that their ancestors hailed from the most Unionist part of my state.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I would put huge money on that any wasp republican from that time period would say the same exact thing as you regarding those Irish and Italians.
Eh, the Italians were relatively Republican (as were the Germans) while the Irish leaned Democratic (AFAIK there's still a decent-sized partisan gap between Americans of German or Italian ancestry and those with Irish ancestry.). It's not a coincidence that Antonin Scalia and Ron DeSantis are big Republican names while the Democrats still boast politicians like Joe Biden and Mike Duggan. The GOP of that era thought that the Great Migration (Party of Lincoln!) was going to save them from the white ethnic hordes.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
IMO while Trump is most likely going to lose, I'm not convinced that either Haley or Desantis have a chance of winning either. While I personally like Desantis he might be the least personable candidate since Richard Nixon if not Barry Goldwater. Haley, meanwhile, appeals to a coalition that's won the popular vote in a Presidential election once in the last 30 years (Dubya would get stomped in 2024 in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote if he performed as he did in 2000 given contemporary demographics.).
Put bluntly, save for a time in the 1990s when fiscal conservatism got trendy and people were really sick of crime and a shorter time in the 2010s when people were mad about Obamacare (which the GOP did a good job of milking for House purposes with REDMAP) the Republican platform has been dreadfully unpopular since the 1930s. For a Republican to win the Presidency they either need a God-tier candidate (Eisenhower and Reagan come to mind here.) or for the Democrats to self-destruct/be in office when something really bad happens. Richard Nixon didn't magically become more telegenic from 1960 to 1968, for example.
So, counterintuitively, Trump supporters aren't exactly wrong to value style over substance. A non-stylish Republican isn't going to win. Unfortunately for them Trump seems to inspire his opponents as much if not more than his supporters and was largely incompetent at governing, but it isn't as if the GOP had been putting forth an all-star cast before he showed up.
It's going to be cold so I'm going to cook either chili, 15 bean soup, or some variety of lentil soup. The 15 bean soup in particular is a totally idiotproof way to produce something that's reasonably healthy and tasty with no real work or skill. Chili is also idiotproof, but then I have a tendency to want to stuff a bunch of crackers in it that undermines the "healthy" part.
My biggest weakness as a cook (aside from general mediocrity and occasional intoxication) is a tendency toward making things cheap and healthy at any cost, and figuring out the flavor later. Sometimes this makes for weird things that horrify my friends (savory oatmeal, for example), but that taste fine IMO. On that note, I think I'm going to try buckwheat at some point.
My friends (SEC college townies) are a mixed bag but trend toward not great given how easily they're impressed by the stuff I make.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
Yeah, I also find myself incredibly cynical over this having been raised by a parent who was not, as Aella's article put it, a "paper tiger".
My youngest (half) sister actually went through a process something like this when our mother and her father divorced. He hired a tough talking idiot of a lawyer and proceeded to sue for custody based on allegations of child abuse (I wasn't told about this before they went through with it because they mistakenly assumed that I would side with my mother. I wouldn't have, but I would have told them that they were embarking on something very dangerous and foolish in the name of assuaging my stepfather's ego over getting screwed in the divorce. Mother didn't give a shit where my sister stayed as long as the child support and alimony checks kept coming in.).
Long story short, being intimately familiar with our mother's character I have every reason to believe my sister's accusations, but they were thin on physical evidence and in my opinion argued the case completely wrong. My sister was arrested as a runaway and then returned to our mother's custody, at which point my mother called her father on sister's phone, told him he would never find her, and chucked the phone out the window going about 70 miles an hour down the road. There was a struggle over the phone during which my sister was punched in the face, but it didn't land directly so there weren't any dramatic bruises for me to take nice pictures of. I got called in by our mother when little sister allegedly started threatening to kill herself (I have no clue whether to believe that or not.).
I got her out of there the next day and talked to his lawyer, a CPS case worker, and so on.
Mother hired a better lawyer (One would think that my stepfather would have learned something from mother running circles around my father in court for 15 years, but apparently not.), said lawyer successfully derailed my sisters' attempts at testimony (I wasn't there because it was supposed to be a preliminary hearing, not the actual custody trial.), and the judge told my sisters to their faces that he didn't believe them, dismissing the whole thing as some variety of teenage drama.
There was no heroic validation for my sisters, no revenge upon our mother, and in fact all they accomplished was putting my sister in actual danger.
To end, I'll just say this. There's never going to be any imposition of justice upon our mother. The only thing to be done is to try to live well and remember that once you're out it is you who is the author of your life story and you who can be your own worst enemy.
Our mother is now in her mid 50s, alone, and living on disability. She is clueless as to why her daughters want next to nothing to do with her. This isn't some grand act of karma, it just sucks.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
Even the author concedes that their strategy is only viable if the parents are paper tigers, and TBH I feel like their conception of parents who aren't paper tigers is abstract at best.
What do you do with a parent who is no stranger to breaking their own windows? Or, to get personal, what do you do with a parent who would burn their own house down (It was a shoddily executed attempt at insurance fraud in which we lost far more than the insurance paid us.) and then have the kid drugged for being sad about it (Mom doctor shopped until she found someone willing to diagnose me with OCD.)?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I wouldn't go so far as to say Christmas is fully Grinchified, but I would say there's been a shrinkage of Santa. what's the point in Santa for people without children? For that matter, what's the point of a Christmas Day gathering when there aren't any nieces, nephews, or grandkids?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
Just to give an example, what happens when one of them brings in fleas? Getting rid of fleas in one cat is a pain in the ass as it is.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
Correct. Due to irresponsibility on my end (roommate had one cat, I adopted a stray cat, didn't get one of them sterilized in time, and the female had a litter of seven of whom all survived), I wound up with nine cats in a similarly-sized condo. It was a nightmare. Once the kittens grew enough to walk the place was permanently trashed. I spent a fortune on food and litter. It was very difficult to find homes for them in a town that's overrun with stray/feral cats.
I've since gotten it down to three (still pushing it IMO; two are being babysat until roommate moves in with her boyfriend and the end goal is to have one cat) and it's a night and day difference in terms of QoL.
Happy side story though: One of my friends took the worst, most feral of the two kittens I had for barn cats, and over a period of months the worse of those two has become an adorable, fully domesticated housecat. I didn't believe it when she told me until she showed me pictures of it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
To get out of the trailer park my dad joined the Marines and has since lived at least 10 hours away from his hometown in the rust belt, returning to visit maybe once a decade. Other than his mom, the one functional aunt, and intermittent periods of contact with/enabling of some cousins (including a cousin who came and lived with us Fresh Prince style for a few years) who lost their dad he has almost nothing to do with them.
It was an ugly disappointment coming from the white trash bullshit from my mother's side (See, even if you escape it's possible to wind up jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.) to find out for myself that dad's side of the family is pretty much the same thing with more drugs and prison sentences, all the way down to both sides having a cousin named K who lost custody of her kids due to drugs.
The dog gets walked when he goes to the bar (which is whenever he can afford it/find someone to pay his tab and physically make it there) and lets it wander around, but otherwise rarely to never. Because of this, it isn't housebroken (He just puts down puppy pads even though the dog is 8 years old.). I know it isn't the dog's fault, but I hate that thing (and people who don't take proper care of their dogs, which is a lot of them). At least it can play with my cats now (The last roommate wanted a puppy and I put my foot down and refused, having correctly surmised that I would wind up caring for it. I think her cat has lived with me for two years now. Cats are relatively low-maintenance so long as you sterilize them and don't wind up with a bunch of kittens.).
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