A Bit of Wit, Mk. 2

THE HITS JUST KEEP ON FUCKING COMING.

The universe, not content with my spouse and I dropping 16K since July on surprise unplanned car and house repairs, threw another one at us. 

My spouse hit a deer with their car on the highway just a short while ago. He and his other partner are physically okay, which is the most important thing.

His car, however, is going to be totaled. Given that it's a 12-year old car with over 200K miles on it, there's no way our insurance will pay to get it repaired. Which means he's going to need a new car IMMEDIATELY. Which also means a car loan. Fortunately, neither of our cars have an existing loan, we own them outright.

But now the one last thing this year he and I were really looking forward to because we had to cancel everything else because of all the financial disasters, will join the list of canceled plans. No more PAX Unplugged, that's now officially off the table. Soooooo in an attempt to recoup some of THAT loss, I'll be putting a couple of 3-day PAX Unplugged passes on eBay, once I physically get them in the mail. Unless someone here wants to take them off my hands. 

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK MY LIFE

What the hell did I do in the second half of 2026 to piss off the universe like this?
 

Back in late September (on Facebook), I announced that I was going to be deleting my FB at the end of the year. I still intend to do that, for this site is still terrible for my brain, and FB continues to get worse by the day. At this point I now see more ads than actual posts by friends in my feed, so, that just gives me even less incentive to stick around.

As a reminder, I don't have any Meta app on my phone, so, if you message me via FB, I will not see it unless I am physically on my PC, which might mean I won't see your message for days afterwards. Best way to get in touch with me is calling me/texting/email. If you need that info, let me know. 😃

I also said I'd be setting up my website to allow those who still want to stay in touch with me and keep up with my shenanigans by subscribing to a newsletter that I intend on putting out once a month, starting in January. That's now been done, it's now live for people to sign up for!

Just an FYI: If you do sign up, you'll get a confirmation message on the website, you won't get an auto-generated confirmation email.

Some of you know this, some of you don't, so--

Most Friday evenings I do video game streaming on Twitch, starting around 7:30-8 PM ET and going for about 3 hours. 

Other times I stream photography stuff, be it editing or film developing. Those tend to be varied at other times during the week, and only happen when I have stuff to work on. 

Tonight I will be finishing my Spooptober by finishing my current playthrough of Resident Evil: Revelations, so if that's something you're interested in, join me on Twitch at 8:00. 

https://www.twitch.tv/eroivas 
 

Also, if you miss ANY stream, they all get uploaded to my YouTube channel for later viewing: https://www.youtube.com/@ERoivas

This probably gets filed under “no shit, Sherlock,” but it’s only been recently that I’ve come to the realization that so many of us had bad parents, parents that did not give us the validation and love that we needed growing up, which is why so many of us seek that on social media and become incredibly depressed when we don’t get it, and I include myself in that.

It’s not surprising that I see this really the most with my fellow creatives and artist friends, as, well, I am one; whenever we post a piece of art or some writing and it doesn’t get the likes, comments, reposts, and shares that we hope for, those feelings of rejection rear their ugly heads. We’re baring little pieces of our soul into the void in hopes for some validation and when something “doesn’t do numbers,” it stings. You’d think after getting the same treatment growing up we’d have a bit of thicker skin, but that’s not always the case.

And I know part of that has to do with the algorithms of social media, which is openly hostile to artists, which then expands into the wider internet at large and how it as a whole is becoming more and more hostile to any creative person by the day. Doubly so if you also do NSFW stuff.

But it doesn’t change the fact that many of us grew up with crap parents or relatives who failed to provide for our emotional needs as kids, so now we are desperately seeking it from the internet. We all want someone, anyone, to be proud of us.

I just want to hug you all. Proud of you all for still keeping on despite the toll life has taken on you. Don’t stop creating, and don’t stop being you.

Been taking a break from most social media. Just tired of all the constant outrage and I need to recharge.

I checked Facebook and Bluesky for the first time in a week earlier today. Instantly regretted it.

If it wasn't for the fact that 95% of my friends and my entire family use Facebook and Facebook only to communicate (I so much prefer just straight text messages), I would've deleted it ages ago.

I keep waffling back and forth between keeping it and deleting it. The fear of cutting off that line of communication keeps me from doing it. But then again, I keep having to remember that I can't keep chasing connections with people who don't have time in their lives for me anymore.

Five days away from turning 40, and man, I did not expect at the end of my 30s to have my spouse de-nest from me a year after we bought a house together, lose most of my friends to parenthood, lose more friends to just becoming complete shut-ins who now apparently turn into pumpkins after 9 PM, to now find myself very directionless and lonely.

The next decade of my life is going to be profoundly different. Since the life I thought I was going to have once I became a homeowner has been completely blown to hell, I've no choice to but to find a new path forward, with new people, even though trying to make new friends and new community is so much harder at this point.

I’ve been thinking about my friends a lot lately. I miss them. I barely see the majority of them.

When I bought my house two years ago, I was thrilled at the prospect that I would now be a 1-2 hours’ drive away from most of them, and was looking forward to having them come visit. But that hasn’t come to pass.

In fact, I’ve recently had the painful realization that for all the people I call friend, there’s really just a handful of people in my life that regularly keep in touch with me, and a lot of my relationships with most of my friends are one-sided. Usually it’s me doing the outreach, the checking in, the planning. Not so much the other way around.

Furthermore, when Ethan made the decision to move to Buffalo last year, I chose not to follow him for two reasons: one, we had just bought the house only a year prior, and I was not going to move again. And two, I didn’t want to abandon everyone. I didn’t want to leave the majority of my friends behind and move to a place where I know no one and know nothing about. I didn’t want to start from nothing AGAIN.

But, as time’s gone on, it’s becoming more and more evident that my second reason for staying here is getting flimsier by the day. With most of my friends now parents, the idea of them visiting me, even just an hour away, seems to be an insurmountable problem. And I get it, it’s a lot of logistics and effort to bundle little ones in a car for a drive, even an hour away. Many also have no energy for anything else. And some have made parenting their whole identity and are presently losing what made them a person, like they’re not allowed to have any other interests outside of being a parent, so something as small as a day trip to visit (with or without the kids) comes with a monumental side of guilt.

For me, though, as someone without kids, and will never have kids, losing most of my friends to parenthood makes me feel sad. They simply have no time for me. It’s not really a coincidence that the friends that I still keep in frequent contact with are ones who are also not parents, but also the ones who are 3+ hours away. It’s pretty telling that in the last 2 years I’ve spent more time with people who live multiple hours away (or even a whole country away) than those who live within 90 minutes of me.

It also makes me feel a bit resentful. I lost my 20s largely due to Crohn’s disease; I had to miss a lot of social gatherings and time with friends because I was constantly in pain with flare-ups, in and out of doctor’s offices, hospitals, and bedridden for weeks or months at a stretch. While my friends were enjoying their after-college life, I couldn’t participate. And by the time I finally was healed, put into remission, and graduated college (I was nearly 30), my friends all got married and started settling down, and began getting to the business of starting families. While I was sick, they moved on with their own lives. When I was finally able to party, so to speak, they got it all out of their system. And while I don’t blame my friends for going about their own lives without me, it’s not fucking fair.

I’ve spent my 30s trying to make up for lost time, trying to chase my 20s. And I’ve largely failed at it. I’m not getting that decade of my life back. My friends have moved on, and I must resign myself to do the same. I simply can’t wait until all those kids turn 18 and my friends have their lives back, as it were.

There’s no one to blame, really. I’m not mad at my friends for following their own paths. I can’t expect them to wait up for me. It simply means that I must go my own way and stop chasing a time that I can’t get back, even if one of those potential paths forward means I leave the place where I’ve spent the last two decades of my life behind and start all over again.