when things get too real for me_irl

Sweet! So I just need affordable healthcare, born into a well off family that has horses and can provide shelter in bad times, have enough disposable cash to enjoy going out, and afford an extremely expensive long-term goal! lol of course I'm kidding, as sarcastic as I might be I am happy that you've found what's important to you.

If anyone is struggling reading this and can't do the above, my only simple suggestion is to force yourself to sit in the sun for 10 minutes a day (I close my eyes and relax, lizard brain will thank you) and/or just stare at something natural (in person) for 20 minutes. The sun can help develop and regulate chemicals in your body and helps break your previous routine. With nature, most studies find you need only 2 hours out of a week to find benefits.

I know not everyone has a backyard or nearby local park, but there is nature close to you where it tries to bust through (empty lot, crappy sidewalk or overgrown lawns), I found a crappy public fishing spot recently (mercury signs posted warning the fish are bad but people keep fishing there) and just kinda park out there and wander around (there's no trails, but the electrical lines running nearby had growth under them so I just walked down it a ways and back). I try to leave my phone in my pocket (or at home if you feel comfortable doing that) and play a game of memorizing a singular plant so I can try to identify it when I get home (resist the temptation to pull out your phone for the millionth thought). Has also helped me find some wild herbs and edibles in my area which I've propagated so I can grow at home (don't eat wild food, at the bare minimum there might be piss on it or worse, extremely toxic chemicals). Kids and pets definitely enjoy the trip, even if they complain they'll eventually come to enjoy the time being spent. Kids especially are trained for more hyper focused entertainment so there's some push back, but it's not their fault and just explain it's for yourself (they understand selfishness lol). It can be as simple as leaving for something 10 minutes early so you can stop and check out a spot you like.

Blasting rope on a hooker's tits is diabolical.

Blast some lines off a hooker’s massive fake tits, and blow a load all over her face.

I like your style, fellow thrill-seeking pervert. We could party together.

I thought it wasn't meant to be expensive :D

You know know what? You're right buddy. Thanks for the inspiring motivation.

Was not ready for that fourth line at all

It's genuinely nice to hear you're enjoying your time here, and that your "trajectory" seems to be for the better.

Mine's been pretty much the opposite. My health started taking a sharp turn for the worse a bit before COVID got going, and I still haven't come to terms with all of it. Started off with a tumor in a particularly vexing place, which caused personality changes over a couple of years although I didn't know it at the time, and doctors chalked up my mental and physical symptoms to everything from anxiety to panic attacks to HIV (which I don't have and really had no chance of having). My up to that point fantastic marriage disintegrated because I turned into an anxious and tired mess, and I was frankly a shit partner. A while after the divorce I lost my job in the company I helped found because the tumor affected my cognitive function too, but doctors kept telling me it's just anxiety, depression, alcoholism, what the fuck ever.

After a while I did end up getting a correct diagnosis, and when I got radiotherapy it triggered an autoimmune condition that really fucked me up, but that also took more than a year to actually get diagnosed correctly, and at that point there'd already been enough damage that it took 20 years off my life expectancy. Naturally the radiotherapy didn't do the trick so I also needed surgery, and its complications combined with the autoimmune stuff have left me unable to work and generally so tired that I can barely function. Haven't had the energy to eg. see my friends all that much, and since I now live alone I can sometimes go for weeks without speaking to another human (I talk to myself a lot…). I'm often in neuropathic and arthritic pain, and I can't even fucking swallow too well anymore because of nerve damage, so eating and sometimes even drinking is a chore and can lead to coughing fits. Thanks to the autoimmune stuff I occasionally get, well… let's say acute diarrhea which has led me to shitting my pants a couple of times because I couldn't get to the toilet in time, and I was at home the second time that happened. So leaving the apartment can be a dicey proposition sometimes for days at a time. I drink way too much nowadays, but it's either that or having to deal with all this sober, and I don't have the energy for that, let alone interest.

If I'm being honest, I'm just waiting to die, and hoping it'll happen sooner rather than later because none of this is curable and will only get worse. My life has lost all meaning, and it's difficult to enjoy anything anymore due to constant brain fog, pain, and tiredness.

Bela Koe-Krompecher spent a lifetime in Ohio's vivid music and arts scene, with all its ups and mostly downs. I really like how he expressed this sentiment, both in his blog and in his awesome book "Love, Death and Photosynthesis":

Nobody got famous, nobody ever really made a dent in any product counting mechanism like Billboard, The College Music Journal or MTV but we loved and cherished one another as if our lives depended on it, night in and night out. What we discovered was the result wasn’t the prize; the prize was the friendship and the making of art for fuck’s sake.

I'm not an artist myself, but I used to hang out a lot with a bunch of them. Maybe because of this, another quote of BKK resonated with me:

Our world was small but it opened up the universe where ideas bounced off of one another like bubbles in beer, we would have one ingenious idea flowing after another without a filter to identify the logical of said idea. Huddled around empty bottles and amplifiers the stage of the world was in the basements and living rooms of our lives.

It's getting harder as you get older, and the same old stories you share ring more and more repetitive, but I still go out my way to stay in touch with my childhood and university friends, and sometimes I think, it's the only thing that keeps me from going completely bitter.
BTW, I stumbled upon BKK's story on the great "Local Waste Music" podcast which I heartily recommend.

Oh I wish I was. I used to keep my apartment really neat but now I haven't cleaned in almost half a year, place looks like a humanitarian crisis

Diane Nguyen put it perfectly:

I guess I had my happy ending, but every happy ending has the day after the happy ending, and the day after that.

There's no single happily ever after because there's always more time, until you die. So just keep living as if you're already in it.