1. Age 15, L; L. was my first real girlfriend. We spent hours driving around in her 1970 something Pontiac Catalina that she affectionately called the “Shitmobile”. We went on trips to the Boundary Waters with the St. Peter youth group. We played softball. We spent a lot of time necking in her back seat. We were friends, good friends. And then along came C. C was about the most manipulative, sex addled female that I’d ever met. She got it in her head to get me away from L., and she did. I succumbed to C.’s wiles hook line and sinker thinking with my hormone-soaked teenage brain. At some point I realized what had happened and what I’d done, and begged L to take me back. She did. Then along came C. again, redoubling her efforts with her hands all over me in ways that no 16-year-old boy could resist. By the time I came to my senses again and got away from her, L. wanted nothing to do with me. “Why should I give myself to someone that cheats on me?” she said. And I had no good answer. She shouldn’t. C. was a bane to my existence for years afterwards. Always popping up when I was down or trying to interfere when I was with someone like it was some challenge to her to own me. So, I guess C. was my first big fuck-up. Allowing her to have control over my life using manipulation and sex. My hormone addled 16-year-old brain was no match for her. C plagued me all through high school. Then, after graduating, I didn’t see C. for about a year until one Friday night when I was at ISU she called me. She was on campus for a band competition and wanted to see me. We spent the next 2 days in my bunk doing what rabbits do best. I didn’t see her again for almost 30 years until she was in town for a family event in the late 2010’s. She had been married 3 or 4 times, once to a woman, and finally to the last man for a few years. As an experiment, I brought up a few things that we used to do and did, she acted like she had no idea what I was talking about and kept talking about her 4 or 5 kids. We had dinner and I haven’t seen her since. And don’t miss her. When on a canoe trip in Canada when I was 16 or so, one night her father pulled me aside to talk to me. I liked her father a lot and was glad to talk to him. He told me that C. wouldn’t make it out of high school without getting pregnant and to not have it be me that got her that way. “That is NOT the direction you need to go” he told me, and I listened. And she didn’t.
2. K. was my best friend freshman and sophomore years. We spent summers living in my room. We ran the printing shop. We worked on cars. We raced cars. We listened to music and explored sounds. We were truly best friends. My junior year, while still under C’s spell I was seeing D. Voted the most beautiful girl in the school, we were quite the couple. I was the long-haired jean jacket and leather wearing tough, driving the worst looking yet fastest car in the school. She was the Greek goddess of Greek/Italian descent. She was a spoiled rotten brat, but we were one. And then along came C. again. She demanded that I start seeing her and drop D. I had it in me to refuse. She told me, “If you don’t leave D., I will take K. away from you.” I didn’t believe her. K, naïve of the ways of the fairer sex fell for all of the attention that C. lavished on him. He turned on me and I reacted violently. Fuck-up number 2. All I remember is slamming him against a locker and threatening to beat the hell out of him. It was almost 30 years before we spoke again. Fortunately, he is forgiving and we reconnected about 10 years ago and after making sure that I was ok, we became close again.
3. James Tavern was an upscale English themed restaurant in Northbrook by Northbrook Court. I worked there when I was 16 as a bus boy. I literally made hundreds of dollars a weekend, four to five hundred in cash a night was the norm. What did I do with all that cash? Well, James Tavern was staffed by 20 something professional servers. They all lived in the city. James Tavern was the main conduit for cocaine in the early 80s to Northbrook. I used to watch the managers cut lines of coke on the glass desktop in the office. I gladly partook in the coke. As an undiagnosed bi-polar I was in heaven. The coke was shared freely, until it wasn’t. Then it was $100 a gram in little folded packets. Suddenly that four or five hundred that I was making wasn’t enough to support my habit. I started buying it in larger quantities, and reselling it at school. Soon I was cutting it to make the profit margins. Soon I couldn’t sell it fast enough to keep ahead of my use. Soon I was buying on credit. Soon I was in really deep. I was driving my friend L. home from school one afternoon and telling her that I had some bad people telling me that if I didn’t come up with about $10,000 real soon, they were going to come visit me at home, and not to have tea. I could only imagine putting my parents through something like that. I know they didn’t have a spare $10,000 laying around to bail me out with. L told me to pull over into Sanders Court near her house. She told me to let her out in front of her bank and wait for me. She came out about 15 minutes later and handed me an envelope. “Here she said, pay it off. If I find out you ever touched coke again, I will personally cut off your balls with a dull knife.” I drove to James Tavern, paid off the debt, quit the restaurant and never touched coke again.
4. Fuck-up number 4: Throughout high school I studied fast cars, carburetors, girls, pills and booze. I was rarely sober. I detested my classmates and had 2 friends and 2 teachers that I liked.  Both English teachers, Mrs. B I actually had classes with and Mrs. F who I just hung out with and enjoyed talking books with. Both would give me passes to spend time in the library which was my refuge. I spent so much time in the library that I got to know Mr. W very well, but that is another story. The only times that I was awakened in classes was when no one else knew the answer and the teacher woke me up to give it. Typically, in Chemistry. I managed to score in the top 1% of the ACT/SAT testing yet was ranked in the lower third of the class. I will never forget the college counselor looking at my numbers and saying “What the fuck is this?” My mother just laughed and said “If you can figure it out, tell his father and I.” I took computer classes, and breezed through the programming. I wrote a program in Basic to solve equations for algebra that the teacher let me use on the final exam. It took me 15 minutes to solve the quadratic equations on the exam and I was done. It took the rest of the class an hour and a half. If I’d have spent half as much time on classes instead of partying and racing cars, there’s no telling where I could have ended up. Certainly not at ISU partying more.
5. Fuck-up number 5: ISU. I landed at ISU with the sole intent of drinking my way through the school year. Which I did. Half way through the first semester I was in the hospital with severe kidney problems. Seems that I had managed to poison my system enough to cause enough damage to threaten my life. I was 18 years old and in such bad shape that the doctors were telling me that if I continued to drink, I’d be dead in 6 months. Did that stop me? Hell no. That was a challenge. I may have quit hard liquor, but I never gave up beer. There was definitely a short between the earphones. I spent most of my time at ISU going to classes that I wasn’t ever signed up for. Creative writing, Art Appreciation, Women’s studies. Classes like Chemistry 101 and algebra trig I showed up to enough to pass at best. I had too much fun in the 200 and 300 level classes that I actually learned stuff in, and my grades showed it.
6. Fuck-up number 6 was the 1979 Yamaha XS 1100 Special, an incredible bike. I bought it without my parent’s blessing to say the least having a family friend co-sign the loan for me behind my parent’s backs. I went from a ’69 Honda 175 to the 1100, quite a leap. With the help of my girlfriend L., we put saddlebags and a trunk on it. It was an awesome bike. It cruised up and down I55 between Normal and Northbrook wonderfully. It gave me the freedom to go wherever whenever I wanted. So why is the XS1100 on the list of fuck-ups? Because I decided to take inspiration from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and drop out of school to ride around the country on the bike. Sure, it was the impetus of a lot of interesting experiences and life lessons, ending up with my riding back from Pheonix Arizona to Normal in January of ’86, but damn, there have to be easier ways to learn life lessons than getting the crap beat out of you and suffering for 3 days in sub-zero temperatures on a motorcycle. The fact that I even lived was impressive.
7. Fuck-up number 7, I stayed in Normal, IL. Because I had nowhere else to go and I wasn’t welcome back in Northbrook. While living in Normal I started an auto repair shop. First, in the back parking lot of my apartment and then in a really bad area of Bloomington. I was actually doing pretty well working on all of the student crap that rolled in the door on the back of a tow truck. I had a nice life, work, a quite apartment, a couple friends. What could go wrong? Most nights I ate at a steak house in Normal called the Golden West. Most nights I had the same waitress, S. Right before Christmas of ’88 I got a call from R., an ISU student. Her old Ford wagon was leaking oil faster than she could pour it in. She dropped it off and for a couple hundred dollars I got it back on the road. I delivered it to her, and when I took her check saw on her ID that she was 10 years older than me. I gave her little thought. In February I got a call from R again. It was sub-zero out and things were breaking all over. Her car wouldn’t start and would I look at it? I had it towed in and it took about 5 minutes to realize that it wasn’t fixable. I called and told her so. I could hear the tears start on the other end of the phone. Here’s fuck-up 7.1: I told her that before she bought something else, to let me look at it. We hung up. Ten minutes later she calls back, there are a few cars in the paper, would I take her to look at them? Fuck-up 7.2: I said yes. See, that waitress at the Golden West? I had finally gotten up the nerve to ask her out to dinner at somewhere other than the Golden West for that Friday and she’d said yes. Fuck-up 7.3: I blew her off. I took R out in my ’47 Chevy with her 5-year-old daughter to look at cars. We didn’t find anything. She called me the next day asking if I’d like to come over for dinner and then go look at cars. Fuck-up 7.4: I said yes. The previous night was the last night that I slept in my own bed. Red flag #1, R asked me the next morning if I could lend her the money to cover the check she wrote to make dinner. Fuck-up 7.5: We were married about 3 months later. I was 21 years old, now married to a 31-year-old with a 5-year-old daughter. So much for my solitary life working at my shop and existing peacefully. We were married about 7 years.
8. Fuck-up number 8: It’s 7 years later, and the shop has moved twice and become an entity of its own. I had a great reputation as a Jaguar and Mercedes mechanic. I needed someone to run the front office and R wanted to do it. I agreed. About a year later, I’m in on a Saturday morning and I did something I never do; I checked the mail. One of the letters was from the Town of Normal, so I opened it. It was an eviction notice due to there not being water service at the shop. I went to the sink and turned the faucet. Water came out. I was perplexed. So, on the off chance that someone would answer, I called city hall. Someone answered and informed me that the water had been shut off due to nonpayment months ago. Sometimes the box doesn’t shut off I was told. So, I started looking around the office for other bills. I found the bottom filing cabinet drawer stuffed full of unpaid bills, months overdue. The outstanding bills totaled over $10,000. I left the shop, drove up to Lexington, packed some clothes and took her key. Fuck-up 8.1: on the way back from Lexington I called A. from Oklahoma whom I’d met online and had been talking to. I told her what had happened. She said she’d be here in a couple days. Fuck-up 8.2: I told her to come. There are an infinite number of Fuck-ups that were made in the next 6 months, more than I can recall easily.
9. Fuck-ups 9.1 and 9.2: T.S. and C.G. My father always told me never to work for an attorney. I didn’t listen. T.S. was a spoiled trust find baby that didn’t work and owned a ’62 Jaguar XKE convertible. He brought it to me to mechanically restore. I spent 5 years doing the work. The agreement was that he’d pay the materials costs and when the project was done, the labor. When I was done it was a work of art. When it was done, I invoiced him for the labor, about $35,000 for the 5 years’ work. Within 10 minutes of sending the invoice I received a suit claiming that I hadn’t done the work right, etc. etc. and suing me for $50,000 in damages. Was I surprised? Not really. Was I pissed? Absolutely. Did I ever see a dime? No. I was told by my attorney that I would spend double the suit cost just to defend myself and that I’d have little chance of winning due to the good old boy network of Bloomington. And C.G.? C would stop in the shop on Friday afternoons and drop off his SAAB 900 Turbo with a list of what he wanted done. He would then go to his girlfriend’s apartment in Normal and pick it up Sunday evening. The bill was always paid with his father’s credit card. This went on for about 5 years. He would come in and play with the dogs and just hang out. Then, he graduated from U of I, we figured we’d never hear from him again. About a month after we saw him last, I get a call from my banker early in the morning. “Scott, your business account is $12,000 overdrawn. Does the name W.G. (C.G.’s father) ring a bell?” His father had charged back ALL of the charges over the last 5 years claiming that they were fraudulent. The way that the merchant services work, they take the money and it’s up to you to recover it. I’m $12,000 overdrawn, I have parts to pay for, rent to cover, payroll to cover and no way to recoup. I was effectively put out of business in a week. 10 years of work, sweat, devotion and my life gone in a week due to two people. The fuck-up? Trusting both of them. I never recovered. I closed the shop a week later.
10. Fuck-up 10.0: When I left the shop, I left about $20,000 worth of equipment there in the building. The purpose was to leave it so that the bank that I had a loan out with could sell it off and offset the debt. I paid one of my employees to stay for 2 weeks to get people back their cars and projects and watch the place. The landlord, who was a corrupt bastard had a different idea. He changed the locks the day after I left and proceeded to move all of the stuff that I left into his shop. People who came for their cars were rudely treated. J, who I’d left behind to watch things spent his money on booze and went on a bender never to be seen again. Trust, fuck-up 10.1 and 10.2.
11. Once the shop was closed, I moved back up North. My father wanted me to come and work for him running a mill in the machine shop. No stress, just a nice peaceful job. That was fuck-up 11.1, trusting him. Within a week he had me running manufacturing. Why the change of plans? He told me that if he had told my mother what his real plan was, she would have never agreed. I don’t think I would have either. Trying to work for my father was fuck-up 11.2. He was so abusive that I never knew what was coming at me. He would come out on the floor and just start ranting at me reducing me to tears. Yes, a grown ass man in tears at his father’s ranting. I had 35 people working under me, speaking half a dozen languages. They wrote a letter to my father telling him that they thought that the way he treated me was wrong. They all signed it and gave it to him. He took half a look at it and crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. He had an employee named T that was stealing him blind. He used to brag that he was building his house with what he stole from my father’s shop. My father refused to believe me or any others and actually took this person’s side accusing me of stealing materials. In the end, when my father accused me of stealing from him telling me that I wasn’t to be in the shop without T’s permission, I handed him my key to the shop and walked away. The end result of working for my father was that I was institutionalized for a month after bailing. We never had what I could call a good relationship through the years, but it never recovered from that episode.
12. Fuck-up 12.0: T. The life lesson here was a) never date a woman that is 20+ years older than you are. And b) Never date a woman who is brilliant intellectually yet emotionally stunted. And c) Never date a 50-year-old virgin. She was an internationally respected airport financier, and spent 5 days a week travelling internationally. However, she didn’t have an emotional cell in her body. I tried, but realized, that I’ll never win. I ended the relationship when in an argument she told me that she knew how to raise children, as in F (my son), because she had watched her sister raise her children. She didn’t get that there was just a little more to it than that. You have to be invested, from birth (or adoption) to understand the responsibility and awesome sense of connection you have with your child. You don’t just observe your sister or watch aa U-Tube video on parenting
13. Fuck-up 13.0: 1999, I met a beautiful, artistic, wonderful woman. B. We were soon living together in an apartment Des Plaines with the dogs. Soon after that Frank came to live with me from Normal. I soon discovered that Beth had no real-life skills. She couldn’t keep a house, she had no cooking or survival skills, she spent most of her time on the couch reading or writing or drawing. She had no communication skills, if she didn’t like a topic, she shut it down with “I’m too annoyed”, “I’m too tired” or it was just all my fault for bringing it up. We were together about 3 years. The final straws were the day that I learned that she hadn’t paid my COBRA insurance and I lost coverage. I also learned that day that she hadn’t paid her car insurance in almost a year. We learned that when she got pulled over on the way to work one morning. I had to find and pay for insurance.  Now, was some of this my fault for not being involved and watching things? Sure, I’ll take some of the blame, but not a lot of it. It’s called adulting, and she couldn’t do it worth a damn. The other main issue was that she couldn’t mother Frank. She may have loved him a great deal, but she didn’t know how to parent. Probably because her parenting was so poor. I really tried to make it work, I really loved her, but in the end you can’t love someone that you can’t communicate with. It’s impossible. You can’t love somebody that you can’t respect. For all the good humanistic, loving aspects you have to have a fundamental basis of life skills. I divorced her in 2002. I saw her a couple times before I married Voula. We had lunch and visited, and somehow, I forgot the bad stuff. I fell under her spell again. I would remember those good visits for a long time. On the second visit she gave me 2 CDs of music from our time together. Every time I listened to those CDs I would think of her and the good times, music being as powerful as it is, and forger the bad. It was a form of brainwashing that was incredibly effective.
14. V.: I’m going to include Voula here not as a Fuck-up, but as one of the few things that I’ve done right in the last 50 years. Unfortunately, I’ve done enough to fuck it up as not. I left B. while still loving her, thinking that I could deal with it and love V. I don’t think I was ever fully invested in V. the way that she deserved to be invested in. I always had one foot out of the door. So that is fuck-up 14.0, being dishonest to Voula. And then there is the monumental fuck-up, 14.1, T. of Manchester, UK. Now that should probably count for at least 3 or 4 fuck-ups for the sheer magnitude of the fuck-up. The amount of hurt and pain that was caused by that dalliance is obscene and I will never outlive the regrets. That episode deserves it’s own chapter.
15. ZGeek: ZGeek was an Australian forum that catered to geeks and oddballs from around the world. The topics ranged from politics to how to format a hard drive. I don’t remember how I found it, but I really enjoyed the people and the topics. What I didn’t know was that I was being stalked by a woman named T.J. from Manchester UK. Unbeknown to me she had been reading my posts and gathering as much info about me as she could. Pretty soon she was messaging me at all hours. We started talking. At her behest we started talking on the phone. Soon I was getting “pictures” in emails and texts. I wasn’t happy at home, that was obvious and she took full advantage of that. She manipulated me and reeled me, and I fell for it all hook line and sinker. Pretty soon we were on the phone hours a day at international rates. I learned about phone sex, and she was a master at it. Pretty soon her kids were on the phone with me and she was involving me in their lives. And then came the big step, I went to London to see her. I’m not going to describe what that visit was like other than to say that it took about 10 years for the scars on my arms to heal. It was a combination of intense sexual hell and feelings that I’d never had before (and thank God never since).  I went back home. And then the cutting and abuse began. When I told her I wouldn’t divorce V. it got insane. I never thought you could be in an abusive long-distance relationship. I always thought that you could just hang up. Not when you are dealing with a narcissistic sociopath that you think you can help. I had the kids used against me. I had her angry outbursts used against me. I “thought” I was in love with this woman. And the harder I tried to be ok with her, the more abusive she became. This went on for 5 years and 4 trips to England with her coming here once. It ended when her “cousin” an active heroin addict moved in with her and I found out that they were sleeping together. That was enough for me. I extracted myself very painfully as no matter how bad it was, it hurt terribly. 5 years and thousands of dollars wasted and a lot of hurt here to Voula. So, you know, I’m leaving a lot of details out because they are a combination of too embarrassing and too hurtful to recount in a PG rated essay. She has been married and divorced 4 times since I knew her according to Facebook, and I am sure that each man was used and abused to a serious degree, I feel sorry for them all.
16. I think that I saved the biggest fuck-up for the most current. On November 7th 2024 at 3:14 PM. That is fuck-up 16.0 though it should count for more than one Fuck-up overall. That is when I contacted B. for the first time in 23 years. I didn’t know what would happen…I just wanted to talk to her… I just wanted to make amends for what had happened. I thought that maybe I still loved her, I knew that I cared for her and felt responsible for what happened in 2002. I had no malice in my heart, but it opened up a can of worms. I fell back in love with an idealized version of her. I fell for the illusion that she had it together. She’d bought a house, she’d been married and divorced again, she had worked the same job for 20+ years. We had lots of good conversations that I enjoyed. We shared music and movies and books. I didn’t realize until things got more serious that as long as those conversations were in her narrow comfort zone, everything was Ok. As soon as a conversation got difficult it was just like 23 years ago, walls and hostility. Sure, she knows how to have conversations at work, professionally, but as soon as they get personal, the shields go up. And they are impenetrable, I know, I tried every tact I could think of. Positive and negative, subtle and hostile, kind and aggressive. I had convinced myself that I was in love with her and that if I just loved her enough everything would work out. I discovered also that she still spent 95% of her non-working waking hours on the couch, iPad in hand watching TV and complaining that she didn’t have enough time off, enough time to herself to do her stuff, enough time to take care of the house, the laundry, etc. Of course she didn’t have time, she was beached on the couch scrolling through TikTok videos for hours a day. I had fallen in love with someone that didn’t exist, someone that was so busy complaining and playing the victim that she was not who I thought I knew. I had fallen in love with someone that was basically lazy to the nth degree. I fell back in love with someone that doesn’t exist in the real world. And, you can’t love someone that can’t take care of themselves and communicate like an adult. It just won’t work. I have had it yelled at me many, many times in the last few weeks that you can’t be in a relationship with someone that is so emotionally inept because you will never be able to change them or function yourself. What is most tragic is that I was willing to throw 23 years with V. away for a fantasy. Fuck-up 16.1 is when I actually filed for divorce from V. thinking that that I didn’t love Voula and was better off without her. I was convinced it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t so much at B.’s behest as it was that I had convinced myself that I didn’t love V. and would be better off without B. and without V. and to go live on my own someplace. Just find a little house somewhere that Sadie and I could live where I could work out of and be in peace. Fortunately, I figured out in time that I was making a grave error and had my attorney file a motion to vacate the divorce petition. Now I have to find a way to put V. and I’’s relationship back together and reduce the hurt to manageable level while asking for forgiveness. Which is not an easy task. I have to keep asking and understand that it will take a lot of time. V. is the stronger, more together, more realistic and more loving woman. I just had to figure that out the hard way.

The bottom line is that I take full responsibility for all of these fuck-ups. Whether I trusted people that I knew I shouldn’t, allowed myself to be manipulated or I was just stupid, I get the credit. Maybe in the case of C.G. and his father and my landlord at the shop I couldn’t foresee such malicious actions, who could I? I should have been able to trust my father, and yet he proved that I couldn’t and I paid the price for that. Yet who doesn’t think that they should trust a parent? I’m not saying that I did everything right either… but things didn’t have to be as bad as they were, so hateful and angry all the time. So, manipulative. It’s not good management to give two people the same goals with different parameters and conflicting rules just to see who gets it done first. It isn’t good management to set people against each other and sit back and watch the scene unfold like watching a cock fight in a dirt ring with the blood and feathers flying. I spent years trying to forgive him for that and might have succeeded if he had lived longer. But he didn’t. Dozens of hours of professional counseling didn’t get me close as some wounds never heal. In the end, it was my decisions that led me to each and every one of these fuck-ups, and mine alone. No one forced my hand, ever. Whether it was motivated by love, lust, sex, craving or just plain impertinence I did it. The only caveat is that hopefully I’m done, at age 60, making such decisions.