The older I get the more I am convinced that my stomach can see the future before my brain can. And it’s a silly thought, really. It runs totally contrary to everything else I believe here in what is deemed the objective reality we all exist in. During the 21st century us as a civilization have been eagerly plowing ourselves ever forward back into the dark ages, trading math and science for all manner of superstition and unverifiable conspiracy, turning blind eyes at uncomfortable truths as we all cling tighter and tighter to what makes us feel better, etc., all the while possessing more knowledge than at any point in human history.
As I grow in days and years I reconcile with an idea that’s been building in my head, one that says I have never been as smart as I once thought, that I may not be particularly ‘bright’ in the first place, but rather that my competition, my peers, are so dim that I have no choice but to be in the upper-half, the better-than-average, the top, let’s call it, ten or fifteen percent. Which is to say I may not be all that great, but if almost everyone else sucks, in a manner of speaking, then it is going to make me appear pretty goddamn good most of the time.
But I am a product of this superstition as well. I say that I’m not superstitious — because obviously I am not — but as a human being I am hardwired just as everyone else to look for patterns. To stick with certain routines that bring me comfort/happiness. It’s funny that I tend to shit on humanity as a whole for being dumb, but I generally always look for the best in everyone — especially those in my immediate universe. I believe conspiracy theorists to be idiots, and yet one of my closest friends buys into a lot of that garbage and I don’t look at him any differently. Almost every woman I have cared about/spent any meaningful time with over the last few years has been into either astrology or crystals or both, and I never found it to be much of an impediment beyond the occasional pseudo-asshole remark from my end. Long/short: As the world changes, I change with it.
But my gut knows. It knows before my brain does, always. I can go weeks and months and even years feeling that spark in my stomach, the one that gets me really excited, where I hope it never shows on my face, when I see a pretty girl and there’s some mutual attraction, the one where I look forward to seeing them, every time, just to feel that glimpse, that shimmer of a spark.
I feel it for so long that I don’t even understand when it isn’t there anymore. I see the same face, and I know intrinsically that I am supposed to feel it, that spark. But maybe they said something that I knew even in the moment it was going to be a dealbreaker and I kept pretending that it wasn’t. Maybe we spent enough time together that I grew bored. Maybe we perhaps made the thing that is sometimes called ‘love’ and the chemistry really wasn’t there, or maybe it was there, the chemistry, that is, but my subconscious end game was never anything beyond getting to that moment. The dog that caught the car.
My brain knows a lot of things. It knows stupid like random shit. Certain plays from certain games. Certain scores from certain big games. It can tell you the proper mathematical play to literally every combination of cards in blackjack, what is important and to look for in a baseball player, analytically speaking. It knows the right things to say in situations where consequences are on the line, where there is pressure, where it is possible to say things without really saying anything. It is capable of saying I Love You in a genuine sort of fashion in the same way it is capable of lying to get what the body wants/desires. It is my best friend. It is also my worst… well, you know how the saying goes.
And it feels certain things. Or at least it tells the rest of the body to. The conductor of the orchestra. That it knows how to flirt with older women because it is aware that they enjoy and appreciate those sorts of things. That it can like tolerate the subtle dog whistles for racism and homophobia and other assorted ‘locker room talk’ from a certain demographic of middle-aged men if it means extracting money from them while at work. That it’s kind of weird to choose to sit behind someone when there are only two people in a given area. That there are acquaintances where both parties are like ‘cool,’ so to say, but that they don’t always say hi or like acknowledge one another out of some expectation that they assume the other side to like make the advance and say it first, rather than the other way around, and so on.
That sometimes people say things and it makes you cringe, but you treat whatever it is they are saying as if it’s ‘normal’ out of some general lubrication to get you through your day where you don’t want to call them out on it because it will only create more problems. That some people can’t just say the truth of the matter when telling a story. That they embellish. That you have been around them for long enough to know when they are embellishing, but that they lack the self-awareness to understand that they can be seen right through.
That life is a Game. That sometimes the game is to be a lawyer, to choose your words most carefully. That other times the game is to be a politician, to play both sides against the middle, or to play all sides against you, or to play yourself and everyone else against another. That every so often, in the moments you can’t even fully appreciate because they are so infrequent, and so fleeting, it’s important to just be yourself.
That randomness accounts for a lot more than people usually give it credit for. That there is such thing as having Good Timing and Bad Timing, but that Timing itself is blind and indifferent to your wants/needs, and hopes/dreams. That John Wooden was correct when he wrote in his Pyramid of Success that ‘luck favors the prepared man,’ which is another way of saying that an intangible such as luck can be minimized through hard work and, like, effort.
That it is a lot easier to say, after the fact, that everything happens for a reason. That reality is actually a lot more depressing. That it boils down to choices and decisions, one’s life, that is, a long trail of breadcrumbs, multiple forks in the road, where one went left when they could/should have gone right (or vice versa), slight (and uncontroversial, at the time) detours, which ultimately leads one to their destination. That it is never perfect. That the times one is able to look back and say they did the Right Thing are outweighed on a scale of probably like 10-to-1 by the times they wish it had gone differently.
That it’s an accident we, as a species, are here. That many/most/all evolutionary biologists theorize if we could go back to the dawn of time — the big bang, as it were — it would have gone differently in every such iteration. Life, that is. That the fact a certain specific chain of events that brought us to this precise moment in the cosmic calendar reinforces (to some) the concept of God, and that it makes it easier (to others) to deduce that Everything Does In Fact Happen For A Reason.
But the gut knows before the brain does. The gut knows when I am in love with a girl long before my brain can compute and like comprehend that it makes any sense to feel such a way. The brain plays these tricks where it is prideful and ego-driven and where it is telling me like not to give away my hand and say the thing before it is Time to betray what I would rather keep hidden away forever. The gut is a coin — where either it is or it isn’t — while the brain is a 12-sided die that must take into consideration all sorts of items that don’t actually Matter.
The country music artist Luke Combs said this really complicated and fancy yet simple little thing a couple weeks ago (as of the time I am writing this currently), describing what it was like as a little boy hearing the song ‘Fast Car’ for the first time. This was en route to performing the song as a duet with Tracy Chapman during the Country Music Awards. He said something along the lines of ‘I knew it was my favorite song before I knew what it meant to have a favorite song.’
I thought it was kind of a beautiful way of putting it. I had this immediate like nostalgia thinking about sports, and the sports teams I love, because it was all so random why/how they ever came to be. I, too, was a little boy when I found myself in the backseat of my mom’s car, crying when the Chiefs lost to the Broncos in a divisional playoff game in 1997. At the time I had no emotional attachment to the Kansas City Chiefs, but then suddenly I did.
I was at the mall with my grandparents in 1999 when I saw a hat that really got my attention. It was blue and white and extremely obnoxiously like busy, and it happened to be a hat representing the Duke University Blue Devils. So right then and there I decided that I was a Duke fan. Just a completely arbitrary reason.
And then one Saturday, during the same year, I was at home after helping my dad do some yard work in San Bernardino CA when I watched a football game between Virginia Tech and some school or another. And there was this quarterback. He was a black guy. And I really liked watching him play football. He like ran around and no one could ever catch him. He threw the ball sometimes, too, and he had a really good arm. His name was Michael Vick.
And so the course of events that transpired over the next decade or so, because of that one football game I saw as a little boy, back when I didn’t know what it meant to have certain favorite teams, brought me in 2008 to attend Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University — otherwise known as Virginia Tech.
Those were all gut instincts. No thoughts or brainwork whatsoever were required.
Then I was in a drive-thru line at the McDonalds on 40th street in San Bernardino CA in March 2013 and I had like four thousand dollars worth of Benjamin Franklin’s in my wallet while I waited behind a couple cars for my large ten-piece McNugget meal. Unemployed and shit at age-22, for no goddamn reason the thought — the impulse — entered my brain that I should use $1,300 of those casino winnings that were curled together, in that fat and almost distasteful my-wallet-can’t-even-close-right-now sort of way, to pay for dealer school. No advanced Virginia Tech calculus (which I did indeed take once upon a time) need be involved. My gut knew what had to be done. It could see the future before my brain had the ability to convince me that I could continue fucking off, living with my parents, waiting for My Big Break.
My brain can’t see the future. In most instances it keeps me from it. I imagine the difference, the thing that separates me from so many others — respectfully — is that I don’t do the thing where I admit that my gut is right, or has been right, at certain crucial junctures of my life, and throw in the towel on everything by reverting to my gut every chance I get. Instead I rely 98 percent of the time on my brain to make the right choices, to figure out the proper decisions, to keep the chains moving on a day-to-day basis, and so on.
That two percent can be everything, though. Back when the sport of baseball consumed my life on a 24/7/365 basis — a lot like the NFL does now — I used to believe that basic mathematics and analytics could account for everything. That if you simply used WAR (Wins Above Replacement) to construct a roster via a dollars spent/wins generated paradigm, it would make losing — over the course of a season — virtually impossible. The idealist in me circa 2011-2015 as a baseball fan never accounted for the two percent, the intangible, the things my own personal life philosophy did not at the time respect or care about.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier about my gut, and being more convinced by it than ever before, it is in that two percent that represents what is truly important. Clubhouse chemistry. Hard work. Leadership. The things that aren’t supposed to mean anything from a mathematical standpoint that actually mean a very decent amount. It sounds stupid, I know. If I was me as a 21 year-old reading this I would probably exit out of the window and discount the author completely. I wouldn’t give a fuck about any of this nonsense.
There is a real-life meaning to all of this, in case I have lost the plot. There are all these rules about like first dates and shit, about not talking about politics or religion, things of that nature. About keeping things on the surface-level. Feeling each other out. If you know me then you know I have never prescribed to any of that. If anything, I want to be the one that does talk about the topics that aren’t supposed to be talked about. It may reveal information that isn’t necessary, or that shouldn’t be on the table.
Through this exercise what I have found is that, while very few people share my beliefs, what can be respected by any party is honesty, and earnestness. Being genuine and authentic. That’s the only way that an atheist socialist mathematically-driven male such as myself can find common ground and become excellent friends and occasionally partake in some adult behavior with females who are the complete opposite, who identify as the superstitious types, who judge me on the color of my eyes as if it means something, who hear that I am a Pisces and draw certain conclusions from that, who laugh when I point-blank shit on them for thinking possessing crystals means a single goddamn thing.
We will let the brain make sense in retrospect of everything that is happening right now. We will let it make certain judgements and connect certain dots that will help us find peace, and sleep, at night, many months or many years from now when we tell ourselves that There Was A Reason it happened this way, that it wasn’t all a mistake, that it wasn’t all just random. We will let it do what it does, because it has no choice. The brain is the brain.
The gut, on the other hand, is going to keep things simple. I like you, you like me. I think you are pretty, you think I am handsome. I believe in math and science, and people who are a whole lot smarter than I am or will ever be. You believe in coincidences and all manner of items that cannot be explained, because it’s better that way. It’s more romantic not knowing things sometimes.
If you’ve come this far then you know my brain doesn’t believe in destiny. My brain believes I, Eric Reining, will forge my own destiny. My gut however understands that whichever way this story of mine ends up is going to be ironic, that it will involve a stupid sort of Opposites Attract type of bullshit where I am going to end up marrying some girl who doesn’t feel any sort of way about the world as I do. And my gut is going to be responsible for it.
Because my gut knows the future better than my brain does. And my gut is going to do what it has always done, and it’s going to make the best decision for me when push comes to shove, when all the chips are down. That’s the way this works.
* * * * *
Here’s some news: I recently agreed to move into a condo in the desert, about ten minutes away from my work. As of April 1, 2024 I will have a new place of residence.
While I’d like to write like a thousand words about how excited I am, how much my life is going to change, how happy I’ll be, etc., I think what I’m most looking forward to, most interested in, and most curious about, is how it is going to impact the lives of my two brothers — whom I have lived with ever since I moved back in with them (along with my mother) back in 2018. Because as much as this is about me it is also very much about the two of them.
Anyone who knows me knows I don’t talk about my family much. This fact is neither intentional nor unintentional. It mainly illustrates two things: (1) That I rarely find it, my family, to be much of anyone’s business, and perhaps more importantly (2) it’s hard for me to find that sweet spot in describing them (my brothers) or explaining them without sounding like I am criticizing them, putting them down to somehow propel myself into a more favorable light, or other things of that specific nature. So whatever follows from this point forward is acknowledging both (a) that the truths I write are not meant to be negative towards them in any way and (b) that I love both of my brothers to death.
Historically I have been the breadwinner of my family. This was true in elementary school and middle school and high school and college and into adulthood. Growing up if any of my extended relatives (aunts and uncles, grandparents, etc.) had placed bets on which of my mom and dad’s three sons would end up ‘making it’ one day, or which would earn the most money, or which would be the most successful, in the very broad and generic way that one judges those types of things, the answer would have been so clear that the discussion need not be had.
And that’s an easy one, because I was the most obviously outgoing and determined from an early age; all roads in my childhood led to wanting to be accepted into a four-year university and so my work ethic, albeit somewhat lazy from my own end, were with that goal in mind. My older brother, in the meantime, dealt (much like my father before him) with issues related to low self-esteem and not having any clear post-public-education endeavors in mind. My younger brother battled obesity from an early age and neither he nor my parents seemed to put much effort into curtailing some of his bad habits. Neither put up particularly stellar grades and neither seemed interested in pursuing the academic route after they each found a way to graduate high school.
Overall I would argue the three of us had a fairly ‘normal’ upbringing. I mean we did the whole nuclear family thing; up until like high school we still ate dinner at the dining room table together. We did what we thought was supposed to be done in a family.
Yet at some point in the awkward pre-teen/early-teen years my older brother and I grew distant. I’d say from the time I was 12 until I graduated high school we only spoke when we had to, at like family get-togethers and stuff. I think we said ‘Hi’ to each other once per day when we saw each other after school (and we attended different middle schools and high schools so that makes more sense). My little brother and I had an adversarial relationship for the majority of that time as well. I regret to say it in retrospect, but in my teenage years most of our communications revolved around me fat-shaming him and fighting or arguing. More than anything, though, I wanted him to want to not be a fat kid. I wanted him to want it for himself, and I was terrible and borderline harmful at communicating it.
With that as some sort of backdrop into our adult years, I would say the three of us have been relatively ‘close,’ or at least ‘cool,’ in the broad we-aren’t-distant-anymore sense, ever since I returned home from Virginia Tech in 2009. I had this wave of self-inflicted unfortunate events that lasted throughout my post-dropout summer of 2009 where like my girlfriend broke up with me and my best friend and I got in a fight and stopped hanging out and I left my dream school all within a few months. In the midst of my depression/doldrums I got back in touch with my two brothers. It probably took something so massive in my personal life to realize/understand how important family is. So that summer we, my brothers and I, played a lot of Rock Band together and it was like the only real bonding experience the three of us ever had. I was 19; my older brother was 21; my younger brother was 13.
When the two of them were on the verge of getting hired — to be table games dealers, like me — there was a brief moment where I thought I could juice them in to the casino I worked at. And so when I was trying to explain what they were like to one of my old bosses (who actually had nothing to do with the hiring process) he joked that: ‘What, so we’re going to have three of you? God help us.’
But that’s the thing: I didn’t know how to really describe my two brothers. I said they were ‘good boys,’ which is honestly as close to the truth as I could get — whether it was 2019 (when said conversation took place) or present-day. My brothers are really fucking good. They are really fucking nice. They aren’t anything like me. We share in certain worldviews as they pertain to existentialism, not believing in God, and socialism; we have similar dry and dark senses of humor; we like sports; we like a great many things. But we aren’t anything alike.
So I described myself, to my boss, as like the black sheep of my family. And he started laughing, saying I am no black sheep. Because how could I be? I have this like choir-boy baby-face image. I show up to work every day. I am borderline excellent at my job. Ostensibly I’m what any and every workplace would be looking for in hiring a person. Yet that was the only way I was able to show what my two brothers were like, by saying something about myself.
What I mean to say is, despite being the middle child, I have so much more experience than either/both of them. I am the only one who is really ‘social’ in any kind of capacity, and even I enjoy being antisocial most of the time. I am the only one who has ever partaken in any kinds of serious drugs (beyond smoking weed, which I turned my older brother onto back in like 2015). My body is littered with tattoos. I am the only one who has been on the rollercoaster of a longterm/loving relationship. I take things so much more personally than they do, as in I can be extremely and dramatically petty if I feel I’ve been slighted, and I am also in more of my finer moments the one who is most understanding and compassionate and empathetic towards/of others. I have reached for greater heights, and I have met much lower pitfalls. I am so much more full of life, and they just simply haven’t gotten there yet, to see it, to capture it, to understand it, to learn from it.
And I want these things so badly for both of them. I want them to know what it’s like to really go through it and be able to tell the story from the other side. I yearn for a day where one of them like loves a girl so ardently where they are on the phone or in-person crying in front of my mom because it didn’t work out, and she tells them: ‘You know who you should talk to, you know who would be a good person to talk to, you know who would understand, etc.? Your brother.’
Likewise, it would mean everything in the world to me if either/both of them reached some goal they had been working hard to obtain, and they hadn’t told me yet, and they were just so excited that they had to tell me, and so they did, or they would, anyway, and I would be their biggest cheerleader. I would be their biggest fan. I’d also be the one to say that Since You’ve Come This Far, Why Not Go A Little Further.
I was so enthusiastic in 2017 about learning how to save money. About Roth IRAs, about 401k. No one ever taught me about any of that shit. My parents were workingclass, they didn’t know any better. So when I got into it I remember talking to my mom about it one night and telling her how much I looked forward to my brothers working at the casino, and earning all this extra money they wouldn’t know what to do with, and making these grand plans with my big head and big stupid ideas about how the three of us could really be a powerhouse working together to achieve a longer-lasting dream. That I would be able to share knowledge with them that none of us got to learn from our parents. It was a cute thought.
Nothing ever seems to work out in real life in the ideal way it sort of plays out in my head. The truth is, once my brothers did start working they almost immediately took the easy way out. They went home early in lieu of working full shifts. They still do it to this day. And I get it. I mean, I do the same bullshit whenever possible. But my workdays last like six or seven hours, if not eight. Their workdays consist of like one of two hours, if not zero. I can’t explain it in any way that makes sense if you have never worked in a casino, but that’s how it works. If there is too much staff for the necessary tables that need to be opened, you (the dealer) have the option of going home.
In the moments I have slipped, talking to my coworkers about my brothers working, er, not working enough, as it were, about the potential of me moving out and getting my own place, etc., across the board I have always received the same type of advice. Do what’s best for you, or You’ve done everything you can do, now it’s up to them, things of that nature. Again, it’s true: I only moved in with my family because they needed financial support, and both of my brothers are dealers only because I literally spent like two years convincing them that this was The Way.
Before that, for over a decade my older brother held an office job that he hated where he was making like 18 bucks an hour. My little brother graduated high school in 2014 and went unemployed for basically six years. Six years, if you can imagine that. He spent that long without the dignity of having a job, a driver’s license, a car, and virtually any independence whatsoever. Even writing that feels low-key kind of astounding. But it really happened.
The first question from any sane person after reading such a thing would have to be something along the lines of Well Who’s Fault Is That, or Who’s To Blame For That? The answer is simple. My dad lost almost all influence on the family over the years for being a passive husband who did not take particular interest in any of his boys, and my mom, to be plain, is an enabler. There just wasn’t any serious pressure that was ever put on my younger brother to get out there and do something about his life.
It’s also a thing within my family (and always has been) that no one is ever, like, confrontational. About anything, ever. I am easily the closest thing to it, confrontational, that is, but even I have sacrificed most of my paternal instincts over these last 5-10 years — as they relate to the necessary things my brothers have needed to do with themselves — by taking the path of least resistance, probably out of some fear that my relationships with them, my two brothers, would somehow devolve or recede down to something more closely resembling what they were during our estranged upbringing. To put it bluntly: It would have done everyone in my family (brothers/mom + dad, even me) a massive service if we had been more confrontational. If we weren’t afraid to just speak plainly to one another. If we didn’t just sweep everything under the rug all the time.
But again, this is why I have felt like the black sheep over the years — or at least the inverse of one. I wouldn’t have gotten by without being challenged harder by my mom, or by authority figures who simply wanted to get the most out of me. (Or wanted me to get the most out of myself.) As far as my brothers are concerned being challenged, or told what to do, or guided in a certain direction to do what’s right for themselves, comes across as an attack. Or as some kind of drag. Like a parent who’s constantly asking their child if they completed their homework that night.
This is pretty much since forever what has made communication with them so difficult. While I am transparent and like eager to share information with my mom — whether it’s personal, financial, looking towards the future, etc., thus that we can make the best decisions possible — my brothers are more or less mysteries. I don’t know much of anything about their personal/financial lives, whether or not they are talking to any girls, whether or not they have any legitimate money saved, whether or not they want to be stationed in Riverside CA for a while or if they want to move elsewhere. None of that. The overwhelming majority of our conversations revolve around bullshit that doesn’t really matter. Movies, music, sports, etc.
Alas: In moving back in with the family, in orchestrating a plan to get my two brothers to become dealers, in literally sharing the burden of a household with my mother while the two of them were unemployed and going to dealer school for like a year, up until the point they each inevitably found jobs (at the same casino), the plan was straightforward: Four family members in the labor force, four incomes, four bites at the proverbial apple, four quarters of a proverbial pie.
Thus we would all be able to save money for a future that was coming whether any of us liked it or not.
If you are reading this then you know it didn’t work out that way. I continued doing my thing, stashing away what I could. I paid off all my credit cards. I finally (after about ten years) finished paying off my student loans/debt. I started building for the days and months and years to come. In the meantime my two brothers — one who traded a job that he hated for a job that he enjoyed, the other who had never even had a job and has no idea how lucky he is — pretty much got in the groove where they made enough to cover their end of rent, and (I can only assume) had/have very little left behind.
I said earlier that I take things more personally than they, my brothers, do. I’ll never hold this against them publicly (at least I don’t think I will), but the thing I take most personally over these last handful of years is that I don’t believe either of them truly knows or understands how difficult it was on my mother and I in the latter stages of their unemployed-while-going-to-dealer-school experience. My mom would cry about it some nights, but she waited until it was just the two of us before she could bring herself to tears. I was taking a deficit each month — spending more than I was making, if ‘deficit’ wasn’t clear enough — because I had faith in my brothers to do the right thing once they were ultimately employed.
So it always felt kind of like a slap in the face to me that once they started working they regressed into signing the Early Out every day and going home early without doing everything they could on that given day. That they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain, so to say, the one that was implied when the four of us (including my mom) would all be working and saving money. That they arrived in a place that was as good as they have ever had it and decided it was Good Enough, that the work at that point was done.
In the meantime, I saved enough money to reasonably put myself in a position to buy a house, but I haven’t yet. That’s on me at the end of the day. I take advice from the Grownups every so often, and they tell me that interest rates are high and it’s a bad time to buy so I’m heeding that. I hate that I want to listen, or that I have to on matters such as these, but I am nothing if not a businessman. I do not want to make a bad deal (despite having a frivolous/impulsive nature more often than I ought to).
In getting a condo I am, for the first time in a very long time, doing something for myself. Doing what I want to do. Doing what is necessarily selfish, or self-serving. Doing what I should have done a long time ago, had I not been so worried about the position I would be leaving my mom and two brothers in. That’s probably been my downfall over these last few years, this silent like commitment I have made to myself that whenever it was that I left, I wanted everything to be in order back home.
But that honestly could go on forever, if we’re taking accounts here. I wager a certain extreme reason why my two brothers feel comfortable enough to not work, at least insofar as signing the Early Out list at the casino they work at, is because they have been able to rely on me to do what must be done to help out the family.
My sincere wish once I am gone — in a relocation sense, not, like, I’m suddenly dead — is that by being forced to work more (given the larger split they are each responsible for) it’s going to make them want to work more. I think recently I wrote about the irony of being a helluva lot lazier when I was only working two or three days a week; that I only grew to like fall in love with working once I became full-time. There is something to be said about having a different mindset, knowing you are working five days consecutively rather than, say, two or three. (This isn’t true for them because they are only part-time, but the same concept applies.)
That’s why I said towards the beginning that I don’t feel like this is about me as much as it is them. Yes, I am the catalyst who is setting these wheels in motion, for I am the one leaving. I have always been motivated by a quiet idea that I only get to hear when no one else is around, when the voice in my head tells me that whatever I am doing isn’t enough, or that I could be doing so much more, but that comes from the retrospective trauma of such lofty expectations from my childhood, where like every teacher I had and every coach I had bestowed on me to fulfill a certain type of role, who encouraged my parents to move me ahead of the other students, etc., and so I will spend my life chasing those dreams and goals through no fault of my own.
The intellectual curiosity I am faced with vis-a-vis my two brothers is that they were never held to such standards, and thus — and this is the sad fucking truth — I remain at age-33 completely clueless as to what motivates them. We just don’t have those kinds of talks. The nitty-gritty, the real shit, the hopes and dreams that I am generally more or less transparent about, they appear uncomfortable sharing. I don’t know what they want to be when they ‘grow up,’ so to say. I don’t know if they want to live somewhere else, or end up in a different occupation one day. I don’t know much of anything.
To that end, the only legitimate unwavering optimism I hold so close to me is that the same blood that runs through my veins runs through theirs. That they feel the same competition within them that I do within me. That they possess real ambitions that they aim to capitalize on. That they want the same things I want.
If you have made it this far then you know how dismayed I am by the set of circumstances that led to to write this specific section of this specific blog. Like, my two brothers are probably the only two people in the entire world that I don’t feel as if I am even in competition with them. With them, it’s like this weird opposite kind of thing: all I have ever wanted is to Help. To lead the way, in a sense. That if they needed financial advice (regarding the saving of money, investing, etc.), or advice on women, or advice on life in general, I would bet that the experience I have at my back is more influential to them than the movies they love so much or the music they listen to or any other source they have at their disposal.
I’ve missed out on the Brother Experience. Of having a little brother. Of having an older brother. We were just so disjointed in our youth, and it’s probably strange on them that I, the brother they both detested growing up with, is the same one that inarguably undoubtedly no-question-about-it has his shit most together, regardless of my own personal disposition of the occasional self-loathing and persistent realizations that I am nowhere close to where I want to be.
But, you know, it’s time to grow up. It’s time for me to grow up, and it is time for each of them to find their way. We usually always know the answers to our own problems and situations. I probably told my mom as long ago as a few years back that the only way we (her and I) were ever going to get the best out of them (my brothers) was when finally I removed myself from the picture. Because it’s all just too convenient, me living here. It is convenient on them, my brothers, that is, it’s convenient on me. It is convenient on everyone, including my mom.
It’s convenient because we all do love each other so much. We don’t often communicate it, as that has never been our style. But we know it to be true. In my youth, like as a late-teenager, young and dumb and in love, I imagined myself the type of person to get married young and have children and do the happily-ever-after thing. Graduate college. Six-figure famous-writer job. Look down on the rest of the world for How Good I Have It.
Instead I took the up-and-down, long-and-winding-road approach, where on three different occasions I moved out of my parents’ house and lived on my own (once with my best friend). And every time I made my way back. I got to spend, over this most recent chapter in my life, so much time with my mom, and my younger brother, and my older brother, and it was like we were back in elementary school and middle school and high school together. If we wanted to see each other, we would be there. If we wanted to talk to each other, we weren’t more than just a hallway away. We would watch football together on Sundays that I took off. We would get to see Chiefs playoff games and Super Bowls together. We would laugh and joke and make fun of each other and it’s been such a wonderful time, always.
Only now, it is time to move forward. Moving out again is merely a stepping stone, that’s what I call it, that’s what my mom calls it — when she isn’t on the verge of breaking down telling me how much she is going to miss me. But she understands. She knows better than anybody that It’s Time. Well aware she is that I have been waiting impatiently for such a move for about as long as I have been back living with her/them. And the same is true now as it was when I made the decision to come back in the first place: I’ll leave when I am no longer needed.
And it is time for my brothers to move forward as well. I know what I am about, what I am made of. I am going to be fine regardless of what happens next. But them, my brothers, this is where I/we get to see what they are all about, what they are made of. And I can’t wait, honestly. Like I said, they are good boys; they are going to do the right thing; and in my private moments with each of them I want to communicate such belief in the most subtle way I can — which has never been my strong suit.
It has been a fulfilling experience for all of us. There is no other way to put it. I have no question that I will remember these last 5-6 years with fondness, knowing I got to be so close — literally and figuratively — to my two brothers, and I’ll be able to think of all the memories we made together in our adult lives living under the same roof. I know how much I am going to miss it.
I also know that this will be the very last time I leave. This time around, I won’t be coming back. That is likely why my mom is being so sentimental about it all, because she knows, too. No longer will I be an 18 year-old making my way across the country to Virginia Tech. No longer will I be a 20 year-old with my best friend calling me because his girlfriend found out he had been cheating on her and needed a new roommate in Colton CA. No longer will I be a 26 year-old where my parents split up and my brothers and mom decided to move out together to this place that I have called home for the last some-odd years and so I got a sweet little apartment in downtown Redlands CA. No longer.
A stepping stone is what it is, just like all the others were… at the time. That stepping stone happens to be a quiet little condo in the city of Cathedral City CA. En route to buying my first house — hopefully as soon as possible — that is where I will make my next stand. In Cathedral City.
As for my brothers, I know they can do it. Over the course of this article I have aimed to sound neither harsh nor gentle towards them, but rather to acknowledge that they are who they are, and that they aren’t like me. Another fun fact about my brothers: They aren’t in any communication with my dad. And it probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that I go and visit him a couple times every month, despite sharing similar feelings towards him that my brothers do.
What I decided a long time ago, at least as it pertains to my dad, our dad, I should say, in relation to my brothers, is that I have zero reason to expect him to be anything other than he already is. That was a problem I had with him for the longest time. That I expected him to care. That I expected him to want to be a good dad. But that wasn’t his style because he didn’t know how to care, and he didn’t know how to be a good dad. In his head, he did care, and he was one. A good dad, that is.
I think the same could be said for my two brothers, whom I have always expected more out of. I expected them to be more like me. To want it as much as I want it. To get this really excellent really easy job and exploit it and take advantage of it and use it to build a better life just as I did. But they never did. Or at least they haven’t yet. This next phase, for them, without me, is like where I was before I knew exactly what it was that I wanted. That’s why I so look forward to their futures and the results that will come from my departure.
* * * * *
Yesterday was my 34th birthday. March 20, 2024. That was the date. On the previous Sunday I sort of haphazardly threw something together so some of my favorite coworkers on day shift and I could have our fun together at one of the local establishments up in Rancho Mirage CA. In year’s past I’ve more or less indiscriminately invited people, saying if you want to come you can, and so on. This time around I didn’t. I went up to the specific people that I wanted to show up, and they all did, and we had a good time.
I’m not so much a fan of birthdays. Not my own, anyway. Even the process of being out with my friends who I invited made me feel sort of guilty, not that they were coming to celebrate my birthday, per se, but the whole thing where nobody wanted me to pay, even though I always like to pay for everything. But it’s your birthday, they argued. And I was like, yeah, well, how much of an asshole would I be if this was all my idea and I made everyone else pay for me?
Then the actual day of my birthday, I didn’t even do anything, because I didn’t want to do anything. There was the girl that I’ve spent the most time with of anyone else in 2024, and she had these very sweet very nice ideas/plans of going to the beach with me or going with me up to the mountains and celebrating out/up there. It was an endearing thought, really. The gesture is what I cared about more than anything.
But when it came down to it I just didn’t want to. I did, but not enough to actually do it. I think the low-key under-the-surface deal I made with myself at some point — whether it was a copout or not — was that I exhausted so much of my Want To during a turbulent and sometimes-tumultuous 2023 campaign and this year I wanted to do the exact opposite. After all, 34 is such a dull and nondescript age and with 35 right around the corner we might as well save our energy and resources for that.
It obviously goes without saying that I lean heavily towards being a pretty boring dude, in general, anyways. Over the years I have slighted so many people — the vast majority being female, of course — by making plans and not following through with them out of some vague preference to do nothing. And I’ve been constantly bombarded by this weird type of sentiment that I am like hanging out with someone else instead, or that I am not interested, when the truth of the matter is reading and writing and playing video games and eating junk food and watching sports is the ultimate in terms of what one would call ‘stiff competition.’ There is something to be said for putting in the ‘leg work’ and forming a bond and building towards a more meaningful connection, but I am not so unlike most people insofar as knowing from jump street, within the first ten seconds of interacting with someone, or whatever specific number that science places on these matters, whether It Is or It Isn’t.
And I didn’t get to make that decision in 2023, which is probably why I remained so engaged with it/in it for so long. The one who did get to dictate the terms to me a year ago reached out to wish me a happy birthday, and it was nice, you know? Hearing from her again. Like she gave me the congratulations both when the Chiefs beat the Ravens in the AFC Championship Game and when the Chiefs beat the 49ers in the Super Bowl, but neither of those items meant anything to her. She was only showing some love because she knew that my favorite football team is one of the only things in the world that I care about.
When times were different, let’s call it a year ago, or perhaps let’s call it March 20th 2023, even though her lawyers and my lawyers would disagree, they’d argue that such a date at such a place and time never occurred, the two of us were allegedly celebrating it together. My birthday, that is. And my birthday last year meant as much to me on paper as my birthday did this year. But it was a special one, I can’t deny that. It was special because she wanted it to be special for me, even though my only aim or focus or mission was to make it special for her.
And I can still see it. Driving way up towards nowhere and stopping at the house she shared with her best friend. Meeting for the second time her best friend’s girlfriend (now fiancé) and standing in the living room with her, her best friend’s girlfriend (now fiancé), and asking her if it was true that she really drove from like two hours away on a regular basis to see her girlfriend (now fiancé), and her responding in a casual sort of matter-of-fact way that: ‘Yeah, she’s worth it.’ And I had this knowing type of smile on my face that said I understood when I told her in return that ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
Which is why I wanted to do something on my birthday, last year, in the first place. I had the Want To. And it flashed in my brain, again, the sleepless night I had at the Circa Hotel, likely because I downed a humungous fucking coffee like two hours earlier; I saw the daylight, looking down out the window, while she was wearing this all-black attire and a pair of pants that she swore she wore at work sometimes but I thought I would have noticed because they were like poppin’ in a certain sort of way; I saw the perilous mission of driving through the construction listening to Metro Boomin’s HEROES AND VILLAINS before finding a parking spot at Treasure Island, of shooting a little craps there; I saw the Starbucks and the green tea I ordered, and the walk to the mall afterwards; I saw getting lost trying to figure out how to park at the Aria, and pretending like I listened to the lady at the front desk tell me/us where the elevators were located; I saw myself lying in bed talking about life for a brief instant before I made a fledgling attempt at taking a nap; I saw Javier’s and getting extremely full even though there were dinner reservations at the Eiffel Tower later that night; I heard about future kids and how much better it would be that instead of buying them presents for their birthdays that they would get to go on adventures and have experiences; I saw a face, and a smile, and so many fucking compliments left and right, aimed at her, for obvious reasons; I saw the tie that I tied when it took me like ten minutes to get ready for the Eiffel Tower when she was all by herself in the restroom for like an hour; I saw the casino floor and considered playing blackjack or throwing some craps while I killed time in my suit smoking a cigarette or two; I saw myself looking at myself in the mirror to make sure everything was right where it needed to be as she briefly exited the restroom and implored me not to look at her, which I didn’t, of course, because she wasn’t ready yet; I saw what she looked like when she was, in fact, ready, and it was a sight to see I can promise you that; I heard her tell me that ‘I hate that fucking cologne’ because it smelled something nice, real nice, as she was who was with me a handful of hours earlier to help pick it out; I saw the mirror and the red lipstick and the black dress and got questioned on which pair of heels looked the nicest; I inquired on her taking a photo of the two of us because I suck at taking pictures and I knew she was so good at them; I saw everything.
Allegedly, of course. Our lawyers know better. None of that ever happened.
Our lives, hers and mine, are in different places now. Literally and metaphorically. But in the subsequent months that have passed since her departure the only thing I understand is that she, the woman with the lawyers opposite my lawyers, represents the last real connection I have had with anybody. I don’t mean that as a slight to the rest of humanity, to my friends, to my family members, etc., but as a statement of fact towards the ever-elusive concept known as substance. I find myself hiding and shying away from it, substance, that is, and have for most of my life, out of fear that once I find it I can’t ever truly turn away from it. This was one of those cases.
That’s why I said it was nice, you know? Hearing from her again. Because some people choose to remember the precipitously-downward slope, some people choose to remember the good times, and then others, like me, exist in this sort of state where we can’t help but recall everything, everywhere, all at once. The whole enchilada. The complete experience. The good that was given, the good that was received, and the opposite, all blended together.
March has always been my favorite month in the calendar year, biases aside for my date of birth. It’s when Spring begins, which I guess is supposed to signify some rebirth or starting anew. A lot like looking at a newspaper in the horoscope section to see if I am going to have a 5-star day or merely a 3-star day, I don’t prescribe to the nonsense or the woo-woo; I just think it’s kind of cute. Kind of romantic in a way. Thinking about March. What it represents. Where we are. Where we are going. Things of that nature.
And I can’t like commit to anything beyond the day — this day. I imagine a stronger man would have the mental/emotional fortitude to pick between one of two doors and let the chips of the future fall where they may. The first door being, of course, the one where I turn my back and live my life in a sort of way that ignores this person completely. The second door being the one where we reconnect in some way where we hear from each other more regularly and go on normally being the same way we’ve always been.
The problem with the doors is that it gives me this like claustrophobic-type of feeling where if I chose door number one I would feel I am abandoning an impactful party in my life, and if I chose door number two I would feel like locked in to being someone that I don’t honestly know whether or not he (being me) is capable of maintaining a friendship. Because I’m really bad at that. I even declared at multiple times that we would never be those. Friends.
And so we exist, her and I, in the empty spaces. Of time. Of space. Of even the blank slate, the tabula rasa, of this blog. The potential energy (as a physics term, not ‘energy’ as in like an intangible state of possessing energy or sharing energy or giving off good/bad energy, etc.), that which only comes about before the words are actually said, before the actions actually take place, before the text messages are sent, etc. It might be tomorrow that we reconvene or it may not come until her birthday arrives and I send a text message of my own; maybe it comes before then, or after, or never at all. The point is: It doesn’t matter. Because we never left where we left off.
I like it that way, for the same noncommittal reasons I like almost everything about my life being that way. And she understands. I know she does. Once upon a time I was a rock that she like uncovered one day, kind of hidden beneath the surface, not so obvious, and while maybe not so mysterious was at least worthy of her curiosity, worthy of some benign level of interest. Over the course of some months the rock got cleaned and polished off, and was able to see some daylight again. And that’s the thing about rocks: they can be relied upon. It really was a rain-or-shine, morning or evening, or early morning, or late evening, type of rock. It was just always there. But, you know, at the end of the day it’s still just a rock.
Future Bets 
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