Philadelphia Eagles 21, Kansas City Chiefs 17
It’s not that I don’t care when the Chiefs lose. It isn’t that I am any less invested this year. I’m just a victim to the Chiefs having won the Super Bowl nine months ago — unironically against these same Philadelphia Eagles — with the added bonus that three weeks ago (to the day) my favorite baseball team won the World Series. I hate to be the Wake Me Up When The Playoffs Start sports fan, but that’s kinda where I am right now.
And it’s funny, you know? It’s funny and it’s a bit sad. It was only like a year ago, and you can parse through my original The Road To Glory series if you don’t believe me, that I was literally saying the same thing, about (not) caring, and about my own (not) emotional investment, but the culprit then was reality. Real life. The incomparable distraction that sports had offered me since I was a young boy strangely began to fade, and you could feel it in every blog I wrote circa November 2022 through February 2023.
I think the real blessing is that I have had so little to actually care about in my personal life — whether it’s untimely deaths in my family, financial issues, interpersonal drama with loved ones, etc. — that almost by default I made my biggest issues the trials and tribulations of my favorite sports teams. Somewhere this could be illustrated on a line graph, but the outcome was always directly proportional. The less real life, the more I cared about sports; the more real life, the less I cared about sports.
It has been illuminating however to witness two of my favorite teams winning championships in the same calendar year and still feeling this void I have been experiencing. Calling it unhappiness or sorrow or something else along those veritable lines lacks, I think you could say, a certain nuance, and honestly doesn’t provide an accurate assessment. I have put on something like 20 pounds over the last three months. I have been running harder, and longer, and more consistently, than at any point in my life. I have been sleeping as well as I can remember.
The answer, I fear, requires a level of humility that I have not dug deep enough for. It hasn’t been since the start of the Donald Trump administration — though it probably predates that — where I had to genuinely lock it in to see what I was truly made of. Where I had no choice but to force myself to get better, and be better moving forward. Where the old way, whatever it was or may have been, was no longer working. It’s a matter of starting from scratch, basically.
And it’s so goddamn uncomfortable doing that, which is why I rarely do it. In my adult life I can only recall two other instances when I encountered a feeling like that, or like this. The first was when I was 19, when I was removed from the first real relationship I had been in and realized just how selfish my behavior was. The second (and last) occurred somewhere in the confusing 2015-’17 era when I was in my mid-20’s and found myself in debt (student loans + credit cards) bordering on the $40,000 range. In both cases I succeeded in ‘growing up,’ or whatever that meant at the time.
This time around is the most confusing of the three, if for no other reason than I know just how far I have already come, just how much progress has already been reached. It’s a trick whenever someone convinces themself that they no longer have anything left to learn, that it’s OK to be stuck in their ways, from here on out. I’ve come to understand in the brief 33 years I have had the opportunity to live and breathe, that it is exactly those moments, the ones where everything seems so easy, where it isn’t so difficult to imagine that there is nothing left to learn, when I have been reminded by how much work still remains.
This one’s going to take everything I’ve got. I know that, now. I lost something, something I am never going to get back, and I felt so much pride with how quickly I turned the page from it all. It was such an indestructible sensation, knowing how low I had once been, how hard I worked to get myself out of it then, in another life, and I figured if this, too, was so easy, just as easy as almost everything else in my life, then never again would I be forced to confront my own nature.
But maybe I never gave myself the time to truly make amends. Maybe that is the reason why I am here wondering what’s missing after seemingly every other aspect of my life has been moving in the right direction. I’m not burdened by any anxiety for thinking I should have gone right when I went left. I’m not killing myself to eat a fucking cheeseburger while my body is rejecting everything I am putting into my mouth. I’m not trying to forget everything all the time just to capture three or four hours of sleep. I’m not using all this agitation against anybody to find some elusive clarity to get me through my weekends.
I was driving home the other night and I had this weird epiphany, this midlife-crises come-to-jesus moment envisioning my immediate future, and it gave me the most satisfaction I have felt in I can’t even begin to explain how long. I was like, all right, here it is. Here you go, Eric. This is what must be done. You are going to buy a house, goddamn it. That’s what you are going to do. And right after you do that, you are going to buy a Porche. That’s what you are going to do, and that’s the way it’s going to be. You are a killer. You always have been a killer. You have spent much of your life, much of your adult life, in particular, telling yourself that you aren’t one. That you aren’t a killer. You have played oh so nice, all the time, so nobody else knows, either. But let’s get back to the basics. Let’s be who you were born to be. A killer. That’s all you are.
In lieu of moving far, far away, to a place nobody knows who I am, where I could legitimately start over, or simply disappearing altogether, which isn’t really an option for me at this point, I’m afraid the only thing I can really do is keep my head down. Show some humility. Focus on something. My eyes have been off the ball for so long, because for whatever reason the ball has always found me.
It’s really fucked up that I have spent so much of the last 10 or 15 years trying to prove vague points to all my imaginary enemies. Not knowing whether or not they have actually been paying attention, I am confident that long ago I surpassed all their expectations. I ran up the score, in fact. Somewhere along that line I realized that it wasn’t about them, it wasn’t about proving a point to them, it was about proving it to myself.
Future Bets 
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