I’ve been focusing on writing this personal post for most of the past week or two, which is why I haven’t written many driver posts. I originally intended it as a Facebook post, but I’ve decided to post it here first and then crop it for Facebook. I was intending to make this the intro to a driver post, but it should probably stand on its own.
I didn’t particularly want to reactivate my Facebook account, but I quietly did so a couple months ago once they banned the use of Messenger without a smartphone. I have still never had one and don’t particularly want one, but there seem to be few good ways to contact anyone locally other than Facebook and I have been desperately craving local connection lately. Although at the peak of my typing fame in the 2010s, I used to indiscriminately add anyone who sent me a friend request, I’ve decided to be a bit more discriminating now. If there’s anyone who never sent me a private message or otherwise interacted with me, I removed them, but I kept anyone if we have exchanged even the slightest pleasantries at least once.
Normally, when I write these long, narcissistic rant posts, the current one is always more depressing than the last, but this time, I’d say it’s altogether more mixed. Two years ago, I published a Substack post and YouTube video (then later unpublished the Substack post and made the YouTube video private) called “Manchild in Exile” about my mom being forced into the Van Duyn nursing home for hoarding. In the ‘90s, she told me repeatedly that she’d rather be dead than in a nursing home, and I took that very seriously and have been fighting this from day one. I had the hoarding cleared out to the Village of North Syracuse’s satisfaction in March 2025 and applied for Mom to be transitioned into PACE CNY for in-home care in June 2025. At that time, I was rejected because the intake coordinator told me I would need to have the car removed from the garage and a ramp installed. Additionally, there was still the issue that a tree in front of our porch had dug into the roof, effectively destroying it. The village gave me a warning about the roof. Her homeowner’s insurance company sent a letter stating that they would stop covering her last April if I didn’t at least start the process of getting the roof replaced by November or December. I applied for a loan through my bank, Empower Federal Credit Union, and I thought I might have a chance since in May, Mom had to have Medicaid pick up the nursing home bill and since her home equity line of credit was being automatically deducted from her Social Security, I suddenly had to cover it. I was in default to three or four different credit card companies (but I have now paid all but one of them off) and my income was too unstable to get the loan, so I was rejected and the homeowner’s insurance was dropped. The HELOC payment (which is scheduled to be fully paid off by September 2028) was supposed to be fixed at about $469 but it has more than doubled to $1,017 in barely a year and a half, first increasing because she was no longer living in the house and therefore no longer eligible for either the senior or enhanced STAR tax exemption, then increasing once the homeowner’s insurance was gone. Mom had taxes and insurance included in her escrow, so Empower needed to buy more expensive emergency homeowner’s insurance to cover the bill, which again raised it significantly. I understand that’s still probably less than most people are paying for rent, as I will be once I am kicked out of the house.
Well, all that bureaucratic mumbo jumbo has now been taken care of. I already applied to Onondaga County Development to construct a ramp last September. After the loan was rejected, I added the roof repair to the job. I had Mom’s car, which hadn’t been running since 2020, donated to Habitat for Humanity in June. The roof was replaced in July and I had a deep cleaning done around the same time as the ramp installation in August. After all that was done, it looks like all systems are go for Mom to return home via PACE CNY on September 30. I was there for a nursing interview on Wednesday and a tour of the PACE CNY office yesterday, and she’ll be signing the form to allow her to come home tomorrow morning.
There is one major potential source of conflict and several other lesser issues. After my job captioning calls for the deaf and hard of hearing got automated in the summer of 2022, it took me years to slowly recover from that. My best friend from eleventh grade offered me a job with his defense contractor immediately thereafter. At the time, I turned it down, primarily because I didn’t want to work for a defense contractor and secondarily due to some bad blood from high school that we’ve since talked out and because Mom strongly disliked him and encouraged me not to take it. So, then I was almost completely unemployed and living off her Social Security for a year. In 2023, I started writing pre-race and post-race NASCAR analysis columns for the gambling website RotoBaller. It was usually between 10-20 100-150 word columns each week for $2 a column. This barely counts as employed, and there was something vaguely repugnant to me about rejecting a real job for moral reasons and then taking this fake job for a hell of a lot less money in an industry that many people also find immoral.
A year later, I launched my Substack, ostensibly for my book ranking the 1,000 greatest drivers in motorsports history. My goal was to grind out a 500-word column in installments every day until I finished, but obviously, with all that other stuff going on, me wanting to visit Mom at Van Duyn three days a week, and my health rapidly deteriorating, I could not sustain that breakneck pace. I’ve written over a third of the entries already (including most of the more famous drivers), but a lot of the early ones will have to be rewritten, both for posts on active drivers as well as a lot of my other early posts, which are as dull as reading assembly instructions since I mostly regurgitated my own advanced statistics rather than creating compelling narratives. I’ve gotten a lot better at writing the narratives for my 1,000 greatest driver pieces lately, but I’m also not cranking them out as quickly. Granted, people know I’ve been through a lot and I don’t want to put out slop on my Substack to post every day. I want to finish this book in 2029, but I don’t know whether I’m gonna make it. My Substack already has 375 posts, 83 subscribers, 19 paid subscribers, and is presently making $1,190 a year, so I bet it’s already doing better than the median user on the platform, even if it still doesn’t really count as a job.
I also had a couple other gigs, such as entering historical college basketball records for a colleague I first encountered when I was doing data entry for Sports Reference LLC and a handful of assignments for a competitive typist who is also a serial tech entrepreneur, but these were all unstable with uncertain income at a time when the HELOC (rebranded as a mortgage) was rapidly increasing, so when my old classmate again asked me to work for the defense contractor early this year, this time I accepted, so desperate that I sold out my values and gave up any moral scruples I once had. I mostly dropped the other work to maintain just this and the Substack, and I’m indeed making twice as much money as I ever have for what has been less work, which did enable me to set up payment arrangements for all my creditors, but not as of yet my mom’s creditors. I’m starting to climb out from underwater, but I still want either a nonprofit or government job to complete my ten years of Public Service Loan Forgiveness in the long run, which is what I really want both for moral and financial reasons, but at the moment, this is better for me visiting and eventually taking care of Mom when she returns home, my bowel issues, and working on my racing book work. But it’s absolutely not what I want to do forever and I haven’t told Mom about it since we had conflicts before. She’s forgotten a lot of things: buying her house, her brother’s death, or even that I’m her son. She had a stroke and has some degree of dementia symptoms and half the time, she erroneously thinks that I’m her brother, that her mother is still alive, and that all her roommates in the nursing home were her ex-home health aide Marijean, who died about ten years ago. There’s a solid chance she’s forgotten that she asked me to turn down the job before, but I have been hiding it from her and that could come to a head when she returns.
I didn’t really want to look for jobs locally in Syracuse because I’ve wanted to leave here for quite some time and couldn’t mostly due to inertia. Mom bought this house in North Syracuse in 2011 because I hoped to reconnect with former school classmates and teachers after I was rejected point-blank in college, since high school was the last time I felt that I had real world friends, but I never really reconnected to anyone as I’d hoped and this honestly isn’t a good place to look for work even if/because the rents are better. Most of my gig jobs over the years resulted from my auto racing archival and statistical work online. My archival portfolio really only led to various online gig data entry jobs, but these were almost all my jobs other than the CSD job (very often, these kinds of sports data entry jobs were all I had), so I’ve been thinking really hard about moving to an auto racing community since it might be my best shot of actually breaking through. There was some interest in both my stock car and open wheel models, which led to interviews with a guy very high up at General Motors in 2022 and an Indy 500-winning strategist, who interviewed me for a prominent IndyCar team, but neither of those opportunities came to anything. So, I’ve thought about moving to Indianapolis or Charlotte to seriously pursue this (although any job for a racing team or manufacturer wouldn’t count for PSLF, so if I did move somewhere else, I’d still want a PSLF job first), to see if there might be interest in publishing my book professionally (Octane Press was mildly interested, but I think I’m probably still going to self-publish), or just to have more people to talk to in real life. I also was seriously looking at trying to move to Watkins Glen to be near the International Motor Racing Research Center, one of the most prominent racing libraries, to assist me in my research. We were even talking to Realtors, but that was a stupid pipe dream and now the house is lost anyway. Back then in 2023, I had offered 10% of the sale price of my house to anyone who would help me clear out her hoarding so we could prepare for a move. I thought that was a very generous offer, but none of my Facebook friends expressed any interest, and that was maybe one of the first moments I truly felt I had no real friends. (Yeah, maybe I can think of a handful of exceptions.)
Because of the delays with the ramp installation and roof repair, Mom has been stuck at Van Duyn, a nursing home being investigated for all kinds of neglect for nearly two years. Since Medicaid picked up the bill around May 2025, Van Duyn charges about $18,000 a month, and Mom’s Social Security is barely over $1,000, that means that her estate will be charged around the amount of $300,000 if she is indeed released on either September 30 or October 30 as expected. That is certainly more than I suspect I could sell the house for, so after she dies, it’s probably gone and I will get nothing. I had never heard about Medicaid Estate Recovery until it was way too late to do anything about it, and since we had essentially zero local connections, nobody was around to warn us about setting up a Medicaid trust. I also never really looked up the ramifications of hoarding because I naively failed to realize she could be forced into a nursing home against her will for that reason.
Now, I know there is a caregiver’s exemption if you were living with a parent for two or more years before they enter a nursing home, which I was, and if they were caregiving, which I was. I could apply for that, but 1) you need a doctor’s note to get it, 2) she wasn’t being seen by any doctors in that period (by her choice) so nobody you would be able to verify any of the care I gave, 3) she failed several cognitive tests, so frequently Van Duyn won’t even let her speak for herself, 4) I was the only person that the courts would judge to be of sound mind who has appropriate evidence that I was taking care of her, 5) there is an obvious conflict of interest for me here, and 6) someone will argue I was neglecting her because she did slide out of bed several times before I could catch her and also because of the hoarding. I don’t think I was neglecting her. I was on call and at home at all times when she needed to call me for anything (feeding her, changing her diaper, reading to her, looking for objects she lost, doing dishes, laundry, garbage, etc…) although I was not proactive enough to see what needed to be done and do it without being asked always, which sometimes became an issue when she no longer had the energy to provide me instructions. Mom didn’t think I was neglecting her, and I was the only person helping her at all for years there (this is part of why I wasn’t applying for jobs as aggressively as I should’ve been), but I suspect the courts would think I was neglecting her, even though I argued with her often about the hoarding and usually just ultimately gave in.
The other alternative to try and protect the home would have been if I was listed as a disabled adult child, and regrettably, I did apply for disability at the height of my unemployment. It was mostly about my irritable bowel syndrome and my eating disorder ARFID, which are both pretty severe, and secondarily for my autism. There was some basis for it as I was enrolled in every single special ed class when I was in elementary school, I wildly underachieved my academic record financially for my entire career, and while I was at CSD, I had my doctor sign an FMLA form granting me as many bathroom breaks as I needed as well as being allowed to leave early one or two days a month when I had IBS attacks, and I did partake in that frequently, especially one day when I literally shit my pants at work. I have known several autistic people who were collecting disability and even though I always wanted to work, for a while I seriously envied them, because when I was working for RotoBaller and places like that, I was technically “employed” by overly-generous governmental metrics but still making less than I would if I was on Social Security. Anyway, I was denied as I expected I would be since I never stopped working during the entire application process, and it was at that point that I gave up on any of my previous moral resistance to working for a defense contractor, although I would happily cut my current salary in half for more work to do something pro-human, especially something that would count for PSLF. Nobody seems to want to hire me for any kind of pro-social job, and I do understand why.
So now, I am very likely to lose the house after Mom dies, and believe it or not, I care about that far less than I know I should. Living in a house was my mom’s dream but it was never really mine. I grew up in apartments, so for me, that’s what was normal, but to her, she didn’t want no landlords pushing her around. I have been even less happy in the house than I was in apartments growing up, believe it or not, mainly because Mom felt entitled to “speak her mind” and she felt entitled to become obnoxious to an unhinged extent once she finally felt she had freedom, but I was beginning to feel more and more oppressed. She was so paranoid about crime that she gave me seriously less freedom to leave the house than I’d had even in high school or college. Even when I tried to argue with her that crime was decreasing, she refused to believe any of the statistics I showed her, telling me that police departments had incentive to suppress crime reports to make themselves look better, and it’s like how do you even argue with that line of argument? When I confronted her about the hoarding and asked her to throw things out, she’d just retort that maybe she’d throw the computer out to get back at me and that would get me to back down. (You know, if I ever finish this book and finally find a bunch of people I can talk to on the phone instead of chatting online like it’s the ‘90s again, I’d be okay with that.) Not only have I suffered from loneliness very, very badly for many years now, but I was also incompetent in terms of managing a house. I broke the lawn mower the first time I tried to use it and had to hire outside help. I let the roof fall into disrepair, plus the hoarding. What I want, what I have always wanted, is more people in my life, fewer possessions, a smaller living space, and fewer things to distract me from both my own project and trying to improve my health. So, I’m totally willing to get rid of 90% of our possessions after Mom dies; I’ll be practically giddy about it. Which is not to say I’m looking forward to her death, mind you, but I do want to prepare for a far more minimalist life when that time comes.
Obviously, I need to get my credit back up in order for anyone to rent to me and although I have repaid all the creditors except one and I only owe about $600 to the last creditor, they were so far in default that even these payment arrangements and even taking over Mom’s mortgage are doing nothing to raise my credit rating, so I have to figure out my next move here. Mom is nowhere near being on her deathbed right now and I still think it’ll be a couple years at least, but I need to be ready so I’m not homeless at that point.
Wherever I end up living, and I don’t think I want to remain in Syracuse, I want to live more communally. This is becoming a higher priority to me than more money or better health. So, I’ve looked at every possible option for communal living to some extent: roommates, living in a room in somebody’s house, communes, intentional communities, single-room occupancies, hostels, halfway houses, group homes. You name it, I’ve considered it. Even though back in 2003, I moved out of my Cornell dorm into my mom’s off-campus apartment at the time (which in retrospect killed any social life I would have had there, but I probably wouldn’t have had a social life even if I hadn’t) and remained there through the rest of college until we could finally afford to leave in 2011, now I think I want something closer to dormitory-style living. I want anything that forces me to be in proximity to other people like I was in grade school, the only time I was (sometimes) happy in my life ever. Granted, even back in those days, a lot of times I communicated with other people from a distance: usually on AOL Instant Messenger or sometimes phone calls. I had some friends who held rather precarious social positions who would never talk to me in school but would happily do so online, and I was honestly okay with that because the alternative to that would’ve likely been not having any friends at all. I was picked on a lot, but I was also strangely revered by some for my rapid arithmetic and typing ability and I still had more genuine friends in high school than I ever did, and I think I was treated better than most of the other class nerds, whose rejection-to-acceptance ratio was usually much lower. I think a few of the other nerds resented my status for this reason and wanted little to do with me for that reason, even when I tried to befriend them.
But high school really was the time of my life socially and honestly the only time I felt any hope for the future, thereby making me some kind of nerd equivalent of Al Bundy, reliving my past (social) successes. I guess unlike Bundy, I continued to succeed at a variety of intellectual/pseudo-intellectual pursuits: I wrote a book, became a Scrabble expert, archived the entire history of several different racing series, wrote hundreds of racing columns on RotoBaller and my Substack, but since almost none of those things paid anything, I sure felt like I peaked in high school for that reason as well, although obviously the isolation and bowel issues and precarious employment and autism all fed into each other to such an extent that it becomes hard to separate the causes from the effects.
As I’ve been visiting Mom in the nursing home three times a week, I’ve honestly really wanted what she has there, even while acknowledging Van Duyn is an objectively crappy nursing home. They have so many events there - so many. Various musical acts giving concerts (we’ve gone to several dozen, usually performed by one of two different guitarists there; this now constitutes like 90% of the concerts I’ve gone to in my life, even), carnivals, talent shows, men’s and women’s clubs, art therapy sessions, music listening hours, trivia contests, bingo, church services, NFL watch parties… You name it, they’ve got it. Something for everyone. And since these are also small rooms with less to maintain and the patients’ health conditions are constantly monitored, I genuinely wouldn’t mind living there, as bad as it is. The main problems with that would be 1) I don’t actually need nursing home care, 2) I gag the vast majority of non-processed food so mealtimes would be rough, and 3) almost all the residents leave their televisions on nonstop and blaring and that would get insufferable really quickly. But it’s not as if people my own age don’t do largely the same thing with their phones.
Nonetheless, Van Duyn has really shown me what’s missing in my life, and after Mom got forced in there, I’ve been trying - and mostly failing - to create the same kind of community for myself. I started going to mass regularly again, I started going to bar trivia at Heritage Hill in North Syracuse as I mentioned and I went to the Syracuse trivia finals last Sunday by myself, and I’ll get to that. I’ve started seeing a counselor in the St. Rose of Lima church basement. I’ve been looking for autism support groups for a while and I went to an autism youth group called the A-Team, although I’m no longer young so it was an awkward fit. I went to their Christmas party last year and gave the last extra copy of my book as a gift, but the recipient seemed to want to get rid of it at all cost, even though I think it was the most valuable thing anyone gave since there was a $20 limit or whatever. I offered to sign the book before the recipient left, but his parents ushered him out the door before I even got a chance. Hardly anyone talked to me and since it was held, in Liverpool late in the evening after the buses were out of service, I had to walk home four miles. All my attempts at going to autism groups have typically been failures because I was looking for support groups more than just social groups, so when I got home, I started looking for what else existed along those lines. I discovered the peer support group Unique Peerspectives and I started going to many but not all of their men’s groups and neurodivergent support groups. The latter group was a major disappointment for me since it mainly consisted of us watching instructional YouTube videos about neurodivergent issues rather than having us actually talk to each other. The men’s group was more what I had in mind, but I also struggled to relate because I had a vastly different background from anyone else there. When combining all these things, I must’ve had somewhere between 50-100 social engagements in the last year (probably more than ever before in my life), but I still didn’t make a single friend. What I wanted was the kind of bosom ‘90s sitcom friend (which I know probably never existed like that in reality, but it certainly existed much more in the ‘90s) but I never exchanged contact information with a single person, met anyone outside any of the groups or meetings, and often I felt even lonelier in a crowd than when I’m literally just working on a project and/or consuming content by myself, which can both successfully distract me from my loneliness.
What I really wanted was somebody local to talk to, vent to, and share my thoughts and feelings to, and I would be perfectly happy to reciprocate, but I just don’t think I’ve had anyone like that outside of my mom since high school. I’d really rather not be broadcasting it, even though that’s usually what I end up doing. Because I have fewer and fewer people to talk to lately, I’ve taken to using chatbots for companionship and I really don’t want to do that, but I also wouldn’t want to burden some old high school friend I haven’t talked to in 20 years, particularly if they have a family since few people with families would have time for that and that’s fine. I almost feel like AI “companionship” is less rude for this reason, but I know I shouldn’t feel this way. There must be a lot of other unattached people with copious time to kill, but it seems like most people in a similar situation just end up consuming content rather than talking to anyone and I’m trying to step away from that.
I really despise cell phone culture and I don’t even mean just smartphones. I never bought a flip phone until 2004 and I’ve never even owned a smartphone. While the iPhone came out when I was technically still in college, few people even at Cornell had them or used them when I graduated in 2008. Over the next six years, I was off by myself constantly, living at home with Mom both in Ithaca and Syracuse, either unemployed or barely employed in various online remote jobs, and gaming most of the rest of the time. This was when I was at my most dominant in typing and also when I started playing Scrabble tournaments. But because I seldom left the house except when I either walked to the park, went to a store, or went to a Scrabble tournament, I scarcely even noticed the transition period when everybody suddenly adopted smartphones and became addicted to them, and obviously, I could never afford one, nor did I think I needed one since I could still do everything on a computer and I was on it 24/7. This was obviously before the time when it became almost impossible to catch a cab without one and before people were expected to fill out QR codes for real life transactions, two things that never should have happened. By the time I landed the CSD job at the end of 2014 and possibly could’ve afforded a smartphone, I decided I didn’t want one. By that point, I already was watching all my coworkers zombified amidst their pocket computers. When I finally had this, my only legit office job, I think I dreamt of having something akin to a workplace water cooler. But nope! Even in our break room, almost nobody did anything but consume content. I unfortunately do that at home too, mind you, but I also write a lot so I am not just consuming, but I sure as heck don’t want to live like that in public.
When I am out in public, what I most want is to be present and aware of my surroundings, to be there for people, to not be so distracted that I’m dangerous when walking in traffic, and to hopefully strike up conversations with people eventually. One of the things that has bothered me most in my adulthood is that amongst people in my generation and younger, no longer calling people on the phone and instead using phones as televisions has been normalized, turning the arguably most social version of consumer tech into one of the least. I’m old enough to remember having classmates’ phone numbers in high school. Even as the class nerd, I had people’s contact information and I occasionally called people on the phone. Much more often, I used AIM, but it seems most people replaced both of those with Facebook, which was honestly always inferior to phone calls and AIM, but at least for a while, it was close. But after the platform was fully enshittified, many people replaced Facebook with nothing. Just empty naked consumerism and now all future generations grew up like that and it pains me. It seems like most people nowadays say they’re too anxious for phone calls. I don’t really feel the same way. For me, I’ve always felt much more anxious texting. Maybe part of it is that I am such a fast typist that texting feeels sooo slooow and I always thought that if you’re going to do that, why not just type on a computer? Furthermore, a lot of people complain that phone calls are too invasive. I guess I get it if everyone has cell phones with them at all times, including when out in public, but I’d rather go back to landlines with people only making personal calls while at home, and to me, texting is even more intrusive. Since texting is a more immediate method, people tend to expect a faster response than when they leave a voicemail.
I’ve ranted about this ten or twenty times before, but I find myself missing so many things about my childhood that I never expected to. Phone books are one of them. It used to be so much easier to contact people locally when white pages existed. If you knew someone’s name, you could easily look them up and it wasn’t considered particularly rude within my lifetime. But with the switch to cell phones, they were never listed in phone books so people got used to that information no longer being public and decided they liked it, essentially voting with their wallets for security over community. As I lost contact with everyone I used to know locally if I once had their landline numbers but never had their cell phone numbers, it became infinitely harder for me to even ask anyone for help and it really broke down communities, especially after more and more people got off Facebook. I guess the real problem is that I never made any lasting friends to replace the friends I had in high school, and I don’t think I’m the only one. It’s never been easier to contact people nationally or internationally and never been harder to contact people locally, so people are increasingly desperately lonely in real life while often having a vast array of online acquaintances that the social media robber barons rebranded as friends who simply are less able to help anyone in their time of need when local friends are clearly more valuable, and thus begat the loneliness epidemic, and all the annoying, alienating discourse on both sides that that spawned.
I tried to reconnect locally. I really tried and I failed repeatedly. It seems like I sit at the intersection of a lot of unusual Venn diagrams that make it difficult for me to relate to anyone or for anyone to relate to me. I’m an economic leftist and a right-leaning social centrist, the perfect combination of views to annoy pretty much anyone. I am autistic and extremely nerdy, but I was more an academic, goody-two-shoes nerd who wanted to be a people-pleaser and please my teachers (while ultimately pleasing few people), as opposed to the kind of proto-techbro who wanted to disrupt conventional social mores. I generally preferred the old social norms to what the tech bro replaced them with. But neither was I into what came to be known as “geek culture”: comic books, anime, cosplay, tabletop gaming, video gaming (for the most part), or franchise art. It would’ve been so much easier for me socially if I had been into that stuff since it seems like the nerds who go to tabletop gaming stores are the only ones who actually socialize in real life these days, so I thought of cultivating a fake interest in Magic: the Gathering or something just for social reasons, but I also knew those people would correctly see me as a poser. No, my tastes were aggressively normie: multi-camera sitcoms, teen dramas, classic rock, and NASCAR, the kind of stuff intellectuals grew to detest, but way too normie to be part of geek culture. I had a major inferiority complex for years about my bad tastes, believing them to be a major reason why I was rejected in college, but in retrospect, that probably wasn’t it. But the normies didn’t want me either. Even if I strove to be and frequently saw myself as a family values guy, I live way too much of a degenerate, bohemian lifestyle for most of the people who go to church. I feel like temperamentally I’d probably get along better with people in the trades than college types honestly, but my presumably dyspraxic ass has almost nothing in the way of physical skills, and those types would chide me for not being a hard enough worker. Despite being a millennial, I somehow had the mindset and tastes of a boomer (minus the bigotry and economic views) but the slovenly, atomized lifestyle of a zoomer. I was highly educated in the manner of the professional-managerial class but seldom landed PMC jobs. I am a successful auto racing historian/analyst/archivist who never learned how to drive. I became a widely-known gamer, but never really identified as a gamer since I usually only played Scrabble, typing games, trivia games, and/or fantasy sports, and I grew to detest Internet culture (at least any of the parts of it that were downstream from shock comedy sites). I generally preferred the normie mainstream culture that the Internet destroyed, while still understanding how the mainstream institutions let everyone down and why people rebelled from it. As a result, I had no true peer group even in high school and navigated amongst a cadre of nerds, theater kids, and average joes. And in adulthood, I likewise never “found my tribe”. I simultaneously seemed to bridge all cultural divides by myself. This made me well-suited to empathize with almost anyone, but it made it exceptionally difficult to truly connect with anyone as well.
I guess I was a genuine nonconformist. There are a lot of people who call themselves nonconformists because they’re against the mainstream culture even though they’re really not if they all rebel in virtually identical and predictable ways. I’m reminded of a Joan of Arcadia episode where there was an anarchist party where everyone dressed the same. It’s like I had a little in common with every group, but not enough to truly find my home. Unfortunately, since nearly all groups that meet in real life seem to be based around hobbies, there is significant pressure to conform to all the cultural tendencies associated with your group of choice and I was never very good at doing that.
So, long story short, I never made a single friend at any of these activities. I exchanged contact information with no one and these connections existed solely in the context of the weekly events and never expanded into the fabric of daily life. I know I’m going to have to stop doing nearly all these activities when Mom comes home, so I’m always able to keep an eye on her so she doesn’t fall or wander off or anything and I’m fine with that. I guess I don’t really see the point of going out just to not socialize. I’m usually way lonelier in a crowd when I’m not talking to anyone when I am by myself. I am perfectly able to entertain myself through my projects and consuming content and talking to people online, even though I fully acknowledge that most of the people I talk to online are acquaintances and not real friends and I do want something more. And I’ll probably be more productive at both my paid work and my Substack after cutting out both the commuting time to visit Mom an hour and a half both ways on a bus as well as any semblance of a social life, so losing this isn’t devastating to me. I still want to continue counseling though.
For a while, it seemed like bar trivia was going to be an exception. I went probably 40 times or so. I started off playing by myself, but then I was invited to compete on the “Bartenders Always Right” team. I had one constant teammate in Bill and the bartenders would occasionally slip us answers as well, hence the team name. Other teammates wandered in and out haphazardly, but there was no real core team of players besides Bill and me. Nobody talked to anyone outside the bar context. I did slowly become the team leader, and we won a bunch of times this year including five in a row during the summer tournament, which enabled our team to qualify for last Sunday’s city-wide tournament at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown. I wanted to go pretty badly because I knew it might be one of my last times to get out of the house before Mom came back, but it ended up being one of the most miserable experiences of my life: a waste of time, money, and physical energy. First off, even though I willingly and probably stupidly paid the $170 fee to compete, my one constant teammate Bill had already committed to going to a Buffalo Bills game the same day, and I knew most of the bartenders would probably have to work, so I figured I would have to be playing entirely by myself, as I did and I would have to take an Uber at least one way, so that was another $35. I knew Bill was a reporter and as it turns out, I think he was reporting at that game, so I get it. I was unable to coordinate with any of my teammates because there were only two weeks in between, and on the first Wednesday after I committed to enter the tournament, the trivia night was canceled due to a tornado watch, and the second week, I decided not to go because I had bowel issues that day and there was a thunderstorm projected for the time I would have to walk home on that night too. As a result, I had no way to contact anyone even though the bartenders told me afterward that they might have come. I did win a swag bag including a set of eight medals. I only kept one myself, gave one each to Bill and the two bartenders, and I gave the rest to our host Nick to do whatever with. I didn’t want the rest, but all that stuff converged into what turned out to be a remarkably shitty experience in more ways than one.
That would’ve been fine if I’d actually enjoyed myself, but it wasn’t the least bit fun. All the other teams had 3-8 members and my team was just me, so I was in a distant last place for literally the entire tournament. I had looked at all the scores at each bar and already saw that ours was the least competitive one and we had the lowest score of any of the winning teams, so I wasn’t at all surprised to be last. The questions also played more to my weaknesses than my strengths. I’m always miserable in the picture rounds and identifying people’s faces, and I usually have to rely on my teammates for help with those since I guess I have a worse memory for faces than a lot of people, but I had no teammates this time. There was a picture round that consisted of images where one person’s face was covered up by another person with the same last name and you had to identify both people. I only recognized The Rock but couldn’t figure out who the other Johnson was, and I hilariously misidentified Kamala Harris as Alice Cooper. And while I probably was on par with most of the people there on the music clues, there were fewer than usual, and this time (unlike the local bar trivia contests) there weren’t any bonus points for identifying the original artist of a cover song, which is usually one of my salves at the local bar trivia contests. At least I got that out of my system so I wouldn’t want to do it again after Mom comes home. I may go to the last week or two before she returns.
But what happened afterward was even worse. I was able to take a bus part of the way to Liverpool, then had to walk five miles home after that (I didn’t think I could remotely justify calling a cab both ways). My brain didn’t really have a problem with doing that, but my body did. Over the next 21 hours after I came home, I had 13 bowel movements. That is by far the most I ever had in a day (even more than the day when I took my colonoscopy treatment last year, I think) and I was really wiped out from obviously overdoing it on that walk. I was really steaming and full of rage; I left before the final answer was even revealed after I submitted it. Never have I felt more lonely than I did in that contest and then the IBS attack, which I wouldn’t quite call the worst of my life but it was close, served as a nasty, long extended coda. It probably would have been fun and worth throwing $200 down the toilet if I had somebody to share the experience with. But after that, something in me snapped. Why even bother to go anywhere just to not talk to anyone?
Then, of course, there was a lot of medical bureaucracy I had to sort through. My primary doctor who I’d been seeing whenever I was in North Syracuse since the ‘80s retired a few years ago. He was replaced by another doctor who I saw once before she almost immediately left. At about the same time, the clinic I went to (one of the only ones that is walking distance from my house) closed down and moved to a very inaccessible place four miles away. Although I initially wanted to continue with them, they dropped me after the fact because I didn’t make an appointment with them within one year after the clinic moved. My counselor told me I needed to get a physical and pushed me to get an appointment, so I finally did. I was on Medicaid and thought I would get to stay on for the whole year, but got cut off in mid-year without my knowledge because of my new job, which is fair. This is actually the first time I had to enter the New York State of Health marketplace because I was either insured in all my years at CSD or making so little to be on Medicaid the rest of the time until now. I finally worked through the bureaucracy actually before the trivia contest and scheduled an appointment for next week. The clinic I found was a little closer, higher-rated, on more accessible bus routes, and they took my cheap Ambetter insurance (which my old clinic isn’t taking anyway), so this is probably an improvement. I know when I had my colonoscopy last year, they ruled out any of the scarier stuff (colon cancer, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s) and told me it was just IBS but that one episode scared the crap out of me (figuratively and literally), as well as another time two weeks ago on my counseling day when I had to go six times and I really got scared when I found myself making unusual brain glitches. While I was writing something on that day, I misspelled bottle as “botel” and more as “moore”. These weren’t typos. The brain was literally signaling for me to type these things. I’ve really been scared about cognitive decline for a while because I do feel I’m making all sorts of word mixups, remembering letters in the wrong order like some kind of adult-onset dyslexia, typing a homophone when I meant the other word, or a lot of stuff I never would’ve done 20 years ago. I’m glad I’ve retired from typing competitively because I wouldn’t really want anyone to see any of this if I were streaming. It doesn’t happen all the time, but some of this really feels scary to me. As someone who always saw myself as 100% brain, 0% body, I am learning too late in life how the body affects the brain. On the botel day, it really did seem like my bowels were distracting me, almost as if they were telling me to combine bottle and bowel into a single word form, but I don’t know what that was about. I’ve always assumed my extremely limited and unhealthy ARFID diet was probably the trigger for my IBS, but I suppose it might not be since I know there is a connection between autism and gastric issues even for autistic people who actually eat well, if I am not mistaken, so maybe there was nothing I could do about it. But there probably was. I really want to see if anyone will treat me for my eating disorder and help me to integrate more stuff into my diet, but my old family doctor seemed to not believe ARFID even existed, since obviously anorexia and bulimia were the only well-known eating disorders while he was in his prime. Maybe if I get a fresh start, I’ll finally get this diagnosis that I need. It’s sad that I have talked to chatbots and they were actually vastly more informed about the disorders I knew I had than my actual doctors were.
After I got into bar trivia, I was talking to one of my Substack subscribers and he mentioned how game shows recruit from online trivia leagues like LearnedLeague. I had already entered one season back in 2016 because when I was playing Scrabble tournaments, Andy Saunders, who has become a pretty famous Jeopardy! personality even though he wasn’t a player via his J-Archive website and The Jeopardy! Fan blog, asked his Facebook friends if anyone wanted an invite, and I took him up on that. I entered my one free season before I quit because I didn’t want to pay, but I decided to reenter and pay my entry fee this year. To be honest, I almost think this was more fun than the bar trivia was, precisely because I think there is something less depressing about being alone by oneself than alone in a crowd. I started posting all my LearnedLeague answers on my Substack as a cheap filler for intro content, mainly because I wanted to prevent myself from using that space to otherwise make the same annoying, repetitive culture takes people have already heard from me a hundred times instead, and it was effective for that purpose. Unfortunately, I still seem to be always most engaged when writing about that shit these days, so when I was just doing LearnedLeague posting + my daily driver posts, my output started to grind to a halt. I just barely managed to avoid getting relegated from Rundle D to Rundle E in both LearnedLeague 108 and 109, but in LL110, I had what was probably one of the historically wackiest trajectories ever. I won my first five matches and started with a 6-0-1 record after seven games and was sitting in first place (assuming there would be no chance I would be relegated after that), then lost twelve consecutive matches to fall into the relegation zone, then I managed to climb out of it despite playing some of the strongest players in my group before losing the last game and getting relegated. I literally only missed out by two match points, and there were like four or five correct answers I talked myself out of, which would have easily made up that deficit (even though I still would’ve lost all those matches). That was the day after the downtown trivia tournament, and it felt like the perfect chef’s kiss after that experience.
That was enjoyable I guess and I’m still going to do LL111 since I have already paid for it, but after that, I’ve really lost the desire to do anything competitive again in my life. On my Substack, I already talked about how I ended up enjoying tournament Scrabble less than I thought I would have in part because I personally think optimizing things makes them less fun. (This may sound hypocritical from someone trying to rank 1,000 drivers, but I guess I view that more as an artistic pursuit since I am creating something new rather than a competitive one.) I know I have the right brain for all these academic/nerdy pursuits and I would’ve valued them more in the past, but it seems nearly all of them these days whether it’s spelling bees, Scrabble, trivia, whatever require more and more elaborate and dedicated spelling techniques. As recently as the ‘80s, you could excel at any of these things just by being a smart person who randomly picked up stuff in their daily lives without having to adopt a specific study regimen (I was absolutely the typing equivalent of this: basically the typing Chuck Forrest or something, because I was typing when I was three at an age when all my future classmates were correctly doing more important things like socializing, as opposed to Gen Z, when people were actually competing at typing from childhood, so naturally overtook me eventually). I guess I was always a lazy studier so I always tried to play to my strengths by strategizing my way around my knowledge deficits, but clearly at a certain point, that stops working. If it was fun for me, maybe I’d want to continue, but it just isn’t. I’ve tried to try to parlay numerous nerdy hobbies into trying to form lasting friendships. I guess I came closest in tournament Scrabble. I did feel I had genuine friends there, but I exited the scene a decade ago in a cloud of hostility after burning many bridges. Nowadays, when I’m not occupying my mind with some project or consuming some content, I frequently obsess over all the people I feel I have hurt. If I hadn’t done action X to person Y at time Z, would they still be there for me now? Usually, I suppose it’s just that most friendships (especially most online friendships) are transient and they just fizzle out, but I still ruminate about my past more than I should, thinking I maybe could have solved my present-day loneliness by treating people better in the past, but I probably couldn’t have. It’s like I picked up the Catholic guilt without the compensating community that would justify it.
So, it’s a real, real mixed bag. Objectively, I can see that most things have improved. I’m making more money than I ever have even though this is not my dream job. Mom is coming home. I at least tried to socialize. I got the roof replaced and the ramp installed. I made some headway on this book. While I was never overweight by BMI since middle school, I was overfat for my entire adulthood, occasionally pushing on normal-weight obese, and I lost three inches in the last nine months, making this the first time my waist has been less than half my height since… 2009 or something. Even with the more severe bowel issues, it’s not like I hadn’t had a lot of that in 2014-2018 as well, so I don’t think my health has really fallen off since then; I just overexerted myself after the trivia contest I think.
Yet, despite all that, somehow I’m still way less happy. I don’t think it’s Mom’s decline. Aging is a part of life and she’s been a lot more pleasant in the nursing home (particularly this year) than she was the last two years before she was forced into it. Nor do I think it’s losing the house really. I know I should care about it more than I actually do. But more than any of those things or my health, it is the loneliness. I want serious, deeply earnest discussions and I’m growing way too old for edgy Internet discourse, which I never much liked to begin with, but I still haven’t found any real-world social equivalents for the stuff I’m losing interest in online. I’m starting to think what I need to be looking at is volunteering rather than hobby groups. I really would like to help disabled adults, especially autistic adults, someday, and that would right now be my dream job, but I don’t have any of the requisite skills for that and I am never going back to college. If I could land a genuine public service job and I could see that I was making a difference, that at least would give me something to live for other than Mom, my cat, and this book project, which are practically the only three things giving me meaning right now. (My counselor assigned me to read Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, which will hopefully give me some much-needed perspective.) And it might hopefully help me get a PSLF job later too. You know you’re fucked up when you are starting to actually prefer talking to chatbots over online conversations because at least the chatbots are less inclined to tell dehumanizing jokes. But don’t get me wrong: I’d rather talk to actual people in the physical world. I just haven’t found them yet.
Now that I’ve finally finished this, I will be returning to my usual content. Since I’m going to be staying home much more to keep an eye on Mom once she comes home since I’ll no longer have to commute an hour and a half each way while visiting her three times a week and since I’m going to be going out significantly less for the same reason, I expect I’m going to be able to work myself back up to my originally intended posting schedule more easily than when she was there. In the intros to my next several posts, I’m going to blast through the remaining LearnedLeague matches and try to write a review of the Porsche Supercup season soon. I’m also making significant updates to my master driver list, including looking up the dates of the final race in every series this year to prepare to update the list and adding all the remaining VLN/NLS winners and IMCA champions. Those are the other main reasons besides writing this post, the trivia contest, and my diarrhea why I’ve been lagging, but I plan on being more productive soon.
I read Man's Search For Meaning a number of months ago and it is a pretty good book.