hurricane Helene didn't get me

[bvanevery]

I just have no relationship whatsoever with r/alphacentauri.  A mod there treated me poorly many years ago, like I was chopped liver when I'd done a pretty big job of trying to drive traffic to them.  So I said you know what?  Forget you.  I'll stick to r/4Xgaming which is far larger.  SMAC comes up in discussion frequently enough there, being one of the all time greats.

The only reason I finally found out the forum had been raised from the dead, is today I was looking for a mindworm emoji on the Will To Power Discord server.  I was wondering why they were on the Alpha Centauri Discord server and why so many good emojis on various servers were locked.  I was plunking through that server, which I haven't been on in a long time, and saw that AC2 had revived.  So now I'm here.

I left Asheville 2 days before the storm hit.  I knew there was some kind of storm coming, but it didn't matter to me.  I had a previous commitment to go help my Mom in Winston-Salem with something.  I was gonna come back to deal with my usual bureaucratic rituals, socialize a bit, then leave again before it got really cold.  Like some kind of Mr. Magoo, I just drove right outta there and BLAM!  everything devastated right behind me.  Back then, I couldn't return if I'd wanted to.

It seems that Hickory was far enough away not to get major damage.  I have another car based homeless friend of mine that planted his flag there after the disaster.  Said it was in ok shape.  I have thought about you BU from time to time as I've passed through there.  I'm a patron of the Hickory Art Museum, I make it a point to stop and see whatever the latest show is.  We should finally have a beer one of these days.  I've been meaning to try that big bar on the central square since forever, but I've always found excuses not to drink alone.

I took a drive to my sister's in Ohio.  Some jerk up there totaled my old car, financially speaking.  It still runs fine, but they dented it up just badly enough to be totaled.  2X to repair what the insurance paid me as settlement, and that was a long fight.  I couldn't even deal with it at all for many months, I was pretty distraught.  I kept the car.  Hey I've put a lot of mechanical labor into it, to make it run well.  Gas MPG is still fine and that's the most important thing.  It's now a bit ugly and I still have to decide how much elbow grease I'll put into making it better.  I have sort of this feeling of resignation that I'm now driving a disposable car.

My Dad has suffered a 2 day evacuation of his hi-rise waterfront condo in Charleston, South Carolina.  Nothing related to any storm.  It seems they built the thing wrong in the 1st place, way back in the 1970s.  And for some reason, some engineering firm only figured that out recently.  There had been a lot of repair work and everything was supposed to be getting fixed.  Then very suddenly, it's announced that it isn't.  City of Charleston makes everyone leave in 2 days.  No resident had warning.  It's a very selective kind of disaster, like a tornado came in and wiped out only your building.  And it's so freaky that there's no insurance for the circumstance, at all.

My Dad is actually in decent psychological shape about it.  I'm not.  In 2024, I was only just starting to come out of my anti-social pandemic shell.  Trying to make an effort.  Then Helene completely wiped off the map, parts of Asheville where I had just started trying to plant my flag.  Art studios are gone.  Places I used to take my dog to a dog park, are a mud and debris strewn ruin.  The only saving grace is at least we had long since ceased going there.  My dog has been dead a couple years now, and I'm not really over that either.  It's just been one damn thing after another.

I did do a sort of "talk about your Helene feelings" group the last time I swung through Asheville.  It helped some.  I should do more of those.  I said, I was already messed up before this happened.  This has messed me up worse.  It makes you feel things like, you will never have stability or safety.  Anything you work for, will be destroyed.

Losing the AC2 server probably contributed to this, come to think of it.  I didn't lose my work, course.  That's living elsewhere now.  But I did lose all my development thread history, and all of those After Action Reports I did.  That's an awful lot of personal interaction and content production, over all these years.

Now I see that the Raleigh area has been underwater, and that was only a tropical depression, not the hurricane proper.  I wonder if Winston-Salem and Hickory will be hammered at some point.    Hope not.  At least I don't think we'd have the same focusing effect that the mountains have for flood damage.  So many places devastated.  Swannanoa, I think big parts of it are still pretty wrecked.  Think Black Mountain fared much better.  The downtown looked fine when I was there last.

Whereas, Biltmore Village... dang.  There's still buildings with steel beams hanging out, just gutted.  Things in better shape are all boarded up.  The arch to get into the Biltmore Estate is fine.  I don't know if it's because it evaded damage, or they just had a big budget to put it right.  Haven't chased down that level of sordid detail.

I try to tell myself there will be other art groups, other communities, not everything can ever be wiped out.  But having your life get turned into an Etch-A-Sketch, where you shake it and it all vanishes, that's hard.

[Buster's Uncle]

I have a lot to say to this, but it's late and I'm tired.  Maybe more in the morning when I'm awake, if the tech coordination don't keep me as busy.

I don't drink, but I'm just 15 minutes west of Hickory, and I'd love to meet you in meatspace sometime.  Let's do that when convenient.

I spent the Helene morning from dawn to noon on my carport watching the trees fall - in barefeet, shorts and a t-shirt, so I'd expected you to be weeks shy of winter migration and asleep in your car when Helene hit hours before the weathermen expected, or dawn.  I've been sincerely worried about you for months, especially the last one.

And this place is my whole life - just imagine how depressed I've been.  Actually gave up trying to resurrect my tech d00dz from the dead, eventually - and that there's still been a huge drag on doing my job getting the word spread that we're back and setting that tech-lack right since AC2 mysteriously came back on the 10th.  Sympathy, my man; I really get that.

Bedtime's coming up, but I really want to say more soon...

[Buster's Uncle]

So you've never mentioned mental health issues in all the years I've known you; this intrigues.  Game knows game, and I'd actually wondered -a  little- if you could be like you are w/o knowing.  Comfortable w/ kicking it around a bit?

Hello angry depressive nurd; I'm a nurd prone to depression w/ severe anger issues...  You are heard, and somebody cares...

[bvanevery]

The pandemic was bad.  I was trapped with a family member in a living situation where the house was experiencing an environmental disaster.  Construction dust everywhere.  It was choking my dog.  It came to a head and he was thrown out of the house.  Of course that meant I had to go with him, to protect him.  He was also quite old and I presume had some kind of cancer, not officially diagnosed.  We nevertheless had some decent times in total survival mode on the road, before the end.  He made it to 17.5 years and for a 65 lb. dog, that doesn't just happen.  I did something right.  Just wish I could have done more right, but I had no resources or family support to work with at all.

I've spent the last 2 years of my life trying to recover from this, and not sure I've made much progress.  The pandemic and the dog survival didn't just destroy me, it also destroyed social networks and emotional support I previously had in Asheville.  I lost a few people during the pandemic, nobody actually to COVID.  Some people just got old and up and died.  Some people had medical or mental problems that finally came due.  Some people are just gone, and I don't know if they're alive or dead, but I presume the worst.

I keep wrestling with Asheville, but I also keep bouncing in and out, not really being consistent about it.  I'm more regional now and definitely uprooted.  The region can go as far north as Ohio, where my sister is.  Or as far south as Charleston, where my Dad is.  Sometimes family is the excuse I allow to pull me away from trying to be social in Asheville.  But mostly it's just fear.  Fear of losing everything all over again.

Helene didn't help.  News reports of more storms don't help.  I have not directly experienced any storm damage.  But indirectly, I'm totally receiving the consequences of these disasters.  They rattle me, and fill me with fear.  I don't really know how to cope with the fear, so my primary tactic has been to avoid it, and suppress it.

Current politics about food stamps and medicaid adds fears on top of fear.  But those fears are more manageable, because I only need X amount of food and I don't have serious physical health issues.  That I know of.  Uh, that's another suppressed fear, that there may be more physically wrong with me than I'm acknowledging.  I'm hoping my gut problems are an understandable case of nerves, and can be handled with better dietary management.

Bad coffee is often a big problem, for instance.  I've gone up a coffee brewing snob learning curve and it's disappointing to have to back off from it.  I make weaker stuff because it's more gut friendly.  I'm pretty in tune to what happens to coffee beans and grounds when they're aging and going bad.  You can get some really bad coffee off a store shelf, and pay a lot of money for the privilege.  I primarily suspect that chlorogenic acid is a big problem for me, and that aging increases it.  I know what the bad stuff smells and tastes like.  I've learned to never, ever tough out a bad cup of coffee.  If it's really bad it can burn holes in me.

I'm encouraged by discovering that eating 2 baby organic carrots a day, substantially helps my gut healing.  The fiber should indeed help.  I think the insight is eating the right amount of fiber.  Not zero, not a whole lot.  A right sized dose.

I try to mentally separate physical problems from mental problems.  A long time ago, I realized pain is a big liar.  If you are in pain, your brain will lie to you about how awful the world is, a kind of despairing.  You won't have those thoughts if you feel just fine.  If I'm having trouble making this separation, I do take CBD oil to keep the edge off.  I don't take it regularly, as surprisingly enough, I usually am able to sleep at night just fine.  But I always have it available in case I need it.  That's my only medication per se.

[Buster's Uncle]

What do you do for money?  I was a rennie on the road, living in a tent for six years sporadically, I think I've told you - and I get some sense of how cheaply a fella can live if he really wants to, though nothing but peanut butter sandwiches gets old fast, and is unsustainable for really long...

[bvanevery]

That's actually not something I'm going to discuss publicly on the internet, because who knows, government snoops could try to use it against me somehow.  But the summary version is I rely on Christmas and birthday gifts and am extremely tight fisted and frugal all year with it.  My cash footprint is terribly, terribly small.