brianlux said:

Smellyman said:

you are who, who you are. 

Grew up in the PNW got married at 24.  Wanted no kids and to retire early and constantly be on the move.  Lived in Hong Kong and now Taiwan.  Goal happened, retired at 42.  Permanent residents of USA, Hong Kong and soon Taiwan, options to where to call home.  Could be anywhere.

I care about animals, my dogs, guitar, PJ, my wife, the planet.

The in between is mine.

Sweet dogies! 

If you don't mind me asking, what was the draw for Hong Kong and Taiwan?

PJ_Soul said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

I'm Rodney, Rod for short. 42, st louis, misery. progressive, liberal, whatever you want to call it. i've been politically active my entire adult life. as you can tell by my post count, most of them from 1998 on have been on amt.

...................

i've never married or had kids. i am really bummed out about that because i like kids and always thought i would have been a pretty kick ass dad. i was nearly married twice. turns out i just have a knack for spending too much time with the wrong people. giving people and relationships chance after chance after chance only to have it fail in a super cataclysmic fashion. either that, or i have the gift of bad timing, because timing is everything and if timing is bad, there is no hope for a lasting relationship. i have wasted a lot of years with the wrong people and sometimes i wish i could have those years back. at this point, i don't even have the desire to start over again and invest what little time i have into getting to know someone and have it fail and end up back as square one. ya know? i have come to realize that intimacy is strange to me. when i have it with someone, everything feels normal. i don't have to question it or worry about it or think about it. when i don't have it, the entire concept seems strange to me. its like "why do i feel like i have to feel intimately connected to someone?" i may not be connected to someone, but i feel like i need to be, and that causes me stress. too much information? maybe, but who cares?

i do know that i love music. i have an extensive record collection and even though i am older i am still discovering new music. like most of us, i am a hoarder of vinyl. i have a great guitar collection. i was hoping that if i ever have a kid that one day they would end up with a kick ass collection of vintage gear.  i would like to play more shows than i do, but at this age it is hard to find other musicians that want it as bad as i do. 

i do know that i am a loyal person. i love my family and close friends dearly. if i love you, i'd stop a bullet for you and you aren't getting rid of me easily. i sometimes expect the same from certain people and they always fall short of expectation, and that always hurts. i have learned to stop expecting anything from anybody. 

jesus reading this i sound pathetic, lol. catharsis is good at times i guess. 

as long as i am being honest, i might as well say i am going to wrigley, and for the first time in my life i am not looking forward to seeing pearl jam. i have seen them over 40 times, and this whole wrigley thing to me feels like "been there, done that", because i attended the other three shows. honestly i have gotten in to other bands that tour extensively and actually put out albums. i don't know if this is a form of a midlife crisis, but i am not finding joy in the things that used to give me a lot of joy. maybe because my ex will be at wrigley. i introduced her to a lot of PJ people that i have known for years. since we split i have been unfriended one by one by all of those people, so it is going to be weird attending preparties and shit knowing those people will be there and they are not going to want to see me. a few years ago i would not have given a fuck. but the older i get, i realize deep down that i'd like it if people liked me. i make it difficult a lot of the time, but i guess that is who i am.

i have enjoyed reading this thread. all of you are wonderful people. it is comforting to know that people that i sometimes disagree with are actually people with their own story. a lot of the time that gets lost when the person typing is behind a 1 cm by 1 cm avatar that i can't even make out what the image is supposed to be. cheers to all of you good folks and i look forward to reading more of who you are.

Rod

Well I like you, and I didn't think that you made it difficult at all.

(I had to cut out a bunch of your post above btw - I exceeded the character limit)

I'm also bad with serious relationships FWIW (so far, anyway). I make terrible choices ... I basically have terrible taste in men, lol. I mean, I have GREAT taste in male friends actually. They're wonderful. But I do the exact opposite when romance comes into it, and I don't really know why - it's like a fucking chemical reaction in my brain, lol. It always seems out of my control a bit, even in hindsight. I just fall in love with men who end up being douchebags and/or jerks, lol (but at least I don't fall in love with evil people or anything like that - these are just run-of-the-mill shitty boyfriends). I don't know if the term "you can't help who you love" actually holds water scientifically, but it certainly feels true for me. I like to think that I finally learned all my lessons with the last one; I'm pretty sure I did - I'm much wiser now ... But the last one (common law marriage) went so spectacularly bad and my heart got so broken that I was turned off of the whole idea of being in a relationship at all. It finally convinced me that this whole relationship thing is something I don't need or want and suddenly being single feels absolutely amazing, like it never has before. For me, and for probably 75% of the people around me as far as I can tell, relationships are way more trouble than they're worth. Congrats to the remaining 25% though!

Degeneratefk said:

This thread got weird for a minute. 

On that note, when I moved to South Carolina, I found it quite unsettling to see people walk around with shirts on that said "go cocks!" After almost 20 years down here, nothing has changed. It's still odd. 

Better?

HughFreakingDillon said:

F Me In The Brain said:

My name is Brett, and I am a Trojan

FIRE AND ICE? WHAT THE SWEET FUCK?

dankind said:

HughFreakingDillon said:

F Me In The Brain said:

My name is Brett, and I am a Trojan

FIRE AND ICE? WHAT THE SWEET FUCK?

What the Sweet Fuck are in Trojan's flavored line (not pictured).