#about m

Over the past ~10 years, literally nothing I have tried would open those files; all the Microsoft stuff I can find basically says to use WordPad, which will (technically) open the files, but they are chock-full of so many random characters that they’re virtually unusable. I figured I’d have to manually pull the content out of each one, but as these are all novel-length stories...uh...that was going to be an Intensive Process.

Anyway, after that, I woke up this morning thinking that, hey, it’s been a few years since I’ve tried; I should search again and see if I can find anything that can open .wri files so I can save them in a newer, readable format.

What I found was an article that said, basically, “try LibreOffice.” The most recent review I found said that it would open most legacy file types, and honestly as long as it would 1) open them in a readable format and 2) let me copy-paste them into a new Word doc, then I was going to be a happy camper.

So I installed it, figuring what the hell, and used it to open the oldest .wri file on my system, a Star Wars fic.

And for the first time in nearly 20 years, I could READ MY FIRST FANFIC.

I’ve now opened and saved all of those old files as .docx files, so God willing, they should be readable for a long time to come.

So last March, my brother came to visit and we finished cleaning my dad’s things out of my mother’s house. This consisted of the things that really made him, him. Books, stamp collection. vinyl collection. The Porn (help that was not a fun time, and yet the funniest thing to see the 1-800-Got-Trash guys haul out box after box of old, musty, gross Playboy mags). It was all divided up, with my brother taking some, and me taking some, and my mother keeping very little (and non of the dirty mags).

And the rest was just...discarded. It was so old and musty and falling apart and really, no one who wasn’t sentimental over my father would have wanted it.

I offered books to his siblings, and all three of them passed. They wanted nothing. Well, that’s not true. Apparently at least one of them wanted the expensive things. And uh. No.

But three things really stuck with me:

1. My father made it clear he didn’t want a memorial, or a shiva, so there was no way to formally grieve him in a communal way, robbing our family of that ritual.

2. He was not a well-liked man, and very few people would have shown up, most likely.

3. There is a sense amongst our family - and it’s a bit true - that things are better now that’s dead.

And I am not okay with any of these things, and I’m not over it. I’ve been struggling since March to really make sense of any of it. Which is weird, because he died in June of 2021. So it’s been nearly 2 years, and I am...

Still wrapping my head around all of these things.

And March was when I started churning out fic like a motherfucker, because I was using it as a coping mechanism. I mean, I still am in a lot of ways. It was an escape. It was a way to think about other things for a while. To not worry so much about these big, scary things that have me wracking my brains for answers when there are none.

I’ve done a lot of withdrawing from other people in my in-person life because it was easier than the mess in my head. And uh...the person who has, in the past, been able to nudge me out of that space has been dead for a few years. So. I have to try to nudge myself.

Anyways. I’m really trying to sort all this out now, so many months later. I’ll get there. But I’m very tired, and kind of feeling like I don’t know how to handle people anymore.