solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
Thank you, and I'll get there.
I don't really blame myself at this point. I made my peace with that last year when I kicked him out. Could I have postponed the inevitable by letting him live with me until the bitter end? Probably, but by how long who knows and the cost to my sanity was going to exceed my ability to deal with it. I just couldn't do it, and I was far from the only one. We all did what we could and none of it was going to fix the unfixable. The only thing I had control over in that situation was how much I was willing to be collateral damage. I reached my end and that was that. We were still friends, exchanged dumb memes or whatever pretty much daily, and saw each other every week or so. I'm gonna miss him.
Sorry about the brother. Alcoholism blows and there isn't a damned thing those who care can do if the person holding the bottle can't find it in himself to quit or at least tone it down to a level that's compatible with the life you want to live. Take it from someone who's more acquainted with it than most.
Edit: I forgot to mention. We did get ahold of one of his cousins (He didn't have much family left and they lived a few hours away but I'm pretty sure that I met her once.) and she was very gracious. She mentioned having offered to let him move in with her. That brought me some peace to hear that he'd had somewhere to go.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
16d ago
Thank you.
The hardest part of this is watching my sister go down the same road with different details (and some invariably shitty boyfriends, one of whom shot himself dead in front of her). She's been spiraling downhill pretty badly lately (mostly because she refuses to give up on the latest shitty boyfriend, and I know it sucks to realize that you need to move out and start over from scratch again, but she was also between jobs for a few months so throw in "broke and the cards are maxed out" into the mix). I offered her a place to stay if she could find somewhere else for her dog, and she retorted that the dog is the only thing she lives for now (Guess how many times I heard that from my now dead friend about his dog.). Same story with mom (who she refuses to live with anyway) and our father (He'd probably give in she pushed hard enough, to our stepmother's fury, but she stuck them with the last dog she had the last time she stayed with them.). Her current plan is allegedly to continue staying with the shitbag boyfriend who was about to kick her out and commute 5 hours a day multiple days a week to her new job. I told her she should plan on moving there as soon as she can swing it but she says she doesn't want to live in the same city as our mother (I get not wanting to live with her but that metro area is big enough for the two of them and I'm pretty sure she's just stalling for time because she refuses to give up on the boyfriend.).
It just sucks. It's the guilt trip that never ends. Our mother was a cartoon villain of a parent and I wasn't older enough to have any chance of defending her, just older enough that I was the first to figure out to run and hide when I heard that tone in her footsteps. It wasn't my fault that I was mom's favorite and she wasn't. No amount of analyzing it to death will completely silence the part of me that feels like the sibling equivalent of a war criminal. I can't rescue her now any more than I could when we were kids. There's plenty of nice stuff you can read about "breaking the cycle", but the fact is that a lot of people don't and the odds for my sister aren't looking good.
Our stepmother is a far better wife than our father deserves and is ordinarily understanding, but she'll never totally get it. Dad will never forgive himself. It doesn't matter how outmatched in court he was. It doesn't matter how hard he did fight or how much he did spend when he could've walked away. It doesn't matter that weekend's at dad's were that much better. All that matters is that he sees his daughter in pain, doesn't know how to make it stop, and feels like it's his fault. So yeah, he'll give whatever she asks as long as he has the money. Mercifully, he made enough in crypto after Trump got elected that he can swing it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
16d ago
It wasn't exactly the same situation, but my friend had also blown through a few hundred thousand in the form of an inheritance from his parents. He'd been a musician, worked various jobs (mostly in auto parts), etc. but couldn't really hold down a job after he started going down with heart failure and other health problems. Irritatingly, it's my understanding that some combination of having had a low on-paper income and having waited too long to apply for disability after he quit working (while subsisting on the inheritance) meant that he didn't have enough work credits to qualify. I don't know the exact details (Maybe he got denied initially and then ran out of work credits by the time his health was sufficiently bad.) but it was maddening to me because he was clearly unable to physically cope with any sort of labor or consistently show up because he'd have days he just couldn't do anything. You could get mad that he didn't do anything to help himself in terms of managing his health problems or maybe argue that he could've tried harder to get a work from home job but he didn't have a work history conducive to that and wasn't self-motivated enough to make it as a gig driver (Anyone can drive a car in circles, but doing so without crashing it and keeping it in good condition to use it for work actually takes some skill, and in my experience from that business a lot of people can't make themselves work enough to pay the bills without the fear of being fired.).
He'd lived hard in the small-time rock and roll scene, wound up with old people problems before his time, and most of his social circle from the good times had either died or aged out and moved on from that life. It really was sad and I felt bad because his life objectively sucked in a way that would've been hard for the best of us to cope with. It was just beyond his means.
There isn't really anything you can tell your friend that he doesn't already know. He has to love and respect himself enough to do stop with the drugs and put up with most likely being broke working a shitty job and having a mundane life because he wants more for himself than to be a statistic. You can't make somebody care about and for themselves. He's probably looking at what feels like an overwhelming amount of effort/self-improvement for what doesn't feel like a lot of return on investment. I'm sorry about your friend, because it sucks to watch.
“He lost his battle with mental health.”
I guess that’s the contemporary Facebook suitable euphemism for “committed suicide”.
Some of you may remember the roommate that I kicked out last year. He took his own life on Saturday morning after a 10/10 argument and crashout with his daughter. Things had been rough lately but I’d seen him earlier the night before at the bar and he seemed more or less himself, just buried in his phone reconnecting with a woman from his past after her breakup such that we didn’t really talk much. The last thing I told him was that we should get together on Sunday.
What do you even say? This story was never going to have a happy ending, but those of us close to him figured that his health would take him first, or a plausibly-accidental overdose. It’s never good news when you get called to the hospital, an escort is waiting to take you back, and a police officer walks in with the doctor. “Was he depressed or did he seem like he would hurt himself?” “I’ve heard the suicide talk so many times either as his former roommate or working at the bar that I would just say that I’d see him tomorrow.” “Was he diagnosed with a mental health condition and did he take any medication?” “What wasn’t he diagnosed with?” “Did he own a firearm?” “Yes, and now that you mention it I don’t think I’ll soon forget what it looked like. I’m guessing this is why I saw a bunch of cops and crime scene tape a few blocks from where he’d been staying when I went to pick her up?” “Yes sir.”
“I wish he’d called/said something. I didn’t know things were so bad.” Perhaps I’m overly grim by disposition (most likely true) or people really are insanely naive and think that things will just magically get better (true of that person I was delivering the news to; nice guy, though) but, really? This shouldn’t exactly have been a surprise, save coming from those who figured he lacked the guts to actually do it. His problems weren’t solvable by a pep talk, nor were they in any sense temporary.
“It’s my fault!” No, it isn’t. The last person he’d been crashing with had been the latest to reach the end of her rope (pun not intended) and told him that he had to go, but that doesn’t make it her fault so much as it made her the loser of the game of musical chairs (This is how I described it to her.). The fact is that everyone close to him at some point or another had done and tolerated what they could in attempting to help him. Some had more patience and resources than others but it invariably ended the same way: frustration and defeat before reaching some form of “I can’t do this anymore.” None of us who were in that hospital room have any reason to blame ourselves. Even in some fairytale alternate scenario where the right person in the right place got him through this bad night there was always going to be another one, and another one, and…you get the idea.
I don’t know at precisely what point our friendship became an exercise in palliative care, and I don’t know if most people think in such terms (I guess not, judging by the surprised reactions from so many.), but that’s what it was. Maybe this is going to sound weird but I find myself having grieved in advance of the event to some extent. I’m sad, but not shocked. I’ll do my part for those of us left behind and at some point the grief will subside and we’ll remember the end less and the better times we had together more. Goodbye, my friend, and damn it I’m sorry I couldn’t fix you. God knows I gave it my best shot.
Selfishly, I’m afraid the contenders for the next call are running a rapid race, and those are my father and sister. Those are going to hurt.
Oh yeah, bonus material: "Is his dog okay?" "Yes, and in fact it's been staying with a different friend for some time now." I'm pretty sure that's called foreshadowing.
Welp, I guess I have a project car now.
The friend of mine who recently passed away left me his car. It's nicer than my car on paper (nine years newer and with 90K miles whereas mine is pushing 250K), but I didn't love it when I owned it, and while mechanically sound enough it is beat to hell with loads of stupid body damage, and the interior is trashed (In my friend's defense, one of the things I hated about the car is that it has a white leather interior that looked great when new but is extremely difficult to keep clean, and the grade of "leather" Mazda used isn't winning any points in my book for durability.).
I'm in the middle of a bare-minimum cleanup (The driver's seat is hopeless and the back seat is rough, but the rest came out fairly well and leather conditioner smells much nicer than stale dog.), and working on a to-do list. I'm not sure what I want to do with it but, keep it or sell it, this pig is need of some lipstick.
In terms of relatively low-budget fixes, I need to do the following:
Fix the rear bumper/replace the broken tail light. I'm fairly confident that the huge dent can be popped out if the bumper cover is removed, and you have to remove the tail lights to remove the bumper cover, so I've ordered the tail light.
Replace the cabin air filter. I did this when I first bought the car from a chain smoker, but holy crap that was 7 years ago. Part ordered, and my fun observation is that cigarette smoke is easier to clean up than dog hair (It was a shorthaired dog.).
Comprehensively finish removing the mud from when the car was driven into a sinkhole. Time consuming, but free.
Repair the touch screen. Mazda touch screens are notorious for the digitizer cracking/delaminating and causing issues (namely, ghost touches that cause the radio to go crazy), but a knockoff replacement is cheap and the job doesn't look that hard. I've ordered the part.
Rotate the two good tires to one axle, get two new tires, and an alignment. Hopefully nothing in the front end is broken, but the absence of clunking is an encouraging sign.
The front brake rotors are warped enough to be irritating and are likely too worn to be turned, but hey the rotors are cheap on Rock Auto. The brake fluid also needs to be flushed because the brakes are even mushier than I remember them being. Low priority.
The Y-pipe/rear muffler either needs to bent back into shape or replaced such that it sits in the hangers correctly and doesn't squeak over bumps.
The driver's side door seal needs to be replaced because it is torn and makes for some annoying road noise.
The LED headlights need to be removed and replaced with the stock halogens. Those were bright enough and the fans for the LEDs make an annoying humming noise.
Things I am unlikely to fix:
The big scrape on the bottom/side of the car. You almost have to look for it and this would require real repair work.
The driver side door skin is damaged from where the fender was smashed into it. I replaced the fender to fix that because it was surprisingly cheap to buy a whole new painted fender, but a whole new door skin is not cheap, and again it's another one of those things where you kind of have to look for the damage.
Almost all of the undercarriage plastic is missing. Added together, that's a few hundred bucks worth of plastic, I never noticed a difference in fuel economy or road noise to justify it, and why would I pay to make changing the oil harder?
The front bumper has its share of scrapes, but fuck it it's an eight year old car. It doesn't have to be perfect, just not look like and feel shit.
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