4: Roadtrip pg 24

SheepShekets on May 12, 2025

I lived in San Diego after my parents divorced, post 9/11. My mom is terribly, terribly racist (she was raised by a Pearl Harbor survivor, and sailors are known for their mouths), but we were also acquainted with quite a few people that had been deployed to Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East. They had very… colorful language to describe people from those areas, which I suppose I should expect from traumatized combat veterans. We lived in some really cheap apartments where a lot of other low-income people lived and a lot of our neighbors were coming back from serving.
(Side tangent, the first apartment complex we lived in was around 2002-2005. We had a neighbor that actually died in their unit and began decomposing rapidly because the units weren't air conditioned. I saw this neighbor maybe 2 or 3 times, and he was morbidly obese and had no one to take care of him or check on him. I don't know his cause of death, but I do remember the kids in the apartment complex being morbidly curious at the grotesque situation of medical professionals struggling to remove his cadaver from his unit.
Other fun things that happened, our roof in our unit collapsed because our upstairs neighbor soaked their floor with Pine-Sol and it ATE the entire floor LMAO)

This comic (as of this chapter and the introduction arc) currently takes place in October 2014, the year I both graduated high school (in May lol) and turned 19.
My ex boyfriend is a Turkish-Moroccan guy, and even he had some problems with random people being racist to him in public when he first immigrated to the USA… Guess which state! Yes, California! Now he lives in the PNW, which for the longest time our international population was mostly comprised of Asians and Latino communities. There's pretty well-established ME communities here now. Things have changed a lot.

Anyways, I have a bit of nostalgia for the old Hot Topics and malls that were staffed almost entirely by Filipino, Latino and Hispanic punks, emos and scene kids lol.