PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

It was only a coffee shop in name...

LOL

However, I did loan one of my lava lamps to the Coffeehouse for over a year to add to the Coffeehouse/hippie/hipster theme.

 

I always wanted a lava lamp

 

Okay, so the fat older girl decided for whatever reason that she did not like me. Sometimes she was actually nice to me, but most of the time she treated me like shit.

I met her for the first time during a group meeting in the same lounge where it is believed the other guy was using a Coffeehouse laptop to download lesbian porn. I was innocently fidgeting with my Fujifilm point-and-shoot digital camera, and this girl just glared at me out of nowhere and said rather rudely “You better not be taking pictures of me!”

Some words were exchanged and one of the women who ran the place sorted it out peacefully.

Despite the fact that this woman was almost always rude to me, I always tried to be nice and gave her more chances than she deserved.

I was diagnosed with Aspergers at age 9 and had very loving and supportive parents. This girl was diagnosed at age 18 and had parents who had divorced and were rather controlling (all I’m gonna say).

One time in 2009, this girl said some really mean things to me totally unprovoked. I don’t remember what exactly it was that she said, but it upset me enough that I started crying uncontrollably, ran out of the building, and locked myself in my best friend’s Oldsmobile*.

I spent a good half hour in that car and it it took my friend and his mom a good deal of time to coax me out.

This happened on a Saturday, and the Coffeehouse was open every Wednesday and Saturday. When I came in the following Wednesday, I still had a less than favorable opinion of the girl, but I was or less over it.

My friend’s mom who ran the Coffeehouse took it even more personally than I did (which is hard for most normal people to do). One thing I immediately noticed was that the fat girl’s car was in the parking lot, and I thought nothing of it. When I walked inside, my friend’s mom who ran the program met me in the lobby and asked me to come into her office. I was surprised to see the land whale herself sitting in the office. I had been running a wee bit late that day, but it was totally unrelated to the land whale’s actions four days earlier. My friend’s mom informed me that she was worried that I was not not going to show up, and she was about to send land whale home for the day as a punishment for being so mean to me if I did not show up.

Land whale apologized to me and I accepted, but our relationship was the equivalent of a cold war until the very last time I saw her.

*The Oldsmobile is long gone but I am still good friends with the guy who owned it; He was a Coffeehouse member too and his mom was the founder.

 

Get one!

 

In 2010 or 2011, Landwhale invited pretty much the entire Coffeehouse except me to her birthday party at a nearby Margaritaville restaurant (this was after the Coffeehouse got a new service provider to pay the bills and had relocated), and didn’t even have the decency to be discreet about it. She may as well have walked right up to me and stuck up both middle fingers in my face...

 

The last time I saw Landwhale was in either 2012 or 2013, long after the original Coffeehouse had become a distant memory. It was actually at Puck, when my best friend John’s band was performing there one night. Through absolutely no fault of his own, he had invited Landwhale because they were still friends.

Landwhale showed up and went from zero to bitch in a matter of seconds as soon as she saw that I was there, along with another friend of mine (and former Coffeehouse member) who’d recently ended up on her personal shitlist. She created a scene and started going on about she wouldn’t have come if she’d know either of us were to be there, and I’m pretty sure this drew some dirty looks from a good number of my friends who were also present.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came when Landwhale made me leave the table I was sitting at to make room
for her friends who’d come along. This was a primo booth next to the sound booth, and I was camped out with my laptop.

She rather rudely asked me to please give up the table for her and her friends, and like the passive idiot I was back then I moved. Unbeknownst to both of us, John had been on the other side of the sound booth and overheard the whole thing. He told me, later that night after Landwhale and friends had left, that he’d overheard the whole and was appalled at her behavior towards me. He also asked me why I hadn’t stayed at table and told Landwhale to go fuck herself. I still ask myself that to this day...

Needless to say, Landwhale has not been invited to any of our gatherings since then!

 

The other girl at the Coffeehouse was roughly my age, born the same year but a few months later. She was actually kind of hot, but her attractiveness was only physical; Her personality was a total turnoff!

In her defense, she did not have an easy childhood compared to mine, and something awful happened to her in her teens that I am not at liberty to discuss. Due to her arrogant personality, I will refer to her as Know-It-All.

Like Landwhale, Know-It-All had a job, a driver’s license, and a car. She also went to the same college as me. Like Landwhale, she could go from liking me to hating me at the drop of a hat, though she was generally nicer than Landwhale.

A lot of her disdain for me, in my opinion, came from her own personal issues and the fact that she was jealous of me.

When I first met her in early 2009, she was driving a tired ‘93 Honda Civic that was her parents. About the same time my dad bought me the Tacoma in September 2009, she bought herself a 1997 Chevy Lumina for a little over a grand.

The Lumina had over 100K miles, but low miles for what was at the time a 12-year old car. The car ran and drove great, and wasn’t in mint condition but not a beater either. I rode in that Lumina a couple times, and one thing I immediately noticed was how cold and insanely powerful the A/C was! The car also had a decent factory sound system; It was an excellent first car.

When my dad bought me a brand new Tacoma, I just had to pull up to the Coffeehouse one time for her to take it personally.

We were also both aspiring photographers, and she preferred Canon. I got my first SLR, a Nikon D3000, for Christmas in 2009. Not long after I got this camera, Know-It-All confronted me at the Coffeehouse one day and said straight up that I’d bought the Nikon on impulse without doing any research, and that Canon made a superior product.

Honestly, comparing Canon to Nikon is like comparing Chevy to Ford, but that’s besides the point!

I got in her face and read her the riot act, saying (A) my parents bought me the camera as a Christmas gift and I played no role in picking it out, (B) that I had not actually asked for an SLR and it was a total surprise, and (C) a camera was a camera to me, especially one that expensive that I didn’t have to pay for!

 

With regards to Know-It-All criticizing me for getting a brand new truck that my parents paid for, let me tell you something...

Very few people I know got their first vehicle without some sort of help from their parents. More often than not, mom and dad buy their kid a vehicle (like mine did). If mom and dad don’t just give their kid a vehicle, then at a bare minimum they are co-signing on the loan and/or helping pay for the vehicle. I’d say the majority of my friends are middle class to upper middle class, with one friend whose dad is a loaded, Bentley-driving pharmaceutical executive.

One of my friends bought his very first car himself for $1,500 and drove it for five years. He then traded his first car for a nicer, newer car. He paid for the second car with his own money, but his dad co-signed on the loan.

My dad bought my Tacoma new for a little under $15K, and put like two grand cash down up front. He financed the rest at 0.9% APR and paid it off within three years. In December 2016, he signed the title over to me.

As I said, most of my friends (Aspie and neurotypical) did not get their first vehicle without some sort of assistance from their parents or legal guardians.

All of my cousins also got their very first vehicle from their parents.

 

Live life like you are always on camera, because you probably are.

 

Also, I’ve said it before and I will say it again. When my parents told me they were buying me a new vehicle back in August 2009, I gave them the following minimum requirements:

1. It had to be a pickup truck.
2. It had to have air-conditioning.
3. It had to have a radio with a CD player and an iPod hookup.

Those were seriously my only three requirements, and the sexy beast you see in the picture below met all three of them!

 

I know...

I never do anything I’d be embarrassed about my Grandma seeing!

 

Also, why do 20 people think the old pantload who hit my truck deserved to get his license back?!?!

 

Going back to Landwhale and Know-It-All, it’s simple...

They were just a couple of crazy bitches who decided that they did not like me from day one, and there was not a damn thing I could do about it.

Seriously, they would second-guess me and call me out every chance they got!

The two of them claimed to be friends, but they would routinely talk shit about each other behind each other’s backs to whoever would listen (including me).

They were also overly sensitive and easily offended by the most trivial of bullshit.

One notable example would be when they brought in food of some sort (I believe it was either homemade cookies or a specific ingredient to make something in the Coffeehouse kitchen). Everyone brought it food from time to time, but nobody (myself included) expected everybody to personally thank them for bringing stuff in, except Know-It-All and Landwhale.

On this one occasion when they brought something in, they were so butthurt that they forced the women who ran the Coffeehouse to hold a meeting about it!

 

Same thing happened to me but with a person on the opposite end of the totem pole when I was delivering pizzas in the summer of 2015...

Everyone, including the delivery drivers, was expected to help clean the pizzeria. This was fine to extent, but I only got paid five bucks an hour (which amounted to twenty bucks a day) plus whatever I made in tips. Needless to say, I never felt like doing more than my fair share. When the well-built Italian immigrant who owned the place was there, nobody messed with me. However, when it was just me, a bratty teenage cashier, and the illegal immigrant cook who spoke very little English, they tried to make me do all the work at the end of the night (sweeping, etc).

On my first or second night there, this fifteen-year old cashier told me
to sweep up the pizzeria, only to promptly sit down and get on her smartphone. I immediately dropped the broom, went out to my truck (which was parked outside the pizza place in full view of my coworkers), and read a John Grisham book until my shift was over. At 9pm on the dot, I started the engine and drove off without ever going back inside. I complained to my boss (the Italian guy who owned the place). He took my side and made sure that nobody dumped their work on me again.

 

Going back to the Coffeehouse...

The Coffeehouse Center we had all come to know and love died a miserable death in 2010 due to budget constraints and bureaucracy. These are the two things that almost always lead to drastic changes or completely shutdowns in the mental health field...

The Coffeehouse was on the verge of losing its funding due to budget cuts, and a private service provider stepped in. Unfortunately, this service provider gained the approval of my friend’s mom who founded the Coffeehouse by telling her what she wanted to hear.

My friend’s mom’s biggest founding principle was that the Coffeehouse was peer-driven, and also that everybody was to be treated like a person and not a diagnosis. Those principles went right out the window almost immediately after the new service provider took over...

 

It was the same way at the detail shop...

 

Come on, PennSilver!

"one's got nuts and the other one don't".

Hershey's with Almonds came out a few years before Dave's joke. Regardless, our Pastor was a good sport about it. I was kinda worried about tagging along to Hell with Dave for being in the vicinity of his dumb-ass-ed-ness. Or worse yet, way worse yet, Pastor mentioning it to Mom the following Sunday.

Evidently our whole group was worried about purgatory or our Mother's wrath, cause Dave found himself Trick-or-Treating alone after that one.

Good grief, haven't thought about those years for decades. Life sure was great for a bunch of dimwitted knuckleheads. Gonna have to see if Netflix has Stand by Me running.

 

The last time I went out I got a caramel apple. It was from the house that looked like Boo Radley's house. No other kids were going up to that house but I took a chance, a little old lady who must have been a hundred years old answered the door with a platter of homemade caramel apples all wrapped in waxed paper. Of course we were all warned about razor blades back then, but I ate that apple because I knew it came from the heart!