"why is angry Bob sandwich icon posting so much Dungeon Meshi content" bc I'm weirdly attracted to every single character in the show. for no reason. Laios. Marcille. Chilchuck. Senshi. Falin. Kabru. there's something about them. help me.

Moppet yawned a rather large yawn, eyes fluttering for a moment in his exhaustion, as he glanced over at his elder self. It had been a very emotional day... Softly, he piped up, and said, "I'm... sorry... again. For asking about Merlin. I didn't know it would be so... so..." the word he wants to say escapes him, as his head bobs for a moment, before finding its way to his elder self's shoulder. "At any rate... I hope you're alright..." he concludes, eyes shutting. -(but-master)

“Mate, you look about ready to drop. You alright?”

At this point expected apartment invaders just seemed part of course down to breaking all known laws of physics so that bit wasn’t particularly bothering him as such. No, it was more the fact he was looking much like he would on a few hours sleep into a double with a rush and that was not a particularly healthy thing to be. The book Douxie was reading when the invasion force arrived is lowered a bit watching with a quirked eyebrow as he’s ceremoniously flopped on.

“Sofa’s even decrepit old things are more comfortable if you sit on ‘em first,” he says leaning forward to grab him around the middle enough to pull his younger self up onto it too mindful of not jostling him too much and that he can nestle comfortably against the back if he wants or even just plains flops first. The same hand appears again on his head with a gentle pat before it’s returned to his book simply watching him out the corner of his eye mindful of him just plain slipping. Can always grab a blanket if it’s needed and not like he needs to go anywhere anytime soon, he was taking a break from trying to write anyway...

“There’s many words I could use but they’re all swearing and I’m not teaching you any bad language, don’t worry about it. What’s done is done and right now think you got more important things to worry about, yeah? Still, trying to entertain my sleep schedule is seriously not good for you so can kindly stop.”

He’s oblivious to the real reason understandably but he knows how his bad sleeping habits started early and has simply put it down to that for good or ill.

CKY

Do any of you remember a film from the ‘90s called Shazaam?

Allow me to refresh your memory: Shazaam was a vehicle for C-list comedian Sinbad, who is perhaps best known for starring in a 1994  sitcom that was creatively titled The Sinbad Show—which I never watched because the show starred Sinbad. The Sinbad Show didn’t even last a full season on the FOX network (probably because the show starred Sinbad), but sometime either shortly before or shortly after that program was cancelled, its namesake landed the lead role in a film entitled Shazaam, a part which allowed him to stretch his acting chops by playing a wisecracking genie who acted exactly like Sinbad.

I distinctly remember seeing the trailer for this cinematic tour de force. To the best of my recollection, the plot revolved around two precocious children—one girl and one boy, naturally, to ensure that twice as many kids would beg their parents to buy the tie-in merchandise that would inexorably be produced if the film was successful—who one way or another encounter a djinn named Shazaam. Though their initial meeting befalls as a startling surprise for all parties concerned, they quickly become the best of pals and Shazaam subsequently convoys his youthful comrades through a rote series of comical PG hijinks. The specific nature of their shenanigans has been lost to the haze of time, but those details don’t matter much; a mid-‘90s movie built upon that scenario and geared toward that audience sort of writes itself (I doubt there was a subplot about Hungarian sex traffickers, for instance). I’m sure Shazaam helps the moppets surmount some sort of reasonably benign conflict and everyone learns a lesson about the true meaning of family by the time the credits roll. I’m assuming a clever dog is also involved in some fashion, and I’m confident the film features at least one protracted flatulence gag. Mind you, this is all just speculation; I can’t verify any of it since I never actually watched Shazaam (I decided not to because the trailer revealed that the film starred Sinbad).

Perhaps you already know where I’m going with this, but in case you don’t: Shazaam likely qualifies as the least successful celluloid offering ever concocted, because it is a movie which literally nobody watched. Oddly, this dearth of viewership didn’t have anything to do with Sinbad starring in it; the main reason nobody watched the film Shazaam is because the film Shazaam doesn’t actually exist. And I have a real difficult time wrapping my head around this, because not only am I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING CERTAIN that I remember viewing the trailer I’ve described, I can also readily visualize the VHS case for this movie that was never really a movie on the shelves at Blockbuster Video (imagine my incredulity when I learned that Blockbuster Video never actually existed, either). And even stranger, there are evidently thousands upon thousands of people who recall the existence of this movie that does not exist as vividly as I do.

If you kept up with the brief internet furor about this topic which arose a couple years ago, you’re undoubtedly aware the Shazaam phenomenon has been explained away as some peculiar mass delusion known as the Mandela Effect—apparently, so many human brains muddled the title and star of the ill-advised Shaquille O’Neal genie flick Kazaam that our collective hive-minds fabricated an illusory film to match our erroneous memories. (Of course, this begs the question: do those of us who remember Shazaam subconsciously wish there was a film in which Sinbad plays a sassy, flatulent genie…?). This clarification makes a kind of sense, even though my vague recollections of the corporeal Kazaam and my lucid recollections of the false Shazaam differ substantially (in my brain, Sinbad never raps or does karate in his movie, yet both disciplines factor into major plot-points in Kazaam—and Shazaam doesn’t meander into a baffling second-act detour about Hungarian sex traffickers like Shaq’s film inexplicably does).

So here’s the reason I’m bringing this up here: when I sat down to write about the band CKY, the paramount thing I intended to delve into was how I was introduced to their music. Do me a favor and keep that in mind—this information will come in handy later.

 #

  When I was a twenty-something in the very late 1990’s-slash-very early 2000’s, I worked at Domino’s Pizza as a delivery driver, which was a really excellent gig at the time. I had almost no bills and gas was a buck a gallon, so I only needed to work about 20 hours a week to earn enough money to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. And like most twenty-something males who make their living as pizza conveyance professionals, when I wasn’t on the road, my comfortable lifestyle mainly entailed spending inordinate amounts of my free time listening to a bunch of punk rock, smoking a bunch of pot, and playing a bunch of video games.

[To be clear, not all of my co-workers at Domino’s did even one of these things. There was Dennis, for instance, who to the best of my knowledge did not enjoy punk rock, marijuana, or video games. He did, however, regularly come into work with cartons of expired baked goods that he extracted from the dumpsters behind Vons, which he would then rinse in the sink to make them “fresh” again. The prevailing rumor about Dennis’s backstory was that he was a former surgeon who had a nervous breakdown after losing a child patient on the operating table. I’m not so sure that was true, although I am very sure that he once brought in a plastic grocery bag filled with vomit instead of pastries and attempted to rinse that in the sink, too—which is why I tend to lean more toward believing Dennis was probably just fundamentally insane. There was no preamble to his unambiguously unhinged act; the dude simply strolled into the prep area at the start of his shift and said “hey, Taylor” to me like it was any other day… except he was carrying a sack of upchuck with him, clutching it right below the straps, as if girding the parcel to ensure he wouldn’t spill any of his cargo. My manager sent him home when she saw what was in the bag, but Dennis came back to work the very next afternoon—sans puke satchel—and the incident was never spoken of again. To this day, I cannot fathom how Dennis accumulated all that vomit, why he was hauling it around in his car, or what he was hoping to accomplish by soaking it in the same basin where we washed our pizza pans. Anyway, what I was getting at is that he didn’t especially fit the stereotype I outlined. We got along okay, though; I always made it a point to be really nice to the guy—you know, considering his alarming derangement and all.]

One of the staples of my Playstation habits in those days was the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. Despite having only spent a combined total of maybe zero-point-three hours on an actual skateboard in my entire life, my best friend Andy and I logged approximately 19,000 hours guiding the avatars in those seminal games through a multitude of gravity-and-logic-defying feats which no human being could ever possibly achieve with or without a skateboard. In the real world, I probably couldn’t even pull off an elementary trick like an ollie—but in the realm of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater I was a four-wheeled fucking god who could effortlessly grind up the side of a building, soar off the opposite edge, perform roughly nineteen twisting flips on my way back down, then execute a perfect landing on the downslope of an opportunely-placed ramp so I could launch off that and catch enough air to do nineteen more flips. Though I have never been an aficionado of that particular sporting pursuit, the Tony Hawk games were incredibly fun and offered endless replay potential due to the almost pornographic extremity of their facets. The conscientious city planners in THPS’s utopia were mindful to randomly insert dozens of half-pipes and empty swimming pools all over their towns, and none of their edifices featured a single surface that could not be utilized for some sort of astonishing aerodynamic exploit.

Instead of composing an original musical score for the series, the developers of the Pro Skater franchise rather ingeniously opted to license fifteen-or-so songs by relatively popular bands for each installment. These tunes supplied the background inspiration during gameplay, and were ostensibly chosen because they represented genres which the skater demographic enjoyed—unsurprisingly, the soundtracks predominantly relied on crowd-pleasing punk and hip-hop material (although one of the sequels featured a song by Powerman 5000, whose fanbase was roughly equivalent to the number of people who have watched Shazaam). However, a cycle of only fifteen tracks doesn’t go a very long way when it’s entirely feasible to play 100 rounds in one sitting—as Andy and I regularly did. So as you might suspect, we ended up hearing the same song-batch an incalculable number of times throughout the course of any given session, which inevitably burned every one of those tracks permanently into our brains. This is how I became intimately familiar with the band CKY, whose cut “Flesh Into Gear” appeared in one of the Tony Hawk releases and was consequently submitted for my listening pleasure hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Luckily, “Flesh Into Gear” is a really cool tune, a prime slice of appealing proto-metal with an insidiously catchy chorus and a snaking stoner-rock guitar riff that would undoubtedly inspire anyone in their right mind to rail-slide across a chain of forty conveniently-equidistant park benches. I could hardly believe a song this excellent and shrewdly-crafted was coined by an outfit like CKY, since the group’s foremost point of notoriety at the time was their drummer’s family ties to one of the cast members of Jackass—an obtuse reality television showcase for the misadventures of a squad of unabashed idiots whose misguided testosterone impelled them to launch bottle rockets out of their rectums, drink animal semen, and obsessively scour the ends of the earth searching for various objects to pummel each other’s testicles with.

My persistent exposure to “Flesh Into Gear” via Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater eventually motivated me to purchase CKY’s 2002 release Infiltrate-Destroy-Rebuild, the album the track was borrowed from. I have been spinning that disc repeatedly since I started writing this, and—while the rest of the band’s material is satisfactory but un-extraordinary—every single time “Flesh Into Gear” comes on, it instills me with a rush of delightful nostalgia. I cannot remember the last time I played any of the Pro Skater installments, but with “Flesh Into Gear” navigating my recollections just like it navigated my board-wielding avatar seventeen years ago, I can still clearly visualize the games’ indelible imagery and virtually weave my way through the vast intricacies of those levels I traversed countless times back then. And these evocations are accompanied by a flood of additional splendid reminiscences, snapshots from a far simpler and more idyllic time—perhaps my very favorite phase of my life—an era free of real jobs and real responsibilities, when on any given day my best friend and I could unreservedly spend endless hours engrossed in Playstation, and the most critical concerns in our purview were what combination of toppings we should order on our pizza and whether or not we would be able to track down an eighth so we could smoke a bowl before watching that evening’s new episode of South Park.  

This is the true and immeasurable splendor of music. Even this many years removed, I can still listen to “Flesh Into Gear” today and instantly be enveloped in those potent and wonderful memories, transported back to a comfortable living room in Lakewood, sitting in front of a big-screen television beside someone who is closer to me than a brother, our fingers frenetically tapping on the joysticks which control our destinies on the monitor, beautifully oblivious to the evaporating hours because we are twenty-one and our time seems infinite and our futures are wide open and we have a whole lifetime of escapades ahead of us. On these glorious occasions, Andy and I weren’t just mindlessly zoning out on some silly skateboarding game. We were ardently devoting ourselves to having fun, pure and unadulterated fun, the kind of serene merriment you only get to have for a woefully short yet richly blessed period of your existence, the kind of immaculate and untroubled amusement you don’t realize you won’t ever experience again until that phase of your life imperceptibly cedes to the next and the ravages of the real world begin to methodically devour your body and your soul. We were also laughing, a lot, often so vigorously and exuberantly that our giggle-fits overtook us in irrepressible paroxysms that brought tears of elation to our eyes. Simply by being in the same room with each other, we were celebrating just how special a friendship that spans literal decades truly is, and how singularly magnificent it feels to spend time with people whose mere presence has the ability to make you happy. So, it didn’t ultimately matter how many times we heard “Flesh Into Gear”. I never got sick of that song. Who could ever get sick of laughter and happiness?

The list of CKY’s quantifiable merits isn’t an especially long one. Nevertheless, they created something which conjures a surge of jubilant memories that I will never forget, and would never want to. Thus, they will always occupy a warm place in my heart, a place where they are inextricably tied to one of the most joyful epochs of my life: those euphoric and carefree days when my best friend and I had all the time in the world to listen to “Flesh Into Gear” over and over and over again while we were playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Okay, are you ready? Here comes the Sinbad part…

In the interest of accuracy, I went online to look up the Pro Skater series and clarify which installment this particular track was used in. As I said, each of the Tony Hawk releases featured a different assortment of songs, and since Andy and I enthusiastically immersed ourselves in all of them as they came out, we heard and re-heard the music on all of those playlists accordingly. I was fairly certain “Flesh Into Gear” was part of Pro Skater 3’s soundtrack, but I wanted to verify that it hadn’t instead appeared in one of the previous games before I started waxing nostalgic here.  

What I found out is this: CKY’s song “Flesh Into Gear” did not appear in any edition of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The band did indeed supply a track to THPS3, but it was an entirely different cut called “96 Quite Bitter Beings”, which I do not have in my collection because it isn’t even on the same album as “Flesh Into Gear”. This means that for the last however-many years, I have been assigning a reverent sentimental significance to a song that, for all intents and purposes, has absolutely no relevance to the detailed web of memories I have snuggled around it. The crystal-clear recollections I have of guiding a pixilated daredevil through a labyrinth of nosegrind-ready obstacles while “Flesh Into Gear” churned in the background never happened.

Shazaam.

For the record, Andy is still my best friend, and has been for 33 years and counting. Our lives have changed significantly since our Pro Skater era, but our bond has not. Though we are only able to hang out every couple months or so at present, whenever we do, we still play video games. And we still watch South Park. And we still approach ordering pizza like the medley of toppings we select are variables in an intricate and vitally-imperative equation. And we still laugh a whole fucking lot.

Sure, I miss the old days—anyone who doesn’t miss the old days obviously wasn’t doing the old days right. Yet, despite only seeing Andy a handful of times a year and having to drive two hours to Oceanside to do so, I never get so wistful for the way things were that I neglect cherishing the way things are now. I love Andy’s wife, Neisa, and I love having a front-row seat to the incredible and inspiring marriage they have built together. I absolutely adore the two remarkable humans they created, Shae and Nixon, and I consider it the most profound honor of my life to be their Uncle Taylor. There are plenty of things I would change about my own contemporary reality, but there isn’t a single thing I would change about theirs.

Still, every now and then, I do find myself wishing I could revisit that living room in Lakewood, settle down in front of that big-screen TV with Andy, turn on the Playstation, and feel as infinite and invincible and utterly content as I did back when I was a twenty-one year-old pizza conveyance professional whose universe was far too harmonious and secure to generate even an inkling of anxiety about the present, let alone the future. If I did return to that time and place, it wouldn’t be so I could instigate any sweeping amendments or pass on some sage piece of cautionary wisdom to my younger self. No, I think I would let the pages of that chapter turn exactly the way they did. Because, all things considered, spending entire days on end doing something as enchantingly frivolous as playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with your best friend in the world isn’t really all that irresponsible—it’s probably precisely what life is all about. And, you know what, it wouldn’t matter to me one bit which CKY song was on the soundtrack, just as long as Andy and I were having fun while we listened to it.  

I hope you enjoyed this piece. Even though it starred Sinbad. If you don’t mind, I’m going to go ahead and roll the credits here on that poignant note. I’ll save the story about my run-in with Hungarian sex traffickers for another time.

 July 21, 2018

said something funny IRL and then envisioned this

sorry for vent posting guys you can scroll away really fast now. if youre reading this please be advised I am using a metaphor I am fine lol

but damn I do not feel like a person. I've been this way my whole life and as a teen I thought I had dependent personality disorder bc I just wanted others to make every decision for me and I would ask permission to eat or watch TV or use the bathroom even if I didn't NEED TO and people would be like why are you ASKING. and as I grew up I realised that my fear of making the wrong decision and ruining my life for myself was so stupid. I used to think if someone else ruined my life it would be okay bc at least it's not me. and others know best. but a decade later and I feel like a fucking dog being paraded around to show off its obedience and it gets disciplined when it barks and when it makes a decision against its owner it gets its leash tightened tighter and tighter till it feels like it might die. and I can't escape it. my dependence is self imposed but I can't survive on my own and maybe I learned how to think and eat on my own but I fucking suck BUT I'M WILLING TO TRY but there's no way out. I'm stuck here. what am I without my mom to control me. I'm afraid of leaving I love my home I just want to be taken care of but this leash isn't comfortably snug anymore it's starting to hurt. if I stay here there's no way I can fight them. some day they'll hold me down and have me married and then someone else will hold me down and... more imminent, soon I'll be shoeholed into another career that will damage my body again. my mom says the damage is my fault and if I cant do it I'm a worthless idiot who should die bc life is pain and that's final. but today my doctor said there's no reason to treat me for weak legs that can't stand and a brain that's spasming and making me want to off myself if I can just... quit the job that's making my body do that. how revolutionary. I'm crying freaking out bc all my parents tell me is tht theres no way out and I have to work jobs I hate bc work sucks and thats how life is and why did my doctor have to give me hope? but if I'm a dog what decision does the dog have. I don't know how to want. I don't know how to be interested in things. my depression doesn't let me like anything and bc of this I'm being controlled. maybe if I wanted something I could do it but all I want is comfort. as long as I crave only the comfort of my bed and the softness of my mother's arms holding me I have to deal with the leash. it's not a bad deal but by fuck I should not deal with this any longer. I can't force myself to leave bc I'm unemployed and psychotic and living alone—even my brother knows I'd fall into pieces from lack of money and general insanity. what the fuck do I do. I like being a pampered puppy but I'm a human and I need to accept it. no matter how psychotic I am, no matter how I've never believed I am a human, I am. my autism says I'm scared of other people and only my mom halfway gets me and I just want simplicity and depression says stay in bed and my health says I have no future and my psychosis says stay in a small ball or else everything will hurt you and my family says I need to listen to them and life is only pain and I need to embrace pain and shut the fuck up and do whatever they say or else. but I need to survive. I can't keep doing this. what do I do? dog on a leash... I can't make myself cut through it. can someone else do it please? I want a different owner. but I don't think any owner is going to be as comforting as my parents. their (prev physical and lifelong psychological) abuse is mixed with so much love I still doubt it's abuse even though I know. they've loved me as much as they're capable of and they do truly take care of me. I need to be my own owner but how the fuck. every few days I cry and want to die to end all of this bc the worst part is that after I get away from them all my problems will be worse bc I'M the problem and my parents love is the only thing keeping me in one piece. I'm a dependent pampered dog that can't run away and can't handle a leash. I just keep ruminating and ruminating and I can't do anything. what the fuck do I do?

wait actually I want to make a list of 28 games I've played bc every time a man asks me my hobbies and I say I'm a gamer he's like "oh yeah? animal crossing doesn't count" first of all it "counts" more than call of duty or whatever so shut up how much money do you have in COD and what do you spend it on, weapon upgrades? okay idiot I invest in properties and the stock market in ACNH. die.

but anyway here's a list of 28 games (that's not animal crossing) I've played that is guaranteed to piss off annoying men:

Genshin Impact

Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (RPG that only vaguely made it out of Japan) - played it 22 times bc I have autism

Imagine Ice Skater (9 times)

Love Nikki: Dress Up Queen

Tocca Bocca. bitch

10 Billion Wives

Dream Girlfriend & Boyfriend

Sims: Freeplay

Sumikko Gurashi and Tsum Tsum. because they sound like my name.

Housamo (gayest story/therapy game)

Love Tangle (otome)

Lost Island (otome)

Seven Hotties, All My Husbands (otome)

Kusoge (tropey otome)

Oden Cart: A Heartwarming Tale

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

Honkai: Star Rail

Jekyll & Hyde

Card Thief

Hidden My Game By Mom (go play it rn)

Creatures Such As We (RN)

Cube Escape - Rusty Lake series

Okami and Okamiden

Hide & Seek: The Story of Dorothy (creepy pixel horror mobile game)

The Stanley Parable

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

God of War and I don't rmbr which one bc I bricked the entire PSP halfway through

Neko Atsume Kitty Collector

@fibmax tagged me to share my 5 favourite songs so here's what I've been playing non-stop on repeat lately

Don't Go Insane - DPR Ian

THE MASTER - Witchez. and honestly half of Santi Minogo iii

She Gets the Flowers & Omg Did She Call Him Baby? - Beth McCarthy

She Had the World - P!aTD

Rongoboti (Idk who sang this) & Phagunero Mohonaye - Bhoomi

some of them come in duos bc I listen to them on repeat and press ⏮️ every six mins for 5 hours

I'm too scared to tag anyone on anything so if you see this you can do it if you'd like. sorry /j

my mom and all the aunties are hell-bent on getting me arranged married except y'all know I'm autistic (hates strangers and loves their alone time) and not into men and in general a weirdo. I'm being forced to never say no, and all these normie men do is imagine that I'm his subservient dream wife/mom and then get mad that I'm not. I'm scared that theyre trying to funnel me from one toxic household to another. I have no tolerance left I've been abused my whole life and all my niceness is gone, if a strange MAN tells me I have to have a baby and grow out my hair and treat him like he's better than me I will fake my death and leave him, I am dead serious. if anyone hits me again I will bite. if my parents get me married against my will, after they stop torturing me to be nice to him they will have a scandal of a bride who ran away on their wedding night and I will die on the street before I come back. I have nothing funny to add I'm miserable. I give up on hoping I spontaneously die, or that someone comes and saves me. I want to move out and be left alone. I know I'm nearly disabled and will not survive on my own but I think dying alone is the only way to make sure no one kills me.

in 2021 I wondered "what if each MC had their own style? or... EARRINGS...?" and at the end of 2022 I spiraled. hope you enjoy.

(I just need everyone to notice each MC has a corresponding number of beauty marks and piercings. no, multiple piercings in one section do not count shhhhh. some MCs share small similarities, can you spot them all? the little details of this brought me great joy!)

MC 1's style is playful, colourful and everything fun. MC 2's style is cool, coordinated and a little edgy. MC 3 wears barely any clothing because I gave up 🖤 and I imagine Toji coerces him into ever having any semblance of modesty 🖤 MC 4's style is soft, comfy and pastels. and MC 5, I imagine, is a bit of goth, a bit of academia, and very put together.

ps. if you made it this far, here are the MC 3 "rejects". I like him the most with no lip piercings, but I think he definitely needs them. can you believe I redrew his face 4 times and yet never gave him clothes.

pps. every MC is named "Nii Juu San (23)" in my head, EXCEPT him. HIS name is Boobina 🖤

ngl I never really thought Locked Tomb was real. I know it is and people have talked to me about it before but something about it was just so wild I did not believe it was a real thing. maybe it's because I haven't read a book in 5 years and could not imagine a fandom related to a book where things actually happen. maybe it's bc there are so many new words I had to fit into my understanding of language, including Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon the Ninth, and space necromancers. either ways the audiobook is on Spotify now and I just stared at it for a couple minutes realizing I was in fact not Goncharov'd.

this is where I come to reblog movies after I watch them but no one's talking ab this scene so I'll say it myself: in Polite Society, when this geneticist rich successful handsome doctor is trying to woo this depressed Desi girl (to do evil experiments on her but anyway) who can barely get out of bed and considers showering an achievement and she dropped out of ART SCHOOL... he asks her what she's doing with her life. and she says she's disappointing her family. I just think it's really poignant that his response was something like "We're really pressured to do things. I think it's okay to just be figuring stuff out."

how often do you hear that? it's okay to not be successful... or anything. Lena doesn't listen to her sister and start painting again, and she doesnt listen to her parents who tell her to quit (and I think there's something so real about her mom telling her she's "above just being a receptionist"... she won't see her daughter for who she is). she doesn't listen to anybody and she just says she'll think about it. she isn't a successful artist, she isn't an artist... she's just Lena. and that's okay.

this is old but this was my first reaction when my friend told me Lin Manuel Miranda was casted as Hermes for the PJATO series

can't believe Vent.co is gone for good. crying. my fingers keep clicking on its spot on my homescreen. 9 years I've spent on that app... multiple times a day every day. it was not only the app where I got to vent and meet some of the greatest people I know, but also my diary—my therapy, my stories, my memories. I know they'll email a copy of some posts but obliterating the app is eviscerating 9 years of my thoughts. really makes you think about the fragility of everything. I'm so sad.

my bday was yesterday... I am no longer in my "early 20s". officially "mid-20s" now. doesn't it feel weird to think you'll never be young again? that you'll never get to experience anything from the past ever again? I feel like I missed out on so much of my life. and I'll keep "missing out". but what I have is also good. I finally had that sensation yesterday. don't know how deep it is, but I have some cool mutuals who make my dash feel like home, and I have IRL friends who message me teeny tiny replies to the silly stuff I post, I have friends who want to see me sometimes (maybe not any other time of year but my god I have like 6 hangouts planned in September), friends who saw me cry yesterday and tried to console me, I've experienced some super nice stuff (like amusement parks, and compliments, and wearing a princess dress, and video game, and being a teacher to 6 adorable kids, and my pink computer setup, and doing heart hand with Arataki Itto, etc.), yummy food, a mom who is kind of trying to be nice, and a brother with the best heart in the world, and also a neat little autistic guy (my cat) who walks around my house with 19 toes and a last one that makes little anklet noise as it taps on the ground. and I have bed <3 so irreparable mind and body and doomed fate aside I think I finally recognize the good things. just took a quarter of a century to see them. even if it doesn't get better from here... (well, I hope it does) I guess it's cool to be older. 25. it's a good number. grief and joy... it's all part of the same thing. I'll try to make this year better. I owe it to myself.

I'm sorry to tell you but you're definitely being abused right now, if you don't believe you're a person it means they've stripped you of your sense of self and are psychologically abusing you (ignoring the fact apparently they used to beat you?!).

I don't know how to help, but just know that you're right to feel mad and like you're going crazy, because they're abusing you and using you. I do believe you can live on your own, I do believe you can be your own person, and I do believe you can be free, maybe not right now, but I do believe in you. I'm sorry things are like these

I know I'm being abused I just downplay it or talk around it a lot... probably also not good that I feel bad about saying it out loud. thank you, just saying this stuff to me means a lot. people IRL don't believe me so it's validating. repeating the last few lines you said in my head. thank you. I'm trying to believe in myself too.

my brother went through the same thing (worse) but he's really resilient. he said he can't save me but part of life is trying and struggling and failing even if it sucks and even if it's "safer" to not fight. will think of both of you when I get the chance to get out.

Wait your parents call you their dog? What the hell?! Are you ok?

NO IM OKAY sorry, they don't literally call me a dog I just feel like one bc I don't have autonomy. they bring me everywhere to show off how obedient I am or whatever their deal is, and they control my hair my clothes my friends my job my living situation my hobbies and my actions to some extent. like it's for the greater good and I have leniency I'm not quite a prisoner I'm just like Rapunzel :) I can paint :) and leave whenever I want I just... I just feel like and feel like I'm treated as a chihuahua in a handbag (treated really well but ultimately not really like a human and more of an accessory) (I heavily use metaphors to describe my life) and I am not at all equipped for living bc personally I don't feel human but maybe thats just my autism's fault bc I'm sure a little abuse and control doesn't make others feel this way. I wanna move out but what is my mom gonna do without me but if I stay I am subjected to psychological torture but if I leave I get no love and care and comfort and also the housing market is so bad where tf do I live haha. anyway c'est la vie!