My dad broke up with his girlfriend, and was telling me this plan about fucking with her disability benefits, because she had gone for plastic surgery or some shit. He found this out from stalking her call logs.

I remember just pacing back and forward in my apartment trying to reason with him on the phone. “Dad, you can’t do this kind of stuff…”

I talked him down, told him I loved him, and will always love him.

I don’t know if it was the next day, but the next time we spoke on the phone he went right back into the same mindset. I couldn’t handle it. Sometime after the call I sent a pretty harsh message that I didn’t want to be involved with him. Haven’t spoken to him since.

Good friend for 5 years or so. He turned into an alt-right fanatic and kept trying to make me upset by spouting “ideas” he knew not only I didn’t agree with, by would actually emotionally upset me (e.g. All street animals should be sacrificed without mercy, all immigrants should be returned to their original county, etc). He pulled this shit at my birthday also, ruinning the night not only for me but everyone present. That was the last time I saw him.

Another friend of over 10 years. He met a guy with a very strong personality and started copying everything the other guy did. Started dressing like him, having the same ideas, etc. I didn’t play along, so everything about my suddenly became the object of criticism as well. Never talked to him again.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one’s yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one’s mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren’t quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We’d get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who’d been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and … shit started going downhill. The couple weren’t bad. Their friends weren’t bad. Their friends’ friends were awful. I didn’t like the new crowd’s vibe, I didn’t like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn’t get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn’t want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone’s patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we’d built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn’t drop the grudge and didn’t see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn’t want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy “why are you here?” old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections … to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends’ defense - we had agreed we’d make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn’t have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I’d never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad’s charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn’t care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I’ve connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don’t think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don’t want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn’t. I took the low road and went behind my friends’ backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult’s perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn’t concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn’t a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room … I just didn’t like how there was more of “them” than “us” and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

This conservative and I kind of had a truce where one of us would explain in detail our perspective on a situation (this was in 2019) and the other would try to rebut or sometimes just learn about something we hadn’t heard before since we ran in different circles.

This went on for months and it was a pretty interesting series of a couple dozen conversations at least. We shared contact information and even texted each other when we found relevant articles that may influence the other, being as objective as a political article could be.

One time, he asked me to provide him with a list of everything Trump had done since he was sure that every single thing Trump was being blamed for was politically motivated and unsubstantial.

So I went through one of those megalists online, and only cherry picked a few dozen of the things Trump himself had signed, like raising the limit of allowable mercury disposal in the. I got through about 4 legislative actions that Jeff checked on his phone, then for the first time, Jeff interrupted me and told me to stop talking and insisted that these were all politically motivated slights and not actually trump’s responsibility.

I pointed out that Trump had signed every single item on this list and these were only his actions as president that directly harmed Americans, and Jeff said that schools were in danger because the DOE was distributing sexually explicit books in elementary schools.

That threw me since obviously we weren’t talking about that at all (and it was easy to show Jeff that that was like three schools in the whole country that were having discussions about explicit sexual education books in elementary schools, rather than the nationwide curricular upheaval he thought it was).

Jeff said he had to go, left, said it was great talking to me again, and then literally every subsequent time for the next 2 months I saw him at places we used to both frequent, would put his hands on his hips, look around as if there were more than three people at the track, saunter back to his truck and drive off. I even waved a couple of times and said “hey!” and he just pretended like he didn’t see me from maybe 20 feet away.

She left us. And hey, if you don’t want to be in someone’s life, you have the right to just leave. And I’m not saying she should have stayed, if she wanted to go. All I’m saying is, maybe your kids deserve at least a hug goodbye, mom. Or maybe even a note? Especially since we didn’t have a dad either?