Checking in on my old Internet friends from 2008-11
I met them in various auto racing forums around then - I was a lonely kid, bullied at school, abused as I said in other posts, I liked racing, and my parents didn't let me drive a quarter midget or Legend, so I watched a lot of racing. This led me online, naturally. We used to shoot the shit on TeamSpeak and watch pirate streams of all the series' - ARCA, NASCAR, IndyCAR, WoO, F1, you name it. It was a blast.
I fell out of touch with them broadly after my LTR relationship started and I was cut off from most of the world. This was 2017ish. I saw they all moved to BlueSky, based on one of their old Xitter accounts, so checking up on them:
Five have transitioned
Seven are gay now
Two work in automotive media
Four work in racing in some other capacity
A lot of pronouns and "AuDHD" in bio, in 2025
Most of them no longer follow racing
All of them have been spiraling, hard, after this election.
I reached out to most and have gotten no response. Not a surprise. It does suck that one who I helped through a divorce and another relationship problem has not shown interest, but that's life.
Auto racing itself has declined, fast, since then. Attendance is down, the racing is not as good.
Just sad, one of my best young adulthood memories was taking a train to Toronto to meet up with like 14 of them at an IndyCar race. I also loved going to Watkins Glen with about 30 of them.
Maybe I'm the one who doesn't fit in after all.