The life story of a snow leopard - Part 2
LJ is making me break this up into multiple pieces to post. So bear with me. There will be several.
Our older sister, while unreliable and often selfish in her behavior, was all we had as far as family for a long time now. As I unravel memory and history with it, I realize what truly brought our mother and stepfather home. It wasn’t the fire so much as what happened next. Right before Thanksgiving of this year, our sister was driving in a mad dash to see her boyfriend, who was married. She’d learned well from our mother how to lead relationships. These things make an impact on your behavior in life, and if you’re not careful, you might repeat patterns. I think it’s not destined, but sometimes people lack self awareness. Actions occur, and they don’t see what they’re doing. In any case, she was following similar behavior as our mother in falling for men who were already involved. That he had kids should also have factored in, given her pause, but it hadn’t seemed to. His wife wasn’t willing to let him go easily, and so there was a tug of war. On this fateful night, that would come to a head.
Our sister was upset at something going on between her boyfriend and his wife. I suppose he was going to stick with her and end things with our sister. They’d argued on the phone, and she dashed off inebriated and upset, driving way too fast to try to get where he lived in a town about 50 minutes away. She would not make it.
We were home up late that night watching TV when we heard the doorbell ring. An EMT was at the door, a longtime friend of our sister’s. He said something bad had happened. He then went about telling us our sister had been in an accident, she was critically injured, and flown by helicopter to the hospital in the nearby city, Amarillo. She was undergoing surgery to save her life, but it didn’t look good. I remember little beyond that. He left after speaking with our stepgrandmother, who was staying with us at the time as previously mentioned. My younger sister and I crumpled to the floor in shock, tears coming unbidden. We didn’t know what to do. Our sister may have had her flaws, but she was more family to us than our mother had been in years, and we loved her dearly. The news that she might not live crushed us.
I don’t think we slept that night. It was all too painful. If we had school the next day, we did not go. Instead, we went to the hospital to see our sister, whom had by some miracle survived the night. Our mother and stepfather would get the news and rush back. This is what would cement their return for the long-term. It wasn’t the fire. They would insist we return to school as normal, but it was not easy, and in this period of time we would be punished for missing classes. It didn’t matter what the reason was. You had to really work to make up for being absent. Some teachers would just refuse to give you the assignments you missed in order to give you failing grades. This was punishment for daring to miss school. Yet the next day my younger sister pleaded to stay at the hospital and not be forced to go back. As she often managed to get treated differently than I, she had been allowed, while I’d been forced to attend classes. This upset me further during an already trying time.
The whole ordeal brought things to a head with our family. Our older sister was the black sheep due to moving out, not bending to our mother’s will, and her wild lifestyle. She’d become pretty outrageous probably due to being suppressed in our household for so many years. It often has the opposite effect parents think it will. She’d also been given a terrible example from our mother and father, her stepfather. Then later having her father back in the mix had pushed her over the edge. I think that’s why she moved out, really.
Now, due to the accident, her biological father came down from Illinois, where he’d moved back to after the divorce. Our older sister’s boyfriend, the married man, also came to see her at the hospital. There was butting of heads between everyone. Our mother’s friends whom she’d half ignored for a time now, the pastor and his wife, were there to support us. Though overall there were factions. We younger kids sided against our mother and stepfather because they’d been out of the mix for so long, and we were on our sister’s side, with her boyfriend strangely, even though we hardly knew him. This was our sister’s side though. We were upset with our mother and didn’t trust her. Our older sister’s father was trying to be neutral and play mediator, but he was biased against our mother as well due to his experience with her and her current husband. It was all a mess with constant arguing and disagreement. Everyone wanted to point fingers of blame and accusation. I remember so little of it now, but at the time it was traumatic and life altering.
My younger sister would never fully recover, missing more and more school as she was upset and couldn’t manage to catch up. She was in the public junior high by now, and her absences were counting against her. Catching up was almost untenable, and teachers really worked against you. Eventually, she’d convince our mother and stepfather to pull her out of school. She was supposed to home school, with our step grandmother as teacher. She’d been a teacher earlier in life, so it was plausible. If only we’d known how exaggerated our stepgrandmother’s history was, her education, and experience. She’d been a substitute teacher, not a full-on teacher. She hadn’t gone to college and didn’t have a degree. She was ignorant of many things and very prejudiced. It was all delusional that she’d ever teach my sister.
I’d continue longer in school, managing to somehow not fail out that semester. It was a difficult time. Our mother and stepfather were back, our stepbrother was still staying with us, going to the Catholic school for the semester he spent living with us, and our sister was in the hospital for several weeks before being taken home by her boyfriend whom thought having EMT training made him better than doctors.
Much of his “care” probably hurt more than helped as she was not following the advice of her doctors. She’d broken so many bones, including several in her spine, her collarbone, her arm, and she had a crushed pelvis they’d had to work to put back together. She had good pain meds, as was common back then when opioids were the thing to prescribe, and her boyfriend wasn’t going to prevent her from getting up and moving around since she didn’t want to be kept to her bed. So she was up even in the hospital with him around, and that was insane. I’m surprised she didn’t do severe damage to herself. Doctors warned that with the damage her body had endured she could risk harming her spinal cord. Yet that didn’t deter her or her boyfriend. I don’t care how stubborn she was; he shouldn’t have encouraged or given in to her. That was wrong of him and did little to recover any respect I could have for him after all the despair he’d been the cause of.
Our stepbrother went back home to spend Christmas with his mother, much to the chagrin of our mother and stepfather. They didn’t want him to go, but he wanted to as he missed his mother. He thought he could come back. His mother would make sure that didn’t happen. So it was. Things continued to be tumultuous at home, school was ever difficult to focus on, and I wasn’t happy with life overall. Our sister was back at her home but still the black sheep. After everything that had happened, our mother didn’t want us to see her. Yet she’d come to see us on Christmas, as limited as her mobility was. She still shouldn’t have been up and about at all. Her status as someone we shouldn’t interact with remained though, as she was not on good terms with our mother. So we were practically banned from speaking with her. This was hard on us considering how close we were to her.
With so much instability and unhappiness at home, I found school less worthwhile. I wanted the freedom I saw my sister had, being out of school, not realizing the lack of education she was experiencing. I hated how hard I was finding things. I’d never had to work so hard to get mediocre grades. I’d been in the honor’s society in junior high. I suppose years of stress at home had taken their toll. I barely made it through the first semester of honor’s biology. I mentioned that class before. It was akin to what is now considered an AP class. While I’d have probably easily handled it years prior, science always being one of my better subjects, I couldn’t focus well or get a grasp on it now.
With kids in school being their usual unkind selves, I’d been bullied all my life to this point, and generally not fitting in so I was always picked on and felt like an outsider, I really wasn’t doing well. I had to change electives from theater arts to speech for the spring term, though the teacher was the same. The school had messed up my schedule with theater arts, and my lunch period as well as English hour were changed. So now I was missing lunch with my girlfriend. She was about the only friend I had anymore, so that was tough. I eventually got it sorted out, but that required the change over to speech I mentioned. I remember one day in speech class when the teacher asked us a question about gays. I’m not sure why or what the context was, or even how it was appropriate. I’m guessing it was not. Everyone around me in class rather loudly voiced their opinions. They were not good ones. There was a consensus that gays should be drug out in the street and shot. This was not corrected by the teacher. Thus, my continued self loathing and internalization. It was a lonely world I lived in.
Teachers continued to punish us for anything they could. If you missed a day, you risked getting a failing grade on assignments you missed. If someone in class acted up, the teacher would give hours of extra homework you were obligated to do or else. The “or else” was being forced to stay after school for detention the next day so you could do the assignments you’d not done as homework the night before. This was due to the “no zero” policy they had instated that year. Yet somehow the kids who instigated these punishments, who also failed to complete the homework, didn’t seem to be held to the same rules. At least I don’t remember them trying to do all the extra homework, staying for detention the next day to do the assignments, or even caring in the least.
At one point, it all became too much. I was virtually always doing school work. I was anxious and couldn’t sleep as I had insomnia back then, too. My mother never did get me treated for my OCD, so it wasn’t any wonder she didn’t try to get me help for my anxiety-caused insomnia. I got to the point where I’d cover up any clocks in my room so I couldn’t see how late I was up and figure out how little sleep I’d get. “I will only get four hours if I fall asleep RIGHT NOW!” They were not good times.
I remember getting home from school only to start my homework. It might be around 4 p.m., and I’d work until around 7, eat some dinner, go back to doing homework if I had more left. Then I’d shower, get ready for bed, and study for the next hour or two before going to bed. I often was up past midnight though studying, stressing out over the next day’s tests or pop quizzes.
I always aspired to go to college. So the sense I was not doing well throughout the fall and going into the spring had me coming unraveled. This whole school year had gone terribly. Which reminds me that I’d taken driver’s ED, but after my sister’s accident, my mother was afraid to let me get my driver’s permit. So she wouldn’t provide the documents I needed in order to take the written test to get my permit. That meant the semester was wasted as I wasn’t allowed to take the test along with my classmates. That was in December. It all snowballed into spring, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
One Friday night when I came home from school, I was just done. I remember feeling defeated. I had so much homework, as well as punishment homework, and then various tests to study for come the next week. It seemed insurmountable. I told my mother I just didn’t want to go back. Instead of being a good parent and talking with me about it, going with me to school to talk to the principal and guidance counselor, she just agreed to withdraw me from school as she had my younger sister. I too would be “home schooled.”
This was all a delusion, of course. We never were taught at home. Things were unstructured at best. It was like a long school vacation with us existing at home but not kept to any real schedule or forced to adhere to lessons or learn anything. The loose oversight, as long as we behaved and went about life as usual, made for some unusual years of childhood. I came of age isolated from my peers. Our mother had never liked us to have friends and kept us from interacting with them outside of school as best she could. She liked to maintain control, and now that she was back home isolated us once again. It was harder with my sister who was more outgoing and forceful about it, but she wasn’t doing very well at this time herself. So both of us were going through a period of what I’d almost call mourning. Perhaps it was for the childhoods we’d known, innocence, the days of being relatively carefree. Everything was different. Nothing felt “right.”
Due to being so isolated and kept away from what was normal for kids our age, I lost touch with my girlfriend. We spoke on the phone sometimes, but we hardly saw one another. Eventually, I called her to tell her I thought we were better as just friends as we’d never really changed from that anyway, other than to say we were dating. She agreed. I don’t know if this upset her or if she felt the same way. It was all so strange for me, and I didn’t hear from her again after that. I meant to keep in touch, but I’d never been good about handling phone calls. They felt uncomfortable. A good parent, again, would have done something here. My mother should have discussed this with me and tried to make sure I was interacting with other kids, to find out what was going on with my girlfriend and see if she could keep me on track there. It was all the chaos that had derailed things in the first place. I really liked this girl. But how do you handle a relationship when you’re young and naïve, all while your entire life as you know it feels like it’s falling apart?
I almost made it through my freshman year. I think I had six weeks left. It’s strange to think back on now. Surreal. I would later get my diploma through a friend my sister had made at the Catholic school. She became Catholic while attending, went to youth group gatherings, and that’s where she met this lady. They weren’t even ten years apart, and that helped forge a friendship. She taught the youth group and helped her go through the process of becoming Catholic, as I recall. So when she saw what had happened with us being pulled from school, she worked through channels to get us diplomas. I don’t know how we qualified. She was a social worker, and I guess she had her means. The laws were very lax in those days for home schooling, also. What kind of curriculum you had to follow and standards you had to meet were practically nonexistent. I suppose she thought we needed something to help us out, especially as messed up as our home lives were, so she did this for us. It’s as valid a diploma as any, it would seem. Although, I’ve always felt a bit like it wasn’t legitimate. I’ve gone on in life, tried to move on, and not worry too much about it.
So we’ve reached the end of my high school years. I skipped ahead to 2002 when I received my diploma. My sister and I are not the same age, but we received them at the same time. I don’t think it mattered much considering the circumstances. It’s another reason I feel less than stellar about the whole thing though.
Was 2002 that long ago? It doesn’t seem like it. I don’t feel like that many years have passed since. I’ve skipped a few though, so I’ll venture back even further just to fill in the gaps.
I previously indicated that home schooling didn’t involve much schooling at home. Our step grandmother showed no initiative in teaching. She didn’t create lesson plans or have a structure to things. There was no schedule for our days let alone weeks. Time simply passed. By some chance I was interested in learning, so I pursued knowledge on my own. I went to the public library. I read. I worked an entire year to save money toward buying a computer. I’d tried and tried to get an old 386 Compaq we had to work online, but by then it was too old. In those days, computer tech advanced quickly. Nowadays, you can use a 10-year-old computer to get online and do basic tasks. Then, five years was too much to keep up with modern computing tasks. The 14,400 baud modem couldn’t manage to connect and hold a connection. It was also too slow for the internet as it had become. I remember getting on AOL using that computer years before, but I never really understood what the internet could be used for at that age. I simply went into AOL chatrooms. That was a bad idea! People were crazy in chat back then. Imagine all that Twitter sees, combined with Reddit, mixed up with 4chan. That’s about what those chatrooms were like. Seeing as they were not for someone 12 years old, I didn’t continue to log on. The internet seemed pointless without someone explaining the point.
Here it was 1999 though, and I now understood. I spent an entire summer trying to get that darn Compaq online. I tried all the software we had for doing so, anything it would run. Sometimes it would try to log on, but then I couldn’t do anything. Prodigy was one such ISP of sorts. It let you connect, but what you were supposed to do with that connection I don’t know to this day. Everything was done via 3.5” floppy disks. That’s disk with a “k” as the circular laser disc variety were not being used in computers when the 386 came out. Nor could the hard drives have installed anything large enough to require a disc. I don’t know if the 386 even had a 100MB hard drive. There were some even more obscure, strange sorts of software I found disks for, but nothing worked to get online. AOL was always sending out trial edition disks, and discs by 1999. My mother wasn’t going to pay for that past the trial period, and even then I couldn’t get it to work on the old computer. All that said, to top it off the old PC was running Windows 3.1. That was practically useless in 1999 and no wonder it wouldn’t install or run newer programs.
Eventually, I’d saved up enough, done research for months, and made phone calls to computer sales companies. I think it was CDW where I purchased the computer. This was in April of 1999. The computer was a Compaq Presario with an AMD K6-2 running at 380MHz and 1MB of pipeline cache on the motherboard. There was an integrated video chip on the motherboard with 4MB video memory. It had an 8GB “bigfoot” hard drive. I’d find out why it was called that. You’ve never seen such a big, strangely shaped hard drive. I can’t remember who made that thing! It also had an Imation Superdisk drive instead of a Zip drive, which made it only useful for reading and writing regular 1.44MB floppies. This beast of a system came with a 15” 800x600 monitor, old ball mouse, and web keyboard. Everything was beige as tech was in those days. This cost me just over $1,000 USD. It was running Windows 98 SE, thank goodness, as that version resolved a lot of the issues 98 had. It was leagues ahead of Windows 95, which I’d never liked.
While I’d done the research and saved the money toward it, my mother was paying for the internet. She actually agreed to that now. Since it was technically a family computer, my sister was allowed to use it. I had it in my room, so she’d come in whenever she wanted and push me out. She and her friends likely wanted to get online and chat, flirt with guys they didn’t know, doing the things that girls their age did with the limited knowledge of application for the internet most kids had in those days. This always upset me because it was my room, and I’d done all the work to get the computer. In spite of that, I made the best of the situation.
The internet was a new frontier. It opened up a world I’d never dreamed of. I was exposed to ideas and people I wouldn’t have been otherwise. I discovered the furry fandom, therianthropy, though it would be a while before I learned that word, and all the myriad stories online in the genre. I read “Trek Wars: The Furry Conflict” where furry writers created a sort of round robin story set in both the Star Wars and Star Trek universes. There was some incident that allowed them to cross over. That was interesting enough at the time, but then make all the characters furry, and it was something amazing. I read it as fast as their moderator and site owner could compile the round robin, or RP threads, into something more cohesive as a story. I remember discovering the Transformation Story Archive and all the stories within. “The Winds of Change” with the round robin stories that followed the Jon Sleeper original, which spawned and entire universe of fiction. Then there was “The Blind Pig” universe, a darker furry futurescape where a virus from Mars would infect the population, and if you didn’t die from it, you might become an anthropomorphic creature. It was definitely a less hopeful look upon how furries might come to be. I can’t remember how the virus came to earth, but that is perhaps unimportant. The realms of fantasy and reality I was exposed to helped form who I was to become, who I am today. I don’t know where I’d be without the internet, and it was all thanks to that first computer.
I’ve actually just recently been back home to Texas, and I dug it out of storage. It’s in the room with me, waiting to be dusted out so I can see if it still works. I imagine it will need a new CMOS battery.
This computer would also be what introduced me to the world of tech and got me interested in it. I joined AMDzone and learned about AMD and their budget processors. There was already a community of enthusiasts, and with their knowledge to tap into, I was able to overclock my 380MHz K6-2. There was a simple jumper on the motherboard that controlled the FSB. It was set at 95MHz for this processor, but users had reported it would run fine at 100Mhz, since it supported other processors, and this would up the CPU to 400MHz. This was a big deal back then. At least it made me feel like I’d done something awesome.
I was hooked. I began to look into how to get more performance out of the little Compaq. The proprietary motherboard was fairly limiting, but there were options. AMD processors were often unlocked, especially the mobile variety. The newly released K6-III was more advanced, comparable (at least according to AMD) to Intel’s Pentium III. I found a K6-III+. This was the mobile chip, which had an unlocked multiplier and substantially more onboard L2 cache. This would work in tandem with the L3 cache on the motherboard, supposedly for significant performance gains. The mobile chip was also made to run cooler than the desktop version, so it could be overclocked with the stock heatsink without overheating. I remember getting some Arctic Silver from the online seller I bought the CPU from. He sent a little in a ziplock bag. I managed the swap, though I remember very little about it now.
With the FSB set to 100MHz, I used the jumper setting for a 6x multiplier in order to get 600MHz. That little CPU ran without a hitch. It was such a cool experience. It was a 400MHz process overclocked 200MHz. I wasn’t content with that though. I had also purchased a Voodoo 3000 video card with 16MB of video memory. That was to bring issues I would never quite overcome. It was passively cooled, which was a bad idea. I was forced to leave the cover off the case and set a 60MM case fan inside to blow air over the heatsink of the video card. It still ran incredibly hot. Most crashes I had from then on were related to that video card. Does anyone remember Voodoo? They used to be THE video card manufacturer. Forget ATI or Nvidia, they were who you went to for graphics. They’re barely a memory now, of course.
I would continue to learn what I could about technology and tinker with the Compaq, but it had limitations from the platform I could never quite overcome. Something like tech gremlins, where the proprietary motherboard refused to operate the components installed to their full potential. It should have been faster, but it wasn’t. In those days motherboards and chipsets made a huge difference. Motherboard reviews were a bigger deal. You could hamper your new computer with a subpar experience due to the motherboard if you chose poorly. This being an OEM board made for a prebuilt company like Compaq meant it was just low budget and lackluster. It didn’t matter. I learned a lot from that computer. I’d even upgrade to a 20GB hard drive before I moved on, keeping the old 8GB Bigfoot for backup purposes.
As time turned to begin the year 2000, a big deal as it was the “new millennium,” I’d have a change of focus in life. This wasn’t necessarily my choice. My stepfather’s brother and sister-in-law had made a habit of coming for Christmas and New Year’s each year, so they were there. I remember watching the live stream of the ball dropping in New York City over a 56K internet connection. It was an image the size of a business card on an 800 x 600 monitor. My step uncle (is that even a thing?) quipped that he didn’t think anyone would ever want to watch video like that on a computer. He thought it was a stupid idea. Little did he know.
January also brought with it the aforementioned change. I’d had the bright idea of listing some of my stepfather’s jewelry online. It started with a pair of earrings on Amazon. Then I thought to do the same on eBay. These were early days for both. Everything took a lot of time and effort to list. I was trying to help my mother as he often didn’t give her much toward maintaining the household, and I wanted to show him he could make money online. He still didn’t understand or think it was a good idea. That was, until the first item sold. Suddenly, I was pulled into servitude. I’d spend much of my day each day, or with his schedule late into the night, browsing listings, purchasing items through the account I’d set up for him, because he was bad about buying things. Research, he called it. Then correspondence was involved, with him dictating emails. He couldn’t type. Mine was the only computer in the house as well, other than the old 386 no one used.
He ended up slowly shifting to selling items. The slow process of submitting each item to eBay was tedious and time consuming. I might get through 10-20 a day, and it took a full workday’s worth of time. I was “helping the family business” and expected to do it. I spent far more time with my stepfather than I liked. Listening to him dictate email correspondence was frustrating to no end. I felt stifled spending so much of my time dealing with this work. Yet I was inspired to create a website for him, learning basic HTML coding with an old HTML how-to book and various resources online. I did more with WYSIWYG than code itself, but a website was the result. I ended up learning about photo editing, web sizing for photos, web hosting, and more. I didn’t like Microsoft’s Frontpage much and ended up using Netscape Composer, a far superior piece of software at the time. Later, I would graduate to using Arachophilia, which allowed you to have two panes for viewing the website, a coding pane on the left and preview pane on the right. This helped immensely. It also provided warnings if there were coding errors and allowed for quick access to various tags.
A major thunderstorm that brought large hail hit around midnight one night the previous year, 1999. Strangely enough, the insurance money wouldn’t be used directly to repair the roof. Instead, our stepfather used it mostly on things he wanted to buy. That’s where so many of those purchases on eBay came from. He also purchased a computer to continue his work, but most of the photo editing, ad creation, and website management were done by me on my computer. With the roof needing repaired, he had my younger sister, she was just over a year younger than me, help him. This was unusual, but she had the coordination and could handle heights well. We’d all lived in such a strange state of things for so long it didn’t seem quite as weird as it should have. I couldn’t work on the roof. I don’t deal with heights very well, and I lack coordination to a level that’s absurd. It felt awful, but that’s where a lot of my diving into the work with his online business came from, trying to do something I knew I could manage to help the family. To make myself useful.
During this time, I’d forge friendships that would last all my adult life up to this day. I found The Balto League and Aurora Borealis groups or “clubs” as they were known back then on Yahoo. Other clubs I joined had to do with RP, old IC and OOC places that worked a bit like round robins, where each club member would post a new piece to move the story along, from the point of view of their created character. The first club I joined was a Lion King themed one. I’d begun to think of myself more as a leopard and tried to emulate one in that setting. Developing as I aged meant going through a sort of growth in my understanding of who I was. I had thought I was a snow leopard, I found that book in 3rd grade and wanted to be a cheetah because it seemed more impressive, so fast and agile, and now I wondered if I could be a leopard. These weren’t thoughts I had on a conscious level or would recognize. It was more like what my favorite animal was as far as I was concerned, and I now placed the leopard on that pedestal. It took time to come to terms with my feelings of inadequacy regarding associating myself with snow leopards. I didn’t feel I was worthy. They were beyond me. So I tried to find something less majestic, yet still majestic. That really isn’t fair to leopards. It’s just how my mind worked things out. I can look back in retrospect and analyze these things now. So much was unclear in those early days online.
I was never very active in the Balto clubs on Yahoo, but things shifted more to a forum called The Icy Boards, and from there they took off. As the group settled in there, I became a part of it. I felt like I belonged. Balto was not my favorite movie, taking a close second to The Lion King, but it did bring a lot of us furry-minded folk together. I think most of us were furries still learning what that meant. Most of us still are. Even more, several of us turned out to be therians. We just didn’t know there was a term for what we felt inside.
I had so many long conversations about animal connections and philosophical curiosities with friends from there. Back then it was on AIM or YIM before everyone shifted over to the former. We had weekly group chats through IRC after we moved from Yahoo chat, which amusingly enough had been done through Yahoo’s Cheetah Chat software. Those were fun times.
While the forum for The Furry Conflict allowed me early exposure to the furry fandom, friendships there were hard to come by. I tried, but they were a close group not overly welcoming to newcomers. At least, not to be part of the friend group. You felt like an outsider trying to be part of something you couldn’t really fit into. With TIB, I was truly a part. I felt included. Those were some of the best days of my life. Everything was online, but who cared? My family didn’t understand how you could have friends online. They thought you had to interact with people in person. Well, the friendships I made were just as real and just as significant as those made in person. The world was just unfamiliar with such concepts. The internet was a new frontier. My family didn’t understand me anyway, so this new facet of that lack of understanding made little difference. I made the mistake of mentioning the furry fandom and being a furry just once to my younger sister. She laughed and teased as if it was the most hilarious if not idiotic thing she’d ever heard. No one in my family has heard a word about it since.
I would also find LJ through this group of friends, since it was the place everyone was joining. It made it so much easier to keep in touch and truly interact without needing to be instant messaging all the time. Everything was organized with people giving accounts of their daily lives. This was social media before it was turned into the tainted mess it is now. It wasn’t about quantity or likes. There were no such things as “likes.” It was just a way for people to journal about their lives and friends to keep up to date with what was going on with one another. It was more intimate and substantive than modern social media. Those early days held something special that seems to have been lost.
Even with MySpace and then Facebook, I would stick with LJ for years past when others moved on. Eventually, I even gave in and joined Twitter. It’s all too much all too fast without the same cohesiveness of the older platforms, but it’s where everyone migrated. So it is a necessity if I want to keep in touch. You can’t stand still in life no matter how hard change might be; though the pace at which social media moves now impacts my OCD. It’s not easy for me to handle.
Friends were brought in from such places, either friends of friends invited to join TIB, or people on LJ we’d befriend and invite. So our network of friends grew a little, while still remaining relatively small. This is how I met my second girlfriend, the first person I fell in love with. It was magical and filled with joys I always imagined. We had a great time together. I loved her deeply. The connection felt like something that could last the test of time. At least I thought so. I should have questioned it when she wanted to go to her prom, but we were too far apart for me to take her. So she went with someone local. That was a difficult moment for me, but I dealt with it alright. She just wanted to participate in things. I could understand that. We talked often, if not every day, and there was mutual appreciation and care shared. We could see into one another, even if the other could not see the beauty of themselves. I always saw her beauty and tried to get her to see herself through my eyes. Everything was online. Perhaps this is when I began the path of loving someone for who they were and not for physical appearance or anything related. I didn’t realize this and wouldn’t know there was such a thing for many years to come.
I tried to live up to the ideal. I wanted to give her tokens of love for Christmas. These were unique to her and her interests. She loved Tolkien and “The Lord of The Rings,” so I remember finding an Elvin ring made of silver etched with words in the Elfish language promising love in some eternal fashion, as elves would. The things we do when we’re in love. I don’t know how I managed it as I wasn’t making a lot of money in those days. I did mix music for a local dance studio when they had dance recitals or competitions to go to. This paid better than the work I did for my stepfather, which didn’t pay at all.
Things were done carefully since privacy was important, and even if we did love each other, she didn’t want to share her address. So I was able to route the gifts I got for her through a mutual friend who did know her address. That was very kind of our friend to do. Since her birthday was right before Christmas, I got her a few things including the ring. Doing things like this felt so grand. Just being in love and getting to express that love was a dream come true.
She told me how she slowly unpacked the box and felt like it was a new discovery with each item. I’d surprised her, and it made an impression. The sentiment she shared was genuine. I knew I’d made her happy. That was the point, right?
We continued to talk and dream together, loving each other, as winter turned into spring. I think that’s when another dance came around. I could be imagining this. Somehow, she’d started hanging out with a local guy. He was a friend she hung out with in a group of friends. I did not come to know until years later how she’d felt like she wanted someone who could be there. Things developed with this friend. She distanced herself from me. Our chats had begun to grow further and further apart. A day, a few days, then a week. I was hurting. It was hard. I didn’t know what was going on. After a month of this withdrawal she was doing, she came on chat one day to tell me she no longer loved me. She ended things then. It was May of 2004. I still had my faith then. I went on a long walk praying and pleading for her to change her mind. It ended up taking me miles into the canyon where trails meandered. I found my way back to town and eventually the dance studio where my sister worked. I never told anyone what had happened at the time. It was too painful. That walk was a journey through pain. It took the rest of the year for me to get past this. Well, to get to the point where I wasn’t broken by it. Love never has been easy on me. The journey it leads me on through life is like an endless trek through that canyon, only never finding my way out.
After the painful experience of first love, I had a friend who I began to have feelings for. Perhaps in retrospect, I came to love him. It was difficult because I’d always imagined myself with a girl, and here I was having feelings for a guy. I still hadn’t come to terms with such things, and I couldn’t manage the feelings easily. By the end of the year I’d tell him how I felt, but he was far away and had other love interests. I tried to explain my reticence, why I felt the way I did, and how I’d need time to work through my feelings. He was not patient or willing. He wanted someone then. He wanted things I could not give him. So he moved on just as I started to open up to the possibility of loving him. It was surreal and overall painful. That’s my second brush with love.
Now, I’ve skipped some events again. It’s not easy keeping things in chronological order while so much was happening simultaneously. Going back to the year before, my mother had grown frustrated with her husband. They’d had a tumultuous relationship with a lot of arguing, not to mention the time he broke her arm. Once, they were fighting about something in their bedroom, so my younger sister and I, along with our stepgrandmother (his mother), went to intervene before it got too heated. He picked his own mother up by her arms, lifting her and slamming her into the bedroom door, breaking it. Though it was flimsy, to do that to your aged mother is just unthinkable. Who does something like that? We had confronted him and told him we wouldn’t allow the arguing to continue, that we were going to separate them, and that set him off. So it turned into a fiasco where he ended up slightly bloodied at the end, but also a bit sobered to realize he might not get away with whatever he wanted. We might come together to stop him in the future. Things calmed down a bit between them, for a while anyway.
The unease never truly improved. It simmered beneath the surface and would come out in new arguments, just not as energized, at least when others were around. He hated living in Texas, hated the town, hated the people, and wanted to go “home” to New Mexico. That’s where his previous wife, whom he’d cheated on with our mother, lived with his son. Those were interesting days in of themselves. While they were having their affair, our mother already divorced but he still married, there’d been a lot of fighting between the two. Our mother would get upset and try to call to talk to him when he went to visit his son, so was his excuse. He was still on the fence, between two worlds, trying to figure out how to have both. His soon-to-be ex-wife wasn’t having any of it, and their arguments were no better than he and our mother’s would be years later. One time our mother called while he was visiting his son, she was talking on the phone with his son and found out his father had told him to “Bring me the duct tape. I need to bind your mom and put her in the closet until she calms down.” That didn’t happen, but it was his intent. This is the kind of crazy I was dealing with growing up.
So our mother cooked up a plan. She had connections with various people in the not so legitimate world I mentioned earlier. At least, these people could be sourced by some of the people she knew who’d helped protect her from the seedier individuals that wanted to use her in the past or see her harmed now. Powerful people with money but who had contacts underground that knew how to get things done. I’m speaking strangely, I realize. I just don’t want to name any specific groups or make references. Suffice it to say, sometimes people in power have less than stellar connections in unsavory parts of society. How our mother thought this was the way to deal with a husband she was unhappy with I will never know. She planned it out, and two men showed up one day. They were supposedly there to bring money to our mother and stepfather for his efforts in protecting our mother, since he was seen as a bodyguard at the time.
That’s actually how some of their previous travels had gone about. He was to accompany her as her “bodyguard” on the road as they tried to keep from staying any one place for too long. There was some rhyme or reason to it all, but I was never let in on it. They also had to be certain places at certain times, also for reasons I did not know. Part of the guise to keep her safe involved the pregnancies I mentioned before, which she would conveniently lose.
Along with the money they were supposed to provide, the men said they were going to take our stepfather to buy a car. So he went with our mother and the men to look at cars. Only that’s not what happened. They took him outside of town to some remote area where they beat him and told him never to return, or else. He was left with the clothes on his back and bloodied, disoriented, dumbfounded, and unsure what had just happened. He didn’t know anything had been planned beyond these men not being who he thought they were and thought perhaps our mother was now in trouble. Though he wouldn’t try to get back, he might have checked to be sure we were all safe while keeping his distance if I’m giving him some credit, but instead he fled to someplace in New Mexico where he had friends. I’m not even sure now how he got there or what his reasoning was. Much of this happened outside of my knowing at the time, and I never would learn the details. I think perhaps he had been left a vehicle at the time. That’s a vague memory or guess.
As strange as that whole ordeal had been, our mother had second thoughts not long after. She went to where he was staying, taking my younger sister along for support. I’ve already said she treated her as a confidant, and even though my sister was rebelling at this point in her teenage life, our mother still treated her that way. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, similar to how it must have been for our older sister prior. This really has an impact on your development as a kid.
The visit went as badly as one might imagine, though not for the reasons you might think. Our stepfather was upset and angry, but he didn’t know our mother had a part in this. He still thought she was as ignorant at the time as he had been. Then who would imagine their wife would be part of such a thing? Not that their relationship was ideal, or that any of this whole mess with underworld aspects of society was normal. I guess you still don’t expect someone you’re close to, even in a dysfunctional relationship, to be involved in such a scheme. I’m sure to this day he still believes she was an innocent bystander. If he has any suspicions, he’s never mentioned such.
The problems that occurred during the visit were more about disagreements between him and our mother. They were trying to work things out, I guess, but he wasn’t willing to admit to having issues. She eventually, with the help of my sister, convinced him to seek psychological help. He was diagnosed as being bipolar and prescribed medication, but he hated this and wouldn’t agree to stay on them. He didn’t like how they made him feel. Bipolar people often get so used to the highs and lows that having a steady, stable mood feels like not having emotions at all. It’s like being numb in other words. I don’t know the full story of this visit either. I wasn’t there, and I only got bits and pieces later when they returned. Our stepfather did not come with them. The whole staying away part was still instilled in his psyche. She wasn’t ready for him to come back anyway. I’m not sure what reasoning they had between them for him to stay there. Perhaps he was scared, or perhaps they just didn’t want to be together and he used this whole crazy situation as an excuse to make a change in life.
He overstayed his welcome with the friends he was staying with. His temper and erratic behavior eventually saw him cast out. They wanted him to seek treatment, to try to improve, to quell his temper, to stop yelling while on the phone, especially with our mother, and most of all to be a better houseguest. Not only was it their home, but part of the place where they lived was their gallery. The husband was a jeweler like our stepfather, and they worked with other artists in the area to run a gallery. His behavior made this more difficult. For a time, he stayed in the camper van he had with him, something he’d managed to recover from our home through means I cannot recall after the whole mess with those men. Perhaps that’s what he was left with after being beat up? His friends allowed him to stay in this on their property, but it wasn’t that close to the main house and lacked amenities. This made for a very uncomfortable stay in the desert of New Mexico with summer setting in. Without a workable compromise he was willing to live with, he finally left to return to the Texas panhandle. He stayed in a city not too far from the small town where we lived.
Initially, he lived out of his camper van moving from location to location. He managed to get a pizza delivery job, worked to save, and would eventually purchase a trailer house he’d be able to place on a lot with rental payments each month. Our mother helped him along the way, of course. I don’t think he’d have managed completely on his own. It wasn’t a small feat, of course. He did have little to start with. I’ll leave his story here for now, with him living in a trailer house on a rented lot where he was working to slowly build his business back up. He primarily utilized the online business I’d created for him. Between a website and his eBay presence, he was able to manage a meager income that improved over time.
Somewhere in this span of years a stray cat our mother had taken to caring for had kittens. The mother was timid and wouldn’t get near people much, but we were slowly able to acclimatize the kittens to humans. There were two sisters. One was pure velvet black, with a black nose, black whiskers, and black pawpads. I loved that little kitten. She slowly came to trust me enough to let me pet her. It was a process that took time.
One day I went out to find she was nowhere to be found. When I asked our mother, she told me she’d taken the two kittens to the vet because the all-black one seemed sick. I hadn’t noticed her acting sick the previous day. She said the vet diagnosed the kittens with feline leukemia. Since the black one was sick and couldn’t be helped, supposedly, she had her put down. I was devastated. It just hurt so much, both that the kitten was gone and that my mother had done this without even speaking with me. The other kitten was treated and sent home. Our mother liked that kitten and wanted to try to keep it healthy for as long as she could. She said the vet told her if a cat is healthy, it can live several years with the virus and not show symptoms or get sick. So she wanted to chance it. This further upset me. Why had she not tried to help the black kitten? If this were true, couldn’t the vet have done something?
Now, I’ll pivot back to my tech talk now. By 2003, I’d outgrown the limited platform. Tech had moved quickly with AMD releasing the first 1GHz processor in 2000. The advancement would see them outpace Intel for the first time. They began their marketing with rating their products for the equivalent IPC or “experience” of an Intel counterpart. So the 1900+ XP was equivalent to a 1900MHz Pentium chip. This may have been true in practice, but it was a lousy marketing ploy. The “XP” was used to make people think of Windows XP, which was popular at the time. AMD said it was a reference to “experience,” but we all knew better. That didn’t matter. The processors were great, and people bought them. After painstaking research, I compiled parts for the first PC I would build myself. It would have 768MB of cutting-edge DDR 266MHz, so 2 times the 133MHz system bus. It was also cutting edge for the bus speed, with 133MHz being a new technology. The IDE channels for the hard drives was 133MBs instead of 100MBs, another new development. I’d have a 52x CD- R/RW drive. The floppy drive was your typical 1.44MB variety, but with a CD ROM such things as Zip drives were no longer really necessary. I bought a slew of 60MM and 80MM fans to max out the Antec case, which was a popular case at the time. The Enermax power supply was also like Silverstone is today. I wonder if it was more than 300 watts. Power requirements back then were so low!
I initially had two 40GB hard drives set up in RAID, the onboard chip another key component of this top-of-the-line motherboard. This totaled 80GB without redundancy, speed being the purpose. I had an 80GB drive for backup. I think these were all Maxtor. The video card was an ATI AIW with 64MB of video memory and the ability to capture video from component and coax inputs. I was hoping to do recordings from TV and old family videos through the VCR. I had Windows XP Professional as my OS. The only problem with all of this cutting-edge technology is how untried it was back then. Drivers were terrible. It took a ton of effort to get Windows to install correctly and not force default drivers that would hose the installation, especially when it came to video or chipset drivers. I remember going through the process countless times trying to get everything to work. The Via 3-in-1 drivers for the chipset that handled half the work, I think the Northbridge was AMD, and Southbridge had to be a 3rd party, never worked right. Those drivers were buggy as heck. I could never get the system to be overly stable no matter what I did. I ended up with blue screens and countless issues I had to sift through. I sometimes wonder if that’s what killed my joy for tech. It just was such a negative experience. Nothing worked right no matter what I did. TCP settings would get messed up. I think this was due to malware or a virus. Then I had to try to figure out what had been changed just so I could get online again. I was never any good at networking. This stuff was way over my head. But I would persevere. I kept on trying and used the computer to the best of my ability between issues.
I ended up RMAing the RAM, swapping out sticks multiple times. In time I would opt not to go with RAID after a complete system failure that resulted in having to start from scratch. All my data was lost when the RAID array failed. Windows XP was strange. It had crashed and tried to create a dump file, but that didn’t work out, and it just hosed the entire installation. When that type of RAID array (was it RAID 0?) fails, you can’t get your data back. At least that was the case then. Things might have changed since. I even tried RMAing the hard drives when further failures occurred. Then I would finally get a SCSI card and try to run an overpriced 10,000 RPM SCSI drive for 160MBs of theoretical transfer speed. This wasn’t actually any faster than a typical 7,200 IDE drive over the 133MB IDE connection. That would also cause me issues, SCSI not really intended for home use, so I ended up switching back to the 40GB drives. One would be my installation drive, one would be backup, and the 80GB ended up being file storage or something like that. It’s been a long time since I had this all set up.
It came to the point where I got tired of all the hassle and began to doubt my competency building a PC. So I looked at alternatives. It was only 2005, a couple years since I put all the money, time and effort into this one. Still, I decided to give up on it and instead searched for a good custom PC building company. I thought I’d found one, so I customized a build and went that route. By now AMD had pioneered consumer 64-bit processors. So I went with a mid-level model, I can’t even remember which. Most of the specs are a blur. The computer was alright, but their solution to reduce issues I was having was to tell me not to use software unless absolutely necessary, as the more software you used the more points of failure. Oh, and don’t get online. Their installation had some issues I couldn’t resolve, and even an RMA did not overcome them. So that was their response. Sad to say, I’m serious.
I made the best of it, managing the issues over time and finding my own work arounds or just not doing things if they didn’t work. Some elements of Windows were just messed up. I think it was something as simple as scheduling tasks. Setting up defragmentation. These were not functional. Various things like that were irksome but not crippling. This was the computer I used for the next five years, and it became more a means to an end than a passion.
Things would happen in my life to further dampen my enthusiasm, and I’d get caught up with survival working more and more until there was little time to explore such interests. Years would pass by, and I’d lose touch with the advancements and changes that were taking place at such a fast pace. When I finally came back to research computer tech for the newspaper where I worked, I was lost. Everything was so different. I don’t know that I’ve caught up even now. I haven’t had the finances to do so anyway. It’s very hard to keep in the know if the technology you have to work with is more than a decade old. You get no hands-on or practical experience.
The life story of a snow leopard - Part 3
Our older sister, while unreliable and often selfish in her behavior, was all we had as far as family for a long time now. As I unravel memory and history with it, I realize what truly brought our mother and stepfather home. It wasn’t the fire so much as what happened next. Right before Thanksgiving of this year, our sister was driving in a mad dash to see her boyfriend, who was married. She’d learned well from our mother how to lead relationships. These things make an impact on your behavior in life, and if you’re not careful, you might repeat patterns. I think it’s not destined, but sometimes people lack self awareness. Actions occur, and they don’t see what they’re doing. In any case, she was following similar behavior as our mother in falling for men who were already involved. That he had kids should also have factored in, given her pause, but it hadn’t seemed to. His wife wasn’t willing to let him go easily, and so there was a tug of war. On this fateful night, that would come to a head.
Our sister was upset at something going on between her boyfriend and his wife. I suppose he was going to stick with her and end things with our sister. They’d argued on the phone, and she dashed off inebriated and upset, driving way too fast to try to get where he lived in a town about 50 minutes away. She would not make it.
We were home up late that night watching TV when we heard the doorbell ring. An EMT was at the door, a longtime friend of our sister’s. He said something bad had happened. He then went about telling us our sister had been in an accident, she was critically injured, and flown by helicopter to the hospital in the nearby city, Amarillo. She was undergoing surgery to save her life, but it didn’t look good. I remember little beyond that. He left after speaking with our stepgrandmother, who was staying with us at the time as previously mentioned. My younger sister and I crumpled to the floor in shock, tears coming unbidden. We didn’t know what to do. Our sister may have had her flaws, but she was more family to us than our mother had been in years, and we loved her dearly. The news that she might not live crushed us.
I don’t think we slept that night. It was all too painful. If we had school the next day, we did not go. Instead, we went to the hospital to see our sister, whom had by some miracle survived the night. Our mother and stepfather would get the news and rush back. This is what would cement their return for the long-term. It wasn’t the fire. They would insist we return to school as normal, but it was not easy, and in this period of time we would be punished for missing classes. It didn’t matter what the reason was. You had to really work to make up for being absent. Some teachers would just refuse to give you the assignments you missed in order to give you failing grades. This was punishment for daring to miss school. Yet the next day my younger sister pleaded to stay at the hospital and not be forced to go back. As she often managed to get treated differently than I, she had been allowed, while I’d been forced to attend classes. This upset me further during an already trying time.
The whole ordeal brought things to a head with our family. Our older sister was the black sheep due to moving out, not bending to our mother’s will, and her wild lifestyle. She’d become pretty outrageous probably due to being suppressed in our household for so many years. It often has the opposite effect parents think it will. She’d also been given a terrible example from our mother and father, her stepfather. Then later having her father back in the mix had pushed her over the edge. I think that’s why she moved out, really.
Now, due to the accident, her biological father came down from Illinois, where he’d moved back to after the divorce. Our older sister’s boyfriend, the married man, also came to see her at the hospital. There was butting of heads between everyone. Our mother’s friends whom she’d half ignored for a time now, the pastor and his wife, were there to support us. Though overall there were factions. We younger kids sided against our mother and stepfather because they’d been out of the mix for so long, and we were on our sister’s side, with her boyfriend strangely, even though we hardly knew him. This was our sister’s side though. We were upset with our mother and didn’t trust her. Our older sister’s father was trying to be neutral and play mediator, but he was biased against our mother as well due to his experience with her and her current husband. It was all a mess with constant arguing and disagreement. Everyone wanted to point fingers of blame and accusation. I remember so little of it now, but at the time it was traumatic and life altering.
My younger sister would never fully recover, missing more and more school as she was upset and couldn’t manage to catch up. She was in the public junior high by now, and her absences were counting against her. Catching up was almost untenable, and teachers really worked against you. Eventually, she’d convince our mother and stepfather to pull her out of school. She was supposed to home school, with our step grandmother as teacher. She’d been a teacher earlier in life, so it was plausible. If only we’d known how exaggerated our stepgrandmother’s history was, her education, and experience. She’d been a substitute teacher, not a full-on teacher. She hadn’t gone to college and didn’t have a degree. She was ignorant of many things and very prejudiced. It was all delusional that she’d ever teach my sister.
I’d continue longer in school, managing to somehow not fail out that semester. It was a difficult time. Our mother and stepfather were back, our stepbrother was still staying with us, going to the Catholic school for the semester he spent living with us, and our sister was in the hospital for several weeks before being taken home by her boyfriend whom thought having EMT training made him better than doctors.
Much of his “care” probably hurt more than helped as she was not following the advice of her doctors. She’d broken so many bones, including several in her spine, her collarbone, her arm, and she had a crushed pelvis they’d had to work to put back together. She had good pain meds, as was common back then when opioids were the thing to prescribe, and her boyfriend wasn’t going to prevent her from getting up and moving around since she didn’t want to be kept to her bed. So she was up even in the hospital with him around, and that was insane. I’m surprised she didn’t do severe damage to herself. Doctors warned that with the damage her body had endured she could risk harming her spinal cord. Yet that didn’t deter her or her boyfriend. I don’t care how stubborn she was; he shouldn’t have encouraged or given in to her. That was wrong of him and did little to recover any respect I could have for him after all the despair he’d been the cause of.
Our stepbrother went back home to spend Christmas with his mother, much to the chagrin of our mother and stepfather. They didn’t want him to go, but he wanted to as he missed his mother. He thought he could come back. His mother would make sure that didn’t happen. So it was. Things continued to be tumultuous at home, school was ever difficult to focus on, and I wasn’t happy with life overall. Our sister was back at her home but still the black sheep. After everything that had happened, our mother didn’t want us to see her. Yet she’d come to see us on Christmas, as limited as her mobility was. She still shouldn’t have been up and about at all. Her status as someone we shouldn’t interact with remained though, as she was not on good terms with our mother. So we were practically banned from speaking with her. This was hard on us considering how close we were to her.
With so much instability and unhappiness at home, I found school less worthwhile. I wanted the freedom I saw my sister had, being out of school, not realizing the lack of education she was experiencing. I hated how hard I was finding things. I’d never had to work so hard to get mediocre grades. I’d been in the honor’s society in junior high. I suppose years of stress at home had taken their toll. I barely made it through the first semester of honor’s biology. I mentioned that class before. It was akin to what is now considered an AP class. While I’d have probably easily handled it years prior, science always being one of my better subjects, I couldn’t focus well or get a grasp on it now.
With kids in school being their usual unkind selves, I’d been bullied all my life to this point, and generally not fitting in so I was always picked on and felt like an outsider, I really wasn’t doing well. I had to change electives from theater arts to speech for the spring term, though the teacher was the same. The school had messed up my schedule with theater arts, and my lunch period as well as English hour were changed. So now I was missing lunch with my girlfriend. She was about the only friend I had anymore, so that was tough. I eventually got it sorted out, but that required the change over to speech I mentioned. I remember one day in speech class when the teacher asked us a question about gays. I’m not sure why or what the context was, or even how it was appropriate. I’m guessing it was not. Everyone around me in class rather loudly voiced their opinions. They were not good ones. There was a consensus that gays should be drug out in the street and shot. This was not corrected by the teacher. Thus, my continued self loathing and internalization. It was a lonely world I lived in.
Teachers continued to punish us for anything they could. If you missed a day, you risked getting a failing grade on assignments you missed. If someone in class acted up, the teacher would give hours of extra homework you were obligated to do or else. The “or else” was being forced to stay after school for detention the next day so you could do the assignments you’d not done as homework the night before. This was due to the “no zero” policy they had instated that year. Yet somehow the kids who instigated these punishments, who also failed to complete the homework, didn’t seem to be held to the same rules. At least I don’t remember them trying to do all the extra homework, staying for detention the next day to do the assignments, or even caring in the least.
At one point, it all became too much. I was virtually always doing school work. I was anxious and couldn’t sleep as I had insomnia back then, too. My mother never did get me treated for my OCD, so it wasn’t any wonder she didn’t try to get me help for my anxiety-caused insomnia. I got to the point where I’d cover up any clocks in my room so I couldn’t see how late I was up and figure out how little sleep I’d get. “I will only get four hours if I fall asleep RIGHT NOW!” They were not good times.
I remember getting home from school only to start my homework. It might be around 4 p.m., and I’d work until around 7, eat some dinner, go back to doing homework if I had more left. Then I’d shower, get ready for bed, and study for the next hour or two before going to bed. I often was up past midnight though studying, stressing out over the next day’s tests or pop quizzes.
I always aspired to go to college. So the sense I was not doing well throughout the fall and going into the spring had me coming unraveled. This whole school year had gone terribly. Which reminds me that I’d taken driver’s ED, but after my sister’s accident, my mother was afraid to let me get my driver’s permit. So she wouldn’t provide the documents I needed in order to take the written test to get my permit. That meant the semester was wasted as I wasn’t allowed to take the test along with my classmates. That was in December. It all snowballed into spring, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
One Friday night when I came home from school, I was just done. I remember feeling defeated. I had so much homework, as well as punishment homework, and then various tests to study for come the next week. It seemed insurmountable. I told my mother I just didn’t want to go back. Instead of being a good parent and talking with me about it, going with me to school to talk to the principal and guidance counselor, she just agreed to withdraw me from school as she had my younger sister. I too would be “home schooled.”
This was all a delusion, of course. We never were taught at home. Things were unstructured at best. It was like a long school vacation with us existing at home but not kept to any real schedule or forced to adhere to lessons or learn anything. The loose oversight, as long as we behaved and went about life as usual, made for some unusual years of childhood. I came of age isolated from my peers. Our mother had never liked us to have friends and kept us from interacting with them outside of school as best she could. She liked to maintain control, and now that she was back home isolated us once again. It was harder with my sister who was more outgoing and forceful about it, but she wasn’t doing very well at this time herself. So both of us were going through a period of what I’d almost call mourning. Perhaps it was for the childhoods we’d known, innocence, the days of being relatively carefree. Everything was different. Nothing felt “right.”
Due to being so isolated and kept away from what was normal for kids our age, I lost touch with my girlfriend. We spoke on the phone sometimes, but we hardly saw one another. Eventually, I called her to tell her I thought we were better as just friends as we’d never really changed from that anyway, other than to say we were dating. She agreed. I don’t know if this upset her or if she felt the same way. It was all so strange for me, and I didn’t hear from her again after that. I meant to keep in touch, but I’d never been good about handling phone calls. They felt uncomfortable. A good parent, again, would have done something here. My mother should have discussed this with me and tried to make sure I was interacting with other kids, to find out what was going on with my girlfriend and see if she could keep me on track there. It was all the chaos that had derailed things in the first place. I really liked this girl. But how do you handle a relationship when you’re young and naïve, all while your entire life as you know it feels like it’s falling apart?
I almost made it through my freshman year. I think I had six weeks left. It’s strange to think back on now. Surreal. I would later get my diploma through a friend my sister had made at the Catholic school. She became Catholic while attending, went to youth group gatherings, and that’s where she met this lady. They weren’t even ten years apart, and that helped forge a friendship. She taught the youth group and helped her go through the process of becoming Catholic, as I recall. So when she saw what had happened with us being pulled from school, she worked through channels to get us diplomas. I don’t know how we qualified. She was a social worker, and I guess she had her means. The laws were very lax in those days for home schooling, also. What kind of curriculum you had to follow and standards you had to meet were practically nonexistent. I suppose she thought we needed something to help us out, especially as messed up as our home lives were, so she did this for us. It’s as valid a diploma as any, it would seem. Although, I’ve always felt a bit like it wasn’t legitimate. I’ve gone on in life, tried to move on, and not worry too much about it.
So we’ve reached the end of my high school years. I skipped ahead to 2002 when I received my diploma. My sister and I are not the same age, but we received them at the same time. I don’t think it mattered much considering the circumstances. It’s another reason I feel less than stellar about the whole thing though.
Was 2002 that long ago? It doesn’t seem like it. I don’t feel like that many years have passed since. I’ve skipped a few though, so I’ll venture back even further just to fill in the gaps.
I previously indicated that home schooling didn’t involve much schooling at home. Our step grandmother showed no initiative in teaching. She didn’t create lesson plans or have a structure to things. There was no schedule for our days let alone weeks. Time simply passed. By some chance I was interested in learning, so I pursued knowledge on my own. I went to the public library. I read. I worked an entire year to save money toward buying a computer. I’d tried and tried to get an old 386 Compaq we had to work online, but by then it was too old. In those days, computer tech advanced quickly. Nowadays, you can use a 10-year-old computer to get online and do basic tasks. Then, five years was too much to keep up with modern computing tasks. The 14,400 baud modem couldn’t manage to connect and hold a connection. It was also too slow for the internet as it had become. I remember getting on AOL using that computer years before, but I never really understood what the internet could be used for at that age. I simply went into AOL chatrooms. That was a bad idea! People were crazy in chat back then. Imagine all that Twitter sees, combined with Reddit, mixed up with 4chan. That’s about what those chatrooms were like. Seeing as they were not for someone 12 years old, I didn’t continue to log on. The internet seemed pointless without someone explaining the point.
Here it was 1999 though, and I now understood. I spent an entire summer trying to get that darn Compaq online. I tried all the software we had for doing so, anything it would run. Sometimes it would try to log on, but then I couldn’t do anything. Prodigy was one such ISP of sorts. It let you connect, but what you were supposed to do with that connection I don’t know to this day. Everything was done via 3.5” floppy disks. That’s disk with a “k” as the circular laser disc variety were not being used in computers when the 386 came out. Nor could the hard drives have installed anything large enough to require a disc. I don’t know if the 386 even had a 100MB hard drive. There were some even more obscure, strange sorts of software I found disks for, but nothing worked to get online. AOL was always sending out trial edition disks, and discs by 1999. My mother wasn’t going to pay for that past the trial period, and even then I couldn’t get it to work on the old computer. All that said, to top it off the old PC was running Windows 3.1. That was practically useless in 1999 and no wonder it wouldn’t install or run newer programs.
Eventually, I’d saved up enough, done research for months, and made phone calls to computer sales companies. I think it was CDW where I purchased the computer. This was in April of 1999. The computer was a Compaq Presario with an AMD K6-2 running at 380MHz and 1MB of pipeline cache on the motherboard. There was an integrated video chip on the motherboard with 4MB video memory. It had an 8GB “bigfoot” hard drive. I’d find out why it was called that. You’ve never seen such a big, strangely shaped hard drive. I can’t remember who made that thing! It also had an Imation Superdisk drive instead of a Zip drive, which made it only useful for reading and writing regular 1.44MB floppies. This beast of a system came with a 15” 800x600 monitor, old ball mouse, and web keyboard. Everything was beige as tech was in those days. This cost me just over $1,000 USD. It was running Windows 98 SE, thank goodness, as that version resolved a lot of the issues 98 had. It was leagues ahead of Windows 95, which I’d never liked.
While I’d done the research and saved the money toward it, my mother was paying for the internet. She actually agreed to that now. Since it was technically a family computer, my sister was allowed to use it. I had it in my room, so she’d come in whenever she wanted and push me out. She and her friends likely wanted to get online and chat, flirt with guys they didn’t know, doing the things that girls their age did with the limited knowledge of application for the internet most kids had in those days. This always upset me because it was my room, and I’d done all the work to get the computer. In spite of that, I made the best of the situation.
The internet was a new frontier. It opened up a world I’d never dreamed of. I was exposed to ideas and people I wouldn’t have been otherwise. I discovered the furry fandom, therianthropy, though it would be a while before I learned that word, and all the myriad stories online in the genre. I read “Trek Wars: The Furry Conflict” where furry writers created a sort of round robin story set in both the Star Wars and Star Trek universes. There was some incident that allowed them to cross over. That was interesting enough at the time, but then make all the characters furry, and it was something amazing. I read it as fast as their moderator and site owner could compile the round robin, or RP threads, into something more cohesive as a story. I remember discovering the Transformation Story Archive and all the stories within. “The Winds of Change” with the round robin stories that followed the Jon Sleeper original, which spawned and entire universe of fiction. Then there was “The Blind Pig” universe, a darker furry futurescape where a virus from Mars would infect the population, and if you didn’t die from it, you might become an anthropomorphic creature. It was definitely a less hopeful look upon how furries might come to be. I can’t remember how the virus came to earth, but that is perhaps unimportant. The realms of fantasy and reality I was exposed to helped form who I was to become, who I am today. I don’t know where I’d be without the internet, and it was all thanks to that first computer.
I’ve actually just recently been back home to Texas, and I dug it out of storage. It’s in the room with me, waiting to be dusted out so I can see if it still works. I imagine it will need a new CMOS battery.
This computer would also be what introduced me to the world of tech and got me interested in it. I joined AMDzone and learned about AMD and their budget processors. There was already a community of enthusiasts, and with their knowledge to tap into, I was able to overclock my 380MHz K6-2. There was a simple jumper on the motherboard that controlled the FSB. It was set at 95MHz for this processor, but users had reported it would run fine at 100Mhz, since it supported other processors, and this would up the CPU to 400MHz. This was a big deal back then. At least it made me feel like I’d done something awesome.
I was hooked. I began to look into how to get more performance out of the little Compaq. The proprietary motherboard was fairly limiting, but there were options. AMD processors were often unlocked, especially the mobile variety. The newly released K6-III was more advanced, comparable (at least according to AMD) to Intel’s Pentium III. I found a K6-III+. This was the mobile chip, which had an unlocked multiplier and substantially more onboard L2 cache. This would work in tandem with the L3 cache on the motherboard, supposedly for significant performance gains. The mobile chip was also made to run cooler than the desktop version, so it could be overclocked with the stock heatsink without overheating. I remember getting some Arctic Silver from the online seller I bought the CPU from. He sent a little in a ziplock bag. I managed the swap, though I remember very little about it now.
With the FSB set to 100MHz, I used the jumper setting for a 6x multiplier in order to get 600MHz. That little CPU ran without a hitch. It was such a cool experience. It was a 400MHz process overclocked 200MHz. I wasn’t content with that though. I had also purchased a Voodoo 3000 video card with 16MB of video memory. That was to bring issues I would never quite overcome. It was passively cooled, which was a bad idea. I was forced to leave the cover off the case and set a 60MM case fan inside to blow air over the heatsink of the video card. It still ran incredibly hot. Most crashes I had from then on were related to that video card. Does anyone remember Voodoo? They used to be THE video card manufacturer. Forget ATI or Nvidia, they were who you went to for graphics. They’re barely a memory now, of course.
I would continue to learn what I could about technology and tinker with the Compaq, but it had limitations from the platform I could never quite overcome. Something like tech gremlins, where the proprietary motherboard refused to operate the components installed to their full potential. It should have been faster, but it wasn’t. In those days motherboards and chipsets made a huge difference. Motherboard reviews were a bigger deal. You could hamper your new computer with a subpar experience due to the motherboard if you chose poorly. This being an OEM board made for a prebuilt company like Compaq meant it was just low budget and lackluster. It didn’t matter. I learned a lot from that computer. I’d even upgrade to a 20GB hard drive before I moved on, keeping the old 8GB Bigfoot for backup purposes.
As time turned to begin the year 2000, a big deal as it was the “new millennium,” I’d have a change of focus in life. This wasn’t necessarily my choice. My stepfather’s brother and sister-in-law had made a habit of coming for Christmas and New Year’s each year, so they were there. I remember watching the live stream of the ball dropping in New York City over a 56K internet connection. It was an image the size of a business card on an 800 x 600 monitor. My step uncle (is that even a thing?) quipped that he didn’t think anyone would ever want to watch video like that on a computer. He thought it was a stupid idea. Little did he know.
January also brought with it the aforementioned change. I’d had the bright idea of listing some of my stepfather’s jewelry online. It started with a pair of earrings on Amazon. Then I thought to do the same on eBay. These were early days for both. Everything took a lot of time and effort to list. I was trying to help my mother as he often didn’t give her much toward maintaining the household, and I wanted to show him he could make money online. He still didn’t understand or think it was a good idea. That was, until the first item sold. Suddenly, I was pulled into servitude. I’d spend much of my day each day, or with his schedule late into the night, browsing listings, purchasing items through the account I’d set up for him, because he was bad about buying things. Research, he called it. Then correspondence was involved, with him dictating emails. He couldn’t type. Mine was the only computer in the house as well, other than the old 386 no one used.
He ended up slowly shifting to selling items. The slow process of submitting each item to eBay was tedious and time consuming. I might get through 10-20 a day, and it took a full workday’s worth of time. I was “helping the family business” and expected to do it. I spent far more time with my stepfather than I liked. Listening to him dictate email correspondence was frustrating to no end. I felt stifled spending so much of my time dealing with this work. Yet I was inspired to create a website for him, learning basic HTML coding with an old HTML how-to book and various resources online. I did more with WYSIWYG than code itself, but a website was the result. I ended up learning about photo editing, web sizing for photos, web hosting, and more. I didn’t like Microsoft’s Frontpage much and ended up using Netscape Composer, a far superior piece of software at the time. Later, I would graduate to using Arachophilia, which allowed you to have two panes for viewing the website, a coding pane on the left and preview pane on the right. This helped immensely. It also provided warnings if there were coding errors and allowed for quick access to various tags.
A major thunderstorm that brought large hail hit around midnight one night the previous year, 1999. Strangely enough, the insurance money wouldn’t be used directly to repair the roof. Instead, our stepfather used it mostly on things he wanted to buy. That’s where so many of those purchases on eBay came from. He also purchased a computer to continue his work, but most of the photo editing, ad creation, and website management were done by me on my computer. With the roof needing repaired, he had my younger sister, she was just over a year younger than me, help him. This was unusual, but she had the coordination and could handle heights well. We’d all lived in such a strange state of things for so long it didn’t seem quite as weird as it should have. I couldn’t work on the roof. I don’t deal with heights very well, and I lack coordination to a level that’s absurd. It felt awful, but that’s where a lot of my diving into the work with his online business came from, trying to do something I knew I could manage to help the family. To make myself useful.
During this time, I’d forge friendships that would last all my adult life up to this day. I found The Balto League and Aurora Borealis groups or “clubs” as they were known back then on Yahoo. Other clubs I joined had to do with RP, old IC and OOC places that worked a bit like round robins, where each club member would post a new piece to move the story along, from the point of view of their created character. The first club I joined was a Lion King themed one. I’d begun to think of myself more as a leopard and tried to emulate one in that setting. Developing as I aged meant going through a sort of growth in my understanding of who I was. I had thought I was a snow leopard, I found that book in 3rd grade and wanted to be a cheetah because it seemed more impressive, so fast and agile, and now I wondered if I could be a leopard. These weren’t thoughts I had on a conscious level or would recognize. It was more like what my favorite animal was as far as I was concerned, and I now placed the leopard on that pedestal. It took time to come to terms with my feelings of inadequacy regarding associating myself with snow leopards. I didn’t feel I was worthy. They were beyond me. So I tried to find something less majestic, yet still majestic. That really isn’t fair to leopards. It’s just how my mind worked things out. I can look back in retrospect and analyze these things now. So much was unclear in those early days online.
I was never very active in the Balto clubs on Yahoo, but things shifted more to a forum called The Icy Boards, and from there they took off. As the group settled in there, I became a part of it. I felt like I belonged. Balto was not my favorite movie, taking a close second to The Lion King, but it did bring a lot of us furry-minded folk together. I think most of us were furries still learning what that meant. Most of us still are. Even more, several of us turned out to be therians. We just didn’t know there was a term for what we felt inside.
I had so many long conversations about animal connections and philosophical curiosities with friends from there. Back then it was on AIM or YIM before everyone shifted over to the former. We had weekly group chats through IRC after we moved from Yahoo chat, which amusingly enough had been done through Yahoo’s Cheetah Chat software. Those were fun times.
While the forum for The Furry Conflict allowed me early exposure to the furry fandom, friendships there were hard to come by. I tried, but they were a close group not overly welcoming to newcomers. At least, not to be part of the friend group. You felt like an outsider trying to be part of something you couldn’t really fit into. With TIB, I was truly a part. I felt included. Those were some of the best days of my life. Everything was online, but who cared? My family didn’t understand how you could have friends online. They thought you had to interact with people in person. Well, the friendships I made were just as real and just as significant as those made in person. The world was just unfamiliar with such concepts. The internet was a new frontier. My family didn’t understand me anyway, so this new facet of that lack of understanding made little difference. I made the mistake of mentioning the furry fandom and being a furry just once to my younger sister. She laughed and teased as if it was the most hilarious if not idiotic thing she’d ever heard. No one in my family has heard a word about it since.
I would also find LJ through this group of friends, since it was the place everyone was joining. It made it so much easier to keep in touch and truly interact without needing to be instant messaging all the time. Everything was organized with people giving accounts of their daily lives. This was social media before it was turned into the tainted mess it is now. It wasn’t about quantity or likes. There were no such things as “likes.” It was just a way for people to journal about their lives and friends to keep up to date with what was going on with one another. It was more intimate and substantive than modern social media. Those early days held something special that seems to have been lost.
Even with MySpace and then Facebook, I would stick with LJ for years past when others moved on. Eventually, I even gave in and joined Twitter. It’s all too much all too fast without the same cohesiveness of the older platforms, but it’s where everyone migrated. So it is a necessity if I want to keep in touch. You can’t stand still in life no matter how hard change might be; though the pace at which social media moves now impacts my OCD. It’s not easy for me to handle.
Friends were brought in from such places, either friends of friends invited to join TIB, or people on LJ we’d befriend and invite. So our network of friends grew a little, while still remaining relatively small. This is how I met my second girlfriend, the first person I fell in love with. It was magical and filled with joys I always imagined. We had a great time together. I loved her deeply. The connection felt like something that could last the test of time. At least I thought so. I should have questioned it when she wanted to go to her prom, but we were too far apart for me to take her. So she went with someone local. That was a difficult moment for me, but I dealt with it alright. She just wanted to participate in things. I could understand that. We talked often, if not every day, and there was mutual appreciation and care shared. We could see into one another, even if the other could not see the beauty of themselves. I always saw her beauty and tried to get her to see herself through my eyes. Everything was online. Perhaps this is when I began the path of loving someone for who they were and not for physical appearance or anything related. I didn’t realize this and wouldn’t know there was such a thing for many years to come.
I tried to live up to the ideal. I wanted to give her tokens of love for Christmas. These were unique to her and her interests. She loved Tolkien and “The Lord of The Rings,” so I remember finding an Elvin ring made of silver etched with words in the Elfish language promising love in some eternal fashion, as elves would. The things we do when we’re in love. I don’t know how I managed it as I wasn’t making a lot of money in those days. I did mix music for a local dance studio when they had dance recitals or competitions to go to. This paid better than the work I did for my stepfather, which didn’t pay at all.
Things were done carefully since privacy was important, and even if we did love each other, she didn’t want to share her address. So I was able to route the gifts I got for her through a mutual friend who did know her address. That was very kind of our friend to do. Since her birthday was right before Christmas, I got her a few things including the ring. Doing things like this felt so grand. Just being in love and getting to express that love was a dream come true.
She told me how she slowly unpacked the box and felt like it was a new discovery with each item. I’d surprised her, and it made an impression. The sentiment she shared was genuine. I knew I’d made her happy. That was the point, right?
We continued to talk and dream together, loving each other, as winter turned into spring. I think that’s when another dance came around. I could be imagining this. Somehow, she’d started hanging out with a local guy. He was a friend she hung out with in a group of friends. I did not come to know until years later how she’d felt like she wanted someone who could be there. Things developed with this friend. She distanced herself from me. Our chats had begun to grow further and further apart. A day, a few days, then a week. I was hurting. It was hard. I didn’t know what was going on. After a month of this withdrawal she was doing, she came on chat one day to tell me she no longer loved me. She ended things then. It was May of 2004. I still had my faith then. I went on a long walk praying and pleading for her to change her mind. It ended up taking me miles into the canyon where trails meandered. I found my way back to town and eventually the dance studio where my sister worked. I never told anyone what had happened at the time. It was too painful. That walk was a journey through pain. It took the rest of the year for me to get past this. Well, to get to the point where I wasn’t broken by it. Love never has been easy on me. The journey it leads me on through life is like an endless trek through that canyon, only never finding my way out.
After the painful experience of first love, I had a friend who I began to have feelings for. Perhaps in retrospect, I came to love him. It was difficult because I’d always imagined myself with a girl, and here I was having feelings for a guy. I still hadn’t come to terms with such things, and I couldn’t manage the feelings easily. By the end of the year I’d tell him how I felt, but he was far away and had other love interests. I tried to explain my reticence, why I felt the way I did, and how I’d need time to work through my feelings. He was not patient or willing. He wanted someone then. He wanted things I could not give him. So he moved on just as I started to open up to the possibility of loving him. It was surreal and overall painful. That’s my second brush with love.
Now, I’ve skipped some events again. It’s not easy keeping things in chronological order while so much was happening simultaneously. Going back to the year before, my mother had grown frustrated with her husband. They’d had a tumultuous relationship with a lot of arguing, not to mention the time he broke her arm. Once, they were fighting about something in their bedroom, so my younger sister and I, along with our stepgrandmother (his mother), went to intervene before it got too heated. He picked his own mother up by her arms, lifting her and slamming her into the bedroom door, breaking it. Though it was flimsy, to do that to your aged mother is just unthinkable. Who does something like that? We had confronted him and told him we wouldn’t allow the arguing to continue, that we were going to separate them, and that set him off. So it turned into a fiasco where he ended up slightly bloodied at the end, but also a bit sobered to realize he might not get away with whatever he wanted. We might come together to stop him in the future. Things calmed down a bit between them, for a while anyway.
The unease never truly improved. It simmered beneath the surface and would come out in new arguments, just not as energized, at least when others were around. He hated living in Texas, hated the town, hated the people, and wanted to go “home” to New Mexico. That’s where his previous wife, whom he’d cheated on with our mother, lived with his son. Those were interesting days in of themselves. While they were having their affair, our mother already divorced but he still married, there’d been a lot of fighting between the two. Our mother would get upset and try to call to talk to him when he went to visit his son, so was his excuse. He was still on the fence, between two worlds, trying to figure out how to have both. His soon-to-be ex-wife wasn’t having any of it, and their arguments were no better than he and our mother’s would be years later. One time our mother called while he was visiting his son, she was talking on the phone with his son and found out his father had told him to “Bring me the duct tape. I need to bind your mom and put her in the closet until she calms down.” That didn’t happen, but it was his intent. This is the kind of crazy I was dealing with growing up.
So our mother cooked up a plan. She had connections with various people in the not so legitimate world I mentioned earlier. At least, these people could be sourced by some of the people she knew who’d helped protect her from the seedier individuals that wanted to use her in the past or see her harmed now. Powerful people with money but who had contacts underground that knew how to get things done. I’m speaking strangely, I realize. I just don’t want to name any specific groups or make references. Suffice it to say, sometimes people in power have less than stellar connections in unsavory parts of society. How our mother thought this was the way to deal with a husband she was unhappy with I will never know. She planned it out, and two men showed up one day. They were supposedly there to bring money to our mother and stepfather for his efforts in protecting our mother, since he was seen as a bodyguard at the time.
That’s actually how some of their previous travels had gone about. He was to accompany her as her “bodyguard” on the road as they tried to keep from staying any one place for too long. There was some rhyme or reason to it all, but I was never let in on it. They also had to be certain places at certain times, also for reasons I did not know. Part of the guise to keep her safe involved the pregnancies I mentioned before, which she would conveniently lose.
Along with the money they were supposed to provide, the men said they were going to take our stepfather to buy a car. So he went with our mother and the men to look at cars. Only that’s not what happened. They took him outside of town to some remote area where they beat him and told him never to return, or else. He was left with the clothes on his back and bloodied, disoriented, dumbfounded, and unsure what had just happened. He didn’t know anything had been planned beyond these men not being who he thought they were and thought perhaps our mother was now in trouble. Though he wouldn’t try to get back, he might have checked to be sure we were all safe while keeping his distance if I’m giving him some credit, but instead he fled to someplace in New Mexico where he had friends. I’m not even sure now how he got there or what his reasoning was. Much of this happened outside of my knowing at the time, and I never would learn the details. I think perhaps he had been left a vehicle at the time. That’s a vague memory or guess.
As strange as that whole ordeal had been, our mother had second thoughts not long after. She went to where he was staying, taking my younger sister along for support. I’ve already said she treated her as a confidant, and even though my sister was rebelling at this point in her teenage life, our mother still treated her that way. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, similar to how it must have been for our older sister prior. This really has an impact on your development as a kid.
The visit went as badly as one might imagine, though not for the reasons you might think. Our stepfather was upset and angry, but he didn’t know our mother had a part in this. He still thought she was as ignorant at the time as he had been. Then who would imagine their wife would be part of such a thing? Not that their relationship was ideal, or that any of this whole mess with underworld aspects of society was normal. I guess you still don’t expect someone you’re close to, even in a dysfunctional relationship, to be involved in such a scheme. I’m sure to this day he still believes she was an innocent bystander. If he has any suspicions, he’s never mentioned such.
The problems that occurred during the visit were more about disagreements between him and our mother. They were trying to work things out, I guess, but he wasn’t willing to admit to having issues. She eventually, with the help of my sister, convinced him to seek psychological help. He was diagnosed as being bipolar and prescribed medication, but he hated this and wouldn’t agree to stay on them. He didn’t like how they made him feel. Bipolar people often get so used to the highs and lows that having a steady, stable mood feels like not having emotions at all. It’s like being numb in other words. I don’t know the full story of this visit either. I wasn’t there, and I only got bits and pieces later when they returned. Our stepfather did not come with them. The whole staying away part was still instilled in his psyche. She wasn’t ready for him to come back anyway. I’m not sure what reasoning they had between them for him to stay there. Perhaps he was scared, or perhaps they just didn’t want to be together and he used this whole crazy situation as an excuse to make a change in life.
He overstayed his welcome with the friends he was staying with. His temper and erratic behavior eventually saw him cast out. They wanted him to seek treatment, to try to improve, to quell his temper, to stop yelling while on the phone, especially with our mother, and most of all to be a better houseguest. Not only was it their home, but part of the place where they lived was their gallery. The husband was a jeweler like our stepfather, and they worked with other artists in the area to run a gallery. His behavior made this more difficult. For a time, he stayed in the camper van he had with him, something he’d managed to recover from our home through means I cannot recall after the whole mess with those men. Perhaps that’s what he was left with after being beat up? His friends allowed him to stay in this on their property, but it wasn’t that close to the main house and lacked amenities. This made for a very uncomfortable stay in the desert of New Mexico with summer setting in. Without a workable compromise he was willing to live with, he finally left to return to the Texas panhandle. He stayed in a city not too far from the small town where we lived.
Initially, he lived out of his camper van moving from location to location. He managed to get a pizza delivery job, worked to save, and would eventually purchase a trailer house he’d be able to place on a lot with rental payments each month. Our mother helped him along the way, of course. I don’t think he’d have managed completely on his own. It wasn’t a small feat, of course. He did have little to start with. I’ll leave his story here for now, with him living in a trailer house on a rented lot where he was working to slowly build his business back up. He primarily utilized the online business I’d created for him. Between a website and his eBay presence, he was able to manage a meager income that improved over time.
Somewhere in this span of years a stray cat our mother had taken to caring for had kittens. The mother was timid and wouldn’t get near people much, but we were slowly able to acclimatize the kittens to humans. There were two sisters. One was pure velvet black, with a black nose, black whiskers, and black pawpads. I loved that little kitten. She slowly came to trust me enough to let me pet her. It was a process that took time.
One day I went out to find she was nowhere to be found. When I asked our mother, she told me she’d taken the two kittens to the vet because the all-black one seemed sick. I hadn’t noticed her acting sick the previous day. She said the vet diagnosed the kittens with feline leukemia. Since the black one was sick and couldn’t be helped, supposedly, she had her put down. I was devastated. It just hurt so much, both that the kitten was gone and that my mother had done this without even speaking with me. The other kitten was treated and sent home. Our mother liked that kitten and wanted to try to keep it healthy for as long as she could. She said the vet told her if a cat is healthy, it can live several years with the virus and not show symptoms or get sick. So she wanted to chance it. This further upset me. Why had she not tried to help the black kitten? If this were true, couldn’t the vet have done something?
Now, I’ll pivot back to my tech talk now. By 2003, I’d outgrown the limited platform. Tech had moved quickly with AMD releasing the first 1GHz processor in 2000. The advancement would see them outpace Intel for the first time. They began their marketing with rating their products for the equivalent IPC or “experience” of an Intel counterpart. So the 1900+ XP was equivalent to a 1900MHz Pentium chip. This may have been true in practice, but it was a lousy marketing ploy. The “XP” was used to make people think of Windows XP, which was popular at the time. AMD said it was a reference to “experience,” but we all knew better. That didn’t matter. The processors were great, and people bought them. After painstaking research, I compiled parts for the first PC I would build myself. It would have 768MB of cutting-edge DDR 266MHz, so 2 times the 133MHz system bus. It was also cutting edge for the bus speed, with 133MHz being a new technology. The IDE channels for the hard drives was 133MBs instead of 100MBs, another new development. I’d have a 52x CD- R/RW drive. The floppy drive was your typical 1.44MB variety, but with a CD ROM such things as Zip drives were no longer really necessary. I bought a slew of 60MM and 80MM fans to max out the Antec case, which was a popular case at the time. The Enermax power supply was also like Silverstone is today. I wonder if it was more than 300 watts. Power requirements back then were so low!
I initially had two 40GB hard drives set up in RAID, the onboard chip another key component of this top-of-the-line motherboard. This totaled 80GB without redundancy, speed being the purpose. I had an 80GB drive for backup. I think these were all Maxtor. The video card was an ATI AIW with 64MB of video memory and the ability to capture video from component and coax inputs. I was hoping to do recordings from TV and old family videos through the VCR. I had Windows XP Professional as my OS. The only problem with all of this cutting-edge technology is how untried it was back then. Drivers were terrible. It took a ton of effort to get Windows to install correctly and not force default drivers that would hose the installation, especially when it came to video or chipset drivers. I remember going through the process countless times trying to get everything to work. The Via 3-in-1 drivers for the chipset that handled half the work, I think the Northbridge was AMD, and Southbridge had to be a 3rd party, never worked right. Those drivers were buggy as heck. I could never get the system to be overly stable no matter what I did. I ended up with blue screens and countless issues I had to sift through. I sometimes wonder if that’s what killed my joy for tech. It just was such a negative experience. Nothing worked right no matter what I did. TCP settings would get messed up. I think this was due to malware or a virus. Then I had to try to figure out what had been changed just so I could get online again. I was never any good at networking. This stuff was way over my head. But I would persevere. I kept on trying and used the computer to the best of my ability between issues.
I ended up RMAing the RAM, swapping out sticks multiple times. In time I would opt not to go with RAID after a complete system failure that resulted in having to start from scratch. All my data was lost when the RAID array failed. Windows XP was strange. It had crashed and tried to create a dump file, but that didn’t work out, and it just hosed the entire installation. When that type of RAID array (was it RAID 0?) fails, you can’t get your data back. At least that was the case then. Things might have changed since. I even tried RMAing the hard drives when further failures occurred. Then I would finally get a SCSI card and try to run an overpriced 10,000 RPM SCSI drive for 160MBs of theoretical transfer speed. This wasn’t actually any faster than a typical 7,200 IDE drive over the 133MB IDE connection. That would also cause me issues, SCSI not really intended for home use, so I ended up switching back to the 40GB drives. One would be my installation drive, one would be backup, and the 80GB ended up being file storage or something like that. It’s been a long time since I had this all set up.
It came to the point where I got tired of all the hassle and began to doubt my competency building a PC. So I looked at alternatives. It was only 2005, a couple years since I put all the money, time and effort into this one. Still, I decided to give up on it and instead searched for a good custom PC building company. I thought I’d found one, so I customized a build and went that route. By now AMD had pioneered consumer 64-bit processors. So I went with a mid-level model, I can’t even remember which. Most of the specs are a blur. The computer was alright, but their solution to reduce issues I was having was to tell me not to use software unless absolutely necessary, as the more software you used the more points of failure. Oh, and don’t get online. Their installation had some issues I couldn’t resolve, and even an RMA did not overcome them. So that was their response. Sad to say, I’m serious.
I made the best of it, managing the issues over time and finding my own work arounds or just not doing things if they didn’t work. Some elements of Windows were just messed up. I think it was something as simple as scheduling tasks. Setting up defragmentation. These were not functional. Various things like that were irksome but not crippling. This was the computer I used for the next five years, and it became more a means to an end than a passion.
Things would happen in my life to further dampen my enthusiasm, and I’d get caught up with survival working more and more until there was little time to explore such interests. Years would pass by, and I’d lose touch with the advancements and changes that were taking place at such a fast pace. When I finally came back to research computer tech for the newspaper where I worked, I was lost. Everything was so different. I don’t know that I’ve caught up even now. I haven’t had the finances to do so anyway. It’s very hard to keep in the know if the technology you have to work with is more than a decade old. You get no hands-on or practical experience.
The life story of a snow leopard - Part 3