I knew eventually I would arrive here, writing about 2023, because I have done it on my blog every December since 2016 — making this a full eight years of accounting. (Do the math.) Everyone knows Charles Dickens for saying: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ and that usually says enough. It says it all, as they say. But rarely does anyone appreciate the poignancy that follows, that which truly makes it such a legendary expression:
‘[It] was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.’
While I absolutely despise cluttering up this page of mine with cliché as heavy-handed as that, none of what follows can describe it, the year 2023, any better, so I give fair warning now that I will not attempt to.
All things considered, I would grade this year an A+. That doesn’t mean it was filled with happiness all the time, it doesn’t mean I accomplished anything extraordinary, and it doesn’t mean I am in a place now that is particularly different than when it got started.
Rather, this year was an illuminating reminder of what makes life worth living. Pain and heartache and depression and anxiety can be an exceedingly unhealthy foursome, but collectively they represent that caring about something, and like truly giving a fuck, greatly outweighs the lukewarm alternative. Growth can only come out of discomfort. And while I admit this was one of the most uncomfortable years of my life, I know the dividends it will pay down the road.
I am aware of that only because as I descended into the year 2023 I was arguably in the fattest and happiest space, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, I had ever been in. There were few stresses and even fewer challenges occupying my days and weeks and months. I was simply working, making money, saving some of it, and moving on with my life. I did not know I was missing anything, for I lived in such a plain and colorless world, where I had forgotten that some things were worth being missed.
It’s always in those simple and thoughtless intervals where everything seems too good to be true that it usually is. This year I fell hard for someone, and it didn’t take long before I knew that it could only end one way — in pain. But as I have lamented in the past some of the initial steps I took, from saying hello for the first time, to engaging in generally friendly conversations, to procuring a particular phone number, to rendezvousing at a particular restaurant, to spending hours upon countless hours on the phone and on Facetime, to willingly sacrificing my sleep, to eventually forgetting what it felt like to have a normal appetite, to later on understanding the dream was over, or that perhaps worse, realizing it — the dream — hadn’t ever really started to begin with, to having to accept that, and deal with it, as I look back on it all in retrospect I can’t blame myself. There are some things that leave a man no choice.
Because she really was quite lovely. From the very beginning I found her to be just so wonderful. I carried a somewhat subtle reputation for being a playboy, or whatever you want to call it, and I remember after like a week (though it may have been only a day or two) of exchanging with her via text message I was ready to shut it all down and completely discard every other woman in my life. So that’s what I did. I put absolutely all my eggs into this one basket, for all of a sudden nobody else mattered to me.
And I imagine that was probably my original sin — though, again, I can’t blame myself since I believed it the honest and gentlemanly thing to do — the idea that removing people from my life put a lot more importance on this one person, and thus added so much internal pressure on me to make it work.
What followed in the coming months was a worst-nightmare kind of scenario for me. I exposed myself to feelings and emotions that hadn’t been unearthed since I was a teenager. My whole schtick in real life is like not giving a shit about anything or anyone at any time, and then one day I woke up and found out how vulnerable and not-bulletproof I was. I tried to fight them, the feelings I don’t like feeling, but I inevitably succumbed and it didn’t subsequently take much time before the whole spool unraveled and I found myself without one of the only people I can ever say I was legitimately ‘close’ to.
Despite never crossing the threshold of being anything beyond really good friends, there was an intimacy to it that felt almost familial, like we’d done the same thing in another life. We went from strangers to confidants in a cosmic blink. Nothing was off the table. It didn’t feel weird or uncomfortable in the handful of times I saw her cry in front of me, the type of shit I’m generally checking my watch to see how soon I can leave, or where I’m like silently judging the other person for shedding tears, because instinctively I just wanted her to feel better, always. It wasn’t a drag whenever she needed me. There were no bridges too far, no mountains I wouldn’t have moved. I would have dropped everything.
At our peak she read me The Giving Tree — one of my favorite stories — on Facetime before I fell asleep. One early morning she read The Tell-Tale Heart by my favorite poet, Edgar Allen Poe, to me and I did fall asleep. When I woke up, though I couldn’t really say how much time had passed, some 10 or 15 minutes, maybe more, maybe less, she was still there, washing the dishes or something, which was a rare thing for her to do — the washing of dishes. And that was kind of our thing for awhile (a while?) there. We talked about topics that I don’t get to talk about with most people. Even poetry.
Of course, I did have my moments this year when I was severely sad and depressed, but the fundamental truth is the only way I could have been capable of getting so low is because so often she made me incredibly happy. When you get high on life, and enjoy the process of waking up, having somebody to sincerely wish a good morning to, and look forward to hearing it back, getting forced off the phone at 4:30 or 5:00 in the A.M. because you have to get up and work the following morning, things of that nature, then there is only one direction that follows. There’s some saying about what goes up…
And then, naturally, I started dating a stripper. I didn’t mean to (not that there is anything wrong with that), it just sort of came to be. I was rebounding emotionally and I think when I am not playing the usual inflated-sense-of-self-worth it’s-all-good-all-the-time anything-goes grandstanding character/persona that I typically showcase on a regular basis, and instead revert to being a real person, with real issues, people tend to lean in and, like, care. The pretty stripper girl just happened to be the one who arrived at that specific moment in my life.
She was 23, a full ten years younger than I am. She was around 5’1,” and had a striking natural petite body with a gorgeous ass. She would wear these black thigh-high latex boots and crawl her way over to me and stroke my cock while she used this like sweet innocent seductive valley-girl kind of voice to say terrible awful sexy things because she knew her customer (so to speak). We had a chemistry built on what for most of my adult life has been my calling-card — good old fashioned surface-level looks and physical consumption — where it did not require much more than a little kissing, or a slight touch, before her and I found ourselves in the bliss of post-coital pillow talk.
But we actually did a lot together. The two of us regularly went on dates. One day we traveled to Los Angeles and ate at this really bougie like outdoor cafe place, and later on stopped by a bar in Downtown Pasadena because they were doing an open mic night which she encouraged me to perform at, so that’s what I did. We’d go on picnics at the park and talk and lay down and people watch. We’d go down the slides in the kid’s play area and get on the swing set just because. Some nights she would text me to get her fast food and stay the night so we’d eat and then get really high together and hold hands while we walked around her apartment complex. We even made a local Applebee’s our ironic Garbage Restaurant place and that was both funny and kind of cute in our minds.
Maybe it was the Filipino in her, but if she noticed I had like a little bit of earwax in my ear she would have me lay down on my side and get out her kit and delicately clean both of them out. One day she got really excited because I told her I had never had my eyebrows done (since, you know, why would I) and so she ‘threaded’ them, which I didn’t know was a thing. She told me I looked Conventionally Attractive For A Man, that is how she described me.
I think that’s what I appreciated most about her, that she was always ready and willing and enthusiastic about seeing and spending time with me. She made me feel like a champion. She was there for me, in person, and that meant a lot.
As these things go, however, she needed (or wanted) more from me than I could give her. Than I was willing to give her. As Chuck Klosterman once wrote, in some way, in the perfect way, in whatever way he said it, that every relationship is a power struggle, and the one who loves the other less is the one who is in power. That’s all it comes down to. I tend to use ‘relationship’ in the very loose sense that is intended by its definition, whether between two lovers, two friends, two acquaintances, two people, two things, in general, but I swear to god if I haven’t been on both ends of that paradigm in the year of our lord, 2023, and don’t understand what my Chuck Klosterman paraphrase means, completely, then I don’t know a goddamn thing about anything.
Life goes on, though, right? That’s what Robert Frost once said. That he can sum up everything he’d learned about life in three words. At this point I am sort of a slave to 2023, because this is the year that both the Kansas City Chiefs (in February) and the Texas Rangers (in November) won their respective championships. It was the mid-to-late 1990’s — I was like six or seven — when I arrived at both of those teams as my favorites, and I had to wait (patiently) until 2020 for the Chiefs to do it for the first time, and had to wait (excruciatingly) until 2023 for the Rangers to do it. This year, they both did it.
I hate to be so abstract about shit, to think so far in advance without simply enjoying life in the present, but since I am making vague references nonstop there is some old saying about the taste of ashes. About two warring countries, or some conflict between two separate and diametrically opposed entities, where the conquering country (or I suppose we can call it an entity) gets what they want. They win the war, so to say. Yet they are merely left with admiring the rubble they have created. And all they have to show for it is the taste of ashes.
In some way that is how I view 2023, at least insofar as the Chiefs and Rangers are concerned — two teams I have been cheering for to win the ultimate prize since I was in elementary school. Am I happy that they won? No doubt. Am I over the moon about both doing it in the same season? I think you are smart enough to know the answer. Was I yelling and cursing and hugging ecstatically everyone who was around me in those specific wrinkles in time? I ask you, dearest readers, the most obvious questions.
Concurrently, how can I possibly divorce this magical and arbitrary twelve-month span of mine as a sports fan from everything else that has happened? How can I one day explain to Eric Jr., or little Sally (who will obviously be a sports fan of her own) that papa’s two favorite teams of all-time reached the mountaintop in the same year, one year, the year 2023, without having that brief instance when I picture or re-remember where I was, who I was, or who I was with, when the Chiefs and Rangers did what they did? I can’t say I wish anything was different. I wouldn’t trade championships in the present for what may or may not be the twinge of what future nostalgia brings me. I’m just saying I might be able, or might have been able, to appreciate it more in a year that was less loaded for me personally.
But let’s get back to the beginning, baby. That’s why 2023 gets graded as highly as it does. I don’t ask for very much in life. I ask for very little, as a matter of fact. Being a kid from San Bernardino has a way of keeping me forever humbled, of realizing that as long as I have a roof over my head, food on the table, clothes on my back, the basic safety net that so easily gets taken for granted, then what do I really have to complain about?
If you know me, though, if you have ever known me, then you know I am the furthest thing from humble. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Like I don’t mean it in terms of believing, as in actually believing, I am better than anybody else. More so it’s saying I want so much more, always. Further, I expect more. Growing up I was the most irrational kid in every class in the very much humble San Bernardino public education system that I ever stepped foot in. I told everyone I was going to Duke University one day. And I ended up at Virginia Tech.
I will spend the duration of my lifetime shooting for the fucking stars, and if I happen to only end up on the moon — if that must be the story that gets written about me — then I can’t have any regrets. I had a lot of audacity as an innocent 18 year-old dating and eventually falling in love with what was almost universally considered the prettiest girl in my high school, and possessed an equal amount of gall as a 33 year-old to think the hottest bitch in the California desert might feel the same way about me that I did about her.
The biggest problem I am confronted by now, if you want to call it that, is I can’t unsee what I have seen. I can’t un-feel what I have felt. Before this year I was kind of under the impression that life was going to be an easy game, one where I wouldn’t have to go through with the trouble of caring, of being wide the fuck awake, of looking forward to hearing from somebody again, where I could just take it or leave it, as they say, all the time, where the burden of my insecurities wouldn’t ever reach the surface again, where I could exist perpetually in a state that involved two parties and two parties only, of the winner and the loser, but that I would never have to know what the losing end felt like. That was my life for almost 15 years. It’s long enough to convince anybody of anything.
Like anyone else, I don’t enjoy being wrong. I have always been so competitive that I would try to fight my older brother whenever he beat me at like Tiddlywinks when I was four and he was six. I never lost that option-less feeling of needing to win. I took it with me to Little League Baseball, to NJB (basketball), to friendships, to relationships, to playing blackjack and poker and various other gambling pursuits, to the workplace, to outside the workplace, to picking meaningless football games present day. I am significantly better now at making it seem on the outside that I am less affected by it, losing, as compared to say, being a kid, or a teenager. But I still feel it. It’s omnipresent.
So this year, 2023, has been an interesting and curious intellectual exercise. Obviously I could neither see nor understand that while it was happening; I was more like ‘wow, I’m really happy,’ or ‘damn, it sucks to feel like shit,’ things like that. As I look back, however, having found some perspective, I am able to revert to the big picture, so to say, the macro in lieu of the micro, and find some peace and understanding and direct my attention to the honest and fair arbitration that only time can offer.
That, specifically, is why I can’t grade this year of mine as anything below the highest of honors, because finally I got to make a pitstop in familiar territory again. I got to become reignited. I got to feel the flames of my desires. I got to get my hopes up. I got to dream the impossible dream once more. I got to feel excited, and let down, and ecstatic, and depressed, and I promise all the daylight that exists in between each of those cracks was fulfilled to the utmost multiple times over. I got to relive both the highs and the pitfalls of the human experience. What more can I ask for out of just one year?
Some nights I find myself in the occasional familiar spot, pacing around my backyard in the wee hours — 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the A.M. — with my lips wrapped around an American Spirit as I look up towards the moon and the stars, smiling with a sense of reflection, goddamning myself in the purest, most playful way imaginable, as all the images flash through my head in a mostly glorious and sometimes melancholy montage. I see a face and I hear a voice, off in the distance, and for a second I remember how real everything felt.
I can’t speak on the hour, whether I was writing about football or baseball or something else entirely, but there is something to be said about being remembered. I recall sitting on top of a hill following a hike at Prospect Park in Loma Linda CA with my estranged stripper girlfriend, overseeing the city, kids playing under the supervision of their parents, a young lesbian couple having a picnic beneath the large primely-located tree at the park, dogs barking, etc. The two of us were talking about relationships, what they’re like — how great they can be, how stupid they oftentimes are. And we got on this tangent about how the losing party tends to have some inherently inescapable need to send these like brick-long text messages well after the fact saying such and such about how they are sorry, or that they wish things had gone differently, or whatever. We had this common bond, the stripper and I, because she was really hot, and thus men from her past enjoy having hot women in their life, and while I am not hot, per se, I do have this ego about me, or pride, if that’s what you prefer to call it, where I can’t bring myself to making people I used to love feel like I actually used to love them, and thus (the overwhelming majority of the time) I hate being the one to text first. And I said to this stripper that it is always better being on the winning side. That it’s always better receiving the text instead of delivering it. And we agreed: That’s us.
Even with at least one bout with Covid — I’m pretty sure it’s only been one time — I am cursed by having a really sharp memory. I remember everything. Somewhere in my mid-20’s I realized nobody likes the smartest guy in the room, the one who knows everything, and ever since then I have made it a point to dumb myself down as much as possible. To speak more like the guy who checks the box that says ‘some college.’ To play down to the level of my competition, as they say in sports.
What was beautiful about this year is that I did not have to play down nearly as often. In fact, I got to play up to my competition. I got to use words I would never say or write to just anybody, because in this case I knew the other side understood. I got to make trivial, stupid, sometimes brilliant references that I generally leave in my holster, knowing that the other side usually does not ‘get’ them. I went substantially deeper in my bag than I generally do, arguably deeper than I ever have.
I remember writing a handwritten Christmas letter last year, one of many handwritten letters I wrote, where I just had to say ‘thank you.’ Thank you for letting me be me. Some people are fucking sociopaths and don’t know what it means to be themselves. Others are too much themselves all the time and it’s a huge turn off. Me, I was just asleep. I forgot what it meant to be able to be my honest self, knowing the opposite end would understand. It’s really underrated and fleeting to have somebody who is there, who feels it, who knows. In Communication Theory they call this a ‘stable exchange.’
I was watching an episode of Survivor last year; it’s one of those shows I re-arrive at every two or three years and have to dismantle like twenty different seasons even though I have already seen most of them. Every so often, in the best seasons, there’s an elimination due to a deadlock in the voting and the de facto tiebreaker is a fire-making competition between two contestants. And seemingly every time there is a huge underdog going up against someone who actually knows how to make a fire, which is highly problematic (as you can imagine) for the one who isn’t as good at it.
Generally speaking, the underdog will panic and reach for the coconut husk. Invariably the host of the show, Jeff Probst, will declare (while he offers play-by-play of the fire-making competition), in reference to the coconut husk, that ‘it burns bright but it burns out quickly.’ In other words: It is risky.
There is safety and security in doing the boy scout thing and building a sustainable fire, but that ain’t me and it never was. The only things that ever got me out of bed were the true gambles, the long shots, the fires that burn bright but burn out too fast, all of that which I knew would give me future complications but made me deliriously overjoyed in the present. I’ve always known that the way I operate does not make sense, objectively speaking, but I don’t know what it is, it just feels to me like such a fucking indictment to actively pursue what could only be considered or described as a ‘normal life.’
So I juxtapose my humble hometown and my humble beginnings coming from a working class family, where more or less everyone I have ever known came from the same socioeconomic climate, where we all just wanted to be, and do, and become, a little bit better than our parents, with this farfetched idea — to everyone who is from the same lot in life — that greatness is not only attainable, but absolutely within the realm of what ought to be expected. I take a lot of pride in who I am and what I have become in this particular chapter in my story, but I still haven’t come upon a day that I woke up, or had this like brief moment of clarity, not even for a hot second, where I thought you know, maybe this is as good as it gets, and I would wager a fairly large sum of money that that instance will never come.
Aside from my own personal wants and needs, and goals, and dreams, naturally I still want to one day do the wife and kids thing. I want the big house with the white picket fence and the red door and the kitchen full of expensive black appliances and the master bedroom with the fireplace and like two different walk-in closets and the restroom that carries the bathtub which doubles as the hot tub with jets and all that shit. I want to truly be in love with somebody, not as a matter of convenience or where I’m like doing the math thing of thinking well shit if I start having kids now then I’m going to be in my 50’s when they graduate high school and I’ll be in my 60’s, probably, when they have kids of their own. I don’t care about any of that.
In the earliest stages of this blog, in 2013, I spent the winter months writing in the garage of my parent’s old house in San Bernardino CA because the little swing in the backyard that I generally did my business on was out of commission, whether due to high winds or recent rain or it being just really fucking cold outside. Those were the days, so they say, where my old best friend would come over and we would make music together. Where I would put these like gaudy purple Dre Beats headphones over my ears and forget about the world a couple hours at a time while I romanticized the normal vagaries of life. I thought I had it pretty much figured out then, too.
I think the point is, 2023 is the year I got to reestablish myself as a writer. I sometimes refer to it, writing, as my labour of love. Of course it’s true that I have been writing regularly, as in literally almost every single day (whether I post or not) since I was occupying a dorm room at such and such address and zip code that ended in West Ambler Johnston, Blacksburg VA, in 2008. Somewhere in my garage here in Riverside CA exists a box filled with pink envelopes covered with lip imprints of MAC lipstick, full of letters and sketches and song quotes and sometimes etched in beautiful calligraphy from a former lover of mine that probably still smells like Viva La Juicy. I used to write for her. She was my inspiration. The one who gave me books, who got me into reading. The one I saved my best for. And throughout the magic of time gone by, I never found the strength to stop. Writing is my drug. It’s not what I do. It is who I am.
And perhaps the reason why this year will always be so special to me is due specifically to that fact. I wrote more handwritten letters in 2023 than I have written in my entire life. That can’t be faked or manufactured in any sort of disingenuous way. It’s an ineluctable declaration that says I am here, and that I care, and that I am spending my time on nobody else but you, and that even though I am not with you right now, I am with you, always.
So whenever I think back on this memorable, excellent, awe-inspiring, difficult, ridiculous year, only one word will come to my mind: Love. I say that writing is my labour of love, but maybe it’s the love — on its regrettably isolated own — that brings out my labour.
I started reading this book, back in like May, I think, around the time I knew everything was going to change, called Infinite Jest. It had been sitting on my bookshelf for like five years, one of those things that I really enjoyed looking at, so thick that it kind of gave credibility to the other 50 or 60 on the bookshelf. I tried to read like two pages of it back in 2017 or something and it was so dense and the writing was so tiny and it all felt just so daunting that I never imagined myself reading the fucking thing. But there it was.
It is currently December 15th and I am still only halfway through. I don’t know what that means, exactly, whether I have been dragging my feet (which I probably have) or if it really isn’t meant to be consumed on a fast track. The author will spend like five paragraphs talking about a meaningless visit between a student and the on-campus doctor and describe the filing cabinet having like two of the drawers locked and the other three unlocked. Multiple pages will feature just one paragraph. When I am sitting in the break area reading it I will tell myself to put it down once a particular sentence ends and it will take me like three minutes to finish the sentence because there are so many commas and semicolons and colons and em-dashes.
But I can feel its weight, this book. I know it is making me look at life in a different way, even though I probably won’t understand until well after I’m through with it. Patience is what it is forcing me to comply with, which I hate. I kind of wish I could go back and make it an ornament on my bookshelf, something I could once again admire from afar, and wonder about its potential, without running the risk of opening it, seeing what it’s all about, witnessing in turn what I am all about, and not having to look back on it with a certain curiosity of how different my life would be if I had never peeled back its cover.
From page 567:
They have shifted into sexual mode. Her lids flutter; his close. There's a concentrated tactile languor. She is left-handed. It is not about consolation. They start the thing with each other's buttons. It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender, that he is both offense and defense and she neither, nothing but this one second's love of her, of-her, spinning as it arcs his way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that for one second she loves him too much to stand it, that she must (she feels) have him, must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone: that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets — that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O. That he is the One.
(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, now, special and only, the One would be not he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered, and will never again.)
And about contempt, it is about a kind of hatred, too, along with the hope and need. Because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out disguised as a contempt he disguises in the tender attention with which he does the thing with her buttons, touches the blouse as if it too were a part of her, and him.
When I was 19 or 20 I went through a massive stage on YouTube where I would watch these like two- and three-hour-long Christopher Hitchens debates on religion. He remains, to this day, regardless of whether or not he was wrong about a few geopolitical issues, on the Mt. Rushmore of my favorite authors.
Anyway, back then I was really hoping to believe in God. I had been questioning my faith — because when the days are darkest I tend to more fervently question everything — and what I found was the boring and depressing truth that, no, the overwhelming probability is that nothing is out there. No one knows we’re here. It’s all just randomness, a mistake, even, that any of us exist in this cold and desolate area of the universe. I still prayed many of those nights, though. I admit it. I made my desperate pleas in the selfish, arrogant way that said even though You probably aren’t there, and You probably aren’t listening even if you are, but if You were ever going to listen to anyone it would be me, and You will probably intervene to give me, specifically, whatever it is I am asking for.
It bothered me for like three weeks, I imagine, the idea that there is no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. That Santa Claus does not exist. That the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy aren’t real. That all the days I went to church in my youth, that all the God Is Good, God Is Great prayers my family said together while we held hands at the dinner table growing up were for naught. That living a good, honest life is pointless without a reward when I die.
But then one day, shortly thereafter, I woke up. Rather than lamenting the pointlessness to it all, this life, it was suddenly incredibly liberating to feel like I had finally found some truth. Like maybe I didn’t have to be a good person only because I thought it would one day carry me to infinite paradise in heaven, but that I could be a good person simply for the sake of it being the right thing to do. I thought without Christianity it would forever lock me up within this world of meaninglessness, and it had the opposite effect. I was finally free.
The truth can be a difficult thing. I spent a generous portion of 2023 clinging on to hope, with the sole intention of just making it through another day. I starved myself unintentionally and I lost like 30 pounds and every day a new person would ask me if something was wrong or if I was okay and I would sit around wanting to send text messages to gain some sense of clarity to temporarily make myself feel better and every weekend was like running a gauntlet until I could finally get back to work and renew my ability to be distracted. I never wanted to show my cards. To admit how goddamn impacted I was.
But when she left my life, again struck the opposite of what I anticipated: I felt free. A weight had been lifted. Of course I had to get over the routines I had made, like sending good morning texts, waiting for her to get on break at work, looking forward to the late-night phone calls when she was off the clock. I would drive to work every day and drive home from work every day and she would be on my mind. Then the following week it would lessen, the thinking about her part, and the next, and the next, and the next. All of a sudden I put on like 20 pounds and was looking normal and healthy, and I was running again with consistency.
And now it’s just memories, you know? I know what she looks like, I know what her voice sounds like, but I can’t like pinpoint either anymore. It’s been fading away. I’m not active on Facebook or whatever. I don’t check up on her life (even though we are still friends). It’s more just an image in my head, she is, where I think back on specific moments we shared together where she will be like smiling or something. Where I hear her obnoxiously dorky laugh, which is different than her fake laugh. By now, she has been out of my life about as long as she was in it. She did burn bright, though.
It is ironic that the way this one person made me feel is — even though I wish it weren’t the case — the way I make (and have made) almost everyone of the opposite sex feel ever since I can remember engaging in this fucked up dynamic involving interpersonal relationships. I have sympathy for these women. I really do. And I have a lot of empathy for anyone who has to put up with me, in general.
Since none of it matters, though, I feel that I have kind of graduated to the level where I can tell these women, point blank, on our first date, or whatever the kids call it these days, that I am emotionally unavailable and that they are going to end up liking me (or worse) and that I don’t want to hurt them and that I always just want us to be ‘cool,’ and I know it probably sounds like a joke when I say it — because after all, it is me who is saying it — but I’m actually deadass serious. I am the worst. And I will continue to be the worst. But I’m being honest about it. That has to count for something (even though when push comes to shove, when the rubber meets the road, it never does).
Listen, I can’t be anybody other than who I already am. I had a really good 15-year run where I believed I had like burned off all of my feelings and emotions and turned into a laissez faire guy who let the action occur in front of him and scooped up the valuable information for pennies on the dollar. This year I got to be part of the action again. I wasn’t allowed to wait around on the sidelines any longer being the person who offers solid, objective, advice knowing I won’t have to deal with any of the consequences. I, instead, got to be in the shit. I got to test out on myself all the advice everyone around me has welcomed over the years. And I saw what I was made of.
There were many nights I did not like the reflection. But as I sit here, now on December 21th, I guess I feel, like, proud? I don’t know what the word is. I just know the last time I went through an existential-type of crisis (pardon the dramatics) it took me almost two years before I made peace with the situation, with myself, with life, with the world around me, things of that nature. I kept holding on to some vague 1-in-1000 chance that everything would turn around and I’d be happy again. I waited by my phone. My heart was like a richter scale that would go from completely neutral to spiking uncontrollably.
I don’t have time for that anymore. I can’t devolve into drugs to feel better, to temporarily escape reality. I have to accept it as is, and I have to be okay with it. 15 years ago my prospects for life, for the future, were dim. On paper I was a college dropout. I got hired at an auto auction company where I made $10.50 per hour. Of the little money I did make, pretty much everything that did not pay for the apartment my best friend and I shared ended up going to the casino he and I frequented.
But one day at a time was the only way I could take it. My ten dollar and fifty cent per hour office job turned into a dealing career where I made enough money such that I could feel pride in the progress I had made, where the blows of past heartbreak and poor decision-making could evaporate some, where I could begin to dream again. I don’t think it’s an accident that the biggest leap I have ever made — personally, professionally, all-encompassing — occurred as a result of the most pain I had ever experienced. Those feelings I don’t like to feel, as I put it earlier, that back then I felt for the first time, of rejection, of inadequacy, of confusion, of being powerless to the will and the whims of somebody other than myself, drove me to be the person I became.
Just like in labor disputes, collective bargaining, etc., where the working class jockeys for position against the capitalists, the ownership class, much gets lost and taken for granted during peacetime. Where the egos of the workers get placated, what can only follow is complacency. It makes it easier to forget what was worth fighting for. And when one loses their edge, they lose everything. In a way that is almost unnoticeable, through the comforts of day-to-day, we meet again at square one.
And I don’t know what that means for me. That’s probably the scariest part, the not knowing. I know only that to get the best out of me it takes something. When I was 19 I was, without any answers or spheres of influence, a young wolf crying out into the wilderness, and now here, at age-33, I am standing on the shoulders of everything I have learned and everything I have known and everything that my life’s experience has given me.
The truth is, I don’t have to know where it is I’m going. I just know I’m going there. An asteroid fell into my life in the year 2023 and removed all the complacency and ability to take my life for granted. It allowed me to dream again. Not of a woman, or of some ideal world I could picture myself living in. Just to dream. And dream bigger. To know that no matter where I am or what I am doing, I can be so much more. I needed that. I really, really fucking did.
One day I will look back on this as a turning point, similar to what it was the last time I made a seismic jump. I’m not going to talk about it in real life, no one has to know, but it’s coming. It’s happening. I can feel it. I was really happy this year, and I will remember it forever. And even in the dark times, I knew that brighter days were ahead.
How else to ride off into the sunset?
Future Bets 
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