Wherein I vent about what's left of my friends and relatives in The Big, Blue House, year one.

I have just four relatives whom I still talk to, and only one of them is someone I actually like. Two of the remaining three are bipolar with delusions, making them extremely difficult to have a conversation with, because they incorporate their delusions into everything. In order to talk to them, a person has to successfully pretend to believe the same nonsense that they do, and I hate it. (My once favorite niece is one of them, her father is the other.)

The remaining one I just accepted a friend request from six weeks ago, when he was drunk texting everyone in our family because his marriage was on the rocks. He’s on the cusp of intellectual disability, and he embraced hip hop culture decades ago, making him a caricature of ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’. I only “like” his posts to see what the rest of our shared gene pool is up to, like a sort of Jerry Springer Live show in the Facebook comments.

The last conversation I had with the niece, she wanted my opinions on how to deal with possession. As in this poor woman literally believes that she is being possessed by the ghost of her boyfriend’s dead ex-wife, and that said ghost is responsible for her violent temper. - I thought hard on that one, and told her that drugs and alcohol make it easier for ghosts to possess people, and that she should make herself a less welcoming vessel. - Then I never wrote her again because *holy freaking crap that is above my pay grade*.

Her three children, all boys, are all autistic. When I found that out several years ago, I was thrilled. I thought that would give us enough commonality to establish some kind of long distance connection. So I sent them $20 gift cards for every birthday, and big boxes of candy for the Winter Solstice, for two years.

I got precisely squat in return. Not even a ‘thanks’ by email. They never accepted my Facebook friend requests. They even waited a full year to get the gift cards, which I know because Amazon sends you a notification when they’re accepted.

So my niece has raised/is raising, (19, 14, and 11), three very ungrateful boys. I realize $20 is chump change, but I’m on SSI here. It’s supposed to be “the thought that counts”. Whatever happened to that?

When I was a kid my Aunt Mary send me a half dollar in a card every Christmas, and I was always touched by the sentiment. Even at five years of age, my mother was explaining to me how much my Aunt loved me, to take the time to send me such a thing. I’m guessing my niece never taught her children basic civilities like gratitude. Which is incredibly disappointing, since we grew up together for several years. Her family and mine were neighbors from what was 5th to 9th grade for me. We spent a lot of time together. When they visited us when I was 28, we got on great. She was always a very nice person.

But then she’s seven years younger than me, so I never hung out with her as an adult, and apparently the adult version of her is completely off the rails.

She brags about drinking an entire case of beer, alone at a campsite, as her idea of weekend fun. She’s on serious relationship number 4, after three husbands. She doesn’t want to get married again, but every 2-4 years one relationship ends and she finds another, always swearing that this one is her “soulmate”.

Yeah, no. I think her soul mate is Miller Lite. And it infuriates me and breaks my heart all at once.

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I have one real life person, and that’s Don, and he’s seventeen years older than me. When he’s gone, I’ll just be a widow living in a three story, six bedroom house by myself, with no one to talk to, and that image of myself makes me want to cry.

I don’t want any more cats when the current batch eventually all die of age related issues. Every time one of them goes, I bawl and hit my head on the wall. It’s terrible. I want a tortoise at that point. Something likely to outlive me, and not likely to eat my eyes if I die at home.

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Of my three remaining old friends, one is delusional religious zealot and Cheeto supporter, with a borderline intellectual disability, (aren’t they all?), that I used to work with, and the other two I just don’t have anything in common with to talk about. We went to school together, and our lives turned out very different, and I have no idea what to even say to them now. The Cheeto supporter I always enjoyed talking to at work, back in 2009-2013, but she was an opiate addict even then. She’s sweet, but she has zero critical thinking ability. She once asked me for one of Don’s lortabs, that he’d been prescribed for a back injury at work. After some thought, I told her that I cared about her too much to give her something that I knew was bad for her.

The old school friends I legitimately like. They’re awesome people. I just have no idea how to talk to them. Maybe I should message them and tell them that. One is morbidly obese, with heart problems. He’s had covid twice, but managed to avoid a respirator, although he did have cat scans and other tests for his heart. The other is barely surviving in the bible belt. So maybe I’ll still have one of them in a few years.

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The one relative I like is my half sister. She’s been very kind to me since our mother died. She’s apologized for mean things she said in years past, and we’ve talked quite a bit. - But now she’s fighting breast cancer, and she’s ten years older than me, so while it’s nice that we’ve made up, she’s yet another loved one that I get to watch die.

She had a double mastectomy last month. Thus far her doctors say they’re not finding any more, so my fingers are metaphorically crossed.

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I need a few healthy, reasonably sane friends. Where does a person find such people? Adults typically go to bars, but I hate drunks, and loud music. I don’t do church, obviously. I can’t do volunteer work, I might lose my SSI.

Maybe I’ll just stick with plan A and asphyxiate myself when Don dies. I just hope I have the guts.

My Australian friend and I seem to have grown too far apart. Conversations stall and stay stalled for a year at a time. I think it started when his father got a new girlfriend, and he hated her irrationally, and I tried to explain it from the perspective of the girlfriend.
Oh well.

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I’ll die, and no one will even notice, and this house will go to whatever charity I pick, and that makes me sad. I can’t even bribe someone to be a pen pal with the promise of property upon my death.

At times like this, it always occurs to me that I wouldn’t have this problem if I died before Don. But he’s been much improved the past two years or so, to the point that I’d feel bad intentionally leaving him with the responsibility of dealing with my corpse. I may wait until our burial plots are paid for, and the headstone is installed, (I’m pre-ordering it, for obvious reasons), then asphyxiate myself.

He never expresses any desire to talk to anyone, and spends the vast majority of his time watching re-runs of 60s-70s TV shows. I legitimately don’t think he’d be nearly as bothered by losing me, as I would be by losing him. He might cry briefly, but nothing would change for him, aside from the bills, obviously. He has no innate need for human connection, so far as I can tell. Quite the contrary. He actively avoids it. He never even uses Facebook, Reddit, or Imgur. He never goes out. Nothing.

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Well that was horrifically depressing. And I took three ibuprofen while I was sitting here, and I still have a headache.

Last updated July 20, 2022