Month: November 2025

About three weeks ago, i had the privilege of spending some time in southern Nevada with a friend. There are people who are fans of Fallout and then there’s FANS, like my friend Daniel whom i’ve known since we were roommates in college and then again when we both moved to Austin. 

He’s seen far more of me than any one person ever should but he has, for reasons that defy logic, always been a friend to me. I… i used to be a very different person and that person wasn’t always worth being a friend to. 

But having gone to one with him the previous year, his wife suggested he invite me and Shelly to go with him to the Fallout Fan Celebration in Goodsprings, NV this year. Shelly declined which left me. 

And let me start this by saying something i’ve often said in this journal – i really, really, REALLY need to stop writing in it as a last minute thought as my Sunday comes to an end. To that point, let this entry be just a quick introduction to what will eventually become a much more thoughtful and much longer entry.

I was in a bit of a daze for a few days after returning from the desert. The reason being that when confronted with an experience larger than what one is ready to receive, it takes time to process that experience. For the sake of brevity, i’ll just focus on the part that probably had the most profound experience on me – the desert. 

The part of Texas i’m from is canopied in rolling hills of limestone and carpeted in cedar trees and oaks. The scrublands of the El Paso region are more traditional desert but other than taking a day trip to Alamagordo for the White Sands National Park, i never spent much time in the area surrounding El Paso. 

As we drove to and from Las Vegas to Primm (where we took busses to Goodsprings), we were surrounded by seemingly endless stretches of desert. It was breathtakingly beautiful and serene. It also wasn’t summer, which makes appreciating the desert a much easier thing to do than when it IS summer. 

Ummm… i’m more short on time than i intended. I’ll come back to this post soon – hopefully during the evenings over the coming days. And when time permits, i’m going to make a Google Album of pix from both myself and Daniel. 

In the meantime, here are a couple of images that will be in that album. 

Okay – i have laundry to battle, food to eat and i should probably have a discussion with my razor soon. 

More to come. 

p.s. it turns out that clicking on the photos doesn’t direct you to a larger size of the image. I’ll see about fixing that. 

In my previous post, i was just about to disclose something an old friend (Heather, now known as Auburn) said to me. It pertained to some previous behaviors of mine and given the time since those behaviors, i really shouldn’t be reserved about bringing it up. 

But the more i thought of it, the more uncomfortable the thought of bringing it up became. 

But here’s what I will say- during the 28 or so years that my obstructive sleep apnea consumed me, living became an exercise in subsistence… of survival. I lived nearly 3 decades getting two and a half hours of recuperative sleep a night – and very likely far less some of those nights. I remember one time when i’d moved to Portland, i was working a night shift. It was probably the absolute worst thing i could have done to myself at the time as to this day i’m still unable to get recuperative sleep when the sun is out. 

I remember going to work and getting a passdown from the previous shift operator. I knew every word that was coming from his mouth but i was unable to understand any of it. My customer service skills were great but i was a terrible match for that job and not getting recuperative sleep was why i was eventually fired. 

But the problem began many, many years before that. If i had to guess when it really began to manifest, i’d say it was my junior year of college; maybe even my sophomore year. 

Working at Motorola in a wafer fab as i did for more than five years was particularly grueling. I was tasked with doing visual inspections of wafers which meant prolonged periods of sitting and staring in a microscope. And nearly every day was a brutal struggle to maintain consciousness… especially after lunch. 

I’d get back to my station, sit down and immediately start dozing off. I’d briefly lose consciousness and bang my eyes on the microscopes optics. People laughed at me. My supervisors hated me – which on that note, at least there was symmetry. 

In stop and go traffic, especially the likes of which i used to deal with on the lower deck of I-35 in Austin, i would constantly be nodding off in the stop and go traffic. How i managed to never rear end anyone or cause an accident is a mystery for the ages.

What i’m getting to in my usual roundabout way is that every day… every goddamned day was an existential struggle to stay awake.  And it had another effect – the only things that were accessible to me were: eat, sleep, work and fuck. It left me incapable of accessing anything beyond those and the only way i got through work was just sheer, mindless and brutal determination. 

It also left me, and to my eternal shame, unable to recognize, let alone take accountability for my own shit. Eventually that bill came due in many forms – jobs lost, job opportunities lost and worst of all, it alienated the love of my life from me and she would eventually leave me. I can’t take full responsibility for that, i have to take responsibility for the part that was mine.

And i suppose i’m still paying for it to this day. I never became what i could have been but more than that is the ever lingering question that as i’m staring down the barrel of 60 years old and having never been married and not even having a date since 2017, and this growing disconnect i live with, which was discussed in a previous entry. I have to wonder- is there just something fundamentally wrong with me? I suppose that’s a discussion best suited for a professional counselor but i will say that i feel like i’m in a good place, emotionally speaking but dating in north Whatcom County is kind of difficult; made more so with fucking President Yamtits pissing off all of Canada (except maybe Alberta- aka The Province of North Texas).

I can’t remember how much i’ve written about the 28 or so years that my obstructive sleep apnea took from me. I know i’ve written about it but i can’t recall if i’ve written about it in this way. It’s not just the things that i missed and the things that i couldn’t see. It’s the lack of emotional filters that left me, again to my eternal shame, impulsive and obsessed with the most banal of things.