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It's Dec. 11, 2009, and I'm on the phone with a woman I've chatted sporadically with on OKCupid for a week and a half, working out terms of crashing at her place for a night to avoid a frozen freeway.

Dec. 11, 2025, I have to take a Lyft back from her place, as we got divorced in 2016.

Yes, yes, yes, it's Pete's "woe the hell is me, my life is falling apart" on schedule after four days since my last post.

I know when I've been shot down. She, herself, shot me down in 2004, leading indirectly to my first marriage. It's not out of the realm of possibility that her initial rejection is the only reason we could eventually find each other. (Her kids in 2004 were 1 and 2, and no thank you.)

But that's precisely the issue. I've not been shot down. She claims to not want to date, period, and I'm sort of resigned to our familiar chaos being about as good as I can do -- while remaining a secret from her kids!

Hey, when you live an a van, almost anything looks better. Not that we could make it work. Her kids are in their 20s now and do not like me ... she basically offloaded all failures on her part on me from the time we were together.

In reality, I had to seize control of SNAP benefits in only a couple of months because we were running out of food two weeks into a given month. I'd noted shopping behaviour and was like "no, if we have enough money to make it through the end of the month, sure, buy the smallest Doritos you can at 7-Eleven, but otherwise, I'm done with this bullshit."

The first Wednesday of the month, I'd pore over the circulars and find ways to turn $500 into $1,200 ... I had to leave some on the card because for some reason, one of her sons refused to drink anything but milk. (I was the new guy ... I couldn't just say, "Hey, babe, have you considered telling him to try water?")

Anyway, this is the person whose pajamas I continue to wear. Our reunion really only brought up old ghosts.

Life has been, in my experience, a bunch of waiting followed by an explosion of things just short of what I can't handle.

For reasons that escape me, I'm listening to music again tonight.

Bringing me back to trance, which is pretty much notorious for going absolutely nowhere for four to five minutes before finally losing the plot for several bars ahead of getting to the point.

Look: I love the genre, but you really have to be invested to put up with it, as I've learned from friends. They want tracks done by the time the foreplay is just beginning; I'm rarely interested in something that doesn't run at least eight minutes.

But, you see, here is the parallel to my life, and why I think trance attached itself like a fungus: devoid of direction, followed by complete collapse before triumphantly being assertive in major (usually ... some trance is in minor past the breakdown, and that's certainly for a certain mood).

It's always wait, wait, wait, oh fuck, shit went off the rails, and oh, look, here's a solution. I don't know a better way to describe trance.

Maybe that's why it speaks to me so deeply. I don't need lyrics -- make me feel.

I am currently going through a maelstrom. My ex is a viable option, as learned in mid-December. Not totally viable, but holy shit, are we still on the same page.

If only she didn't have kids ...

It's fucking hell to be next to the love of your life for two nights and have to leave. She told me she actually couldn't relax with me there, as she expected something to go wrong.

Which is not an expectation one holds when inviting a former partner to your apartment. She knew better.

I'm not going to once again revisit how things went, but they went well.

The problem is now disentanglement. Though I'm not sure I want to. She's absolutely terrible for me, but I can't see being happier with anyone else. Maybe that's bias, but ... she's exactly my brand of crazy while we're not trying to destroy each other.

I did not say this was a healthy relationship. It is not.

This said, I think there's a weird dichotomy in the world of relationships. Sure, something where you're just working together without issue sounds appealing.

But for some people, the fight is the point. And if you're mismatched on this front, problems will ensue.

She told me on the night we met that she'd most likely get bored of me within a week, as she needs a certain level of challenge.

That was 16 years ago.

I also don't care for a compliant bitch, as that's usually my role, so things moved along.

I just don't know what to make of it currently. We met up, we obviously still connect, and yet ... we can't make it work.

Nichol fucking Hahnloser is being ... deliberately obtuse.

It's her right, of course. I brought up our time together from last month, and she kinda went off on a bender.

What is crucial to bring up is that we can't be in the same room without feeling what's happening. That was our downfall in 2009, and it remains the issue today.

I'm not sure we really like each other. But we are drawn like moths to a flame.

I can say that we love each other, but that eventually feels a bit hollow. I think we both love what could have been, but 16 years in, that's less of a possible outcome than a reality.

She had very different goals. She wanted kids. I wanted to avoid kids by all means. The timing of our divorce was to ensure Texas law didn't rope me into child support (at five years, it doesn't matter whether you're the biological father -- this is now your problem). My lawyer got us divorced mere days before hitting that cutoff.

My lawyer, of course, being one of my columnists in college. I think he was better at lawyering than writing, but hey, he was in Austin, and I needed a divorce.

It's sort of crazy that Jonathan, a columnist I decided to give a shot at in the late '90s, would be my divorce attorney. Life can be funny sometimes.

All this notwithstanding, I am left with the reality with Nichol. Her phone is off because she paid for mine, and I don't really care what your metric is there, but it seems pretty damn obvious.

I envy those of you who do not need friction to enjoy a relationship. Those sound nice. I can't do that. Unless someone is mentally and physically challenging me, I'm bored.

I never knew what I was going to write from one week to the next. Once I was managing editor, I was like "fuck, fuck, fuck, I have to write a column" while herding cats.

You run a college newsroom sometime and tell me how it goes.

But back to the topic at hand, I had a very simple process that lasted my whole career. That title? It's why I'm writing right now.

So as not to bury the lede, the formula is this:

• Have a headline.
• Have a thesis.
• Know where the fuck I'm going.

I'm only posting this because I know where I'm going.

Being a columnist is one of the easiest jobs in the world. Even with a few interviews here and there, you get to spout off about current events. One of the nice things about student journalism is no one has already worked in, say, the White House press office.

So we just wing it. Not the East Wing at this point, I'd imagine.

There were several Tuesday evenings where I was concerned I'd not fill the left of A4. On Tuesday nights, as such, I became far more interested in what reporters were working on.

Here's the bar: "Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me!"

And then, usually about 25 minutes later, my column was headed to the copy desk, after which the edited copy was discarded, and I ran the original, because, oh, yes, I was also the designer.

Look ... I'm a copyeditor by trade over the decades, but in college, the desk may as well have been the error-introduction desk. The chiefs were all solid, but under them? Yeah, I'll keep my original copy, let you play editor and then run what I wrote. (This is, incidentally, a very bad idea, as everyone needs an editor.)

It has been the same every time since I settled into column writing in the late '90s: Once I have a hed, the whole thing flows out so fast I'm not even thinking about it. Maybe that's an odd writing process, but until I've seen the whole thing writ large, I can't even start. Once I know, then it's a simple matter of getting from Point A to Point B.

Unlike the rest of my life.

I've worked in sales for 10 years and as an aspiring musician I was dying to teach music or playing music full time for once. I found a job near me for the front desk at a Music school. I somehow managed to get the job, And I was the most experienced sales person they ever hired. For a bit, we were all happy and it was mutual.

I started going through some personal things, And it was impacting my job so I enrolled in therapy and got a prescription for escitalopram and it helped at first, but every few months I would have a conflict with someone, or share my opinion on something I disagreed with alotta.. emotion. We abruptly lost a lot of teachers this holiday season and there were a lot of question marks on what was happening with some programs. A teacher came up and chewed me out for enrolling a student on their schedule for a day they closed but we didn't the update. I expressed my dissatisfaction of this on my end of day report and that was the last straw for them and they fired me at the end of day yesterday. No final paychecks or anything.

I'm pretty torn because I got do the coolest thing ever in my opinion. I got to be the connection between the community and incredible music teachers. I got to do a ton of cool stuff. I learned so many neat things getting to work with musicians of all different backgrounds. I wish I had done better with de-escalating myself but it feels like my brain just goes on autopilot and I can't help it

I guess now I will file for unemployment and apply to all the sales jobs that dont sound too awful. I have no savings and tons of debt and expensive rent so I only have the weekend to get over it.

Thanks for letting me share beehaw.

This seems innocuous enough until you learn that two of these stickers were slid under my door, and the very few people who know where I park have disavowed knowledge.

So, I don't know what to make of it.

I have no idea who placed them, why, or the reasoning, which is frankly maddening. At least one of these would be nice to have.

I instead have a pair of stickers that could have come from 1999, when I blew up my life for the second time.

I mean, that's oddly specific terminology on a sticker.

Hi beeple, hope you all have a very festive and comfortable end of 2025. I wish you all a great 2026 where you will find joy and happiness 💕. Hopefully we'll see some sanity and compassion on the world stage for once :)

Her grandson's mom ended up with a dead car that meant she couldn't get him there for Christmas. I'm not even going to go into the rest of that branch of the family, as his dad is beyond useless.

So, being indigent, I did what I could and called Mom. Babe was quite irritated by this. Mom was unwilling to help for reasons that historically make a lot of sense.

But I had to try.

As I listen to Nine Inch Nails' Something I Can Never Have in an attempt to right myself, things are only deteriorating. NIN is always a bad sign.

Those two days together, with such reconnection, served as exactly what I didn't need. I don't know what the fuck I was thinking ... it was a terrible fucking idea, but with my dad dying, I needed something to cling to.

Oh, I now have something; it's just not what I'd wish on anyone else. God, I wish we'd not gotten along ... I'd have had closure instead of this fucking mess.

I'd be seriously considering social services but for the fact that they treat me like an incompetent idiot, which does not advance the cause. I'm a victim of bad luck professionally, not some sort of microbrain that needs to be told how basic operations happen.

To touch someone intimately again, to just default to assisting each other again, was intoxicating. This is "hey, it's Christmas in five days, and fuck off for trying to help."

I don't have the funds to go up there, and even if I did ... it wouldn't end well. Leaving me feeling very alone in my van (at least it's not cold tonight) and knowing that, well, we gave it another shot, but here we are.

I've been home nine days but can't bring myself to change out of her clothes. I smell like her (yes, in every way; dryer sheets eventually stop working), and I mean, I'll take that over Tide and Bounce.

But I don't know what to do about it. And I'm now worried this could go somewhere incredibly dark. I don't want to specify exactly how many suicide attempts I have under my belt, nor how serious they got, but I'm not OK, and I don't have the resources to do anything other than crack open another beer and kick the can to tomorrow.

Fuck, is it frustrating to have your person ... and have her totally unavailable. You'd think I would have learned my lesson over 16 years, but I didn't. I'm not particularly stable nor aware of how normal people interact.

While my career was intact, this was marginally doable. Without that, I'm lost. I'm just lonely and know that my soulmate was a brief respite, but now I have to deal with my dad being dead; my mom telling me I'm making bad choices; my body, heart and mind all saying the same thing; and the door is shut.

For now. We've played the waiting game for years before, but it hits a bit different at 46 than 25.

Not a creature was stirring not even a mouse

The sun has gone down and the moon has come up

And long ago somebody left with the cup But he's striving and driving and hugging the turns and thinking of someone for whom he still burns..

Cuz he's going the distance..

I went out to Church Night, and it was a blast.

Thing is, now I'm going to wake up feeling empty. I met some great new people around a fire. We talked tattoos, piercings, and now I'm back in my van.

this week's book of note: Who's Afraid of Gender?

For those keeping track, I spent Tuesday through Thursday with my ex-wife.

I've already spoken at length about that, and to repeat it would advance nothing.

I'm deliberately avoiding the NSFW tag, because, honestly, it doesn't mean anything. What matters is who we are to each other, and that is safe for work.

I've been back in my van for a couple of days, and I guess someone would like this, but what a fucking masochistic starting point.

My ex is, in fact, a masochist. I branded her ... twice. When someone asks politely, I'm inclined to be a submissive bitch. (I'm serious, here. 50 Shades hadn't come out yet, so we didn't even yet have a terrible rendition of BDSM that was about to spring forth.)

To call my ex-wife difficult is to ignore that you don't want to be with me. We are equally difficult, and that's why we work. You don't really notice this when it starts, as you're a bit too busy fucking.

We were both exactly what the other needed, at exactly the right time. All of the foreplay was negated by "oh fuck, you're mine." You don't really recover from that.

This said, we can't talk right now, as we skated so close to the edge of reality that one of us may have fallen off the cliff. Neither of us would ever admit that, which is unuseful.

I have completely cut off trying to meet others as a result. I'd been fucking around on Reddit, but, honestly, I don't want someone else. I'm not going to do better, and so to try is folly.

She owns me, I own her, and this just works. I don't know I'd feel comfortable owning someone else.

I mean, the guy handing out eggnog (with extra nog available) likely did lead to a hangover, but this is something different.

The burner warehouse offered an event last night (these sorts of things happen right under your nose, but as with a speakeasy, you have to know when and where they are) with food, fire dancing (because of course they did), some serious house and trance, copious amounts of alcohol and weed, and of course a few different fire pits.

There were three tiers for tickets: Free, $15 and $30. I opted for option 1.

The friend who introduced me properly to the burn scene felt inclined to come out last night, so we'd occasionally cross paths, and then once we'd kind of tapped out, we retreated to his van.

He has a dog that really brings all the girls to the ... drainage ditch. So we're drinking beers and shooting the shit while a woman plays with his dog a few feet away.

All in all, a wonderful night. I made new acquaintances, ate some OK food, heard some good tunes and hung out with the guy who's become my closest friend in the past couple of years.

But then, you wake up alone in a trash-filled van and realize that was fiction.

Quick backstory: He died Nov. 14.

I keep trying to feel something -- anything -- and yet my mind tends to wander to my ex-wife for that.

I very vaguely remember times where we'd have fun, as with me riding on his shoulders, but the final year Oma came for Christmas, all of that was gone.

A friend and I had split a beer several months back (I think we were 11) when my parents went out for the night and got us pizza.

As 11-year-olds are, we stupidly did not dispose of the evidence. My parents being reasonable people, the punishment was "don't ever do this again."

So it is against this backdrop that I'm sitting in my room, and my dad bursts in, furious. In my face like he'd never been before, and I was frozen in shock and confusion. I'd not done anything.

Over the course of the next half hour, the picture becomes clear: Oma had opened a beer thinking it was a V8.

What I never got was an apology. He knew damn fucking well that he'd falsely accused me and scared me, but apologizing was apparently too much.

There were nearly 35 years for that apology. It just didn't happen.

Just after my rent went up by more than my food and cat budget, I rehomed Clovis and bought a van.

I'd done quite a fair amount of research, having been dabbling in tiny-home living for seven years, so building out an off-grid system wasn't the issue it could have been.

I was not prepared for how things would transpire.

I selected my van based on the Cummins engine and Allison transmission, both of which are famous for longevity. Thing is, that covers nothing else, so when the starter motor dies, well, that's a replacement. Serpentine belt breaks on your way back from a build day? That's a $400 tow for five miles.

The electrical system was a high point early on. Everything just worked, and my laptop was happy to work with my 5G hotspot while the fridge actually kept ice cream cold.

Moving forward two years, my fridge has failed so many times that I don't even bother putting anything other than beverages in it. It's a cooler after having to throw out hundreds of dollars of food over several rounds of trusting it again.

The electrical system? Well ... you sign up for certain things when putting your batteries in series, and one is sudden imbalance. Which means the whole system is dead. This is fine when you can crash with a friend and charge there, but when he's down on the coast, this becomes a very expensive hotel adventure.

One other thing that made me feel good about this decision was my ex-boss was fine with me using the dumpsters (I park a few hundred feet away from those), but that lease ran out a year ago, and everyone else nearby locks theirs.

There is a lot of trash in here.

It's not all doom and gloom, but some days, it feels that way. For example, I never waste food anymore unless the fridge fucks me.

But slowly, normal human conditions change. I had a gym membership to shower daily and perform other bodily functions. Sadly, things did not go well at work, and now that was a $20 expense I couldn't justify.

I'm not a naturally stinky person, and I still had the nearby brewery to go to for indoor plumbing; so far, so good.

Obviously, I was still peeing in bottles when leaving the van wasn't really an option. There's a fair amount of grass here where I could dump them, so I wasn't being a bad neighbour.

Then, you have the first time you get sick. Even the 24-hour 7-Eleven an eight-minute walk away is not going to be a solution to shitting the bed. This is where a bucket comes into play, if you hadn't donated the bucket to the makerspace for an event and not retrieved it.

So, now I'm not regularly bathing, and that's the least of my hygiene concerns.

I share this not for sympathy, but because there's a strong sense overall that people become homeless and everything goes wrong at once -- and we just become degenerates. That isn't the case; many would like to bounce back, but as things continue to deteriorate, that simply becomes harder.

My dad dying means I'll have the funds sometime to file for bankruptcy and hopefully be able to get back on track, but that still looks like a long road.

I'm lucky that I have an exit ramp. Once one starts going down this rabbit hole, things just get more and more complex. When people talk about social services in standard media, this is all but ignored.

It's not just housing or jobs; it's literally needing to jumpstart your life with a dead battery. Bootstraps!

Throw in the increasing cruelty of services for the indigent, and you're creating the problem you're trying to scare people with.

Balance housing costs and wages, and I think you might be surprised how the homeless problem solves itself.

Maybe a few hippies want to be here, but the rest of us do not.

this week's reading:

It was about this time 16 years ago that I started talking with my second ex-wife. We'd chatted briefly five years earlier, but she shut things down immediately.

And so when what happened happened, neither of us was in the mindset to fully process it. I was technically still married, and she wasn't exactly single.

As I've gone into excruciating detail before, no need here. The Cliff's Notes version is a lot of random shit happened in short order that rose to the level of weather causing us to meet.

Having spoken on the phone the night before, we confirmed my intent and need. I had an ex who'd gotten me a hotel room in Tacoma, Wash., but she reserved it starting Sunday night, and the friend I was crashing with moved the "out this weekend" goalposts from EOD Sunday to Friday.

I harbour no ill will toward him ... I'd overstayed the original "couple of weeks," so no issue there. I was able to crash with a former coworker for a night Saturday, which is where the phone call happened.

See, the issue was an ice storm on I-5. This simply doesn't happen; way too far west, but here we are.

So, driving up the 5 to Tacoma was unacceptably risky. And the woman I'd been talking to for a week lived on the South Coast of Oregon, which wouldn't be much warmer, but above freezing.

But what led to this improbable situation was how we immediately interacted. She was prickly for the first couple of rounds of messages, but then she somehow softened. I believe there's a term, tsundere, for this.

She was a hardened bitch (I don't say this derogatorily; she will happily admit as much herself) who didn't understand why she even said yes to my random ask.

One night. No funny business.

That fell apart almost comically in a few stages; needless to say, we ended up ... well, the first time was awkward because no one was there for that!

The problem is, we'd touched (her idea) while watching The Neverending Story, a movie her son was named after the main character of and also the first one I remember seeing as a child (it would later inform my preference for electronic music), and it happened to be in the place I would eventually come to revere to the point that it was my last physical address before everything fell apart and I was at her door.

States away.

I'll eventually write a book with all the details, but I'm not here to provide a history lesson; I'm here to talk about next Tuesday.

Because it is now tentatively planned, nine years after our divorce, that I visit for a couple of days. She brought it up this time, so my homelessness wasn't the motivating factor.

My dad dying a couple of weeks ago and her talking with my mom for the first time in years likely softened her stance.

I'm of two minds. At this point of mental chaos, between the death and other tangible problems, a couple of days with the person who knows me better than anyone else sounds really appealing.

Fiction, but we know it is. Her boys would not countenance me in her bed. And we have a two-day window, which she has opened.

It's a bizarre situation. Hell, just finally getting along for hours at a time on the phone after so many years was unexpected.

Graduated during the pandemic, got a good job right after graduation working in IT (I don’t have a degree in IT but I’m good with computers and learn quickly). I’ve been working from home since 2019.

My work just announced that work from home will be forbidden (no exceptions) starting January. My choice is to move to a high cost of living city to keep my job (which my current salary truly cannot afford) or find a new job. I live rurally so finding a new job is tough, especially in my field.

Not confident about my future. I (think) I have a wide breadth of technical digital skills (I can do parametric 3D modelling, video edit+colour grading, software and app mockups using Figma and XD, graphic design using vector graphics, anything M365 -tenant administration and deployment, digital training, PowerBI data cleaning and dashboards, powerautomate, blah blah blah).

I don’t even know what other jobs I can do. I’ve only ever worked at this place and I feel that on paper, I’m not very hireable. Surely though someone with my assortment of skills can find a line of work where I’d thrive and learn more.

I just feel stuck in a rut and have no idea what to do.

Because I do.

In 2003, I went to my college roommate's parents for the final time. I'd burned a bunch of new music on MP3 CDs, and this came on as I was driving through blinding rain in bumper-to-bumper traffic up the 205.

Now, if you don't like trance, this is unlikely to change your opinion, as it essentially goes nowhere for the better part of five minutes (curse of the genre). But if you do, here's my holiday gift.

It's basically my Alice's Restaurant, which I first heard in that house Thanksgiving 1997. This one is thankfully less than 18 minutes.

this week's reading is Zoopolis: