The ramblings of an abused kid (trigger warnings galore)

[GoSlash27]

I'm sitting here munching my first bowl of "Jiffy Pop" in 45 years. It has all the "feels". Totally worth it!
 

[GoSlash27]

 One of the puzzling constants in my life has been the communication breakdowns between people who speak clearly, directly, and fully vs. people who speak obliquely and interpret the unspoken as "implied".
 This paradox has been part of my life pretty much continuously.
 I'm firmly in the former group and I get along famously well with others in my group. The latter group... Not so much. 
 I've come to realize that the source of the miscommunication is not me. Logically, it *cannot* be. That is 100% on the other end; people who "hear" statements that were never made and never actually say what they mean. I don't understand how such people communicate effectively with each other. Never got the hang of it myself.
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 Went to see "Project Hail Mary" with my son today and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. He felt a bit "poorly done by" with the way that film shamelessly tugs at the heartstrings. Two grown men in a dark theater crying over a rock!    I pointed out that with my current emotional dysregulation, nearly *every* strong emotional reaction tugs at my heartstrings, so I'm kinda used to it. 
 It was a good day of quality father/ son bonding time. Breakfast, dominating the leaderboard on Joust, a good nerd movie, and sushi, punctuated by life stories. Fun fact: I cannot directly tie my residence in a house to a school I attended or a year, but I can *IMMEDIATELY* tie it to an arcade game I played. So that's a thing.
 My retirement coincides with his 4th year anniversary doing the job I used to do and the second year of my recovery from cPTSD. So there's a lot of "feels" there too.

[GoSlash27]

The evocative process of playing a video game:
 Since my memory is devoid of all narrative cues and eidetic, every time I play an arcade game it triggers all the environmental cues from where I was the last time I played it.
 Tron was the Kuhn's on Hodgkiss, but Dig- Dug was the "Whiskey a go-go" on Frankstown and Pole Position was the roller disco I went on field trips to in middle school.
 I astonished my son as I wandered through the arcade, pinpointing where I lived when I'd last played each machine.
 I even identified the location of the last time I'd played "Area 51", which was with him as a tweener, recounting details of the evening and triggering some of *his* eidetic recalls from that night.

 My memory is very convoluted and cumbersome, but also very powerful. This is the way it works for me. I mostly can't remember anything, but if you ask me about the last time I played "Crazy Climber", an entire story will fall out.