Still Skidding Broadside

"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a ride!'"

I heard that quote sometime around 2000 and it stopped me cold, not because it was something I wanted to be but because it was something I already was. Somebody had managed to put words around a thing I'd been living for twenty plus years without ever naming it. I didn't choose that philosophy. You don't choose a philosophy when you're burying friends in their twenties and thirties.

Someone once said about me that I don't dip my toe in the water to test it, I just dive right in. That's true. It's been true my whole life. But it wasn't some personality quirk I was born with. It was beaten into me by circumstances that didn't leave room for careful.

The Default World Wasn't Built for Me

I'm 69 years old and most of my friends are gone. Not from age, but from AIDS.

I always knew I was different and I always knew I liked boys. That's not the kind of thing you announce in the late 60s and early 70s, you just carry it around and hope nobody notices. I grew up with nuclear drills in elementary school, duck under your desk and kiss your sweet ass goodbye, and then JFK got shot, and then MLK, and then Bobby Kennedy, and Stonewall happened when I was thirteen years old. Innocence left me early. By the time I started coming out in the mid 70s I'd already learned that the world was not a safe or predictable place and that the people in charge of it didn't have my best interests at heart. I didn't come out because I wanted to. I came out because I had to. Nobody else was going to build community for us. Nobody else was going to fight for our rights. If you stayed hidden you stayed safe but nothing changed, and I'd already seen enough of the world to know that nothing changing meant people keep dying.

Then Reagan and the gay plague (AIDS). And whatever innocence was left got burned out completely.

If you weren't there it's hard to fully explain and if you were there you can't forget and I won't forget. Reagan was in the White House and wouldn't say the word AIDS while people were dying. Rock Hudson, a personal friend of the Reagans who'd sat at Nancy's table at a state dinner, pleaded for White House help getting AIDS treatment in Paris. Nancy turned him down. He was dead nine weeks later. The culture had opinions about who I was and none of them were good. The institutions that were supposed to protect people, government, churches, sometimes even hospitals, had decided that people like me weren't really their problem.

Most of my family couldn't or wouldn't accept who I loved. That's a sentence that's easier to write now than it was to live through then. You figure out pretty quick when you're young and gay in that era that the default world, the one everybody else seems to get handed, is actively excluding you. Nobody is building a place for you at the table. If you want a family you build one yourself, out of the people who show up when the people who were supposed to show up don't.

And we did. We built families. When AIDS hit and people were dying their biological families would sometimes just vanish. Wouldn't visit. Wouldn't call. Would let their own son or brother or cousin die in a hospital room with nobody holding their hand because they were too ashamed or too scared or too hateful to be there. So we showed up instead. We took care of people whose families had abandoned them to die alone because somebody had to and nobody else was going to.

My first boyfriend and I were together thirteen years. He committed suicide. AIDS had already taught me what loss looked like, had already taught me that you can build something real and have it taken from you and have to start over with nothing but the knowledge that you did it before so you can probably do it again. Too many years later the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges and same-sex marriage became legal in every state. I wish he could have seen it.

His death broke me. I found him. I called 911. I had to tell his family he was gone. I had to make the funeral arrangements, and this time it wasn't for a friend from the community, it was for the person I loved. I'd spent years taking care of others, taking care of him, building and rebuilding and showing up, but I'd never taken care of myself. Somewhere in all that loss and all that pain I couldn't find a reason to keep going, and I became a drug addict because the alternative was feeling everything I'd been carrying for thirty years.

I came back from it. That's a longer story than I'm going to tell here, but I came back. Once more I had to rebuild, and this time what I was rebuilding was me.

After that you don't expect the world to include you and you don't trust anyone else's defaults because you've seen where that gets people. And you stop caring about risk, because when you don't know if you're next, playing it safe starts to feel like a waste of whatever time you've got.

That's where the quote comes from. That's why it hit me the way it did. I'd already been skidding broadside for twenty plus years by the time I heard it. Marching, fighting for equal rights, building community, burying friends, starting over, doing it again. I never learned to dip my toe in first because the water never waited for me to be ready.

Building Things

I built my first PC. This was back when that meant something, when you were picking components and putting them together yourself because the off the shelf options were either too expensive or too limited or just not what you needed. I stood up my own BBS on an acoustic coupled modem, one user at a time, with set hours that people knew to call in on, which for anyone who doesn't remember was basically a small online community running on hardware in your house before the internet made that seem quaint. My own machine, my own software, my own space, my own rules.

Forty-Three Years of Someone Else's Tools

Then the career happened and I spent the next four decades using whatever the job put in front of me.

Clarion and Visual Basic in the DOS days, writing database applications on machines where you knew exactly what was in memory and what wasn't because you put it there. Then a side venture into OS/2 because someone somewhere made a bet on IBM, and OS/2 was genuinely impressive technology that couldn't decide what it wanted to be and eventually collapsed under the weight of trying to be everything. Back to Windows when OS/2 died, because that's where the work was. C# and .NET, which is honestly some of Microsoft's best engineering, a solid language on a solid runtime, but welded to an ecosystem that got heavier and more opinionated with every release. Then Apple, because that's what was on the desk. Then AWS and Java, because enterprise architecture doesn't care what you'd rather be writing, it cares what the infrastructure team already bought.

Every one of those platforms was someone else's decision. I didn't pick Clarion because I loved Clarion, I picked it because the project needed it. I didn't go back to Windows because I missed it, I went back because OS/2 was dead and the contracts were in Redmond's ecosystem. Nobody chooses Java, you just end up writing it because that's what the AWS shop was running. Forty-three years of being good at tools I didn't choose, on platforms I didn't pick, building things that belonged to someone else.

I was good at it. That wasn't the problem. The problem was spending four decades knowing what I would have done differently and having it not matter because it wasn't my call. If you've ever sat in a corporate environment staring at a technology decision that was made three levels above you by someone who doesn't write code, you know exactly what I mean.

Retirement

When I retired I knew two things. First, I was done with Windows. Not angry at it. Just done. Forty years is enough. Second, I wanted Linux. Not because I had some ideological commitment to open source, but because for the first time in forty-three years nobody was telling me what to run and I wanted something that was mine.

I bought a System76 Adder WS because the hardware was right, and it came with Pop!_OS 22.04 installed, which meant that even my first Linux experience was technically someone else's choice riding along with the hardware purchase. The pattern was hard to break apparently.

Pop was fine. It was more than fine actually, it's what got me into the Linux world and eventually into COSMIC and into creating applets for it. But Pop is built on Ubuntu LTS, which means packages that are months behind and a desktop environment that moves faster than the base it's sitting on. I've spent forty-three years waiting on other people's release schedules. I wasn't about to start a new career of it.

So I went looking.

The Distro Graveyard

Fedora. RPM annoyed me.

Linux Mint. I genuinely loved it. Great desktop, great community, everything works. But I'd just spent forty-three years on Windows and Mint felt so much like Windows that it triggered something between nostalgia and PTSD. I didn't leave Microsoft's ecosystem to land in something that reminded me of it every time I opened the file manager.

Manjaro. Meh.

Garuda. Garish, loud, and KDE.

CachyOS. Now this one was interesting. The performance was real, the custom kernels were fast, the optimized packages made a noticeable difference. But it was the same old story wearing new clothes. Somebody else's desktop theme, somebody else's default terminal, somebody else's keybindings, somebody else's idea of what my computer should look like when I sit down in the morning. Great engine. Too many opinions.

Each one was fine. Each one had somebody else's fingerprints all over it. I kept moving.

Arch

I installed Arch Linux on a bare drive and for the first time since the BBS, every single thing on my machine was there because I put it there. Every package. Every service. Every kernel. Every config file. Nothing was installed because a committee decided it should ship by default. Nothing was themed to match someone else's aesthetic. Nothing was running that I didn't start.

I pulled in the CachyOS repositories because their engineering is genuinely good, optimized packages, custom kernels compiled with flags that actually matter on modern hardware, stuff that makes a measurable difference. But I left their desktop opinions on the shelf. Their kernel, my system. That's the whole point.

But this post is already long enough, and the Arch setup is its own story. How I layer CachyOS repos on vanilla Arch, why I run dual kernels, what BTRFS snapshots have to do with any of it, and why the CachyOS vs EndeavourOS debate that's all over Reddit right now is asking the wrong question. That's next time.

What a Ride

I started building my own things because the world didn't have room for me in it. Built my own family because the one I was born into couldn't handle who I loved. Built families for people who were dying alone because theirs walked away. Built my own PC and stood up my own BBS because the spaces and the machines I needed didn't exist. Spent forty-three years building on other people's platforms because that's what the work required, and then finally, in retirement, got to build my own system again.

The blog is called VintageTechie and people probably assume that's about old hardware or retro computing. It's not. It's about me. I'm the vintage. I was there for the BBS era, the DOS era, the OS/2 detour, the Windows decades, the Apple years, the AWS sprawl, and now Linux. I've been building things my entire life, not because it's a hobby but because it's how I survived, and I'm not done yet.

What a ride.