What Every Happened To Me?

Hello, long time no see. This is going to be a personal post that I’m sure will be of zero interest to anyone. However, since the last film I reviewed was in January of 2017, I thought it appropriate to briefly explain my absence. I’m going to cover a few things, from politics to my health, to the passing of my mother, and even the passing of my cat in 2018. I’ll also talk about my lack of desire to watch horror movies. All of these played an important role in why I haven’t been posting here.

So let’s dive in, shall we…

I spent the first half of my life being a Republican. About halfway through Bush Jr.’s first term, I realized I was being lied to. I had failed on every level to see the falsehoods I was being fed by the party. I had supported a war in Iraq, I believed they had WMD’s. When Colin Powell sat before the U.N and told the world that Iraq was concealing WMD’s, I believed him! Even though our scientists were telling us it was false. And guess what? It was indeed false.

You see, it turns out that what I was told was the “liberal media” was not in fact the liberal media, it was just the media, and they were right. I’ve always believed that people have the right to love and be whomever they want to be. But more than that, I believe that being gay or transgender is not a choice. It’s who these people are.

After 9/11, I watched then-president Bush push an agenda of hate and fear. The further I got away from the party, the more I started to see that they have been doing that for years and years, but they masked it through patriotism and Christianity. I became so disgusted by the party that I registered as an Independent. I have been ever since, and I have voted for Democrats and Independents since the early 2000s.

Now let’s jump ahead to 2016 and trump. I wasn’t a fan of his, but I loved The Celebrity Apprentice. I always kind of thought trump was an unpleasant person and he made some of the dumbest decisions on that show, but I just loved seeing these celebs trying to work together. But seeing his insane run for president and actually winning depressed and terrified me. And the sad part is, I recall watching his announcement that he was running, it was laughable and it went bad. He said things that were just flat racist and xenophobic that should have ended his political career.

But even after that speech, I was still willing to listen to him. I thought for sure he would come out and say something like, “I misspoke, what I meant to say was…” and that he’d walk it back and we’d move on. But he didn’t. He doubled down on that hate. And then little by little the GOP went all in on it.

The man is so obviously a narcissist. So obviously racist. And yet so many people were like, “Yeah, but her emails.”

I knew it was going to be bad. I knew if the GOP didn’t start standing up to trump, we would be paying for it for years. And that’s exactly what has happened. The man is literally the embodiment of everything the GOP accuses the Democrats of being. I watched this disgusting human, embarrass our country on a daily basis. The world was laughing at us. And his idiotic supporters didn’t give a damn. They loved him more because “He says it like it is.” The man lied on a daily basis and they loved it. They still do.

So, yes, I saw the writing on the wall. This country that I loved, it turns out, was not the country I thought it was. That so many people knew trump was a trash human being, and still voted for him. It really bothered me. But more than that, knowing that it was going to get worse, for years to come, I just crawled further into my social anxiety-riddled world.

I didn’t want to write. And I just couldn’t get into movies any longer. I just binge-watched TV and doom scrolled on Twitter. I don’t know why I lost interest in films. I mean, I would literally be like, I don’t want to spend 90 minutes or two hours watching something and then end up watching 7 episodes of some TV shows I’d never seen before.

But this isn’t the only thing that was going on. My health was getting worse. You see, I’m a binge eater with diabetes. Basically, it means I don’t eat because I’m hungry, I eat because I want to eat. My diabetes was out of control and my doctor was telling me I needed to go on insulin. I did not want that to happen. So I said, give me three more months to get my act together. He agreed.

Now just around that time, I had been introduced to the game of Destiny. I hated it at first. I had been a Call of Duty fan until the game turned into a heaping pile of garbage. But Destiny sucked me in and all of a sudden, I was playing it 8 hours a day or more. I was consumed with it. In that three months until my next doctor’s appointment, I had lost 30 pounds and my diabetes was near normal numbers. Since I wasn’t watching as many movies and TV shows, I wasn’t binge eating.

I was playing so much I thought, I could be a streamer, I could make YouTube videos and get paid for doing something that I love. I spent about a thousand dollars on equipment. I started putting out videos. Started to build a small following, and then Destiny 2 came out and it sucked. I kept playing but it was bad. I still play it, and it’s in my opinion, the worst it’s ever been. I don’t know what they’re doing over there at Bungie but the game is not in a good place and I honestly no longer think it’s ever going to be as good as it was. I still have hope though.

Anyway, my streaming career never took off for a couple of reasons. One, I don’t like to talk to people I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to be political on stream, but if someone says some stupid trump stuff, I would respond. But most of all, I cannot play and talk to people at the same time. I just can’t. I either play or I talk. And then there was the increasing levels of social anxiety that had been getting worse. I made videos for a couple more years but I just wasn’t into it. It was taking the fun out of playing the game.

Also, I’m a web designer. And my business was tanking. I just lost interest in designing because I was always so eager to get a new client that I would underbid. So I’d charge like 1500 for a site, that anyone else would charge five grand for. I was overworked, underpaid. But then, one of my clients hired me on a monthly basis to update their site. And, I became complacent. They paid me just enough to pay the bills and have a little left over.

Instead of taking on new clients, I just satback and worked for them. I let my business go down the drain more or less. Then, at the height of comfort, they tell me they’re retiring. But we got like a year left. Then they tell me maybe longer because they need to keep the business going until their new home is ready and that could be two years or more.

I still sat on my ass because I just had no motivation. I was drowning in depression and didn’t realize it. Then, about 4 months ago, I was told two weeks before the next payday, that it would be my last. I thought I still had a year left. So, in the past 4 months, I’ve maxed out all my credit cards, I’ve only got 500 a month coming in, from that same client but that will end in January.

So why am I writing this on a Sunday morning instead of trying to find new clients or work? Well, I’ve put an ad on Facebook, it’s been on for a week and it’s so far done nothing but I’m just tired. I have been working 12 or more hours a day for months, every single day of the week trying to learn more about my craft, taking classes and so on and I’m just tired. I loved writing for this site. I miss reviewing movies. And I think I’d like to start again. But this time I’m gonna be less creepy about it.

What do I mean by less creepy? I am a 53-year-old guy living in a crappy town, with a broken tooth, I’m overweight, the closest I’ve come to a date in years is watching horror movies and dreaming about whoever the female lead is. And I feel like all my old posts came off as creepy when it was my intention to be like creepy funny. But I was wrong because, especially in the past few years, the last thing any woman needs is to be sexualized by some nerd on the internet passing himself off as a critic. I am better than that, we all should be better than that.

But wait, there’s more! In the years since my last post, my aunt has passed away, two years later, my uncle Kim passed away. Even more sad. Kim was funny, he was a cop, a good cop, I idolized him growing up. He was healthy, led an active lifestyle. Like me, he was 6 foot 2 inches tall. A solid 220 and died in hospice just a shell of his former self. Then this past January, my mother died. We had always been close. In many ways, she was my best friend. Her health had been declining but we were optimistic. She kept telling us she was going. And we didn’t believe her. Because she had been telling us she was dying for 10 years. But, she lost her leg and spent months in the hospital before and after.

She wouldn’t do her exercises, so her back became infested with bed sores. She got transferred to a Vegas hospital, she was going to have some surgery that would scrape all that stuff off her back and give her a chance to heal. She had a DNR. That night she had a heart attack. The doctors and nurses rushed in, I wasn’t there, my dad was. They just started working on her and my dad okayed it. Not thinking. I would have done the same thing. That’s what you do.

She never really recovered from that and she spent her last week of life, in a hospital bed, in a mostly vegetative state, in pain and suffering. After about 5 days, my dad had decided that we’re gonna need to talk about turning the machines off. Because we knew this wasn’t what she wanted. It was late afternoon, early evening and we decided that I would go home and grab my login info for Peacock so that I could spend the night with her watching Murder She Wrote. She loved that show, I hated it. We didn’t know if she could fully understand what was going on but if there was anything left, maybe the music and the sounds of the show would bring her some kind of comfort.

I raced home, it was a 2-hour drive. I had a beard that she hated, so I shaved it off while I was home, I grabbed the login info for Peacock, fed the cat, and was just about ready to leave when my dad gave me the news. My mother had passed, she had another heart attack, she was gone. I think I shouted “NO!” into the phone. I cried. That was just over six months ago.

I had another doctor’s appointment this past week. All my numbers looked good except for my blood sugar. It had been good, but the last 4 months have been stressful, losing my main client and main source of income. Trying everything to obtain new clients and not being able to. It’s just been very difficult. But I finally talked about my mental health to my doctor, she put me on a new medicine. She said it’s got some potential side effects but to bear with it. It should take a couple of weeks for it to start working, but in the meantime, the side effects could be difficult.

For me, the side effects have been a mild headache, mild nausea, and a not caring attitude. I don’t know how to describe it. I just have been wanting to keep going to bed. I have zero energy. But, on the bright side, I gave into it, I spent hours in bed, Friday and yesterday, waking up late afternoon, and feeling pretty good. The energy isn’t all there yet but I feel almost optimistic, maybe?

And this optimism has made me want to give this another go. Now I have to focus on making money, so I need new clients. I’m going to focus on SEO and SEO blog writing for them, if possible but I certainly won’t turn down any design work. But the plan is to also try to get in a review a week over here if at all possible. I just watched Shadow In The Clouds last night on Hulu and I really enjoyed it. So, I hope to write about it soon. Maybe tomorrow, we shall see.

Anyway, if you took the time to read all my ramblings here, thank you. Thanks for listening and thanks for understanding.