I still have the old link to my voip app, which I started using in 2008/09 with USB hardware plugged into my computer. I still have that hardware but I doubt it works. I also still have an email full of voicemails up until I stopped paying for it, which it turns out was 2020, not 2019.

I’d still be doing it today, but after my wife got pregnant she told me I had to get a phone.

Funny thing, the very night I activated it I had a blowout on the side of the road and called her so I could yank the spare from the back of her vehicle and get home.

We both drove near identical jeeps at the time and I was already on my spare.

Of course I got the whole, “SEE! You’d be waiting on me to miss you and come out looking for you if you didn’t get this phone!”

I hate having a phone to this day. I really wish I could just vanish completely from everyone from time to time.

I found a spot at the lake near me that has no service recently, so I’m going to pretend to go fishing this summer and just go sit there.

I am more and more convinced every day that I’m not neurotypical. My mother said to me on Sunday, “oh lord, the way you think. You’ve always had the same brain and I’d tell you to take things a different way and your grandma would say, “leave that baby alone. He’s just creative. Let him be weird.””

I’m definitely not right.

Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever been more insulted haha.

Are you even remotely serious?

Oh boy oh boy. Story time.

So around 2015 I got a call at work from an ex-girlfriend. I was 100% certain that the first time I had sex with her had occurred in 2008.

She informed me that it was actually in 2007 when we got drunk and ended up crashing at a friends place.

The whole point of her call was to tell me that she had a daughter, and that daughter was mine. I watched that baby for her when she was about 6 months old. It never even crossed my mind.

She had me totally convinced. I called my old friend who informed me that we did in fact have sex night and that he heard us and was annoyed by it. The timing was perfect. Uh oh.

Anyway, I always liked her. I didn’t think I had any reason to distrust her. So, like the fool I am, I just went with it.

She said that she didn’t tell me because of my heavy drinking, drug use, and promiscuity. She didn’t think I was cut out to be a dad, but then she seen through social media how good I was with my kids and decided she was wrong, all these years later. Things started seeming off pretty quick. She told me that a friend of hers passed away in a car accident, and she always told the daughter that he was her father.

Deeper than that, though, she told his family he was the father.

She told me that the little girl was that family’s link to him and that she didn’t want to break their hearts. But she wanted me to know, and she wanted me to have a relationship with my daughter. I thought it was fucked up that she had done that, but I certainly didn’t want to crush some mother’s heart who lost her young son in an accident and miraculously found that he had left a child for her to love.

She said that I could come around and that we would let the kid know when she was older.

We first agreed to meet at a park, I went and sat there for two hours and she never showed up. Then she apologized and said something came up, she wanted to meet at the petting zoo that was in town. I went to the petting zoo, sat there for a while, and she never showed up. She told me that she would be in touch with me, that she was sorry things kept coming up.

At that point, I had still refused to get a cell phone because I am so antisocial. I didn’t want to have to talk to people or answer people when I was outside of my home or my job. I didn’t get a cell phone until 2019, I always used an iPod touch with a VOIP app. So whenever I was left hanging, I just had to wait.

I ended up talking with the kid on the phone a few times, she was a very sweet kid, but very troubled. That trouble I knew, had to come from somewhere.

The last time we scheduled to meet, I got a call the day before. It was her sister.

“angryseal, I have always liked you. When I found out my sister was talking to you again, I couldn’t just sit by and let you get scammed. You are not the first long lost father, you’re probably about the 5th. To give you a clue how awful my sister is, she met a lonely older man who has spent his entire life taking care of his sick mother. He never had time to date, and after his mom passed he went out and had the misfortune of meeting my sister. She was at his house one night and noticed a bank statement with a large number. She hatched a plan and called him up a few weeks later. She told him she had cancer and that she couldn’t afford the surgery and was going to die if she didn’t get it. It was early enough that all she needed was a surgery, and that surgery was 40k. This man gave her 40,000 dollars, she called him one more time to say the surgery was successful and then she ghosted him. She blew all of that money vacationing with another man in Florida. They probably spent half of it on cocaine. You tell my sister that you want a DNA test and you will never hear from her again.”

What!? Ok.

So the next time we spoke, I told her that it wasn’t anything personal, I just didn’t want heartbreak on down the line and I told her I’d like to get a DNA test. “How dare you? What, you don’t trust me? I have never been anything but good to you! You know what?! I’ve done just fine raising her without you up to now and I’ll keep doing fine, you asshole!”

I have never heard from her again.

I still think about that pretty often haha. What a world we live in.

Could be it honestly. :)

I live deep in the Appalachian mountains and I haven’t met a single person interested in the things that I am since I was a kid.

I’m so bad and hate socializing so much that I recently got the Mortal Kombat II deluxe arcade cabinet, the same dude kept joining my match every single time I played so I just stopped going online haha.

He contacted me and we talked once, and that was that.

I really like him too, I just can’t handle it. Even that tiny little bit of it.

I don’t know why I’m like that. I’m not bad at talking to people. I’ve been told I’m damn good at it. I’ve been told I’m charismatic and all that. There’s just something broken in me.

Probably comes from the abuse I suffered as a kid if I’m being honest. It was rough, and it trained me I guess.

But then again, my whole family is like me. I don’t even know 90% of them, but I can tell you that 90% of them do not have Facebook. The ones that do, they don’t ever post, they don’t ever like, nothing. It’s like it’s just who we are or something.

I have brothers who grew up in different households. Two of them never experienced any abuse as children, they were spoiled. They are just like me. They talk to no one.

I’ve done the whole therapy thing, I just do not have it in me to have friends.

I haven’t had a desire to make a friend since I was a kid.

I do get lonely. I’ll have a thought that I’d like to share and I know I drive my wife crazy.

I wouldn’t even care if I could find a way to make some money. Right now I’m a stay at home dad. That’s what my wife wanted me to do. I was making money on the stock market, not taking big risks, just making above minimum wage. Then the election happened and now that’s over.

Thank you for caring.

Heeeey it’s me. Totally socially crippled.

I don’t even know how to maintain relationships, don’t have an interest in trying. There’s something wrong with me.

My only friend on this planet is my uncle.

You can’t just say that and not lay any dirt down at all.

Some people got it right back in the day.

Super Metroid is a perfect game from start to finish. I still play it a few times a year I’d say.

Care to fill me in on what that’s about?

I could Google it, and I’ll do that if you tell me I’m a moron and that’s what I should do. I don’t want to be an imposition, I’d just rather hear from someone who know what they’re doing firsthand.

I’m about to cancel everything and buy a good vpn service.

Learn, learn, traumatize someone you care deeply about without meaning to, learn, learn, that person dies. Learn some more, then some more, then die.

I initially thought it was a funny way to address it. I’m straight, but I got bullied and called gay constantly in school because I didn’t fit the rural, huntin’, big belt buckle, rebel flag, cowboy boot wearing stereotype of masculinity.

To them, being called gay was the worse thing you could do to them because it called their masculinity into question.

When I was 17 I called this cowboy hat, belt buckle kid a homophobe for calling me gay. At first he thought I was calling him a homo, and it was so funny to say, “it means you’re such a pussy that you’re scared of queers.”

I think it was worse for him than if I had called him gay. Then he had to go on a tirade about how he wasn’t scared of queers, so I replied, “Ah, you’re just scared you might be queer. I see.”

I went home with a blacked eye, but I never lay in bed wishing I had said anything different with that one haha.

My daughter loves Michael Jackson.

It’s funny, I never much liked his music before aside from a couple big songs. Now that I’m always hearing it, I regularly catch myself singing along and enjoying it.

This is what I initially came to say and got lost along the way. Thank you.

I am surprised that the “thank ya fer ya service” crowd isn’t throwing a fit.

Thank you for your service mostly means, “look at me being a real good boy! Are you happy I’m a real good boy?! I thought about joining! Did you know that I thought about it? Mama said I have flat feet. Did I say thank you for your service?”

Well, this dude did fire a random shot into a crowd and hit a pregnant teenager. He got out of prison early and was picked up by ICE from there.

Dude has a serious brain injury and PTSD. He should have received the best treatment he could get. He should have received citizenship immediately upon earning his Purple Heart (or fighting for the US in the first place). He should have been afforded a path to a decent life.

He wasn’t. He committed a senseless crime, probably directly as a result of his brain injury and ptsd that he got defending a country he had lived in since he was a toddler.

Even considering his violent act, he spent over a decade in prison and “paid his debt to society”. Of course it isn’t about that. It isn’t about rehabilitation. It’s about punishment, and because he happened to be born a few years before his family brought him here, before he could ever even think about where he wanted to be, he gets to live the rest of his life in misery.

A recipient of a Purple Heart, a war hero. And oh boy, he’s gonna spend the rest of his life paying for that.

Breaks my heart and I wish I could help him in some way.

I hope your kids like it.

It has always seemed to me that my kids have gone out of their way to avoid liking anything I like. That’s fine, but I never could relate to them.

I adopted my son so it was different with him. We did everything together and he was happy to look into my interests sometimes. He and I played world of Warcraft together for a decade and I’d cut off a couple toes to go back and have that with him again.