Killing Addiction and Other Fallacies (Part 5 of 5)

This is the final part of my multiple-post series, Killing Addiction and Other Fallacies.  Before I continue, I want to note that addiction, depression, and every other disorder I've touched are immensely complicated subjects.  I am not an expert on psychological disorders, and I have not been diagnosed or advised by any professionals.  I am only using these posts to work through my most destructive vices, hoping to better understand myself and to finally gain control over my life.

Here is a quick recap of the previous parts:

• Part 1.  Introduction.
• Part 2.  Determined the causes and patterns of my videogame addiction.
• Part 3.  Defined specifically my addictions.
• Part 4.  Removed an unexpected compulsion from my life.

If you have the time, I strongly urge you to watch this short video on Unethical Game Design by 5 Inch Floppy.  The host speaks with professionals and sorts out evidence about how some of today's game designers are purposely placing mechanics into their games to get people addicted to them.  When I was in school, a few of my professors briefly covered the subject, and articles I've found about game addiction also mention similar things.  But so far, 5 Inch Floppy's presentation is one of the most concise when it comes to describing videogame addiction/compulsion.

For the longest time, I never understood how some people could play games and not get addicted while others got hooked so easily.  I took offense when "specialists" said that those who get addicted to videogames have psychological issues and would just get addicted to other things if games weren't present.  So if I wasn't addicted to games, does that mean I would just find something else to get addicted to instead?  That's a hypothetical question that I can never answer truthfully.  But research has helped me conclude that genetics play an important part when it comes to addiction.  Some people get addicted to games easily because they're genetically predisposed to do so.  I just have to accept that videogames as a whole aren't addicting to everyone and that game addiction only affects some people.

I've spent the past few years ranting about the destructive nature of videogames.  (That's right, warning people of the dangers of games while being hooked to them myself.)  I let videogames ruin my life and I've seen videogames ruin the lives of others.  After all these years, all my experiences, and all the posts I've written, that must mean I've finally established that games are just terrible, wasteful products, right?

Behemoth vs The Warrior of Light by Yoshitaka Amano

When I think back to how games have affected me, I realize that videogames have motivated and inspired me in more ways than I could have ever imagine.  Off the top of my head, games like Castlevania, Contra, Mega Man, Jet Grind Radio, and Project Justice influenced my taste in music.  The Final Fantasy series, Lunar, Grandia, and Skies of Arcadia made me want to write stories so other people could experience adventures as amazing and as epic as I did.  Fighting games like Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, and Tekken inspired me to train in aikido, jiujitsu, and Shotokan Karate.  Finally, I wouldn't even be an artist today if it wasn't for Yoshitaka Amano's watercolor paintings of the Final Fantasy series.

Games have never been a completely negative experience.  I even have fond memories of World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2.  I mean, the main reason I got addicted to those games in the first place was because I had such a good experience with my friends that I wanted to prolong that experience.

A lot has happened since I began writing this series two weeks ago.  I've seriously considered restarting my WoW subscription, I've fallen in and out of depression, and even though I said things have been "smooth sails" ever since I deleted my porn, I absolutely lose my mind every time I see a beautiful woman.  Yes, I still play videogames every now and then, and I'm nowhere near as productive as I'd like to be, but at least I haven't buckled when it comes to the important things.  I still haven't touched WoW or TF2, depression hasn't completely crippled me, and I continue to fight the urge to masturbate.  That's probably more information than I should be giving out on the internet but it's alright.  This is my road to recovery and zero fucks have been given.

Killing a giant mechanical worm with friends.  (Iron Brigade)

Like I mentioned, I do play videogames occasionally.  Recently, I've been playing games socially with friends.  It's nice because it kind of keeps everyone in check.  As long as I recognize that the game isn't a complete black hole, then I can giggle with my buddies and enjoy beating up monsters (or each other) together.  I try to sneak in a few minutes of single player (of any game) on days that I don't get to play with friends.  If I keep my relationship with games a controlled thing then it's nice to use it as an actual source of entertainment.  I can only hope that I've finally figured things out for myself, and that my relationship with games stays casual civil, and fun.

There is one last thing I'd like to note before I finish this post.  I've been wanting to get into shape so I could get back into martial arts again.  Some of the best years of my life were the ones I spent training.  I stopped partly because of silly drama with my teacher and partly because I wanted to spend more time with my then-girlfriend.  I should have set that shallow crap aside and kept going for my own sake.  Anyways, I feel like I was at my physical peek when I trained in jiujitsu.  I weighed 130 lbs and I looked and felt awesome.  Over a year later, when I attended grad school, my weight fell to 100 lbs.  That's just one example of how hard malnutrition and depression hit me.  Today, I've gotten my weight up to 119 lbs but all my muscle is gone.  I've been slowly trying to get my strength back, but it's been so fucking hard without any goals to strive for.  So I decided to set a specific goal for my 30th birthday.  I'm hoping to reach 130 lbs by the time my birthday arrives (April 11th).  That's about a pound a week.  It feels like a doable goal if I monitor my diet and work out regularly.  So far, I'm on schedule.  I've gained a little bit of weight ever since I decided to reach for that goal last week.  I'll let you know what happens.

Killing Addiction and Other Fallacies (Part 4 of 5)

Click here for Part 3.

Writing about addiction has really helped me sort the scattered mess of ideas floating around in my head.  Researching the subject has helped give me a better understanding of what I'm up against.  And support from online communities (particularly Reddit) have given me the strength to carry on.

I've been avoiding Reddit for the past few years.  I heard it was the place to go if you wanted to waste your time and I didn't want another black hole to ruin my life.  I was already wasting enough time with games, 4chan, and other unproductive things.  But I recently started frequenting the forum and realized that Reddit is like everything else in life.  You can either take advantage of the things that its community has to offer, or you can squander away your time and look at stupid pics all day.

/r/GetMotivated and /r/hownottogiveaFUCK are two magical Subreddits (or forums within Reddit), and /r/StopGaming is exactly the type of supportive community that I've been looking for.  Unfortunately, the user base in /r/StopGaming is extremely small and the forum itself is pretty inactive.  However, I did find a massive and active community for addicts called /r/NoFap.

/r/NoFap is a community for porn addicts.  While I don't (currently) consider myself a porn addict, I do understand the allure of pornography and I know firsthand how addiction can contort someone's life.  So I spent some time in the forum, watching videos, studying articles, and reading through entire threads.  I sympathized with these people because they were fighting the same fight I was.

The thing that really hit home for me was this sixteen-minute video, The Great Porn Experiment: Gary Wilson at TEDxGlasgow.  (It is an amazing watch.  I highly recommend you check it out, or at least have it playing in the background as you do other things.)  About four and a half minutes in, Wilson lists the symptoms that people often mistake with "arousal addiction", including ADHD, social anxiety, depression, concentration problems, performance anxiety, and OCD.  Every time he listed off a symptom, a bell went off in my head.  I've had at least some problems with each of these disorders throughout my entire adult life, especially social anxiety, depression, and concentration problems.

That was all I needed to hear.  If I could rid myself of these horrible things by simply removing porn from my life then it was worth it.  Even if porn wasn't the main cause of my problems, it definitely was not helping me in my current situation.  If anything, it could be making my existing problems much worse.  So I rounded up as much porn as I could find and I deleted it.  Over 1.6 TB.  There's still a lot of random videos and images jumbled up in my hard drives, but I delete them every time I encounter them.  For the most part, all of my hard drives are clean and all of the porn is gone.

It's been two weeks since I stopped both masturbating and looking at porn.  The first few days had some unexpected results.  Towards the end of my day, I found myself compulsively going to my (defunct) porn folder or typing in the site that I used to visit to look for new porn.  Each time, I snapped out of it and stopped myself.  I won't lie to you, it was fucking weird and a little scary.  It felt like I woke up in the middle of sleepwalking and wondered where the hell I was and what the hell I was doing.  A problem that most "fapstronauts" (or people that abstain from porn and masturbation) deal with is relapse.  Day 3 was an absolute nightmare for me.  My body was going through serious withdrawal and my mind was logically explaining why masturbating every once would be okay.  But I ignored my own lies and drudged through it.  When Day 3 ended, it's been nothing but smooth sails.

Other than the physical and psychological benefits, removing porn from my life means two huge things for me:  More space and more time.  First, I don't need to spend money on another hard drive any time soon.  Lately, I had been running out of space everywhere.  My desktop hard drive and my three external hard drives were all running low, but when I deleted the porn I magically had an enormous amount of disk space to work with.  Second, I now have more time for other things.

I have been looking at porn ever since I first got access to the internet, which was eighteen years ago.  I was a tech-savvy kid so I found porn almost immediately.  Since then, I've been looking at or for porn at least once a day, every day.  Admittedly, when I was younger I used to spend hours a day with porn.  As I grew older, I'd skip a day every once in a while or only spend a few minutes here or there.  But whether I felt like it or not, porn was a daily ritual.  On average, I'd say I spent about an hour a day, ever since I was eleven years old, looking at or looking for porn.  So let's do some quick and basic math.  Eighteen years of porn equals to about 6,570 hours, or 273 straight days, or nine straight months.  Can you imagine?  I've wasted nine months of my life doing nothing but looking at porn.  I could have read a stack of books, learned a new language, learned to play an instrument, or honed my art skills even more.  Instead, I just sat there watching people fuck on my monitor.  What a terrible waste of time.

Anyways, I may have wasted my youth by choosing a digital world over the real world, but that doesn't mean my entire life is gone.  There is still time to change and there is still hope for the future.

(End of Part 4)
Click here for Part 5.

Killing Addiction and Other Fallacies (Part 3 of 5)

I left Part 2 with an interesting dilemma:  What do I do when I'm potentially addicted to the product that my industry creates?  I'm probably making this more difficult than it should be.  Let's deconstruct the situation.

"Videogames" is such a general word.  By that, I mean saying something like "I love videogames" is like saying "I love movies" or "I love music."  I know a lot of people who claim to enjoy all music but let's be honest, no one can possibly enjoy all music.  If you are a music lover, you will be fond of one or more genres, but you will also prefer not to listen to one or more other genres.  It's the same with movies, sports, TV shows, anime, and in this case, videogames.  So when I said, "I am addicted to videogames," I was unintentionally making a false generalization.  Even if I got more specific genre-wise then it would still be a false statement.

For example, World of Warcraft, one of the games I admitted to being addicted to, is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game).  So does that mean I'm addicted to all MMORPGs?  Short answer, no.  I played a wide range of MMORPGs and got extremely bored with almost all of them.  How about Team Fortress 2?  TF2 is categorized as a first-person shooter (FPS).  Am I potentially addicted to all FPSs?  God, no.  I've played countless FPSs and got instantly disinterested with almost all of them too.  That FPS list includes Call of Duty and Halo, two popular FPS franchises known for being addictive.

WoW and TF2 are different for me because they have certain elements that kept me interested.  For example, when I was in grade school, I spent an enormous amount of time playing the old Warcraft games, which were a completely different genre compared to World of Warcraft.  However, the thing that all those games have in common is that they take place in the Warcraft universe, a fictional world that I was already familiar with.  So being able to experience a world from my childhood firsthand in a shiny new game was a strong allure that kept me hooked.  TF2, on the other hand, takes place in a new universe that I was unfamiliar with.  But I got into TF2 because of my friends from grad school.  We would all sit in the same room and play together.  Whether we won (which we mostly did) or lost, it was always a fun and exciting experience.  I continued playing TF2 long after my friends left because I kept seeking those fun and exciting moments that I used to have with my friends.  My experiences with both games actually get way more complex than that but I don't want to get any more into the boring detail.  I just wanted to cover a basic overview.

In conclusion, while I do enjoy many videogames, I do not enjoy all videogames.  I don't even enjoy all videogames from the same genre.  There's just a few particular games that fascinate me and keep me mesmerized.  So where do I go from here?  Let's take a look at the warning signs that I ignored while playing these addictive games.

One of the first things I said when I first played World of Warcraft was "I can see how this can be addicting."  I knew WoW followed in the footsteps of Everquest, Ultima Online, and Diablo II.  Before WoW, those three games were known throughout the videogame community as some of the most addicting games ever released.  So I listened to my instinct and I played it smart.  I enjoyed WoW for all it was worth then cut my subscription off after a few weeks.  When I fell into depression and restarted my subscription, I kept seeing red flags.  Trouble in my relationship (because I chose to play the game instead of spending time with her), exhaustion at work and school (because I spent the whole night playing the game), and being generally unhappy with my situation in life.  I ignored all the red flags so I could sit in my fake digital world.

When most of my friends left Team Fortress 2, I continued playing the game with one or two friends, but eventually everyone faded out.  I found myself playing alone night after night and not having any fun.  I took the game way too seriously.  When I lost, I stubbornly continued playing so I could pull off a win.  When I won, I felt a short breath of relief but continued playing so I could taste that pseudo-joy again.  It was a sad existence.  I didn't even play socially.  I turned off all my chats so I didn't have to listen to the other players' whining.

How can I apply the lessons I learned from WoW and TF2 to future games?  In WoW, my instinct screamed at me to stop playing and I initially listened to it.  I shouldn't have fallen into peer pressure and I shouldn't have continued playing the game.  I restarted my WoW subscription twice, and both times I knew what I was getting myself into.  In TF2, I should have recognized the warning signs and stopped myself from wasting my life like that.  Again, I knew better, but I chose not to listen to reason.

In short, I knew either beforehand or while I was playing, that those particular games were addictive to me.  I saw red flags but I ignored them.  I watched as my addictive behavior ruined my life, and I chose pseudo-success and pseudo-happiness in a videogame over real success and real happiness in life.  In the future, both before playing and while playing a game, I need to ask myself, "Will I get addicted to this game?"  And I need to answer as honest and genuine as possible.  I also need to pay attention to my life outside the game.  Are parts of my life deteriorating because I'm spending too much time in this game?  If so, I need to rip myself away from it immediately.  I'm almost 30 years old and I already wasted most of my life.  I don't want to be stuck inside another black hole.

During this recent crusade of banishing my videogame addiction, I discovered some other things that I'll cover in my next blog post:  Taking it one step further.

(End of Part 3)
Click here for Part 4.

Killing Addiction and Other Fallacies (Part 2 of 5)

As I mentioned in Part 1, let's analyze my addictive behavior and see if I can figure out how to stop my addiction forever.

I've been using videogames to distract myself from reality for as long as I can remember.  Dad gone completely fucking nuts?  (Which was every day.)  Shitty day at school?  (Which was every school day.)  Videogames were always there to comfort me.

Alright, so I've always used videogames as a crutch.  That doesn't tell me enough.  Which were the worst times?  I can't speak for my childhood.  Everything before college is a hazy, depressing memory.  However, there were three major incidents that happened "recently" that I can remember.

• After college.  The first time I fell deep into addiction was when I finished undergrad.  I was so exhausted and burnt out that I sat at home and played World of Warcraft for six months straight.
• After grad school.  The second (and worst) time was when I finished grad school.  I was beaten down from the workload and still depressed over my ex-girlfriend when my father passed away.  So I started up World of Warcraft again and didn't stop for almost two whole years.  I filled in the rest of the time with Team Fortress 2, collecting stupid-looking hats and getting worthless achievements.  Almost three consecutive years doing nothing but playing videogames.
• After the art show.  Finally, the third time was last October.  I was blissfully living the artist's life in Austin when I suddenly had to change gears and kill myself to finish paintings for an art show.  During that crunch, I learned I was out of money and had to move back to Houston (a city I absolutely despise), back home with my mother.  Imagine that, a 29-year-old addicted to games and living with his mom.  I wasted a lot of time and a lot of money trying to figure out my life in Austin.  And when I finally got it down, I had to leave it.

So what did those three worst times have in common?  I didn't even realize it until now.  I thought the depression was linked to something else, and it still could be deep-rooted into other things.  But the main thing that those three incidents had in common was I got burnt out.  I pushed myself to work ungodly hours so I could meet deadlines.  And when I was done, I didn't want to do anything else.  I just wanted to turn off my brain and play videogames, hiding in my corner of the world and eating from the lotus.

Well, now I know the basic cause.  What can I do to prevent myself from burning out again?  You know, I gave that question a lot of thought, and sadly the only answer I can come up with is "nothing".  There is nothing I can do to stop myself from burning out again.  There will always be deadlines, and no matter how hard I try to avoid it, I will eventually lose sleep trying to hit a few of them.

To help me understand what I've been going through, I'm going to lay out what I now know:  Deadlines (will eventually) lead to burnout.  Burnout leads to depression.  And depression triggers my addiction.  So where can I intervene to stop this chain?

• Deadlines.  The best way to stop the cycle is to cut it off at the head.  If I can plan my tasks better, avoid procrastinating, and really work at time management and meeting my own milestones, then I can avoid burnout.  But it's going to take a lot of effort to get into this kind of work mode, and even more effort to maintain it.
• Burnout.  When burnout happens, I need to set aside some time to let my mind and body recover.  But I absolutely cannot let myself stay in this stage for long.  Just a few days or a week of rest, then I need to ease myself back into work mode.
• Depression.  Depression is something that I've been struggling with since childhood.  It comes and goes a lot, and most of the time I can ignore it and pretend everything's okay.  But it hits home hard when I'm burned out and life-changing events start fucking with my head.  When shit hits the fan, I need to stop trying to be a superhero and stop trying to tackle things by myself.  I need to seek help from online communities, I need a change of environment and a change of energy, and I need to spend more time with my friends and family.  I can't let this shit ruin my life anymore.
• Addiction.  My addiction to videogames is tricky.  It's not like games are a drug that I can just quit.  For those of you that don't know my history, I've spent years pursuing videogames.  The graduate school program that I attended is completely focused on game development.  Even before grad school, when I was in college I chose to study art specifically because I felt like it was the best way for me to get a job in the game industry.  I'm addicted to videogames but I can't just quit games because this is my industry, this is my life.  So now what?

(End of Part 2)
Click here for Part 3.

Killing Addiction and Other Fallacies (Part 1 of 5)

I was going to write a blog post about how I managed to beat addiction and how my life's changed for the better.  Then I stumbled upon this post from last year.  Well, fuck.  I could barely go five months without getting depressed and falling back into my old ways.  No matter how many times I think I've shot it down, my addiction doesn't ever seem to die.

A couple of weeks ago, my mom asked me, "What's wrong with you?"  Those words may sound a little offensive but I totally understood what she meant when she said it.  I've been out of school for three years and I haven't been able to hold a stable job.  I'm nowhere near as physically active as I used to be and something is slightly off about my personality.  My mom knew something was wrong with me but she couldn't pinpoint it.  I know she's talked about it to my sister and my brother-in-law.  For the most part, they've all been supportive in whatever endeavours I've tried to accomplish.  But I also know my brother-in-law's siblings and my extended family talks shit about me behind my back.  I've heard the stories, I hear the backhanded compliments, and I see the way they fucking look at me.  My mom's the only one that had the guts to ask me to my face.  "What's wrong with you?"

We talked for a while.  I told her a little bit about my problems, mainly my social anxiety and depression.  She asked me if I wanted to see someone to get help, a therapist, a psychiatrist, or something.  And those are exactly the words I wanted to hear.  I have a lot of problems that I need to get fixed but I can't afford the therapy.  Of course, "afford" in a monetary sense.  Maybe I shouldn't put a price on my mental state when the difference between being depressed and happy could mean my very life.  I could never convince myself to commit suicide but I think about it all the time.  Maybe if I didn't get help, a slight push could send me reeling.  I ended the conversation by telling my mom, "I'll figure things out and I'll let you know."

Therapy costs a lot of money, and I've already spent more than enough of my parents' stash to just jump into it on a whim.  The medication is expensive and dangerous too.  I mean, Christ, I'm always forgetting to take my vitamins.  What are the consequences if I forget to take a mood-altering pill?  Anyways, I don't remember what I was reading exactly, some news article or blog post, maybe it was a YouTube video or a combination of things.  But before I confirmed the decision with my mom to seek professional help, it suddenly made sense to me:  We live in a consumer society.

For-fucking-ever, companies have been peddling remedies, tonics, treatments, diets, cures.  Doctors and other professionals are frequently claiming one thing or another and charging out the ass for their time and recommendations.  Yeah, I'm sad, pathetic, and desperate.  But fuck no, I'm not gonna fall into that shit.  I can't even afford to pay off my student loans.  I absolutely cannot afford to owe doctors and pharmaceutical companies for their shitty cures.  My situation is bad, but it's not so bad that my family is finding me on the bathroom floor covered in blood.  I have unlimited access to the internet, news articles, information, and communities.  So let's analyze my addictive behavior and sort this shit out.

(End of Part 1)
Click here for Part 2.

My Life As a 29-Year-Old Living In My Mom's House

I always spend the beginning of a new year optimistic.  Usually, all I can remember from the last few years are the bad things.  This new year's gotta be better, right?  Probably not.  I'm going to be just as jobless, miserable, and alone this year as I was the past few years.

I'm not being pessimistic, just realistic.  Though I truly am thankful for the good things in my life.  I have a loving family and three awesome dogs that I get to see all the time.  Also, I can afford food and I have a roof over my head.  Things aren't bad, they're just not good.  And even though I know how to fix things, I can't get past my mental issues to do it.  Stuck in Purgatory but at least I'm not in Hell.

Stories
Anyways, I've run out of things to talk about.  Maybe I had things to say when I started this blog but now my mind's gone blank.  Well, not completely blank.  I do have a lot of depressing things that I'd like to vent about, but I don't want this blog to go completely into that direction.  Instead, I'm going to set aside time each week to type up stories.  I've got a lot of stories in my head and writing them in my little book isn't enough for me anymore.  I feel that it's better to harness all that negative energy into something creative.  I think people would rather read a depressing story about a fictional character than read depressing rants about someone's life.  I'll still whine a little bit and rant here and there, but like I mentioned in my first post, whining will be kept at a minimum.

Addictions
It's been a while since I last posted and a lot of things have changed in my life.  First, I finally quit Team Fortress 2 for good.  I've just played it to the point of disgust.  Nevertheless, it was an addiction that needed to go.  Just like my other addictions (World of Warcraft and cigarettes are the biggest ones that come to mind), my friends got me into it and I continued doing it long after they stopped.  Abandoned and alone with a disgusting, filthy habit.

I noticed a couple of other addictions popping up.  Lately, my mind's been scrambling to find something else to replace all that missing TF2 time.  Mostly, I've been spending a lot of time with these Holiday Steam sales, playing a lot of different videogames and watching a lot of different movies.  The big thing I really got into the past few weeks was Super Street Fighter IV.

But something happened last weekend that really hit home.  I had spent most of my day playing SSF4.  Sitting around and doing anything for over eight hours would make anyone feel like shit, so I decided to wind down and take a nap.  But right before I logged off, someone messaged me and asked me to play.  I couldn't back down from a challenge.

We played, and naturally, because I had been playing the game all night/morning, I destroyed him in the first few fights.  But he got his bearings and my fatigue started setting in.  He figured out my patterns and my fighting style, and his win streak over me was embarrassing.  At this point, I had dogs annoying me while I was playing, so I booted them out of my room and shut the door.  But the dogs weren't the problem.  I continued to lose.

With this newfound competition, my heart was racing and my adrenaline was pumping.  And I still lost.  I was tired and now my own mind was playing tricks on me.  There was absolutely no way I could win at this moment.  I needed to calm down and I needed rest.  I should've manned up and closed the game.  Instead, I continued to play and continued to seethe.  During a match, I heard the door to my room open and I immediately snapped at whoever it was.  "Could you please close the door."  It was my mom, and even though my words were semi-polite, the way I said it was harsh and unforgivable.  I've never seen her act scared because of something I did before, and there was fear in her eyes as she speechlessly obeyed me.

After the match (which I lost) I ran after her and apologized.  I made up the excuse that the dogs were annoying me and that I didn't want them in my room.  In her regular voice, she said it was okay.  And normally I would've believed her, but I couldn't get her horrified face out of my mind.

I played and lost a few more games then stopped playing.  I decided that if didn't want to lose like that again, I needed to either play a lot more (to get better at the game) or play a lot less (to become a casual player again).  I chose the latter and I uninstalled the game.  Hitting rock bottom and playing to the point of disgust is the only way I can kill an addiction.

Follow-Up: Mayan Prophecy (Original Post)
There's not much to be said about this.  I spent the few hours before and after 12:00 PM alone and nothing happened.  So I closed my eyes and meditated.  I tried to clear my mind but it was hard when I was desperately searching for answers.  I don't know if the following was a result of the "vibrations" that I mentioned in that post or my over-anxious state of mind, but I had a lot of vivid dreams that ended with someone telling me, "Keep doing what you're doing, you're on the right path."  But since what I've been doing has brought my life to a standstill and left me unfulfilled, the only thing I can deduce from that Saturday is that either the Mayans were wrong or I had been misled by a lunatic claiming to have the correct message from his ancestors.  Maybe both but it doesn't matter.  The bottom line is that I didn't figure my life out that day.  Or maybe I already figured things out and I just can't bring myself to change things.

Follow-Up: CT2 M155 (Original Post)
I had a cop friend look up my white whale.  It turns out that I went to school with the guy.  And just like 90% of the people I went to grade school with, I don't remember him at all.  But apparently, he hung out with the "loser crowd" in high school.  Since he lives so close to me, he's most likely just coming to my dead end to get high.  I doubt he's a real threat.

The Dead End Next To My House

My home in Houston, Texas is right next to a dead end.  For years, people have been parking back there to do God-knows-what.  Naturally, I've chased a good number of people out of that small street.  One memorable time, during my college years, I approached a car parked in the dead end.  And before speeding off, I saw him stand up in his seat to pull up his pants.  Fucking disgusting.  Go jack off or get your dick sucked elsewhere.

I moved back to Houston a couple of months ago, and since I've been back I've noticed a couple of new cars parking back there at different times.  One vehicle was full of teenagers, but they stopped parking there after a while.  I'm guessing my direct eye contact made them paranoid.  The other car has been a mystery to me.  It's a white male in a fairly new car that goes there alone.  And he's extra paranoid.

The first couple of times when I saw him, I was just walking to my car.  Every time he notices me (and he seems to always see me first), he gets spooked and drives off as quickly as possible.  Very suspicious behavior.  Anyways, a couple of weeks ago, I parked my car in front of my house because I was planning on going to the store that day.  I ended up not going and I decided to park my car in the driveway to get it off of the street.  (In order to get to my driveway, I need to access that dead end.)  So I backed my car up to turn into the dead end.  I was going real slow, making sure no crazy kids or animals were behind me.  As luck would have it, that guy was waiting there.  His lights suddenly came on and I was wondering why he didn't fly off like he usually did.  That's right, he was trapped!  My car was in the way.  What I wanted to do was to leave my car blocking the dead end and get out to confront him directly.  Of course, I didn't know who the fuck he was or what the fuck he's capable of doing.  So I continued to drive in reverse to make way for him.  As soon as there was an opening, his car flew out of the dead end.  Instead of turning into the dead end like I originally planned, I did what any good citizen would do:  I followed him.  But he was driving like a madman so I let him go.  The last thing I needed was some random kid to run in the middle of the street as I'm trying to get the lunatic's license plate number.  However, I must have spooked him good.  I haven't seen him around in weeks.  Until now.

Earlier tonight, I left to get a quick meal at Subway and guess who I saw.  As I was leaving the dead end, his car was entering the dead end, but he quickly swerved out when he saw my headlights.  I thought it could be the guy but maybe not.  Maybe he swerved for a completely different reason, and he wasn't rushing to get away from me this time.  Since this guy was going so slow, I got a chance to look at and tweet his license plate number.

CT2 M155

I started to doubt myself.  Maybe this wasn't the guy.  Maybe he swerved for a completely different reason.  Then as we pulled up to the light, the suspicious behavior began.  He went into the left turn lane as I took the right turn lane.  In my peripheral vision, his car slowly moved up towards my car and I saw him turn to get a good look at me.  I didn't turn to look at him.  I didn't want him to get suspicious.  Part of me wishes that I turned to look at him too so he would know that I know what he looks like.  Another part of me wishes that I took a picture of him with my iPhone.  But camera phones are so shitty at night, and maybe me looking at him or taking a picture of him would have spooked him to the point of stalking and harming me.  The light turned green, and I took my right turn.  Thinking it was safe, he turned right behind me, then he drove off towards the freeway.

Like I said, I don't know what that guy was doing back there.  He's either masturbating, doing drugs, or observing my house or one of my neighbor's house to burglarize.  (This is not just my paranoia.  My friend's house was recently broken into by someone that parked in front of it regularly.)  If I have any more run-ins with this guy, I'll post here again.  One last time:  CT2 M155