See the picture. You wouldn’t believe how many of these (and other treasures, like broken glass) end up in your carpet when a “guest” trashes your place.

Hi everyone!

Thank you very much for your patience! This has been the week from hell, and I have nothing to show for it other than an account of what I’ve been doing. I know I’m behind on both production and emails, but I’m going to need to get more behind as I spend this week un-destroying my home and office, because it is a safety hazard that I need to fix.

I should be back to business as usual on or by the 21st of this month. The keys for May are going to be the keys for the rest of the month. I’m deeply sorry about what is going to be a 2 week delay on everything, and of course if you want a month refund or something just hit me up.

So what the heck happened? The short story is I tried to help a person who effectively destroyed my office and made my property a physical hazard. There were police, me and my son discreetly fleeing our home, and literal shit in my office this week. If you want to know the long story, it’s below, but I need to spend a week just working on this place to get it back in order. I’ll get back with everyone next week, where I have cool stuff to put out and show folks as soon as I can test it <3 Perfect world, I’ll show you a video of the new place fully restored on Monday, get caught up on emails through the week, and finish the testing on the new things and get them out to you by the end of the month <3


Here’s the long version! If it’s TL/DR I <3 <3 <3 and will have more shortly.

So where to begin? The problems really became extreme to the point of preventing me from working last week on the 8th, but they started about a month and a half ago. I’ll start there.

A couple months ago I got a call from an old friend indicating his wife had left him, he was about to become homeless, no one would take his cats, the wife took everything, his parents and family wouldn’t take him in, he was completely broke, and he was so sad he was suicidal. Basically a guy down on his luck so severely he was a living blues song. 

Me, thinking myself to be a good person, volunteered to take him into my newly completed office for a short while, rent free. I volunteered to care for his animals in my home so they would be maintained regularly with my cats, and give him a safe, stress-free place to be for a couple months while he got back on his feet. For those that don’t know, one of my younger sisters killed herself a few years ago. This was traumatizing, so when people say they’re suicidal, I take them very seriously and try to help as best I can.

This was my first of many, many mistakes. While I pictured a cot and maybe a few things in the ample storage I had available, I began to think something had gone awry when more than half the office was full of furniture. I became uncomfortable when the overpowering smell of drugs and trash made it impossible to be in the office at all, and mail began to arrive for my guest as if he lived there. Veelicious and my kid were afraid of him after the first week. He didn’t seem quite right, but at the same time, I expected this and advised everyone that we be patient and understanding. He was going through a rough time and needed our help.

Over the next couple weeks, he got less and less comfortable to be around for all of us, so we started avoiding him. It became obvious he had a severe drug problem that we didn’t know about, and we weren’t quite sure how to deal with that. The weed was a known entity, but he was exhibiting behavior that wasn’t weed-like. We had seen this before in my sister with a meth problem, but he didn’t have other meth symptoms. We’re still not sure. In any case we only saw him in the mornings to use the restroom, and a sort of uncomfortable stability settled in. 

For what it’s worth I was able to compensate around this for several weeks. I have a decent laptop for development, and I was able to RDP into the office computer and work as normal. It’s how I finished the new build and added some really cool things I’m excited to share with everyone. That said, allowing this weird discomfort with the guy in the office to become “normal” ultimately caused a huge problem.

I had initially agreed to permit him to stay 2 months, and I wasn’t about to extend that. In the course of a month the whole property began to take on a terrible smell, I wouldn’t let my kid outside anywhere near him, and the whole property was overrun with raccoons because he kept leaving food waste outside. The compassion that led us to allow him to stay had been exhausted, and we needed him to go for our own sanity. It wasn’t working out for anyone. On the 7th I was too afraid to talk to him, but I conjured up the courage on the 8th and asked him when he planned to leave. He advised he would be out by the 7th of July per our agreement, but then it all went wrong. Unbeknownst to me he had developed a seething hatred of me over the last few weeks, and proceeded to list my various failures as a human dating back to the mid ‘90s. He ranted at me for over an hour, but the key takeaway is that in his mind, I had become the perpetrator of his entire situation. It wasn’t the wife; it wasn’t the drugs; it was me being the worst friend a person could have. He accused me of insisting he move in against his will (I told him now is not a good time but we would do it anyway to keep him from being homeless and I personally didn’t want him to kill himself), repairing his vehicle against his will (I told him I did not want to do it but would do it because no other choice seemed possible), and the dude scared the hell out of me. I was a “bad friend” and he was no longer “weak” enough to permit friends as bad as me in his life. Once again he expressed suicidal statements. I walked away while he was still talking, deadbolted the doors, locked all the windows, and freaked the hell out. Veelicious got home, and we drafted a notice indicating he needed to leave. It even contained a bonus deal that if he left quickly and peacefully, he wouldn’t owe us the nearly $800 we spent on his vehicle and feeding his cats. We hand-delivered the notice, went back inside, and locked the door behind us.

At exactly 2 AM that night, for reasons unknown, he attempted to quietly enter the house. I was already up all night watching the cameras because he was being so erratic when we spoke. In the entire time he had been here, not once had he done this, and we were clear that entering the house after 9PM was not allowed (I am usually asleep at that time, and I usually sleep on the couch because I have trouble sleeping unless I’m listening to TV loudly.) We had the door bolted, thankfully, so he returned to my office. I got a cryptic email about locking the door, and the next time we spoke he clarified that he just needed to use the washroom, but since I locked the door, he simply pooped in my office, now.

You can imagine this was a rather triggering event. I just built that office, and I haven’t even been able to really work in it yet. Now this guy I didn’t even want here, who had made it smell so bad with drugs and trash that I couldn’t get near my own place, was now pooping in it.

His story didn’t check out. There’s a toilet at the park that’s right next to my house, and I go to that park literally every day it’s so close. He was fully dressed, too, so even that’s not an excuse. There’s no reason to poop in the office from a practical standpoint. I checked the cameras and saw him slowly walking around before he decided to try to enter the house. Potty emergencies aren’t slow; they’re emergencies. My determination was that this wasn’t a guy with a potty emergency, at all.

I checked more camera footage. He’d been a busy guy and I had dozens of recordings that the cameras caught. What’s that object he’s carrying in this one? Dude was walking around carrying what looked like an AR-15 style rifle covered in a blanket or a bag.

I immediately called the police, who told me to lock the doors, and that they would send a car to the area just out of sight. I told them I had his cats in my house, and they said don’t worry about it. Cats aren’t protected pets in Oregon and are treated as simple property like a shelf or a TV. They advised me to tell him he can have his cats back at the police station. They advised that was the extent they could do. The problem was that he had items on the property and had received mail there. Those two things mean the police can’t remove an unwanted person, and if it’s a worst-case-scenario, we might just need to move until he can be evicted. Drugs aren’t illegal in Oregon any more so that doesn’t work, and unless he directly threatens to kill someone other than himself, the police were powerless. Grimly, the officer said this happens all the time when people try to help others.

I discreetly evacuated the house with my kid, doing my damnedest to not let him know what the heck was going on. Literally, I told him we were going to pretend to be secret agents and try to sneak out without being seen. I don’t need him traumatized over this. Once we arrived where we were going, I sent a reply to the cryptic email (the “I poop in your office now” email) with a picture of him holding the gun-like object asking if that was, indeed, a firearm. This triggered yet another, much angrier rant that involved him flinging every insult in the book at me. He revealed his true colors on that one, though. He was fully knowledgeable that receiving mail meant I couldn’t get rid of him, and he fully intended on staying there as long as he needed. He declared the office to be his, now, and there’s nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t even legally start an eviction until next month. In fact, since I was being such a pest to him, he would make it much worse for me, because he was taking his animals into his new office and if I did anything to stop him he’d come after me and accuse me of a variety of crimes wasting even more of my time and resources.

I held firm, advised he could not have his animals out there, and that he could have them at the police station once he found a place for them to be.

After a brief delay he stated he would leave in the next 48 hours. The prospect of dealing with the police seemed to be the cue to move onto the next sucker down the line. Miraculously, the guy with no hope, no options, and no money had all of these things. Even the mean ex wife who refused the cats became available to take them at a moment’s notice. In the next 48 hours, he was gone. 

Those 48 hours were anything but peaceful. Veelicious and I slept in shifts like night security guards while the kid stayed with a relative. “Do drugs outside, please” went out the window for him and he would randomly just take photos of our security system, for whatever reason. Occasionally he would pantomime things at the security system, though what he was trying to convey is unclear. I’m confident he was just trying to creep us out.

So why did this happen? How did I go from being helpful to being a loathsome enemy to this guy just for very politely checking to see if he’d found a new place? I’ll never know. I can tell you I’ve seen this rapid turn-to-enemy thing in two of my sisters, both for different reasons. 

The day before she killed herself, my sister K called her friends and some family members and made enemies of them. I didn’t get a call because she may have known I would have just tried to talk her out of it, though it could have just as easily been the knowledge that I rarely answer my phone. Regardless, I suspect that making everyone angry with her made it easier to do what she did. Is that the reason I’m suddenly the enemy to this guy? I sure hope not, but I don’t know. He’s gone, and I doubt I’ll ever talk to him again.

My other sister M, who has fought drug addiction with meth for the last 10 years, does this regularly. You could literally present a bag of her meth to her, and she would attack you for being so evil. That’s not meth; it’s anything else. It’s not her meth, it’s that other guy’s meth. Maybe it’s your meth and you’re trying to blame her! Why would you accuse her of being on that? Asshole. Fuckface. Etc… trying to help is an enemy behavior, because trying to help implicitly requires her to admit she needs help. It goes in cycles. I love her and she’s actually a ton of fun, and if she read this she would be livid, but it is what it is. This felt closer to the situation with the current guest, and is my working hypothesis for what really went on here. I don’t doubt that he hates my guts right now; I just think it’s because of some drug affecting his perception of others. I’m not mad at him, really; I’m mad at drug addiction and what it does to people.

Anyway.

After he was gone for the last time (along with a MASSIVE “fuck you” letter sent to me via email and SMS) I changed the locks and surveyed the damage. It had been over a week since I went to the office or back yard, and since I knew he was pooping inside the office I was horrified to do it. It was bad, but not as bad as it could have been. I had to throw away all of the appliances out there, because they were completely ruined and sticky to the touch. Underneath the appliances he left odorous foods so they would rot. In the driveway right where Veelicious parks were strategically located glass toys. I’ve been finding small shards of glass from broken bottles everywhere, including on the sidewalk near the house, so no more bare feet outside for a while. There was some kind of mysterious white fluid in the can recycle bin so I had to toss that out. The screen door was broken. The brand new carpet, a container of my kid’s toys, and most of the shelves had pipe ashes, weed, and wood shavings sprinkled all over them. There was weed and some kind of yellow fluid that foamed up like white shaving cream when I sprayed ammonia on it in the fridge. No idea what the hell that was but it was very well ventilated and I was wearing a chemical respirator. Out the back door is just a disaster. I have a little pond out there that you can’t approach without being confronted with the scent of an outhouse, so I assume the pond is just ¾ piss with some shit thrown in for good measure. This list isn’t even exhaustive, but you get the idea.

Needless to say everything is pretty fucked up. I spent all day yesterday covered in PPE cleaning the place. My vacuum is going to smell like a bong forever, but at least I’ve cleaned up the physical hazards in there. I’m not sure what the going rate of weed is these days, but in early 2000’s prices I’d say I sucked up $50 to $100 of the stuff. I never did get around to mounting the AC out there like I intended, so thank goodness for that or it would be ruined.

Veelicious came to help after she got back. “Where’s Princess Celestia?”
“Um… on the shelf that’s... not here…”

My autographed, one-of-a-kind Princess Celestia plushie and the shelf she was on are gone, along with a variety of other small items that I know about. In what should be a surprise to no one, I was robbed. Not of high-value items, mind you -- just cheap tools, decorations, and a thing I cared a great deal about. Really though, even if I did get Celestia back, she would smell like smoke forever, so I guess it’s just as well that she’s gone and I’m not going to pursue it. Veelicious says she’s working on something to replace her.

So welcome to today! I’m writing this from my laptop, I just have testing to do for the next release, I drew some cool logos and branding for the new horse game (LOGO IS FUCKING AWESOME -- Veelicious) along with working on the coding for it, but I feel like I need to stop being paranoid about work for a week and just focus on trying to fix this place. I need to take this week off and un-fuck this situation and get my head on straight, so I’ll be back able to focus on doing what I want to do, which is make cool content and technology for you.