[2-1-24] I mentioned back in December that the biggest error I made last year, critically, was basically making one person assume the burden of all my interpersonal needs. I had a decently-sized cast of characters and background characters and tertiary characters surrounding me, people I could go to to talk about sports and politics, occasional real life, nonsense, bullshit, etc., and I either substituted or discarded them, sacrificing nearly all of my non-family members at the alter of unrequited love.
She moved away at the beginning of July, this unicorn-like woman who turned into the sun — that thing that seemingly everything revolved around. Her departure, naturally, created a vacuum for all the intellectual and emotional needs she once satisfied, whether in-person or over the phone or through text messages throughout my days and nights. Strangely, I feel like I overcame my biggest internal struggles (the sensation in the pit of my stomach, loss of appetite, lack of sleep, etc.) before she even went away. I had a couple months circa May until July to ‘get over it,’ so to say, and in the subsequent months thereafter I felt not a lot. I was eating again and sleeping like a baby, and I’ve always said if you give me those two things I can figure out the rest.
The last six months, however, have been a different kind of struggle, that which some people refer to as Unintended Consequences. The thing about liking someone, like really really getting to that level, is feeling the need to play it straight — and, in 2023, I played it straighter than I have ever played anything — out of some intense fear of fucking it up and losing that person that is so special. It is to that end that I didn’t really do anything extracurricular while in the midst of my infatuation with her. In lieu of doing the whole 33 year-old single guy thing, I stayed home most of the time.
The unintended consequences that I mentioned above, those are what came for me in the second half of 2023 and bled into the start of 2024. I found myself executing so many of the hopes and visions I once cared about pre-2023 with the women I put on ice. I woke up in hotel rooms and apartments next to certain females I once longed for only to realize in the most cliché fashion imaginable that the juice was never really worth the squeeze, that there was a reason why I put them off in the first place. It’s perhaps true that when I am feeling low (even when I don’t know it) I subconsciously have this like urge to go out and reassert myself in the animal kingdom. Then, when I get it all out of my system, I find the type of understanding that I am experiencing right now, knowing every one of them were merely distractions that didn’t offer much staying power.
Real life was what I thought I was seeking, and I believed I had to like sleep with these women to break through and get to that real life. (It sounds backwards, I’m aware.) Looking back on it, even though six months isn’t that long of a time, I no longer believe real life was what I wanted. I think fake life was what I was searching for, what I sought after — to make myself feel better. I wanted to feel something again. I was ravenous to recapture the adrenaline rush of being behind closed doors, kissing, and grabbing, and being on top of them, or behind them, feeling their legs shaking beneath me, talking that talk in whispers with my lips pressed against their ears, reaching for and getting a firm grip around their throats when they told me they were about to finish.
These momentary gains and fleeting accomplishments pale in comparison to working towards forever, which for a time, last year, I thought I was doing. Simultaneously it’s both cute and kind of pathetic that I dreamed so highly, so recently, knowing now that I am basically fulfilling the reputation that has been bestowed upon me (even if I never saw myself as the dog that everyone thought I was/thinks I am). I’m neither ashamed nor proud to say any of these things. Emotionally I remain in this like numb type of state where really everything is just a matter of fact.
It’s raining right now. I hear the raindrops falling like pellets against the thinly-veiled metallic covering to the patio I am writing under. When I open my mouth to breathe I see the rare white clouds come out, only accessible to be seen in Southern California for like 20 or 30 nights out of a calendar year. A storm is coming in.
So what does any of this mean? I suppose that is the question I’ve been asking myself. I think in 2023 I saw what life really had to offer me, which was ultimately just the predictable concoction of getting my hopes up before being let down. You can’t win ’em all, as they say. Hearts were not built to withstand those types of onslaughts in perpetuity, or as some constant, like a drug that keeps you high over and over again. The appreciation one feels for actually reaching such heights is in knowing those types of years, or fractions of years, or people, don’t come around often enough to make you feel comfortable in such a homeostasis. You can kind of see it, or try to understand it, while it’s happening. But mostly it’s only realized and truly understood when it isn’t there anymore.
I convinced myself by the time she left, at the beginning of July, that because I no longer felt the love I had for her in my stomach, that because I could eat and sleep again, the story was over for me. That I had moved on. Partially true, or some substantial percentage, as it were, these last six months have been in some way an extension of all that I carried with me along the way. Had I really been content and moved on, as they say, I would have had no business carrying on with women I saw no future in, who I was in a sense just using for my own benefit, and instead would have been at home jacking off and playing video games or whatever.
In a longwinded sort of way, that is the point I have arrived at. I don’t need to pursue these dead-ends to make myself feel better. For a time — for six months, let’s say — my ego probably did. But what I find present day, present tense, right this second, hitherto, is I am right where I started. Where I was pre-2023. Pre-unrequited-love. Pre-feelings I should not have been feeling. I saw what the other end, the shallow end, looked like, and it was cool. It was everything I thought it would be. It was exactly what it has always been, and what it always will be.
Q.E.D.
* * * * *
Kansas City Chiefs 17, Baltimore Ravens 10
In a previous blog — during the now-defunct Road To Glory series — the word I used to describe myself, as a Chiefs fan, was magnanimous. While I know that I am in the 99th percentile insofar as caring about my favorite football team, almost to the point where it’s like embarrassing, I am currently [2-2-24] in the most privileged position insofar as NFL diehards are concerned. Understanding that, I feel it’s sort of incumbent upon me to not be obnoxious, or arrogant, around all my friends who have favorite (less successful) teams of their own.
In fact, three of the regulars on the smoke patio at the casino I work at, people I would consider ‘friends,’ or at the very least people I would stop reading my book for because I’d rather talk to them — pretty high praise if you ask me — happen to be fans of the Miami Dolphins, Buffalo Bills, and Baltimore Ravens… the three teams the Chiefs knocked down like dominoes in the first three rounds of the playoffs. And each week, leading up to game time, I actually spent like ninety-plus percent of the time trying to convince them, as if I was writing a persuasive essay or something, why their team was going to defeat my team.
Now of course there was some element of reverse-psychology involved there; the person who knows me best, his name is Emin, continually said I was ‘full of shit’ and a ‘fucking bullshitter’ and ‘playing mind games,’ and to an extent he was right. The small voice in the back of my head kept telling me to like my chances, to like the Chiefs’ chances, but how am I honestly supposed to separate that voice — the one that tells me what I want to happen — from the worst-case scenario? The problem with so many/most sports fans is their complete and unwavering lack of objectivity. Obviously I could speak from my id all the time and tell everyone Patrick Mahomes plays quarterback for the Chiefs and thus the Chiefs are probably going to win, and I would be right significantly more often than not. But that isn’t how I operate. I would much rather present the argument for why the other team has a legitimate shot. If I’m right, then I can go into work the following week and tell everyone that I was right, that I wasn’t surprised. If I’m wrong, then that means Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs won and advanced. It’s a win-win for me.
As it pertains to last Sunday’s game, a 17-10 win in the AFC Championship over the Ravens, I’m reminded by perhaps the most arrogant comment I made during the 2023 NFL season, which probably came around Week 4 or Week 5 — to these same coworkers I spend most of my smoke patio time talking with about football. They actually laughed at me when I said it, presumably because it sounded like a joke. Ironically it was perhaps the most honest thing I have ever said about football, and about the Chiefs more specifically. I said (in some form or another):
Kansas City only uses the regular season as practice. They just fuck around. All we care about are the playoffs.
I don’t even know if I meant that when I said it, but sometimes one stumbles on the truth by accident. Never have I been more convinced that that’s the truth than right now, having completely demolished the Dolphins, beaten the Bills by a score that did not reflect how badly the Chiefs owned that game, and were in complete control on the road against arguably the best team in the NFL during the AFC Championship Game.
The Chiefs looked pedestrian for most of the year. I didn’t even request vacation time for their playoff games because, as I told my boss, who was surprised that I didn’t take any days off, ‘It doesn’t feel like our year.’ I was wrong about that. Now that we are here — we in the collective Chiefs-fan sense — I feel like it must be our (collective) year. That we (collectively) have to go through with the business of winning our (collective) third Super Bowl in five years, cementing ourselves (collectively) as one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the NFL. I could absolutely be wrong about that, and it’s surely going to hurt if that is the case, but why would they (the Chiefs, non-collectively in this case) put up with the trouble of coming this far without finishing the job?
As a matter of coincidence, the aforementioned Emin is actually a massive San Francisco 49ers fan, so it will be our two teams going at it for glory on February 11th. Four years ago this exact matchup took place in the Super Bowl, in Miami, when a 24 year-old Patrick Mahomes brought the Chiefs back from a 20-10 deficit with something like six minutes left in the game and ultimately won, 31-20, delivering the Chiefs their first championship in my lifetime.
I was ecstatic, of course, but I was in a way kind of pissed off, because when Emin came up to me at work, the first time we saw each other post-Super-Bowl, he shook my hand and wished me congratulations. I thought, that’s my line. That’s what I was supposed to be doing/saying to him, from the other side. It was just one in a long line of moments where I knew he and I were severely alike. That I knew how much that loss stung him, just as it would have me. But he had the stones, just as I do, to be the bigger man.
The other thing I remember from that Super Bowl, which occurred in early February, 2020, is that my mom was like a week removed from nearly dying from what was at the time considered ‘influenza.’ That was what they called it. In retrospect it was probably the original, the OG, the thing that killed like over a million people in the United States, and many more million around the globe, that which inevitably shut down businesses and changed everyone’s lives, called Covid-19.
I was 29 years old. It feels like a long time ago now. Since then the Chiefs have been to two additional Super Bowls — first losing 31-9 to Tom Brady and the Bucs, then last year winning 38-35 over the Eagles — and gone to four AFC Championship Games. I have been there for the ride the entire time. I have watched every game. I have celebrated the wins, been disappointed by the losses, and let everyone know that It Isn’t Our Time.
Even though it has been. The whole way.
* * * * *
[2-3-24] Pursuant to the first section of this article, one of the strangest aspects of my life post-July, 2023, was becoming friends, or better friends than we were, or good friends, period, with her — the unicorn/unrequited love girl’s — best friend.
A couple weeks after she left for the east coast, I had an opportunity (in a moment of weakness) to tell her best friend that if she every needed anything, spiritually, emotionally, however I phrased it, that I would be [t]here. After the words escaped themselves from my mouth I felt sort of hollow. Not like I didn’t mean it, but that it’s not something I would normally say. For an instant I must have been channeling a version of Good Guy Eric. In other words, I said what seemed like the right thing to say. Like some cliché in a book or movie to keep the action moving along.
As genuine a sentiment as it was — knowing to varying degrees the affect, or impact, her best friend’s departure would have on both of us — I figured we would leave it at that. I said something I was supposed to say, or at least what a normal person in my position ought to say, she received it, and the two of us could thereby wash our hands of each other and the entire situation.
But there’s just something about her that I couldn’t ignore. A couple/few drunk nights I found her name on my Facebook Messenger and called her up. So we would have sporadic conversations on my drives home from god knows where, or on her drives home from work, and at the beginning there — when my wounds were still so fresh — she provided some semblance of support, or understanding, even as I remained as guarded as I could possibly be while not trying to reveal too much about myself. From there it kind of turned into what I would consider, at least from my perspective, as a genuine exchange between friends.
I think the highest compliment I could deliver is that she has emotional depth. Setting aside that she has experienced more suffering than I have, at least in terms of having gone through certain natural life cycle traumas that I have not yet had to endure, she knew how to empathize with my menial plight. Sure, she accused me of speaking in riddles, and talking in circles to explain myself, but that’s all part of the experience. She gets it, so to say. She gets me.
And while I lacked trust initially — given her understandable preference and alliance to her best friend — at a certain point I didn’t (and still don’t) know who else I was (or am) supposed to run to. In the opening article to this blog I mentioned ‘real life,’ and how incapable so many of these women I run around with are at communicating it, real life, and accepting me for who I am, and so I find that the only person in my current universe who knows how to deal with me is the best friend of the one person I used to think was the only person in the world who really understood.
This probably makes sense. Like it doesn’t take a fucking genius to know that the reason the two of us know each other and exist in each other’s lives is because of her best friend. To keep her, my old unicorn, existing, and to make it all seem like it was actually real, that it wasn’t some figment of my imagination, that it really meant something while it was happening, I have to keep her best friend in my orbit. I imagine that’s the layman explanation.
I don’t know if that’s so true anymore, though. We may have transcended the whole We’re Only Here Because Of Her and become actually legitimate friends who can talk about shit. I couldn’t tell you what it’s like from her perspective. I would wager that she enjoys talking to me as much as I do her. I guess it really doesn’t matter.
But emotional depth, that is what she possesses. Her hair is the color you think of when you picture the month of February. In the pits of my ever-receding existence, in the life I live so privately so much of the time, the list of people I can say know me, like actually know me, is so short that it is basically immediate family members and this one girl, this one best friend of a woman I once cared for so deeply.
[2-4-24] I’ve reestablished my list of so-called characters and background characters and tertiary characters. Some of those who weren’t in my life at this time last year are back in it. Football is a 365-days-per-year conversation piece so I don’t lack for those talks; politics are sort of dead to me but there’s a genocide going on in Palestine at the moment so we’ve got that to hang our hats on as Americans, since our government is supporting it; nonsense and bullshit are two of my favorite topics so I have a support group for that.
But when it comes to real life, you don’t have to scroll very far. I basically have my mom, and I have the best friend of the girl I used to share everything with. I very much appreciate that she was there for me, that she is still there for me. I spend my life not asking for or needing anything from anybody, but I am man enough to say that I needed her. And she was/is there.
Tragically, I have to write this down now, on here, for February, 2024, because I know a time will come — perhaps a week from now, perhaps a year from now — where she won’t be there. When it comes to real life I don’t do the reverse-psychology thing like I do with sports. This is not one of those self-fulfilling prophecies I want to see come true. Or some shot that I’m calling because I want to be right.
I just know who I am. I’m stuck with being me, every day, all the time. And what I have learned over all these years, if history is any indication, is I am not built for longevity. I am what I described in my Year In Review, from the other side, as a fire that burns bright but burns out quickly. A flash in the pan, so to say. It’ll be fun, it’ll be interesting, it’ll be something to look back on with a certain level of fondness, where the other end can say Remember That One Guy who did this or said that, but where I usually exist is merely in memory. I will get bored or tired. Or I will find a way to burn the bridge.
But what’s important here is the present, because that’s all we have. When I told this February-color-haired woman, back in July, 2023, that if she ever needed anything I would be there, I was lying. If you had a decoder, or some device to translate what I was really saying, as I spoke in a riddle, or talked in a circle, it would have come across as something like this:
If I ever need you, I hope you’ll be there.
* * * * *
[2-7-24] February holds a special place in my heart, but mainly because of how lousy of a month it is. I mean there’s lousy, in terms of the cold and dreary weather, and there’s lousy in terms of memories. Dave Chappelle in one of his Netflix specials quipped that they gave gay people Pride Month in June, where the weather is sunny and vibrant and everyone is outside all the time, and they made February Black History Month because, for a variety of reasons, it’s pretty much the worst month of the calendar year.
15 years ago, in February, 2009, I was holed up in my dorm room at Virginia Tech. On one of the last two or three days of January my girlfriend of the time and I mutually took a break from one another, in a classic classic Eric moment where, face-to-face via Skype, I surmised that it might have been for the best to take a break. Directionally our relationship was in an absolute nosedive. I truly believed it was the only way I could have salvaged the situation, offering time off in hopes that absence would make the heart grow fonder, and so on.
The next month — February — was by far the longest and most difficult month of my life and it’s not particularly close. I imagined that by doing the mature thing, the thing that felt like the right thing to do, my ex-girlfriend would have told me no, that we would work things out in realtime. That we didn’t need to take a sabbatical. By virtue of accepting the terms that I didn’t actually want her to accept, I figure in retrospect that she was probably already en route to breaking up with me.
What I remember about February, 2009, was my dorm room. The weather was cold outside. It was cold every day of the week. Some days it snowed. Some days it was incredibly windy and rainy and still cold. Some days I never left my dorm room at all. I’d get these care packages from my mom like every couple weeks, filled with all the goodies and junk food that eventually turned into my diet. I had this food card that was meant to last for an entire semester, and I used it so rarely during the month of February that at the end of the semester, in May, I had like $300 left on it so my old roommates/friends from Lynchburg VA and I on my last night at Virginia Tech went to the fast food market and basically bought everything in the store until the card was maxed out.
In one month, in February, I lost 30 pounds. Thirty mutherfucking pounds in the shortest month of the year. When I left for Virginia Tech circa August, 2008 I weighed 145 lbs. Upon returning for winter break c. December, 2008 I weighed 165, which is low-key chunky for me. When I went back for spring break in March, 2008 I was sub-135. I remember like the week before coming home my ex-girlfriend on her Myspace page posted a picture via HTML — back when you could code your Myspace, in the Myspace days — of a polar bear. That was her nickname for me because I was/am always warm. Warm-blooded. And she was tiny. I was the polar bear. She told me on the phone one night that she began referring to me, to her family members and friends, as her boyfriend again. So that made me happy.
But I stayed in my dorm room all month. I stopped going to classes. I communicated with my Comm professor (no pun intended) on Facebook — because everyone on the east coast was using Facebook instead of Myspace — that I was depressed, and since I was the only Comm major in a class filled with business majors, she told me not to sweat it. That she would give me the assignments and grade me with an A at the end of the semester.
Really the only consistent per-night time I set aside to leave my dorm room was when I was on the phone with my best friend. I would go on walks out in the snow, or in the rain, or in the sleet, around Lane Stadium, which was the whole reason I wanted to go to Virginia Tech in the first place — because I loved the football team when I was a little boy. I’d tell him about my situation. Hunger. Lack of sleep. Depression. Etcetera. I’d take the same route outside my dorm room at West Ambler Johnston, the same dorm that featured the beginning of the massacre at VT in 2007 which killed 32 students and faculty, exit outside to the beach volleyball courts, cross the street in my snow jacket so I could make the roundabout on the outskirts of the football stadium. I remember one night I wasn’t even on the phone. I just went for a walk. I looked at the Hokie Stone featuring the words in some sort of serif that read: Lane Stadium. I felt a certain reverence and simultaneous disgust as I thought to myself: This was what it was all about to you. This is why you came here. Just for this?
It’s the same month I picked up my smoking habit. February, 2009. I bought my first pack of Newports from the student store. Something about blowing white clouds in the wintertime just did it for me. Hard to believe, in retrospect, but I’d go all day without smoking and then at like midnight I would call my best friend, back home in San Bernardino CA when it was still 9:00 in the P.M. Pacific Standard Time, and I’d smoke literally three cigarettes while I was on the phone with him.
I exercised a lot to pass the time. I had this little iPod, not one of the big ones but one of the miniature ones that was like the fifth or sixth generation, probably. It was cherry red, and on the back in white lettering it said ‘Merry Christmas, Eric,’ or ‘Happy birthday.’ Something along those lines. My mom got it for me. Almost every night I would do an insane amount of pushups and situps and listen to Parkway Drive. The album was called Killing With A Smile that featured ‘Romance Is Dead.’ I was incredibly motivated despite my depression. I knew I would make it home eventually. I knew I would have to run into my girlfriend of the time, again, one way or another. So I wanted to look my best.
And when I ended up in her room, c. March 7th, 2009 after a night of dancing at Club Sevilla in Riverside CA, when I took my shirt off I was the skinniest/most fit I had ever been over the course of our relationship. I had no tattoos. Just skin and bones. I remember politicking for a few minutes with her mom, my ex-girlfriend’s, before the two of us ended up in her room over on Robin Road in San Bernardino CA. She just sort of gasped, my ex-girlfriend that is, when I took off my white V-neck, and I still don’t know if she was surprised by how much weight I had lost or if she was turned on because I was looking my peak skinny-muscular self.
That was the night I went in for the plunge for the hardest, most sentimental sex of my life. Initially she stopped me so I could read out of a little pink book she had, titled My Friend Leonard. And before she let me enter she forced me to read to her, from a page that was bookmarked by a pink sticky note that said: Eric, my darling, please read this to me. I never forget. I laid on top of her, on her little twin-sized bed. Pink comforter and pink pillow cases. On the bulletin board next to her bed she had pinned up random clippings I sent her over the autumn months from the Virginia Tech student newspaper. And I read to her. I can’t know for certain — because how would one know such things — but it may have been, given the circumstances of February, 2009, the happiest and most fulfilling individual moment I have ever experienced.
That girl, she was romance. She certainly was. She tested and challenged me more than anyone ever has and more than anyone could be capable of, since she was the first. She left me in that dorm room, on the east coast, where survival was the only way. I give a lot of credit, typically, to the girls that have the ability to take me to such places, physically, emotionally, all the words that I use ad nauseam to describe what honestly can’t be boxed up and explained to any rational person that hasn’t been there, that hasn’t been through it.
I would have these portions of days that lasted like 10 or 15 minutes where I was able to gorge on several fruit roll-ups and some Cheese Itz, or something. And then the moment would pass and I would no longer be able to put down any food. I would want to lay to in bed all day. I didn’t want to respond to any text messages or phone calls. Just sleep. Some would say I was withering away, and nobody wanted to see that. And I didn’t want to show anybody.
But if you ask me, that is why February matters. That is the impact February had on my life. Every year since then, since 2009, February has come around and I have made my peace thinking about where I was when February came to be. It was the darkest month I have ever known, in 2009. Just sitting in my dorm room. Watching movies on pirated online websites. Benjamin Button. Hamlet 2. Many others. It was a very obscure time to be alive.
Now I see it differently. I don’t look back on shit like that and lament the way I was. I look back on it and celebrate to myself that I made it out. I did survive. My pain then was just weakness leaving my body, along with all the weight I shed and all the knowledge I picked up for future reference.
[2-8-24] I always find it funny looking back, trying to reconcile my blind spots and vulnerabilities and insecurities present day, just how magnified all of them were when I was 18 years old. I make all sorts of generalizations and, objectively, tend to look at life through the prism that everyone has more or less had a similar life experience as I have. Not so much in terms of doing the same things, but rather feeling the same things. I believe it’s like its own brand of worldview to imagine oneself as nothing beyond ordinary, as the opposite of special, that everyone has to go through shit and deal with shit. It’s a coping mechanism.
But every so often it is worthwhile to acknowledge the position I found myself in as an 18 year-old, because it did have some uniqueness to it. I mean I literally signed myself up to abandon my upbringing in Southern California to spend a year at Virginia Tech. I fell in love with a girl at the end of my senior year of high school. I partook in a long-distance relationship and the competitor in me wanted to prove wrong what everyone always said about those. I had to mentally and emotionally accept that I was all alone, that my loved ones weren’t a simple drive away from me. And then I had to deal with all the worst pains, all at once, all alone in my dorm room. I had nobody to rely on other than myself.
I say that only as a means to connect it to my life currently. I’ve been in relationships since, and even when I have had my loved ones there, present, I asked only that I could get an hour or two to myself every night, where I could do my writing, when back in the day — let’s call it February, 2009 — I longed for nothing besides spending time with those same loved ones. It’s almost as if I became comfortable with being alone.
That’s what makes relationships so complicated, at least from my experience. You are either the one who needs the distance, or you are the one who wants to limit the distance. The old cliché of wanting what you can’t have. It sometimes seems impossible to come across a person who wants it as badly as you do, where the distance doesn’t factor into the equation. Where there is like a 50/50 split.
We all have these junctures in our lives where in a sense everything funnels back to them, the junctures, that is. I feel like a broken record at times, because I know I have talked about February, 2009, before, and it seems as if I’m repeating myself or like hung up on it, but that’s not why I continue bringing it up. I mention it only because it’s what I consider my Cornerstone, the direct point in my life from which everything returns to. It is of that much import. Nothing about me would make any sense without it. It’s the same reason why whenever I feel pain in my life I know that the only reason it’s felt is due to the fact it means something, that it will one day be looked back on as a learning lesson.
[2-10-24] As someone who is not immune to the occasional setback or momentary anxiety episode, I generally find that the best and first course of action is to remind myself that I have been through much worse (than whatever may be happening at the time). Part of the beauty of February, 2009, is that back then I didn’t even know what depression was. I didn’t know what anxiety was. I didn’t know what heartache felt like. I didn’t know what I was going through while I was going through it, and probably a major reason why I was able to make it out was because I was so ignorant to my feelings, my self, the world around me, etc., all the things that I was learning/had to learn on the fly.
It’s never easy feeling that type of way. Life is not supposed to be easy. The choice I made, some time long ago, is that I will be here, and around, to take on and accept the challenge that life offers. The motivational-type speeches I sometimes offer my mom as she deals with her alcoholism, or that I sneak in subliminally during conversations with my brothers (who are not cut from the same cloth, so to say, as I am) typically don’t resonate. Like I said, expecting difficulty in life is not everyone’s cup of tea. In some sick way wanting life to be difficult is not something people can generally appreciate. But I speak to people I love the most in terms that I, Eric, would want to hear. And it doesn’t work for everyone. I say it nonetheless.
* * * * *
[2-14-24] Last night I had one of those anxiety attacks that was worthy of the name. It has been a while, truth be told, since it arrived in that legitimate oh-god-no-here-it-comes windup followed by a tidal wave of realizations during the brief but impactful interval where I was like making peace with god in my grey Ralph Lauren socks as I paced the cold ground in my backyard, alternating between interlocking both fingers above my head as I told myself to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, before removing my hands and shaking them out at my sides to mentally make myself believe that I was keeping my blood circulating.
All that bullshit in the last article — the one directly above this one — about being (emphasis mine): someone who is not immune to the occasional setback or momentary anxiety episode, I generally find that the best and first course of action is to remind myself that I have been through much worse (than whatever may be happening at the time) was good for nothing. Last night was a shit show, mostly.
But that’s the thing about these ‘episodes,’ as I call them. They don’t just pop up out of nowhere, even though that’s how it seems while it’s happening. They occur for a reason. That reason, it’s obvious to say, is because there is some unfinished business that I must tend to to ensure such an episode doesn’t happen again — at least not on the same terms. Along the way on the climb up this mountain comes adversity. You deal with said adversity when it comes, and then move on to the next challenge that must be overcome, and so on.
I think the healthiest aspect of writing these really long blogs in realtime, on a day-to-day-type basis over the course of a given month (as opposed to writing about a specific topic and then being done with it) is it allows me to process my feelings and emotions and what’s most important to me. This particular anxiety attack was like an extension of everything I have jotted down on here over the course of the last 2-3 months, a reminder of how I want, and how I aim, to proceed with this life of mine.
It started with some booze and some weed, as these things oftentimes go with me, and I knew immediately how fucked I was about to be. Questions of ‘Why do I feel the need to drink in the first place?’ and ‘Why do I feel the need to get high?’ and ‘Why do I feel the need to smoke cigarettes?’ quickly transitioned to ‘Why do I get fucked up once or twice or a few times every week?’ And why am I on the road, driving, occasionally, when I have already gone to jail for driving under the influence? This isn’t me, dawg. I should be so much better than this.
Then I thought about being in eighth grade, on lunch detention for the something-or-other time that was not the first or second, sitting as punishment in Mrs. Boyce’s English class, where many moons ago she made me sit in silence for 15 minutes (because that’s as long as she could keep me). And then around minute-12 or minute-13 one day she quietly walked up to me and my shithead attitude, probably with my arms crossed pretending not to give a single fuck about what she was about to say because that’s me; that’s what I used to do with authority figures. And so she pointed up at her wall towards a yellow laminated sign hanging up in front of the classroom, atop the whiteboard. She said one of her old students made it for her. She said she wanted me to look at it and really think about it. Like really, really think about it. Internalize it. Because it was meant for students like me. It said:
Good enough isn’t.
I then thought about all the little league coaches I had, in baseball, basketball, soccer, and so on. P.E. teachers. Pretty much everyone who has ever held any power over me, whether in a father-to-son or teacher-to-student or coach-to-player sense. I thought about how they all seemingly treated me differently than they treated the other kids. How they coached me harder than they coached the others. And it seemed like unfair to me, at the time, the whole ordeal of being a kid or being a teenager, and observing how different it was. Not that they coached me differently than they coached everyone else. But that they knew they could. They knew they had to coach me differently than they coached everyone else.
One of my coaches, his name was Stan Smith. He coached me when I played for the Diamondbacks as a 10 year-old at Wildwood Little League of San Bernardino CA. Our team finished in second place in the whole district — featuring like 12 or 14 different leagues and about 50 or 60 teams — and it was the furthest a Wildwood team ever advanced. One day after practice he, Coach Smith, came up to me in private, and he told me not to get so upset every time I made an out at the plate, to not show such a negative attitude each time things weren’t going right. He said I was The Leader. The leader of the team. And that the rest of the team goes as I go, they perform how I perform. And that they — everyone else on the team — can see it when I am not happy.
Then I thought about my own mom, my mother, that is, the one who holds me to such an embarrassingly higher standard than she does my two brothers. I thought about how much I hate(d) that, the being-held-to-a-higher-standard thing. How it doesn’t seem fair that I get chastised every now and again over what I consider small potatoes while the two of them, my brothers, that is, can skate when they have actually big fish they need to fry (that they rarely do).
It all came into focus during my anxiety attack. That it’s always been this way with me. I’m not saying some Spiderman shit where ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ or whatever. The guy who said that ended up fucking dying over some bullshit so what does he know. I’m more just coming to grips with the idea that authority figures simply do not waste their time unless they understand that there is some kind of potential they are trying to unlock.
Clarity is all I ever look for, even within myself. And clarity is in some way what I found last night. I don’t worship or idolize anybody, but what I admire in people I care to pay attention to is work ethic. Striving all the time to be better. I waste a lot of words on this blog feigning some desire to move forward in a positive way where I am like constantly sharpening my mental and intestinal fortitude, but the way last night sort of revealed itself to me was purely to say that I haven’t actually been doing anything about it.
Which is to say: I am still pursuing and acting on these fly-by-night females where I am well aware there is no future. I am still drinking and smoking and hitting the road and putting myself at risk for that one-in-one-hundred night where I get pulled over and all of a sudden I have a second strike against me, and by then I can pretty much kiss my job goodbye and expose myself to having to move to Las Vegas or some shit where the state gaming commission doesn’t particularly give a fuck about those sorts of things.
[2-15-24] One day at a time. That’s all we got. There seems to be this mentality or cliché groupthink among older generations that to be alive in the year 2024 means to want everything to happen right now. Instant Gratification, it’s called. I am not above wanting it, whatever it is, and wanting it right now, but almost everybody who came from the 1990’s (or 1990, specifically, as I did) has been operating from this mindset since birth. Instant Gratification did not arrive in 2024, or anytime recently; it’s been around forever for Millennials and post-Millennials/Generation Z. Carpe Diem. That kind of shit.
But part of my learning process, or learning curve over the years, has been focused on un-learning all these me-first, I-have-to-have-it and I-have-to-have-it-now habits that generally always only bring more pain and despair. There actually does exist something called a Long Game. Once upon a time I played such a game and it delivered me from my own personal poverty and debt. I overcame such an obstacle and eventually accumulated enough money to make me happy, or content, and I forgot how to play the Long Game.
[2-18-24] That’s how this shit works. When hip-hop artist Evidence on his song ‘You’ spoke that it’s:
Kind of ill, the mind's a trip
20-20 when we broke but blind when rich
This particular brand of intrapersonal amnesia is exactly what he was talking about. Finding the perfect marriage between ability and work ethic is a difficult blend to find and/or harness, let alone master. It’s the same reason labor unions lose in their longterm struggle against the capitalists, for complacency almost always sets in after they, the unions, win a collective bargaining battle. They forget that the fight is perpetual, or what Leon Trotsky called The Permanent Revolution vis-a-vis the workingclass against the owners of industry.
What I have always found to be rich, in a manner of speaking, is that the overwhelming majority of the ‘older generations,’ as I described above, the ones who almost universally consider the 40-and-under crowd to be entitled, or lazy, or whatever patronizing adjective you prefer, is that most of them accumulated their wealth at a time when the American government was much more forgiving towards workers. It was a lot easier to simply exist.
What I mean by that is houses were, like, affordable. Families could survive on a single income. And you didn’t even need a ‘good’ job, so to say. My grandpa had four daughters and a wife and bounced around like seven different ‘unskilled labor’ jobs. It would be the equivalent present-day of working at like Walmart or Amazon and providing for an entire household. Veterans who came back from the war were buying houses for a couple thousand dollars apiece. The marginal tax rate for the richest people in the country was over 90%. These are all facts. Old people had it Easy.
But like I mentioned, people forget. Old people forget a lot of things, anyway, but they never had to deal with going into debt for a decade (or lifetime) for going to a four-year university. They could pay for their college by working at a fucking diner, or something. The houses they bought weren’t a half-million dollars or some shit. They made significantly less money, sure, but the cost of living wasn’t so absurd as it is today.
This mantra that young people are lazy and entitled has been drilled into us over the years. It is as much a part of our identity, our worldview, how we are forced to see ourselves, as iPhones and video games and the Internet and everything else we have had at our disposal over the years. Having for the last decade or so worked a job where almost everyone is and has been older than me, I have received tons of love and respect for being one of the ‘good ones’ — insofar as ‘young’ people are concerned — for showing up to work and being good at my job and showing an eagerness to learn, and so on.
Yet when I look at myself in the mirror I do not see a ‘good one.’ I see a ‘normal one.’ Where once I was considered cocky and entitled and lazy — which are still three pretty good words worth describing me as, to be fair — the pendulum has just swung so far in a certain direction that I have become so goddamn aware of what young people are seen as that I never wanted to be one of ‘them.’ It’s like an insecurity of mine to not want to be identified as someone who doesn’t want to work, who wants to take the easy way out all the time.
I want to be lazy! That’s the crazy thing. I hit this crossroads like five years ago when I put in to be a full-time dealer — instead of on-call (where I was working like three or four days a week) — and I immediately (upon accepting a full-time position) had like buyer’s remorse, because I was really comfortable in the spot I was in. I think I only accepted the full-time designation due to the fact that those opportunities were so fleeting, and I feared if I didn’t take it then that the next chance wouldn’t arise for another four or five years — which is how long it took me to become full-time in the first place.
Ironically enough, I don’t think I ever developed any sort of work ethic until I became full-time. There is the whole chicken-and-the-egg theory, and that happened to be the case with me. Was I always a hard worker but chose not to be because I didn’t have to? Or was it because I had to that I did? I honestly still don’t know.
Since I am on the schedule, five days a week, from Wednesday to Sunday, starting at 12:00 in the P.M. Pacific Standard Time and ending at 8:00 P.M. (or sooner, god-willing), at this point I have no choice. I am as a casino employee nothing more than a mere number, a warm body to fill a spot, to stand on a table, to deal, to be a dealer. They don’t care if I am lazy or entitled or young or arrogant. They just need me to be there.
The lesson that my anxiety attack taught me is that everything I do is a choice. I could literally check out for the rest of my life doing the things I am doing right now, from fucking women I do not care about, to consuming alcohol on an unproblematic basis, to smoking cigarettes, to occasionally partaking in recreational drugs, to gambling, to letting the wind be at my heels rather than my face. To not having to give a fuck. I could do this forever. And it could be a very comfortable life for me.
But I am starting to grasp things from the other end. I am beginning to understand what all those teachers, and coaches, and parents were looking for when they decided I was one worth going harder on. Like I said, this is one day at a time. I am not looking for that Instant Gratification. I want to play the Long Game. I want it to be difficult. I want to wake up every day and accept the challenge, and make the choices, just so one day I will be able to look back with pride. It’s going to be a good story.
I’ll probably write about it.
* * * * *
Kansas City Chiefs 25, San Francisco 49ers 22
[2-16-24] Since Patrick Mahomes took over as starting quarterback in 2018, the Chiefs have:
6 AFC Championship Game appearances
4 Super Bowl appearances
3 Super Bowl wins
My favorite word in sports is Dynasty, and that’s what this is. After just six seasons as a starter (and seven in the league) Patrick Mahomes has already vaulted himself into legendary status, shoulder-to-shoulder with a minor collection of the best players at his position in the history of the sport. Save for Tom Brady — who owns 7 Super Bowl rings — Mahomes has, at worst, put himself on par with everybody else.
People have spent a lot of time focusing on the overtime period, the one where the 49ers won the coin toss and elected to receive (when I felt it logically made more sense to kick it), but where this game was won actually occurred on a 3rd-and-4 coming out of the two-minute warning in the 4th quarter.
At the time the 49ers were around KC’s 35 yard-line, but since the Chiefs only had two timeouts left a first down conversion would have essentially iced it in San Francisco’s favor. It was the most tense I got over the course of the game, pacing around the living room imploring to my two brothers that ‘A first down wins it.’ I think everyone watching knew exactly what was coming: some form of a Chiefs’ blitz. Certainly the 49ers knew it. They just didn’t know where it was coming from.
With Kansas City overloaded to the right side of the line, SF’s quarterback Brock Purdy did what he assumed the rational thing and slid his protection that way. But once he put his head down to snap the ball, the Chiefs second-year, first-team All-Pro cornerback, Trent McDuffie, put his foot in the ground on the opposite side of the line — on the left side — and darted through the open gap to disrupt and tip the ensuing pass, leaving the Niners with a 4th-and-4 where they ultimately kicked a field goal to take a 19-16 lead with about 1:50 left on the clock.
It may have been because I had seen it so many times, over these last six years, but I had supreme confidence in Patrick Mahomes’s ability to march the Chiefs down the field for, at bare minimum, a game-tying field goal to send the game into overtime. While they drove to San Francisco’s 10 yard-line with 10 seconds left in the game, the only real surprise I felt is that they didn’t win it right then and there. An incomplete pass intended for Travis Kelce set them, the Chiefs, up for a gimme field goal to send the game into overtime tied at 19-apiece.
I was texting with 49ers-fan-Emin, briefly, because he consumes these mutherfucking games as religiously as I do, and told him how happy I was that San Francisco decided to accept the ball in OT. There isn’t any rhythm or science to this overtime rule; the fact is we’ve never seen it before. My gut instinct/reaction of wanting the ball second, after San Francisco finished their theoretical drive, stemmed from all the days in my youth and teenage years watching college football, where both teams got to possess the ball. And in college you want the ball second because you want to know what you are going for. If the other team scores a field goal, you know a touchdown wins. If the other team gets stopped, you know a field goal wins. If the first team scores a touchdown, you know you need, at the least, a touchdown to keep the game going. Etc.
Given that both defenses, KC and SF, were tired out, I told both of my brothers on the spot that ‘If the Niners score a touchdown, the Chiefs are going for two after they score theirs.’ In a crucial moment — the most crucial moment of the football season since it was in the Super Bowl — I had extreme belief that Patrick Mahomes was going to win the game, regardless of what the Niners did with their possession. When it ended in a field goal to make the score 22-19, again, I had seen it too many times. I just knew Mahomes was going to win it.
So it wasn’t so much a surprise, and more of a fact of life, an inevitably, when he did, throwing a short pass in the flat to speedster Mecole Hardman — unironically drafted five years ago by the Chiefs in the second round to replace Tyreek Hill, who had legal troubles at the time and was expected to get suspended that year — on a play called ‘Tom and Jerry,’ because of course it was. Last year the Chiefs won on a play called ‘Corndog.’ They are stupid and hilarious and brilliant with all the shit they come up with, and I love them for it.
Going back-to-back is another thing I can cross off my sports-fan bucket list. I remember last year, when the Chiefs beat the Eagles 38-35, I was in constant communication with my unicorn/unrequited love girl, and I was so happy that night. She was working. I was at home celebrating with my family. At that time there were already kernels of the truth, of what I knew was coming in my near future, of pain, and heartache, and loss, so it made me feel so fucking happy when Kansas City won, at least temporarily, as if maybe I was just using the Chiefs to distract me (which I was), and that maybe their second Super Bowl in the last four years would provide the necessary band-aid to cure what ailed me.
I think that feeling lasted about two days. Two days was all it was. After that I was right back on it. Right back on being in my own head as an over-thinker who didn’t have the means to be satisfied by something so out of my control such as a Super Bowl win. It wouldn’t be for many months until my gut instinct, my soul’s warning, my premonition, my chronicle of a death foretold, came to fruition. We did the whole song and dance for a while there, and it was nice. I wrote my letters and sent my mixtapes via Apple Music and we rendezvoused every now and again, like we sometimes did.
Neither of us knew what the end was going to look like, but we both saw it, knowing that it was coming, in our own way. The cat and mouse, the Tom and Jerry, let’s call it, that the two of us played was meant to carve out a special place in our hearts for each other in the future, understanding whatever it happened to be from either direction was a fledgling cause. That we both wanted to let each other down as easily as possible. The empire that we built did not come crashing down with the dramatics and toxicity that one would assume, that the two of us probably would have bet on since it would have been so much more fun that way, but rather in a thud. No noise. No drama. No regrets. Just the love that we cultivated. There was enough love to simply let it go, and move on with our lives.
Appreciation is a thing I show sometimes. It is, I promise. What I appreciate so much about this year’s Super Bowl win — since, yes, I am still talking about the Chiefs — is that I don’t have any external baggage that is keeping me from enjoying it. After last year, and all that I described in the last few paragraphs, I think I have the perspective I need when it comes to football. Football does not matter. It does, but it really doesn’t.
So perhaps it is for that reason that I was able to enjoy Patrick Mahomes’s clutch 4th quarter drive to send the game into overtime, and then his game-winning driving in overtime, while both of my brothers were significantly more nervous than I was. Sure, I was standing up. Pacing at times. But I wasn’t living and dying on any of this shit. It was just a football game, you know? Just a playoff game. Just a really, really fucking important playoff game. Just a Super Bowl, you know?
And all I kept saying to myself, in my head. All I said, aloud, a handful of times when the game was on the line. All I kept saying. All I said. I said this:
‘We have Patrick Mahomes.’
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