I’ve made reference dozens of times on this blog over the years about how much of a blessing it is that my life has, for lack of a better way of saying it, come ‘easy’ most of the time. For as long as I can remember most of my struggles have been self-inflicted, as opposed to some cosmic joke the universe has played on me. I have learned and developed patience over the years, not as something that comes naturally but out of recognition that however bad I think I have it, whatever it is, it doesn’t really compare to how bad or how difficult most people do.
That’s why virtually the only thing I don’t have any patience for are people that complain… about almost everything… all the time. I don’t like having people like that in my life. During my day-to-day I, ironically, play the role of an old curmudgeon, someone who is never satisfied, the old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, etc., but the reason it works (for me) is because everyone around me who knows me is well aware that I am pretty much as positive as they come. I’m incredibly supportive. And generally I like the way I am.
I also can’t stand myself most of the time. It’s one of those things. Like if I didn’t possess some ability to be sharp and/or quick-witted, to have such empathy and be such a big cheerleader to my friends and family, to be able to lose and gain 30 pounds whenever I flipped the switch and decided it to be so, to generally be somebody people enjoy being around, if I wasn’t so capable, in other words, I probably would have offed myself a long time ago. Instead I’ve walked that thin line between self-confidence bordering on arrogance out of love for myself while simultaneously owning a disposition which is prone to grotesque levels of self-loathing.
I go through these exaggerated cycles where, just as one example, I’ll look at myself in the mirror one day and decide it’s time to lose a bunch of weight — to get in better shape. And I’ll really like try and exercise and eat a little bit better and after a couple months or whatever I will look at myself in the mirror again and decide that the work is done. And then I’ll revert back to not giving a shit and the same process will repeat itself. Over and over again.
But that’s how I operate, and have operated, each and every aspect of my life for these last 15 years. I will gamble, and then I’ll gamble some more, and then after absorbing enough losses I’ll wake up one day and decide that enough is enough. Then I’ll get comfortable again, and I’ll repeat the process. I’ll be talking to or seeing like multiple women at the same time and then I’ll get sick of them, one by one, and replace them, and then go through the same process with the replacements, and then I’ll wake up one day and ask myself what exactly it is I am doing. Then the process will repeat.
Where I find myself sitting now (metaphorically speaking) is wondering how I got so lost. Questioning what my identity is. If I see myself as one of the Good Guys, then why does everything about my behavior signal that the opposite is true? And why has it been so hard for me to see?
One thing I don’t do is lie to myself. I can go through stretches where I lose my way, and I have my moments of confusion. But it never got me anywhere to bury my head in the sand and pretend everything is great all the time, like I’m not in need of any changes. And I don’t mean a-la-carte-type changes that require like buttoning up my the way I look, or gambling unnecessarily, or various fledgling escapades with females; I’m saying with where I’m at right now, the moment calls for changes of the wholesale variety — a reinvention of myself.
And actions speak louder than words. I get that. Part of the reason I’ve made the decision to be increasingly honest on my blog is because I feel it creates some sort of pressure on me, like these monthly snippets are really just part of a much larger narrative, a living organism that has neither a starting point nor an end goal in mind, where I’ll be able to look back and see the progress I have made.
I guess all I’m saying is I’m not where I want to be right now, and I’m finally ready to make an honest effort to do better. Last summer I went through the sad boy nonsense of dealing with rejection before putting myself back out there to prove that I wasn’t as worthless as I saw myself, and then I became a runaway train, a rudderless ship, filling the void of the intense feelings I harbored by inserting myself into situations where I could feeling anything at all. The only road that leads to — and has ever led to in my own personal experience — is emptiness, and a more exaggerated sense of loneliness.
The truth is I have never been very good at managing my life’s prosperities, when they have come. Despite having a very positive nature, a type of positivity that comes naturally to me, almost like it’s my baseline, of being generally optimistic about the future, of finding reasons to smile even during the down times, etc., whenever it is I do feel real, legitimate happiness, it’s like I am living in a perpetual state of ecstasy. So when the crash-landing back to earth inevitably occurs — because it has to, it just does — I always have a rough time negotiating through it. I take the initial lumps. Then I’m blinded by the normalcy of not being sad anymore. And finally I come to the place I only now find that I have arrived at: understanding that I was never quite out of the woods, so to say, and that the normalcy wasn’t the brand of ‘normal’ I sought.
This is not my first rodeo, which is why (for whatever reason) I assumed I would do so much better the next time around. This time around. Really the only difference between the person I am now and the person I was the last time I was going through an existential crises — figuring shit out, in a way — is that my floor has been raised. Like I still feel the same way. I still feel the same things. Regret, betrayal, some vague sensation of trying to hold water within my hands, and feeling it slip away, and holding on tighter, etc. It’s just that I’m not 19 years old anymore. I’m not unemployed. I don’t have like $18.72 USD in my bank account. I don’t have a drug problem. All the intrapersonal issues I was confronted by way back when were compounded by being a child, and not having the prior life experience to draw from. I am currently stable, and that’s a fine way to start.
I’ve always had a fear of actually trying, of putting in the effort. I think I have been afraid of that my whole life. Last year I literally had a conversation where the other person asked me what my biggest fear was/is, and I thought about it for a second, and then I said the thing I’m most afraid of is failing to live up to my own expectations. And I think I meant it, too. The problem with my own expectations are that they require effort, and they require actually trying. I’ve spent my life putting off the energy it takes to fulfill my expectations out of fear that it, trying/giving effort, won’t be good enough.
It’s tiresome, being this self-critical. It isn’t in any way healthy for me. But it is what I do, and the mental/emotional toll has been a lifelong burden of mine to bear. It is, whether ironically or unironically, what makes me so great and so dialed in and so caring and so smart and where I like remember things that nobody is ever supposed to remember because they make the other party feel so special, in a way. I don’t take it easy on anybody, ever, so why would I take it easy on myself?
I was having a conversation in my dorm room in 2009 with a wonderful red-headed girl that was both the love of my life and the bane of my existence and she explained to me that I’m a difficult person, that I am not easy to be with, and I told her that she’s a difficult person, and not easy to be with, and I felt very proud that the two of us — just kids — were making the choice to continue on, out in the wilderness seeking the impossible dream, and so I told her that that makes it even more special. That it wasn’t easy. That it wasn’t supposed to be easy. But that we were still doing it. Then I made a joke about Bootstrap’s bootstraps from Pirates of the Caribbean and I don’t know if her laugh ever sounded better than it did in that moment.
The point is, I accept the challenge. I don’t know why but I feel like whenever I get out of this (whatever this is) I’m going to be the no-doubt-about-it best version of myself that I’ve ever been. That’s what gives me fuel to keep going. That is what motivates me. That’s what gives me my ever-elusive Reason to continue waking up, making choices, and showing the world what I’ve got.
In the meantime I know I’m not, like, happy. I’m not running on adrenaline every day where I’m falling asleep at 5:00 or 6:00 Pacific Standard Time and waking up a few hours later full of energy to get another day started. I don’t feel the excitement for the great unknown that life sometimes has to offer. I don’t have anything, or anyone, to look forward to. I’m kinda just going through the motions. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Like I’ve said: I have been here before. It is OK. I am going to be OK.
I’ve been running again. Every day I have been running. It’s nothing exceptional, just 30 minutes at a time, a couple miles uphill, or a couple miles and a half. It’s what I need to be doing, running, that is, because like everything else it’s a choice I am making. All the gambling, all the going out, all the bullshit with all the women, all the extra shit, are things of the (recent) past at this point. As far as I’m concerned, the dollars I earn are only to be dedicated to items such as rent, and groceries, and the necessary obligations that need to be taken care of.
So for the time being, that is what I mean to say by making an ‘honest effort.’ I want to know exactly how much money I’ll be able to save each month if I’m not fucking off entire paychecks at the casino, or finding reasons to go out multiple times a week, or going out and ending up at a casino for an official double-whammy two-for-one scenario. I’m too old to be doing that shit. I’m much better off pretending to actually be the grumpy old man character that I play so well.
* * * * *
Speaking of May, it was around this time last year when life took a turn on me.
Towards the beginning of the month (I think it was the 8th, or some shit) H— drove out to Riverside CA because we’d been planning for a couple weeks to go out to Victoria Gardens out in Rancho Cucamonga CA to do some shopping and eat sushi, and even though I involuntarily tried to sabotage the operation like the week before, she put the hammer down and said something like You Can Be On Your Bullshit or whatever But Next Week We Are Going To Rancho Cucamonga.
And then she came over that day. It was probably like two or three o’clock in the afternoon. She got out of her car and was wearing this green top with her titties all popping out and some jeans and I don’t know what it was about it, but I just had to introduce her to my family — my two brothers and my mom (whom she met, briefly, a different time). In retrospect I felt incredibly embarrassed that I like put her on, so to speak, because I know she didn’t want to meet and/or say hi to my family. She just wanted to hop out of her car and into mine and off we go. But it was something I felt I needed to do, like absolutely, at the time. Because I don’t like girls in the way I liked her. I had to put a face to the name, as far as my brothers were concerned. I needed them to know, or understand, just whose name I’d dropped on several occasions over the preceding months.
I also remember very vividly the feeling, or sensation, that if it didn’t happen then, that day, then it would never happen.
Afterwards we went out and made the thirty or so minute drive to Rancho Cucamonga. She told me that morning her ex-boyfriend had shown up at her place unannounced and like talked to her on her porch and she told me he tried to kiss her but that she didn’t do it. Then some time later she told me one of her other loverboys was telling her he went to HR because he was trying to save his job (that he’d recently been fired from) and that she gave him the perfect kill-off text by just sending him a thumbs up emoji. Brutal. And then we got to Victoria Gardens and walked around and did a bunch of shopping for all sorts of stuff. She didn’t expect me to pay for everything but that’s what I did, not in a way to try to impress her (because she didn’t need me or my money, ever), just more so because I have too much pride to let a woman pay for anything in front of me. I did let her pay for her own watch, though, since she insisted.
I purchased a couple things for myself that day, too. I got some sunglasses and I got a watch. I still wear those sunglasses, and I still wear that watch, to this day. I don’t do it as some vague desperate lifeline that keeps me connected to her, H—, in any sort of way; I just like the glasses. They’re comfortable. And the watch was like a thousand dollars or something. That would have been a terrible investment if I dumped the watch out of spite.
We ate sushi, and then we drove off to Yaamava (formerly San Manuel) Casino. I almost missed my exit and kind of slammed my car over a curb getting on the freeway her and I needed to get on. We arrived and got some drinks at the bar and were talking and doing our thing. She was always so great to talk to. That’s probably what I most appreciated about her, that it never got like stale. The conversations. I think it was when we were at the bar, one of those wraparound 360-degree bars with the flat slot machines and TVs all over the place, when the thought crept up in the back of my head that I knew that was going to be The Night where I pressed the issue of our friendship, and the nature of it, in hopes of finding a definitive answer that I could live with.
Because you have to understand: The situation — globally, in the macro sense, over the course of a few months — had become untenable for me. No matter how much she tried to put me at ease and placate my ego, and regardless of the fact that most days the two of us would go wire-to-wire, from the time she woke up until the time I fell asleep, sharing some sort of text-chain or phone call or Facetime exchange, it was never enough for me. The closer I got to her (emotionally) the harder it was for me to be without her. So basically my only moments of peace came whenever I was hearing from her over the phone, or within some unspecified physical distance at work.
Seemingly everything else became a problem; and it grew in silence, like a cancer. Inoperable and Incurable. I dreaded my weekends — Mondays and Tuesdays — the most. I grew to have a strange phobia for even the day before my weekend started, knowing what was coming. It made me like physically sick sometimes, the pain in the pit of my stomach. And the angst that came with it. The slope got so slippery that around April 2023 I started drinking in the afternoon, taking as long of a nap as I could, before waking up and drinking some more at nighttime. My diet consisted of like eight beers per day and, god willing, a 15- or 20-minute interval where the alcohol would calm my nerves enough to allow me the chance to eat before falling asleep again. In a matter of time, only a handful of weeks, I dropped from 165 pounds (give or take my homeostasis, weight-wise) down to just a shade north of 130.
There was one night, fairly early on, in February or so, when I asked if she was awake, by chance, and I ended up calling her and we were on the phone for like an hour, where I basically explained to her what was happening to me. We had similar conversations on a couple other occasions, but we rarely accomplished anything. She would ask what I want from her, I would say I didn’t know, we’d agree to ‘take a break’ from talking, or whatever, and then like a day would pass and the two of us would pick up where we left off. I guess looking back it sounds pretty dumb, but she was the true Can’t Live With/Can’t Live Without person for me.
But then the next week would roll around, another glorious Wednesday (my own personal Monday) where I had her to look forward to, seeing her, that is, and hearing from her, before the same process repeated itself and the weekend would again take her away from me. Over time it was rare that a full workday went by without someone, one of my coworkers, asking me why I had lost so much weight, if I was OK, if something was wrong (because of my precipitous shedding of lb’s), etc., but when it came to H—, and my interactions with her, specifically, I tried genuinely to be as normal as possible and not make her feel like personally responsible for the massive wave of depression I’d been experiencing as a direct result of her influence.
Because that was never my end goal, to make her feel bad. I really just wanted her to be happy, and to find a way to make myself happy. It was impossible for me to hide it, though — my overall discomfort. She was obviously smart enough to notice. I imagine by the time I realized that the situation was hopeless and I was going down with the ship it was much too late. The two of us enjoyed our experience together enough that neither of us wanted it to end, but we both saw the writing on the wall. Like it really was the best. For what it was.
The rubber had to meet the road, eventually. It was more about who (between the two of us) would make the first move to initiate the endgame. Despite both of our best efforts to prolong the inevitable, I decided, out of fear of having the moment taken out of my hands, out of feeling I’d rather take a shot and miss rather than have my destiny dictated to me, I put her on the spot. Because I needed to hear it. I couldn’t keep going on this way.
So I lost some money at the casino, that night, and then a couple hours later I was standing outside her car before she left, giving her an ultimatum, as was phrased by yours truly, and she did not have the answer that I needed. And that was that. The official beginning of the end.
I went to work the following Wednesday, knowing she was coming in at her usual 6:00 P.M. PST slot, and I left early (at 4:00 P.M.) because for whatever reason I just couldn’t stomach her anymore. My ego had been bruised too severely. The following day (Thursday) I made a request with one of the big bosses to take some time away from work — something I hadn’t done in 10 years, i.e. ever — and they granted it so long as I completed the rest of the pay period. I asked for a week. They gave me two weeks.
It was a brutal stretch, finishing those last eight days of the pay period. During one of them this guy came up to my table, and he and I have known each other for some years. Probably like five or six. He played a lot of poker. But occasionally he would play craps. I was his favorite craps dealer, or right up there, because I talked a lot of shit to him, about sports, mostly, and he and I were around the same age and while I was off at Virginia Tech he was at Villanova. So we always had that millennial/sports connection. I always liked the guy. Last year (2023) we made a bet during the Boston Celtics vs. Philadelphia 76ers playoff series and I was on Boston and he was on Philly, and he never paid up. So it goes.
Anyway, he came up to my table to chill with me. And he was talking about how he was banging one of the cocktail servers, and I was doing my thing where I didn’t really like care, but I was listening and egging him on because I could usually squeeze five or ten bucks out of him. That’s what the boys do, you know? We pretend to care.
And then he asked me what I thought about the Asian chick who works during the night shift, and I agreed that, yeah, she’s great, and, yeah, she’s good looking, and since he and I had already spent like ten minutes putting our dicks on the table I think I told him flat out that I’m Gonna Marry That One. Then he told me that he thought I quote out-kicked my coverage, which is a football reference, where the punter kicks the ball too far (beyond the coverage of the ten guys who are chasing the punt returner), and the punt returner has a lot of room, and the kicking team can’t run fast enough to make up the ground, and so the punt returner can make moves, and has more open field to work with, and so it puts the kicking team, the one who in this instance ‘out-kicked their coverage,’ at a disadvantage. I didn’t forget that.
But at the time I didn’t think very much of that conversation, to be honest. As the months passed, later on, and I put the pieces together, I think I always knew, y’know? If that makes sense. This guy was a complete dog, which is likely why he enjoyed talking to me over the years as much as he did. We had a decent amount in common, in other words. But lo and behold it wasn’t too long after, maybe a day or two, when I got a text from the girl, the Asian chick who worked nights, telling me that I had said some things to someone, that I shouldn’t have said, but she wouldn’t tell me who it was. I was confused, naturally, but I was in the proverbial blender and confused about so many things back then.
She was always so polite, even in the rare occasions we did have a tiff. Rather than just ignoring me or giving me the silent treatment, which most girls do, or popping off and being super aggressive, via text or otherwise, one afternoon while I was at work H— texted me something along the lines of ‘I’m not happy with you at the moment because you said such and such to such and such person,’ and so on. Her and I weren’t talking too much for awhile there after that. It was the lowest and emptiest phase, or era, of our friendship.
I dealt a blackjack tournament that Sunday — a week before I would be on a leave of absence. Her and I passed each other in the hallway. I was en route to walking out of the building and she was coming around the corner where the patio area meets the hallway I was walking down. Our interactions had been terse ever since the night I offered the ultimatum. We crossed eyes and I don’t think she could tell in that hot second if I was going to say anything, but of course I did. I missed her, and, honestly, even in spite of being like disappointed (by her) and upset (with her), I was never going to let it be one of those things where we, like, weren’t going to be cool with one another anymore.
But I can imagine she didn’t really know how to take me, where I was coming from, what person I was going to be towards her, etc., at that point. Because even though we had pretty much combed through exhausting portions of both of our histories — during the prior six months when we’d been about as close as two people can get in many ways — this was a door that had not yet been opened and seen into. Had I looked at her and not said anything, she would have done the bad bitch thing and ignored me and continued walking in the opposite direction down the hall. But that ain’t what happened.
I said ‘Hi Heather,’ and she said ‘Hello Eric.’ And then I went to my car and drove home.
The next week was awkward. I don’t remember her and I talking very much. I’m sure there was cordiality whenever we did run into each other, or when we were at work in the same proximity. We weren’t unfriendly or anything. The Sunday before my two-week hiatus was May 14th, 2023, and she was off at Legoland with her niece for a birthday and I remember getting stuck in traffic for like four hours or something. She texted me that morning, H— did, while I was in traffic, making sure I was OK and that I wasn’t involved in the crash that occurred on the I-10 Freeway. That was probably the first communication the two of us had all week, or thereabouts.
I once wrote about this specific day, because while I was stuck in traffic (for four or five hours listening to The Killers’ Pressure Machine on repeat) it really did feel like some absurd cosmic punishment, that literally the day before my two-week leave of absence — again, the only time I’ve ever taken one of those — I was met by the longest commute (by a long shot) in ten years worth of driving from various cities in the Inland Empire to the desert. There was also the interpersonal drama between H— and I, which by then wasn’t like a big deal, per se, but it was an element that exacerbated my own personal situation.
And then I took my two weeks off. I remember spending a lot of time with the stripper. Caitlyn was her name. I slept over at her place a handful of times. We smoked some weed together and went out shopping and shit. I bought her groceries and assorted items (a new litter box, litter, food, etc.) for her cat. We went out to eat a couple times at a Korean BBQ joint in Rancho Cucamonga. We went hiking a lot. We did an open mic night in Pasadena CA. Things of that nature.
It was all very strange, those two weeks. I know I was enjoying myself — at least as much as I could at that time — but there were a few instances when I had these obscure types of epiphanies, in realtime, while I would be taking a shower at Caitlyn’s townhouse, or where I would wake up and it would be like 12:30 P.M. PST, with absolutely no cares and no obligations in the world, knowing that it was all over, in a sense. That the last six months of my life were spent chasing a dream that was never really there, or, if it was, for a time, it wasn’t meant to be.
I went back to work at the end of May (2023) and felt revitalized in some ways. I mean I wasn’t looking forward to it, going back, because the fantasyland I was living in for two weeks was only delaying the reality that was going to confront me whether I took time off or not. A couple weeks later, H— took off a week of her own and went to South Jersey, which seemed like a peculiar spot to vacation but, again, I’d been making vague attempts at disassociating myself from everything involving her and was in the midst of a fling with a stripper who did, during the good times, make me happy. So that’s what it was.
One night, while H— was away for a week, I remember waking up at like 3:30 A.M. PST and reaching for my phone which lay atop a pile of pillows next to Caitlyn’s bed and there was a text from her, H—, that is, and she told me that she was planning on moving away, to the east coast, and I was in a stupor having just woken up, so when I texted back and said ‘Have a nice life,’ or whatever I said, I think she was probably taken aback by that. Like maybe she was expecting me to put up a fight and say no, please, don’t go, or something.
Things got more serious when she returned and we were both back to work again. I was in her section in the table games department around 6:30 or 7:00 P.M. PST and she came over and said some joke, offering like an olive branch to me, because I fumbled the cards on a blackjack game when I was putting them in the discard rack, likely because I was on edge, and she gave me the old ‘Is it your first day?’ or whatever, and I wasn’t in the mood, for her or anything else in the world, not that day, and not during that whole stretch of my life. So I rolled my eyes and gave her the cold shoulder and ignored her. That was what I did.
And then the next table I went to was in the high limits and it didn’t have any players on it, and her best friend, H—’s, that is, was in my section, and I was all heated and pouty and childlike and asked her: ‘When is your friend leaving?’ And she said something like ‘maybe a couple weeks, maybe six months,’ something like that. And I remember popping off and saying ‘Why can’t it be, like, tomorrow?’ and then later that night I got a very aggressive text from H— asking me why I ignored her and why I said all the shit I did to her best friend.
And then later she said she’ll be leaving soon and that I won’t have to deal with her (literally and metaphorically) anymore, and I said ‘Good.’ It was a classic expression, worthy of future generations. Then she, H—, asked me why I was being so ‘nasty’ — that’s how I knew she meant business, because she’d never referred to me being nasty towards her, ever — and in an expression of real, actual, legitimate truth, I told her what I was feeling: I said that I was upset that she was going to leave.
In a truly remarkable turn of events, after that night relations between us, H— and I, were actually very friendly. Everything moved so fast, around then, the time it took for me to take my two weeks off, coming back, having her take a week off, then coming back, and it was only like a week or two later before she put in her notice. Long gone were the days of constant text messages, of late-night, post-work (from her end) phone calls. Long gone were the trips to Riverside CA or the tour she gave me in Twentynine Palms CA. In the rearview mirror was an alleged birthday rendezvous in Las Vegas NV. No more movie-watching nights from long distance via Facetime. No more nothing.
Yet it was for that brief stretch, following her two-week notice, when the two of us got back to being ourselves with each other. And it wasn’t with some ulterior motive in mind, on my end, where I thought if I simply started being nice then maybe she would stay. The opposite was true: I was being nice because she was leaving. She wouldn’t be there anymore. The days and nights of sweating her absence would finally go the way of the Dodo bird. The weight had been lifted off.
And in the back of my mind, in my heart of hearts, I knew I was going to miss her — perhaps more than I have ever missed anybody. That’s probably the message I most wanted to get across to her in those final two weeks, that the memory I wished she would have of me wouldn’t be the one where I was letting The End dictate what wonder and joy infused the Beginning and the Middle. That there was a time that existed between us when anything was possible.
I wanted her to know that, and understand it. That the type of love I have to offer isn’t of the garden variety; with me, it either is or it is not; and it isn’t a temporary thing. We throw around the word ‘love’ as a way of saying I love this, or I love that, and it cheapens and discredits, almost, in a sense, the times where there is simply no other way to describe something. There are no words to explain what this woman, H—, meant to me or my life. That’s why the only word is Love. It says everything. Yet, on rare occasions such as this, it doesn’t say nearly enough.
With some nine or ten months to reflect, the lasting images and residual feelings that exist within me, vis-á-vis H—, aka the Asian chick who worked the night shift, are that she kind of saved me, twice.
The first way she saved me was very passively, from her end. All she had to do was be herself. She let me know that all the years I had spent being numb and living on auto-pilot without the fear, and the consequences, of caring about someone else, weren’t merely a choice but rather circumstantial. In other words, it wasn’t me who got to decide whether or not I got to love another person in the purest most utmost sense. And it made me realize that all those dormant feelings I had spent something like 15 years not feeling, not having to deal with, never left me. They were always there. Just waiting for someone worthy enough to express them, and bring them back out.
There was a longing for the future again. Something to dream about. There were goals to attain, both personal and mutual. There was something to aspire to. There were images of Life. There was that saying that rang true, from the film As Good As It Gets, when Jack Nicholson finally admits, in a moment of true weakness, that ‘You make me want to be a better man.’
Of the litany of things I appreciate about her, the one that stands out the most is that she taught me not to write anyone off based on their beliefs. I would be lying if I said I didn’t spend a solid decade during my 20’s judging women on their religion, political views, whether or not they believed in astrology, or crystals, etc. And what I learned about H— is that you can be incredibly smart and be a good worker and all the other things I admire about a person and still sprinkle in a little woo-woo on the side. After all, she accepted me for who I am, and I am the absolute source for believing in absolutely nothing.
The second way she saved me was very actively, from her end. She left. Had she stuck around, I would have only continued my spiral, my ‘withering away,’ as she put it. I often joked (in the way that wasn’t really a joke) that our place of work, H—’s and mine, was not big enough for the two of us. There ain’t no way I would have stuck around if she didn’t make her move to the east coast. By leaving, she allowed me the freedom of not having to care anymore, again.
That’s what made this, or me, I guess you could say, so impossible. It was always going to be a Catch-22 with H—, and it was never going to make any sense. I was either going to dive head-first into the deep end and so deleteriously and so euphorically be impacted that I’d find myself, inevitably, begging for a way to get out, or I’d be ‘happy’ and ‘comfortable’ continuing on in my treasured and uninterrupted loneliness. I hate it both ways, and I love it both ways.
These aspects of our relationship aren’t, and never have been, lost on me. While I think some minor disservices were done insofar as blunt honesty was concerned, and while I believe I have reasonable, like, gripes, if that’s how you want to put it, the philosophical and intellectual parts of me never have, and never will, have any bad words to say about this particular woman.
Because we just don’t have that much time. To bitch and moan. It’s too much of a waste. Everything in this world — the people, places, and things — is so finite. It comes and it goes. It’s there and it isn’t there. In a football game each team runs 60 or 70 plays in a given week. That’s the extent of the action. But the difference between winning and losing usually occurs on only two or three of them. Plays, that is.
In a very significant way that’s how life tends to operate. Most of the time you are just jockeying for position, sparring with your sparring partner (whether it’s reality in general or another person, specifically), but the moments that matter, and the people that matter, are boiled and concentrated and compacted into extremely small spaces and intervals. Those are the things that you remember. Those are the things that mean something. And what is life without that meaning?
In writing about H—, I write not about the 60 or 70 plays worth of sparring, and jockeying. I write about the plays that represented one of the critical junctures of my lifetime. I write about the seemingly insignificant things, the sometimes-forgotten details, those which determine the winner and the loser of the game. Not the bullshit that happened in the first quarter, or before halftime, or with a few minutes left in the third. They were the moments felt when everything was on the line, which in turn become the precious few blinks, and grains of sand, that make life worth living.
The last time I saw her was on a bench, on a Sunday. It was right before the 4th of July. We talked for 15 or 20 minutes because she was on break, and I don’t know. I don’t know what I was trying to say. How was I supposed to condense something like 7 or 8 months into that minuscule amount of time?
But we hugged it out, and we told each other I Love You, and I didn’t turn back around to look at her while she was walking away. Let it be, I kept telling myself. Let that be our final face-to-face interaction.
I picked up Caitlyn on a Tuesday (July 3rd) and the two of us went to Riverside CA to eat at one of those large indoor gathering spots where there are like 10 different places to eat, a fro-yo parlor, a couple bars, etc., and I ordered a burger and had too much pride to tell the guy to leave off the onions so when I opened the box to eat it it was basically a fucking bun compressed around a massive allotment of diced onions and a burger patty on the side. That’s the impression it gave. Then we left there and walked the surrounding area. It was lovely warm sunny summer evening and we ended up at this swanky bar/restaurant a few blocks away and I got a couple Old Fashion’s with the big brick blocks of cubed ice that had the imprint of the bar like tattooed on them.
I took her home and there was this little kid with a ball playing catch with one of his friends, and I was feeling slightly hammered so I told the kid to ‘Hey, ball,’ or whatever, and sharply clapped my hands together real quick to let him know I wanted him to throw it my way, so we played catch for a minute. I’ve played catch a million times in my life but I honestly can’t remember, thinking back on it, how long it had been until that night. Then Caitlyn was like turned on by me having friendly relations with this kid — I’ve for whatever reason always been good with kids, I can’t help it — and she told me ‘I’ve never wanted to suck your dick more than I do right now,’ so we went back up to her place and hung out for a little while before I drove home.
The first thing I did when I made it home was shower. I remember taking a really long shower, which for me lasts about five minutes. Despite the busy nature of my day/evening what I really remember was thinking about H—. I wanted to just stay in bed and do nothing for that entire weekend, because my heart was an incredibly heavy one knowing her, H—’s, departure was imminent. So everything I was doing (including, but not limited to, that particular day) was the start of a long line of finding Things To Do that would distract me.
But when I exited the shower, and started drying myself off, I did the thing I always do and double-tapped my iPhone to make it light up to see, in the off chance, if anyone had tried to get ahold of me. And there she was. There was H—, asking if I was free. And I said of course I am. Free. For her, I was always free. I made myself so available to her that even I, in retrospect, am turned off by it.
Almost immediately when we got on the Facetime call she was crying. I mean I had seen her cry on a handful of occasions before — when we did Facetime for the first time (as an excuse to discuss our Book Club) and she went through her memory box; when her sister’s dog was gravely ill and it kind of like triggered her because she had a dog that she loved very much that passed away at an early age and she couldn’t afford to help him; the night we watched Licorice Pizza and one of her loverboys decided to hit me up via Instagram and I had to confront her to say What The Hell Is This About and she told me she wanted the same thing I wanted, regarding the future, in some abstract way, and that was the same night that we ended up on Facetime until we both fell asleep and my computer probably died somewhere along the way, etc. — but it was never like this. The crying, that is.
This was the type of crying where she was hysterical, whether it was being hit smack-dab by the reality of her car being filled to the brim with all her belongings for her new adventure on the east coast, having said her goodbyes to her best friend, having those doubts one feels where they are met by a certain moment of truth, a buyer’s remorse, in a sense. It could have been any of those items, individually, or it could have been all of them, in totality.
I think part of her just needed to hear from me again, given that the previous couple months everything between us had been so scattered. Because even though I never particularly cared for the ‘best friend’ moniker, I am fairly confident positing that I provided something for her, whether emotionally or intellectually or some combination thereof, that nobody else in her life had the ability to. I imagine it’s akin to being in the friend zone on steroids.
For the first five minutes she was so beyond control to the point where I was starting to worry that she was going to tell me she was staying. In California. That she wasn’t going to go through with it. I was an emotional nightmare myself, during those days and weeks leading up to that specific phone call, but I just hated seeing her like that. So I spent the initial bulk of my time just telling her to breathe in through her nose, and out through her mouth, that everything was OK, that everything was going to be OK, and don’t get me wrong, I did not want her to leave. But I tried to be magnanimous. I told her ‘You have to go. You just have to.’
Then when things lightened up, with her being something like four hours away from her Big Move, I told her one of the nicest things, given the circumstances — the conflicted circumstances of me wanting her to go while not really wanting her to leave — that I’ve ever said to anybody. I said: As badly as your loved ones back home are going to miss you, that’s how excited everybody out there is going to feel to receive you.
But that was me, you know? That was how I dealt with my own personal suffering. By saying the necessary things even when I knew how negatively it was going to affect me in the long run. I have spent so much of my life in moments that brought me that kind of pain looking inward, and bringing everybody I could down with me, so I don’t know if it was age or life experience, but I felt this time around, with this specific person, to look outwards, and try to comfort her at my expense.
That was the language the two of us spoke to one another. Our love language, if that’s what you want to call it. Picking each other up. Instilling the necessary beliefs for the moments when we both needed to hear them. I am extremely empathetic, and so is she. I am extremely supportive, and so is she. We can all say what we want about people, and people we love and care about, but when she told me I finally met my match, somewhere there, along the line, months before, she was right. Only it wasn’t the type of match one assumes. Such as peanut butter and jelly. Or a ball in a glove. You only meet your match when you are hopeless, when you have been truly bested. That’s the spirit of the phrase.
It probably wouldn’t surprise you, understanding the narrative aspect in all this, what with mentioning the guy who went to Villanova, and H— vacationing in New Jersey, etc., that in a matter of time she will be having his baby. And I don’t really think I’m speaking out of class by saying so, because like I’ve said — like I have told You, specifically — nobody ever reads this shit. Nobody I know. Maybe an occasional ex-lover peers in from time to time. But I disguise and camouflage all of the real shit by writing blogs that are so daunting, and so long, that most people won’t read them, anyway.
If truth be told, for whatever it’s worth, I never anticipated writing about any of this. It was probably a pride/ego thing. Where I don’t like want to post any of my L’s. My blog has always been the safest of my safe spaces, a spot I can post up at (literally and otherwise) and if I wanted to I could lie and embellish and make it seem like I am always right and I am always winning and if I don’t want to deal with the painstaking process of being alive, and confronting the truth, meeting reality where it meets me, etc., I wouldn’t have to. But that’s not me.
2024 was (and is currently) a year of rebirth, for me, which is unironic to the text here. A new life will come to be from a woman that I used to think, for a minor wrinkle in time, would be having mine at some point in the distant future. And that’s a wonderful thing, her having her baby. Because most of the people who have kids — and I really mean no disrespect by saying this, it’s just the atheist, socialist, intellectual in me that can’t help it — are dumb and have no business doing so. This girl will bring in a smart human being, because she is smart. And she is good. And it’s the smart ones, and the good ones, who will usher in the leaders and the decision-makers of a future that has to come.
We will meet again, someday. The sun will shine and there will be handshakes, and smiles, and hugs. Happiness will be omnipresent. And laughter. There will always be laughter. The cornerstone of a friendship that came and went but never died. And then another goodbye. It’ll be everything, while it lasts, and nothing, as is our way of life.
* * * * *
I suppose this final section can act as an addendum, or some aside that runs parallel to everything I have already written, but this article — May 2024 — is really just a long drawn out way of saying one thing:
It’s good to be alive.
My artistic style throughout my 15-year journey as a writer has in many ways been shaped by my style as a person, which is to say pretty much since the time I was able to communicate with words as a little boy I have found myself in situations where I had to talk my way out of, or through, things. With that being what it is, the leap I have aimed at making in 2024 regarding my writing is not to do a complete 180-degree turn, eschewing my longform in favor of some entirely more palatable Less Is More thing that I have never been particularly fond of or good at. It’s instead doubling down on what I’ve been doing. Making the longform even longer. And even more specific.
Because I know that in the past I have been guilty of obfuscating, and being intentionally ambiguous. I’ve been accused of talking in circles and speaking in riddles. Regardless of which flavor you choose to describe it, I’m aware that I have done a poor job at being direct.
I write here that it’s good to be alive not out of some happiness that I can’t describe. What I mean to say is life has been hard on me before and there were many days I woke up and wish I wasn’t. Alive, that is. Where I went to sleep and wished I would no longer have to deal with any of this bullshit. I resorted to drugs. I placed myself in precarious situations thinking I had nothing to lose. I have led a selfish life, for better and for worse, but never was I more selfish than the first time I experienced so much hurt.
The dramatics of my 2023 campaign weren’t really that dramatic. Like I think if I tried to explain it to an uninvolved third party who had no dog in the fight, so to say, they would want to know what the big deal is/was. And given the givens, the nature of what transpired, I wouldn’t have an acceptable explanation for them. Of why I felt how I did. Or of why to this day I am still writing about it.
That’s always kind of the philosophical dilemma one deals with after the fact, when something is there and then it isn’t, or when someone becomes a major piece of your life and then they are gone — the idea that, because it/they are no longer there, none of it meant anything. It’s a depressing approach that is so fucking natural at the same time. The truth is obviously much closer to the tired cliché that The Journey Is The Destination, but it doesn’t change that the end of the road feels so final, always.
People have all sorts of crazy ideas about what happens after you die. The monotheists (Catholics, Christians, Muslims, etc.) believe in an everlasting paradise, or heaven; the Vikings believe(d) in Valhalla; Buddhists believe in reincarnation; there have been thousands of different religions and gods since the dawn of time and they all more or less prescribe to the same principle: live a good, noble, honorable life, and get rewarded in death.
As the absolute most boring person who has ever walked this earth, I, Eric, believe that when it’s time to go, when it’s all finally over, when the last ride is complete, the lights simply go out. And that’s it. No more feelings. No more emotions. No more having to deal with the heartache and heartbreak of life. You are there, and then you aren’t there. And when I talk about you I am also including me, obviously.
But the flip-side of the lights going out is that they turn on, too. I don’t believe in the miracles of certain fictional stories, like walking on water, or healing blindness by the touch, etc., but the real miracle of life is just being here, existing. I think I wrote about this some years ago, that the odds of someone being born are so astronomical (given the obscene amount of sperm that get released upon entry to get to the real prize, to penetrate the egg) that it comes out to like one in four hundred trillion. A truly unconscionable figure.
So it’s important to keep this perspective, when going through life. When feeling the worst of all pains, all at once. From confusion, to inadequacy. To having trouble eating and sleeping. Having knots in your stomach. Wishing you were elsewhere, or someone else entirely. Wanting nothing more than for those feelings to go away. Trying everything, but to no avail. Being at your wit’s end.
Because just as life existed long before you were born, and long after you will die, so, too, is true about the people and places and things that come and go throughout life. You existed before their arrival, and you will continue to exist after (for a while, anyway). And it’s going to hurt. I mean I still remember lying in my old bed in Riverside CA and scrolling through Facebook and seeing an image on the People You May Know feature and it was this really pretty girl, and she looked so familiar but I could never, like, place her.
But when she came into my life, months later, it all made sense to me. I predicted several times exactly how it was going to go down between us, even to her — that we were only ever going to be a flash in the pan, so to say — in my own personal collection of letters that I wrote to her, one by one, over the months. But it was always a funny like running joke between us, since neither of us actually expected it to end. Or at least not so suddenly, when it did.
And I’ve thought about what it would’ve been like, my life, I mean, if her and hadn’t made the initial moves that we made. We could have been ships forever passing in the night. We could’ve, but that isn’t how it was ever going to be. I’m too fucking cool, and she’s too fucking pretty, and one way or another it was destined to work out exactly in the manner that it did.
But like I said, the lights turn on, and the lights go out. Life does not stop.
I hate drawing upon the experience with my first love, Caitlin, while I continue to negotiate through my most recent existential setback. It’s just that I have nowhere else to go. I have nothing else to compare it to. While the actual comparisons are slim, the crossover, or overlap, I guess you could say, is (1) how I felt, and (2) that it obviously still occupies space in my mind after all these months. And I can only assume it will be many more before it’s all over. It’ll be one of those things I carry with me for the rest of my life.
The difference is that when Caitlin left my life, c. 2009, I couldn’t find a reason to carry on. She was everything to me, the most beautiful woman in the world, the smartest woman in the world, and I could kind of hide behind her in many ways because I thought it said something about me that she chose me over the field. I was without any identity when she was gone. And it took me a long time, emotionally, to find out who I truly was and what I wanted, again, out of life.
This time around I certainly experienced a level of devastation, like personally, but it also gave me a strange sense of hope. That I am still allowed to love. That I can still care about another human being other than myself. And I know it’s a rare thing for me. To love and to care. But to see and actually go through it makes me really look forward to the future. Knowing it’s still out there.
Because I have been documenting all of this in one form or another since before the Kansas City Chiefs won their first of back-to-back Super Bowls, around the turn of 2022-’23. (You didn’t think I’d make it a whole blog without mentioning the Chiefs, did you?) That I was so invested, even the NFL became secondary to me. That the Chiefs won the goddamn Super Bowl and the satisfaction I felt was barely even temporary. That I was so deep in my personal life and feelings that I couldn’t even appreciate the things that make me me, the things that I most enjoy and so look forward to.
It has been a clean 18 months where I have had no problems unloading a clip and shelling out like 500 or a thousand words per night (if that’s what I wanted to do), since, as is my custom, I always write better, and never lack for content, when I am feeling a little depressed. There are levels to this shit, though. Like there’s the stage when I can feel it coming, when I know that I’m completely fucked. There’s the stage where I am fucked. There’s the stage that involves the stress diet and the seismic drop in weight. There’s the stage where I’m seemingly unnecessarily defending myself against people who care about me and I’m the dog in the meme with the fire all around me saying ‘everything’s fine.’ There’s the stage when I begin to come down (or up, depending on how you look at it). There’s the stage where everything in life is a distraction. And then there’s the stage I kind of feel like I’m at, right now, where I can see the light. Like I know it’s there and I am moving towards it. I’m not there yet. But it is there. The light.
And I don’t mind this process of grieving, not anymore. Like I mentioned earlier, Caitlin’s exit was the hardest life experience I had to navigate through specifically due to the fact that I had nothing to compare it to. H—’s was difficult partially because it had been so long and I had forgotten what it was like, and equally because I honestly didn’t know it was still a thing, for me, to have any feelings whatsoever. And so I can only compare her, H—, that is, to Caitlin. It ain’t that big of a club.
That’s why I say it’s good to be alive. That’s why I say I have hope. The whole world is out there and in front of me, and while I don’t ever want to sound like a Hallmark Card or an ABC Family Movie that comes on during Sunday nights, or whatever, I take a lot of pride in being a real person, with real problems, who continually churns out these life experiences that make me better in the long run, that offer me the perspective to help other people, even in small ways, because I’ve been through it, I’ve lived it, I’ve felt it, and I want nothing more than to keep going.
So I will be the walking contradiction who welcomes the pain. Who accepts the challenge. Who writes about how much I hate it. Who one day down the road rationalizes that I’m better off having experienced it. Because life is easy. It’s only during the hard parts that I remember that’s when it’s at at its best, life, that is, when I am at my most uncomfortable state. For that’s the only way I know that I truly give a fuck.
Maybe that’s what makes me such a hopeless romantic, and such an irrational optimist. That I can take the punches and absorb the blows and get knocked down and continue looking for the bright side. Always. Let that be how I am remembered.
With love,
ER
Future Bets 
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