A mystery it is not: the way I feel about astrology. But just so everyone is absolutely and without any doubts clear with where I stand, no, I don’t think there is anything to it. It seems like a load of nonsense much in the same way Christianity or Catholicism or Islam is nonsense, or any manner of person who wastes my time appealing to their own emotions while fake-contemplating whether or not they should hit their 16 while I, the dealer, is showing a face card, before ultimately waving me off and saying ‘I don’t think you have it.’
In other words: astrology is vibes. Religion is vibes. Either staying on or hitting a 16 for at least half the population is vibes.
But there did seem to be something to it — astrology and woo-woo and vibes — when it came to the man I once and always considered to be my best friend. His name was Trey. Because there was some serious Written In The Stars shit about our friendship that was fucking undeniable. On my right wrist exists a tattoo with three letters, EQX, which is short for the word Equinox, as I was born on March 20th (the day of the spring equinox) and he was born on September 21st (the day of the fall equinox), and those represent the only two within the 365-day calendar year where there are exactly 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness.
(If you want to get technical and say that the spring and autumn equinoxes don’t always occur on those days because of the way the earth revolves every four years, so be it. Also you can go fuck yourselves.)
Perhaps even more rare, or at least ‘rare’ in terms of the odds involved where two random people are born on two random days that happen to be directly on opposite ends of the equinox, is that Trey and I actually possess the same exact number of digits in each our first names, our middle names, and our last names. Mine is Eric A—ur Reining. His is Trey J—ph V—-er. 4-6-7.
Either of these phenomena I consider a funny coincidence, but together (especially considering that we actually got along better than any two people I have ever come in contact with) are nothing short of truly remarkable.
And we did used to joke, Trey and I, that people were full of shit when they called themselves ‘best friends.’ Because others would seemingly always have a group of people whom they considered best friends, while he and I were steadfast in holding true to the actual dictionary definition of what in fact ‘best’ means. Not that we knew the actual definition. Just that there are many friends and many good friends and many friends who can be identified as many things. But there is only one who is best.
Trey was my all-time dawg, from the earliest point when my older brother and one of his older brothers played Little League Baseball on the same team some year in the late-90’s or early-aughts and Trey and I met with our Pokemon cards on the top level of the bleachers at Newmark Little League in San Bernardino CA. We didn’t even know each other. But we were there.
And then in high school when we were in sixth period baseball together and I was 14 and a freshman and I didn’t know anybody Trey was the one who approached me and inevitably turned into my partner for stretching and playing catch and going to the weight room. And it’s funny how a couple years later we both knew each other but never really, like, hung out, or anything, and it was just one of those things where we became best friends and didn’t have to even acknowledge that it was the case.
The term ‘thick as thieves’ has been around a long time, but I’m pretty sure no two thieves ever were in it so thick as myself and Trey. Years after high school I heard randomly from passers-by about the speculation that went on behind our two backs. That we were gay. That we were off doing drugs. Etc. And each time, when I heard it, years later, a new theory was borne to be either confirmed or denied and a feeling of pleasantness met me. . . that nobody ever truly knew what the hell was going on between us.
It was nothing, honestly. We just liked to spend time together. We liked to talk. We in many ways felt similarly about the world, whether it be religion or women or anything else of minor consequence in the age of being a teenager. We had enormous levels of pride so even in our best-friendship, competition always was involved. We were also, with regard to certain aspects, complete opposites, what with how I was book smart and he was street smart, or how he was straight edge and I was always the one to experiment with drugs and alcohol. The equinox gave to us, and to much the equinox was given — when it came to Trey and I.
Every story of mine pays tribute to the rise and fall both love and friendship, and Trey perhaps might be the most quintessential example. For with him there was not only love of a friend but the type of love reserved for a brother. For him it was not only friendship, nor being a ‘best friend,’ but being the best of best friends.
And any onlooker could obviously ask the question that must be begged, that which deals in the realm of What Kind Of Best Friend Could It Have Been If The Two Of You Are No Longer Best Friends, but I can top that by saying this last half-decade stretch isn’t even the first time we broke up, in a manner of speaking. Brothers fight, and I fought with Trey more than I ever fought with anyone.
There was a night several years ago, though by now I couldn’t even tell you which year it was, specifically, when I came home from work and I happened to be in a good mood for whatever reason, and my mother approached me and asked if she could talk to me about something. Since that isn’t anything she ever said to me, unless it indeed was actually something, and not nothing, I gave her the obvious answer and heard what she had to say.
What followed was one of the most awkward and disgusting pit-of-the-stomach feelings of my life, one where my mother told me that there were multiple instances in the past where Trey would make certain comments to her — the kinds of things guys sometimes say to women that can easily be dismissed as jokes, unless of course those advances are reciprocated, where then they no longer are just ‘jokes’ — and that on this specific day Trey called her while she was at work to see what she was doing. Talking about nothing in particular.
My childhood impulses began to kick in. The little voice in my head kept telling me this couldn’t be so. That my mother was fabricating the situation, or giving a little too much credit to herself. That there was a reasonable explanation for it all. No way it was possible for my best friend, and the best friend of all best friends, to betray me like that.
But there also was an uneasy element festering in the back of my mind, where everything came back to Trey calling my mom while she was at work. Had there been a specific purpose for such a call it would have been normal, but since there wasn’t it was just weird. That’s the only word to describe it.
Not to mention that Trey for virtually as long as I’ve known him had been the ultimate womanizer. Despite lacking traditionally good looks, the man had an incredible amount of interpersonal leverage and pull from the opposite sex. Before ‘gaslighting’ became part of the zeitgeist and lexicon, Trey practiced it and I learned from him how to exercise it. And I not only learned from him, but aided in his lies and gaslighting maneuvers almost as if it were all part of a game, where he would serve me up the ollie-oop to dunk through the basket or vice versa, forever. Whatever benefitted he or I, or both of us, there was no limit and no boundary to what the two of us were capable of.
With all of these thoughts and dynamics swirling about my head, I could do nothing but immediately upon hearing such words from my mother call Trey. So I left my house and walked around the neighborhood and he told me he had just gone to Bakers to get some food and I told him I had something I needed to talk to him about — which made his perspective the same as mine when my own mother inquired of me some 15 minutes earlier — and I basically laid out what my mom told me and asked what was going on.
And Trey was so cool. Like, he hardly skipped a beat. What? He’d say. Huh? He’d follow. It was as if he was trying to get me to hang myself by saying such an outlandish thing that could not be true, and to that he succeeded. By the time I got off the phone I felt genuinely like some misunderstanding had taken place, and was relieved by it so much that I did not lose any sleep over it.
But the major crux of the phone call revolved around me asking Trey why, in fact, he called my mom while she was at work, and to what end, and he told me he was driving around at the time with his wife and needed to know our address so they could send a Christmas card. Ah! I thought to myself. That actually makes sense!
Only, the following morning I was sitting in my living room eating something and somehow my phone lit up before me, and it was Trey, of course. And the text sounded so lively and everything. But such a text message, it asked a question. And that question was this: What is your address? [My wife] and I need it so we can send a Christmas card!’
There again my stomach dropped and I put my food down and didn’t touch another bite, for it was then I understood that it could not be possible for Trey to have called my mother the day before to ascertain our address, or else he would not have needed to ask me, personally, the following day. Why would he not have just asked me in the first place?
I think I texted him back our address but didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day. When he called later in the night, which was a common thing for the two of us to do, to just be on the phone for an hour at a time almost every night, which is kinda crazy to think about in retrospect, that we did such things for no particular reason, I told him I wasn’t feeling well and tried to get off the phone as quickly as I could. And I think he knew then, during that call, that there was a rift. Further, I believe the only reason he called was to take the temperature of the room, in a manning of speaking. To see whether or not this was going to be a Thing.
It was the following night when Trey and I’s mutual friend threw a party at his apartment, and both of us were there. Trey and I, I mean. And I remember two things from that night. The first is that I did more cocaine than I have ever done in my life. The second is that a handful of us ended up at the casino, formerly known as San Manuel in San Bernardino CA.
Other than that, it was just a bizarre evening and morning. I think after I lost my money gambling Trey let me borrow $500 or so, and although I couldn’t turn it into anything I did leave with a $500 chip. So when Trey and I ended up in the elevator, on our way out of the building, as we had done hundreds of times in the past, when we were young and taking nightly trips to this particular casino, I gave him his $500 back even though he owed me $1,300 from a couple previous things he needed help with.
And he tried to refuse accepting the money, citing that he owed me, but I wasn’t going to be denied because in my heart I had a strong feeling like he and I weren’t going to be seeing each other anymore. I imagine he could feel it, too. I just wanted my hands clean of owing him anything at all, which does sound strange because, again, he was in fact the one who owed me. And he still does, despite it being such an inconsequential figure.
Nevertheless, in the coming days I carried with me a heavy heart and maintained a depressed disposition — insofar as not having much of an appetite and keeping such a lingering thought in my head that my best friend and I were no longer — and this lasted for a couple weeks. Finally one day for no apparent reason I decided to talk about it while on a dead craps game with one of my coworkers, and he was about ten years older than me and we grew up like three blocks from one another in San Bernardino CA. I keep my personal life away from work most of the time, but something told me this was someone I could talk to and trust, so I laid out the situation to him.
He was understanding, per usual, but I’ll never forget what he said when it came to people like Trey, who not only are womanizing but have, like, a problem, or addiction, to such things. And what this coworker of mine said is that to them it’s a game, and what bigger prize to capture than the mother of one’s best friend?
Suddenly I felt all right about the situation. I didn’t forgive what Trey did, or I suppose attempted, but I forgave him for the person he is. Because I think if sneaking behind your best friend’s back to try to sleep with his mom is an item in need of checking off your bucket list, then you have a problem. And seeing it from this perspective, it made me feel sorry for Trey.
The real shame was on me, for despite being closer to Trey than anyone outside of his own family, over the many years I had known him I had convinced myself that I was the exception to his pathological lies and untoward behaviors. In some instances I was part of the lies, and partook in the lies, if it meant I could help him in some way. We were just so good at it, playing off of each other, that I could tell simply by a look he gave me, or the tone of voice he was using, and my brain would switch into my own lying, and my own bullshitting mode, and then he and I after all was said and done for the night would laugh all the way home about it.
So I couldn’t imagine him using my faithful friendship and unwavering loyalty against me, which is why I dismissed my mother as easily as I did and why I looked for any reasonable excuse from Trey during our subsequent phone call to make sense of it. Had he not texted me the following morning, asking for our address to send a Christmas card — having said that was the reason he called my mom while she was at work — there is a very real chance the two of us, Trey and I, would still be present-day exactly as we always were.
The biggest shock of the entire situation was just that: That the absolute greatest liar and game-player I have ever met could be capable of forgetting after some 12 hours had passed about the goddamn Christmas card.
Trey might not have been the best at mathematics, or writing a 500-word essay, but my guy was as sharp as anyone who has ever lived about maintaining a lie from days or weeks or months prior and bringing it up before me in common conversation at some random occasion that benefitted him, such that I could validate whatever was such a lie that he told, and oftentimes the lies would become so layered that they sprouted roots of their own and turned into an alternate universe that only he and I inhabited, of something that allegedly ‘happened’ which never, in fact, did, such that certain people would not have to know his whereabouts on certain nights.
I think seeing him in action as often as I did and, again, being a part of it as often as I was, completely blinded me. Like it gave me immunity. And it’s true irrefutably that I loved Trey more than I loved my own brothers, and that I trusted Trey more than I have ever trusted anybody. Although I’ll never know the straight dope about how much exactly he got away with in terms of how many liberties he took when it came to our interpersonal relationship, I can’t help but think, what with trying to sleep with my mom, that there had to be more than just the tip of such an iceberg.
Crazily enough, perhaps because I am nothing more than just a glutton for punishment, there were a few nights, early on, maybe within six months or a year after the situation broke us up, that I called Trey in an attempt to talk to him. And each time he let the phone ring out until his voicemail came on; he didn’t hit the red button on his iPhone after a ring or two to give me the satisfaction. I wasn’t calling to yell at him or demand of an apology that I knew he would never give. For I knew he would deny and deny and deny until he was blue in the face. I was just calling to say hi. To say what’s up. To catch up.
Then some years passed, and I became full-time at the casino. I got myself a girlfriend and she came with me one day to Redlands CA while I got my haircut, and she wanted to get coffee at a cute little coffee shop downtown and when we were done drinking our coffee we walked back to my car and lo and behold Trey was getting out of his truck because he and I shared the same barber from back in like 2010 but the barber was always good about keeping our appointments separated so he didn’t expect that Trey and I would run into one another. Had my girlfriend and I not went to get coffee, Trey and I wouldn’t have seen each other. But we did, and we shook hands, and that was that.
Another year or so went by and one of Trey’s older brothers passed away, so my mom and I went to the funeral. Covid was happening and so the church could only be filled with so many people, but after the service I walked over and gave a hug to every one of Trey’s family members — because I do love them like my own family — and when Trey and I met we gave each other a hug and I told him I Love You and he responded the same, and that also was that.
Then a couple years ago his other older brother passed away, and even though this particular brother and I had for a time an ironclad relationship of our own, I didn’t think it was my place to show up again. I contributed to the GoFundMe and everything, but in all the months and years that had passed I feel like Trey had made his stand with me, that by his inaction and apparent feelingless-ness towards our friendship he let me know that I was expendable.
But nothing that happened really changes the way I feel, or have felt, about him. When we were kids we had this fight one night outside of Del Rosa Lanes bowling alley in San Bernardino CA and didn’t speak to one another for a year and a half. And upon seeing each other again (a year and a half later) it was like we picked up where we left off. Many lifetimes could pass and something very similar would happen again, because there really isn’t any turning back from everything we went through.
The thing that originally brought us together, Trey and I, was our nature. On the surface we were as opposite as opposites could be: him an artist and I the logical type; he being tall and me short; he wearing his glasses and me without any; he with his tattoos everywhere on full display while mine remain hidden; he with his dancing abilities to me with my two left feet; his right-handedness to my left-handedness; his fall equinox to mine spring.
But our nature revolved around the limits of just how far we could perpetually push the envelope, so to speak, and how much we could get away with before it became problematic. Trey and I very much prescribed to the idea of playing with fire, and I think we both found some love for it at the earliest stages of our lives. As such he and I were forever simpatico. We met each other, and we learned each other, and we had so grave and dangerous an amount in common that neither of us had a choice but to become exactly what it is we became.
It’s in these great strengths of ours, however, that become such great weaknesses. This pride that we shared led us to many petty fights, some that broke us up and others that, for the fainter of hearts, easily could have. I as a winner liked at everything to win, and he as a winner must defeat me whenever possible. It is thus how the two of us grew such a fondness for gambling, and of loving games where, opposed to how we, together, were able to secure so much control in so many aspects of everyday life, had no control over the outcomes of such gambles.
Sometimes, however, pushed too far the envelope does go, and the fire with which one plays does burn. And such pride would not allow me as if nothing had happened to carry on, and such pride did not allow him to admit mistake where called for was such an admission. So goes the story of Trey and I.
And I don’t know how differently I was supposed to manage the situation. Did I not make my best attempt at ignorance by pulling the wool over my eyes at first instinct? Did I not take my best friend’s word, and side, over my own mother’s, when originally the news made its way upon my ears? Even after all was said and done, did I not allow Trey an escape hatch by virtue of a simple apology — one that was clearly and objectively owed to me?
Here I found one of the few moments in my life where I was willing to set aside my own pride, which ironically enough involved perhaps the most blatant betrayal I have ever encountered. To see it written before me in such a way is almost embarrassing, the fact that that was how much and how deeply I loved this man, this one best friend of mine.
Alas, what manifests out of such a circumstance is merely another rung up the ladder, another notch on the belt, and another so-called life experience to draw upon. Just as with a precious couple others, Trey is a person I don’t much prefer to talk about publicly because he and everything that came with him, and the relationship we shared, is so goddamn personal to me. And it’s with the people that I grew to have such love for, and such tight-knit relations with, whose stories so often go untold in my everyday life — even though they are always the best and most interesting stories to tell.
Just as Trey was the kid I grew up with, from boyhood to manhood, so too did he offer me this final lesson which allowed me to grow up further by growing apart from him. As much as it hurt initially coming to grips with such a situation, I thought it was going to hurt a lot more than it ultimately did. And as much of a surprise it was to learn of his betrayal, the biggest surprise of all was that I got over it so quickly, as simply as one who gets out of one cab and into another.
And so over these last handful of years my life has been as stable as it ever was, notwithstanding the small stint of the past year or so in which I have exhausted many words about on this particular blog. That was nothing, really. Not in comparison to a topic such as this that does not so freely remove itself from my fingertips.
I am willing to admit that my life has never been the same without him, because how could it? I mean there’s the obvious like day-to-day bullshit of being kids in high school, and getting our names called back-to-back during graduation; there were the nightly conversations while I was away for a year at Virginia Tech when I would call him at 12:00 A.M. Eastern Time while it was 9:00 P.M. PST; there was my arrival back home, and our subsequent departure from one another; and then there was also a glorious stage when we reconvened, where we lived together for a year or so and went to the casino damn near every night and I eventually started going to dealer school.
And always throughout it all we had a telepathic type of connection, and we used it to like work damn near everybody who existed in our universe. All of those late-night phone calls, those which were about nothing, were actually the holy grail of bouncing ideas off of one another, and of making our future moves, some which happened and others that never got off the ground, and I remember around the time that we stopped engaging anymore with one another our motive was to figure out how to start a business together — as that was our dream, Trey’s and mine, and what so many of our years had been building towards.
But when I think of him now I don’t really miss the struggles of how to manipulate this woman or that, or of the potential ability for the two of us together to become co-owners of some business. I just miss having somebody I don’t have to think for a second or two about choosing my words correctly in front of whenever I open my mouth. I miss the utter lack of judgement for being who I am, and doing what I do. I miss having somebody whom, regardless of the contents of this particular subject matter, I could rely on completely.
In Communication Theory this relationship would be described as a ‘stable exchange,’ the final and most intimate stage of the Social Penetration Theory. Where every card on the table has been shown and every chip played. Where when I crashed my car and almost died in 2013 it was Trey who showed up at the wreckage at approximately 3:00 A.M. PST because at that hour I had no one else to turn to. Where when he and our mutual friend, whom Trey and I partied with at his apartment the last time Trey and I hung out in any sort of capacity, were out in a pickle, surrounded by police one morning while they were graffitiing the streets of downtown San Bernardino, it was I who answered the call and picked them up and drove them home, passing multiple cop cars with their lights on while we escaped.
In other words, you never know how close you are to somebody until the true moments of consequence arise. When it came to Trey, and when it came to me, there was never a need to ask a question. For we were always there for one another.
I write about this now because every year when September rolls around, it’s Trey’s birthday month so he is who I think about. The equinox is coming again for it’s biannual revolution of equal light. Summertime is ending. The leaves will again decide which colors they wish to become. The weather is cooling. I can already smell it in the air.
And Trey and I have more important shit to deal with than some petty circumstance which split our friendship in half. He has children, and they are growing. I lost two friends, and he lost two brothers. In the greatest of realms that decide what Matters and what Matters Not, this of which I choose to write falls certainly in the latter category.
With as much time to reflect on it as has been granted me, over these last five or six or seven years — however long it’s been — I’m honestly under the impression that Trey didn’t even mean anything by it. That it was just Trey being Trey, and that he couldn’t help himself. It is thus how I made peace originally, by forgiving him privately not for what he did but for who he is. Because while I have not spoken to him in these many years, instinctually I know still if he or his family ever needed of me anything at all that I would be there. And I have a feeling like the same would be true from his end, regardless of everything that transpired.
That is just who I am as a man, I suppose. This unspoken and perhaps undeserving loyalty I give. Often I waste away my time chasing the latest and greatest high, whether it be of the flesh or of capital or some rush of adrenaline in any manner whatsoever. And I fool myself into believing these castles I manufacture in my head for such transient endeavors are built, sturdy and firm, until arrives a mere common gust of wind to remind me that such a foundation is made only of sand.
The reason Trey still means so much to me, even here, well past the end of it all, is due to the fact that on innumerable occasions spanning well north of a decade such a common gust between us did come and go. And even the stiff winds came. They came to erase all the sandcastles I built for all of the passers-by, so much so that I can hardly remember most of them.
Yet when such a dust was settled, all that remained were the real castles, the actual ones, those which were not built of sand. These are the structures that have lasted through time, that were maintained in some way, for they took years of hard work both to construct and keep erect, those which, albeit neglected, stand strong still. And commensurate to how highly they rose, and rose they did, is how deeply those roots were cultivated beneath the earth.
° ° ° ° °
Kansas City Chiefs 27, Baltimore Ravens 20
The end of this game is what will be remembered, as with no time left on the fourth quarter game clock Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson threw an absolute strike to tight end Isaiah Likely in the back of the end zone for what appeared to be a game-tying touchdown. With head coach John Harbaugh holding up two fingers, signifying Baltimore would attempt a game-winning two-point conversion, replays showed one of Likely’s toes barely scraping the white chalk, thus nullifying the touchdown and giving the Kansas City Chiefs a 27-20 victory.
The truth of the game is it shouldn’t have been close enough for such a play to happen in the first place. The lazy Chiefs fan take would be to say that The Better Team Won, but that is an easy thing to say during any win given that Kansas City are back-to-back Super Bowl champions and entered the 2024 season as the betting favorite to win it again. In other words, the Chiefs are always going to be the better team — regardless of opponent.
The reason that the better team won this game is because it was in many ways a dominant performance. Early on, it was obvious that Baltimore’s offensive line could not withstand the Kansas City pass rush, and for much of the game Lamar Jackson was forced into either throwing short passes (oftentimes behind the line of scrimmage) or scrambling. He ended his night with a whopping 16 carries for 122 yards, an untenable workload over a full season.
The Chiefs offense ended with 27 points, but in the spirit of the most perfect analogy that they have a habit of ‘playing with their food,’ they indeed left very much meat on the bone. Twice they had drives stall inside the red zone, and strangely decided to punt the ball on a 4th-and-5 from around midfield. One could argue that with a 20-10 lead at the time of said punt they must’ve felt extremely confident in the defense. And yet it speaks to all the points they left on the table.
The offense was led by second-year receiver Rashee Rice, who picked up where he left off last season by gathering 7 catches for 103 yards and establishing himself clearly as Patrick Mahomes’s favorite target. Rookie Xavier Worthy added two touchdowns, one on a Tyreek Hill-style reverse and the other on a broken coverage where he found himself wide the fuck open alongside the right boundary. Travis Kelce (3 catches, 34 yards) did essentially nothing in the statistical department, but it was right in line with my theory that the Chiefs will be keeping him in the garage for most of the season and unleash him during the games that matter (i.e. the playoffs).
And one can dream on exactly how the offense will look once Hollywood Brown returns from a shoulder injury he suffered during the first preseason game against the Jaguars. Because everything tonight already seemed to be there. Isiah Pacheco did his thing in the running game; the offensive line held up against one of the better defensive units in the NFL; there is simply too much speed running around on the outside and it’s going to allow the Rashee Rice’s and Travis Kelce’s of the world to eat in the middle of the field. I do not have any clue what it’s going to look like when a defensive coordinator ‘figures it out,’ so to speak, but even then the Chiefs will be able to learn from it and offer a counterpunch.
Some may lament the defense and how they performed during certain stretches of this game, but I’d give them a solid grade of B-average given that Baltimore found its most success during two-minute and on long fifty-fifty-type long passes. They offered consistent pressure in the pass rush and held Derrick Henry to 46 yards on 13 carries (3.5 yards per), and on the consequential drive that ultimately decided the game they were clearly fatigued in the way that every team is going to be fatigued in Week One.
° ° ° ° °
Chuck Klosterman in his book Eating The Dinosaur (2009) writes of the popular band Weezer, and argues that lead singer Rivers Cuomo has always been honest and literal, devoid of any irony. That he writes, Cuomo, I mean, without any intention of trying to connect with other people, and that it was a more or less a mistake that so many people attached themselves and were able to relate to Weezer’s most popular album, Pinkerton (1996). However, because of that perfect storm, everything afterwards is viewed as a disappointment because it seems that he is now purposefully avoiding that connection, almost making fun of his original fans.
My favorite album of the last three years comes from arguably my favorite all-time band — The Killers — and it’s called Pressure Machine (2021). What’s strange about my liking towards this particular album is that it is easily the least critically acclaimed of all The Killers musical content, possessing nothing in terms of either radio-friendly singles or the iconic sound that has made the band famous over the last 20 years.
Nonetheless, contrary to records such as ‘Mr. Brightside’ (off of Hott Fuss [2004]) or ‘When You Were Young’ (from Sam’s Town [2006]), Pressure Machine eschews radio play and the band’s signature guitar sounds and keyboard mastery almost as if the decision was intentional. The album is so strait-forward and clean that it’s hardly recognizable compared to rest of the band’s abundant catalogue.
But what puts it over the top for me, personally, is that the album is so goddamn workingclass (i.e. relatable). And when last year on September 21st, 2023, I saw them perform at Yaamava Casino in Highland CA, lead singer Brandon Flowers went on a few-minutes-long story about how the band’s drummer (Ronnie Vannucci) had a mom who worked at one of the downtown casinos in Las Vegas for over 20 years as a cleaning lady. I imagine Flowers was using such a story in a way to relate to where the band happened to be that night — at a casino — but I consumed such an anecdote to help make some sense out of why Pressure Machine was so different than anything else the band has done.
Of the multitude of reasons why Pressure Machine is so good is because it captures the lives of ordinary people. Over the last couple years I have shifted from having this and that as my favorite song, from ‘Another Life’ to ‘In The Car Outside’ all the way to ‘The Getting By.’ The beauty of having an entire album without one or two singles to clasp onto, such that they represent a sort of marker that one keeps coming back to, is it allows the audience, and almost implores them, to really listen to each song, and in a sense have an ability to grow up and understand each song when it’s time to grow up and understand them.
The other night I put on the self-titled record of the album — ‘Pressure Machine’ off the album Pressure Machine, as it were — and the lyrics are so blatant and in your face that one needs not to do much analyzing or configuring as to What It All Means. And it’s perhaps true that up until that moment the other night I never actually listened, but there I was:
Hope’ll set your eyes agleam
Like four feet dangling in the stream
The Kingdom of God it’s a pressure machine
Every step, gotta keep it clean
A mattress on a hardwood floor
Who could ever ask for more?
I’ll get up and cut the grass
Ain’t nothing wrong with working class
I, I don’t remember the last time
You asked how I was
Don’t you feel the time slipping away?
It ain’t funny at all
It’s gonna break your heart one day
Keep the debt cloud off the kids
Only sunshine on their lids
Jiminy Cricket and Power Wheels
And memories of Happy Meals
Sometimes I look at the stars
I think about how small we are
Sweating it out in the pressure machine
Good ’til the last drop
Why don’t you say little things?
Butterflies don’t just dance on a string
It feels like you clipped all their wings
And every year goes by faster than the one before
We had that treadmill now for months
I think she might’ve used it once
If I shut my mouth and keep the peace
She’ll cook my eggs in bacon grease
Life’ll grow you a big red rose
Then rip it from beneath your nose
And run it through the pressure machine
And spit you out a name tag memory
° ° ° ° °
‘That is, to live selfishly,’ said Yuan bluntly.
‘Have it so,’ Sheng answered cooly. ‘But who is not selfish? We are all selfish. Meng is selfish in his very cause. That cause! Look at its leaders, Yuan, and dare to say they are not selfish — one was a robber once — one has shifted back and forth to this winning side and that — how does the third one live except upon the very money he collects for his cause? — No, to me it is more honorable to say straightly, I am selfish. I take this for myself. I take my comfort. So be it that I am selfish. But also I am not greedy. I love beauty. I need a delicacy about me in my house and circumstances. I will not live poorly. I only ask enough to surround myself with peace and beauty and a little pleasure.’
‘And your countrymen who have no peace or pleasure?’ Yuan asked, his heart seething in him.
‘Can I help it?’ Sheng replied. ‘Has it not been for centuries that the poor are born and famines come and wars break out, and shall I be so silly as to think that in my one life I can change it all? I would only lose myself in struggle, and in losing myself, my noblest self, this me — why should I struggle against a people’s fate? I might as well leap in the sea to make it dry up into productive land —’
Yuan could not answer such smoothness. That night he could only lie awhile after Sheng had gone to sleep and listen to the thunder of that vast changing city beating against the very walls against which he lay.
— A House Divided
° ° ° ° °
She’s 27. She has two young children and describes the relationship she is in as ‘it’s complicated.’ Her skin is pale like porcelain but she speaks the most beautiful Spanish my ears have ever heard. She is taller than I am, in the way that she stands a couple inches above my slight five-foot-seven-inch frame, meaning if ever she wore heels in front of me she would be a tower. Her body is slender and she walks and moves so gracefully, a woman one could easily picture wearing a fancy hat at the Kentucky Derby, or smoking a cigarette Cruella de Vil-style with an extender, or dressing up real Roaring Twenties-esque. She is all I see.
It’s fucked up, really, because I trained this woman at work about a month ago. And over the years I have trained a handful of young and attractive females, and I always make it a point whenever I do not to make any moves or go out of my way flirting with them, because generally at that point I would see myself as nothing more than being on the right side of a glorified pimping operation. Where I get hand-selected to usher in a new crop of table games dealer and take advantage of my duty or role by acting as I may in everyday life.
So when this one fell down from the heavens and onto my lap, so to speak, I kept it so goddamn professional that one ought not recognize me. And yet one such as myself never really gets to decide what time it is until the moment arrives, which it did. She did, anyway. And as it goes she was the one who dictated to me that I had no choice but to take an interest, for she made it clear of her own.
And I have been doing very well of recent, pursuant to my last blog. No females have been present in my life. I’ve neither slept with anybody nor come close. Off the grid I have gone and some happiness I have found. I have taken my pleasure by removing myself from anything that could render itself as problematic.
Could this woman perhaps be the prize through all of my recent inactions that I have been waiting for? Who knows. I don’t carry with me any expectations whatsoever, and I am done making any sort of practice involving myself with anybody I work with, and yet at the same time while I keep to myself my hands and other physiological appendages I am resigned to this notion that if she decides I am worth rolling the dice over that I do not have the strength to deny her will.
This is why I imagine so often I prescribe to the kindergarten, playground-style ethics of engaging with the opposite sex. I must be the meanest and most asshole-ish version of myself to those whom I admire and adore most ardently. I must weed out the weak — for only the strong survive — and if the challenge gets accepted, then I have no choice but to accept it in return.
What I mean to say is this: I can no more help being myself than she can being her own self. And although I wish not to make my entire life a labyrinth of self-fulfilling prophecies, I feel as if I am opening a door that I have already been through, and it would be counterproductive if I spent so much of my time over this last year making it a theme on my blog — of learning from recent mistakes — and yet still finding a convenient type of amnesia for this girl specifically because a larger and more impactful theme throughout my own personal life experience is the fact that I have proven myself poor at exercising such self control.
This is déjà vu. Where this one certain apple of everyone’s eye is fixated on mine. Where she’s, like, infatuated, and I don’t know what I am doing to make it so, because as I already just said: I can be nothing other than who I already am. And she remains so curious of why I ignore her, and why I bully her. And she also gives these really perfect kinds of hugs, where my arms surround her body as if it was built for me and me only, and then she pulls me in ever tighter, and laments through a text message before the night is over that I released far too soon.
She is empathetic. She doesn’t even yet know who I am but still she knows, you know? Wherever there is a common wrinkle in the fabric she questions me on what eats me, what bothers me, what annoys me, and maybe it’s her. Maybe it’s this idea that I never want or seek for anything and yet it still comes. Maybe I am afraid of her, and the unknown of what she brings with her. Maybe I had planned on having a hiatus from women that carried with it no expiration date. Maybe I do fall in love too easily.
I watched The 40 Year Old Virgin a couple months back, and there was that scene where the character Jay (Romany Malco) tells the film’s protagonist (Steve Carrel), upon him (Carrel) having a certain interest in a woman, that he shouldn’t lose his virginity to her, that he should instead ‘just get a bunch of these hood rats.’ And while these hood rats aren’t and never have been and never will be The One, they do make the world go ’round. They are the elixir to being so absent and so self-interested and feeling so empty so much of the time.
It is not ironic in any sort of way that upon checking out, in a sense, of such women — these hood rats — even in spite of my absence and self-absorption and emptiness, I got gifted this flower. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, either.
Because where I come from, I spend all my time knocking myself down for not having the physical frame I would have desired in my youth, nor the dashing good looks that dwarf over mine in comparison to many of my immediate contemporaries, and so it’s always a confusing sort of reality to live in where these truly exquisite creatures choose me — when it is much more in my nature simply to keep my head down.
° ° ° ° °
Kansas City Chiefs 26, Cincinnati Bengals 25
I had to work so my engagement to this game — in realtime — was scattered and sketchy at best. I saw this play and that play, and Harrison Butker’s game-winning field goal as time expired, but as a whole it seemed as if each time I looked up at the television screen that Patrick Mahomes had thrown another interception (of which he had three, but one was called back due to penalty on the defense) or that the Chiefs were moving in the wrong direction.
Upon rewatching the game when I got home, it didn’t appear that I really missed anything. Kansas City played an exceptionally sloppy game, featuring not only those two interceptions but also a lost fumble, and it is these types of games which have kind of become the hallmark for the two-time defending champs. Rarely are they pretty, but almost always they — the Chiefs — find a way to come out on top.
It does speak in some way to their overall greatness that they three times gave away the football, that Mahomes finished the day with a pedestrian 151 passing yards on only 18 completions, that the defense allowed 25 points to a team that scored just 10 against the Patriots in Week One, and still they managed to scrape out a win versus a team tied with the second-highest projected win total (10.5) in the AFC.
The only real takeaways to be gleaned from such a game is that the Chiefs will be without their workhorse running back, Isiah Pacheco, for 6-8 weeks due to a fractured fibula, which is compounded by finding out earlier in the week that WR Hollywood Brown will likely miss the entirety of the regular season because of his shoulder injury. All of a sudden Kansas City appears thin at their talent positions.
And yet, what other team in the NFL could suffer from such a talent drop-off and it be worth little more than a shrug? After all, the Chiefs have Patrick Mahomes. They have proven they can win with a depleted receiver group. They have proven they can win by relying on their defense.
In this quest for a first-ever Super Bowl three-peat, however, I think a good chance remains that they will bolster the offense with a new toy here or a new toy there, such that they won’t have a margin of error so slim as they had a season ago. This, I fear, is not the season for the Chiefs to take such chances and rely on their Jesus Christ figure playing quarterback.
As it stands after two weeks, Kansas City is 2-0 and two of their main rivals in the AFC — the Ravens and Bengals — are each 0-2 and do not possess the tiebreaker with the Chiefs should they end the regular season with the same record. There are problems to be corrected and better football yet to be played, but this team makes a habit every year of fucking around and doing weird shit and improving upon their deficiencies rather than trying to hide them.
° ° ° ° °
When I became full-time at the casino I work at the year was, I think, like 2019 or something. I’d been working there for four and a half years, and when a position opened for me to go full-time I accepted it, conditional on moving to the swing shift — which back then was from 7:00 P.M. PST until 3:00 A.M. (even though most nights I’d get off at 1:00 A.M. or so depending on business.
I lived in Riverside CA, and since I worked out in the Palm Springs area, and since it takes roughly an hour to get from Riverside to the desert, and since rush hour traffic is a thing, it was really taking me like an hour and 45 minutes to get to work every night. This was a real bitch to deal with, as one can imagine. So the first chance I got to return to day shift (where I miss both the morning and evening rushes in traffic) I did, which was right before Covid.
I always did like the swing shift, though, mostly because it was so much busier and more alive inside the casino. My game of choice — craps — was also much busier and much more action-packed, and honestly I never knew whether or not I was good enough at dealing the fucking thing until all the swing shift veterans accepted me and confirmed me into their fraternity. It didn’t take long for them to respect me, but the impression I got from them — for making me feel like I belonged — has never left.
So it was kind of my silent, private notion that once I moved closer to my workplace that I would make my return to swing shift. In April, when I moved from Riverside to Cathedral City CA, I began my political badgering at the bosses to get me there. Unfortunately for me, staff has been so bootstrapped over these land handful of months that for the first time in the ten years I have worked at this particular casino, we were too short on day shift for me to make the move.
That is, of course, (since I am writing about this right now) until recently. Sometime next month I will be making the move back to swing shift to deal craps again.
And I had buyer’s remorse almost immediately upon signing my name on the silly little posting. Like, I felt almost as if the only reason I was putting in for the damn thing was because I have been running my mouth about it so much over the last several months. The truth is, this has been arguably the most comfortable (and certainly the most profitable) era of day shift I have experienced. It doesn’t totally make sense for me to do this right now. Yet this is what I am going to do. I am going to do it because I must do it.
Last night I was watching on YouTube a series called America’s Game: The Story of the 2023 Kansas City Chiefs, which annually spends an hour highlighting whichever team won the Super Bowl the previous year. I would have watched it eventually — since you would be hard-pressed to find any Chiefs-related content that I haven’t seen — but there was this scene where Travis Kelce is being interviewed and giving a soundbite about the playoffs, and he said something like, ‘These are the moments you live for. You live for that pressure.’
And suddenly I was reminded of a conversation I had with the most experienced craps dealer I have ever known, a man who went by the name of David (Dave) Lewis, and a couple years ago when two of my friends — both craps dealers — got married, Dave kind of pulled me aside and he and I were talking and he told me, in whichever way he said it, that he always liked dealing craps with me because he noticed early on and always that when the lights got the brightest I always performed my best. That I not only enjoyed the pressure of a jammed up craps game, but that I needed it. He told me I was a true craps dealer, and that I could deal it anywhere in the world.
A couple months ago cancer took Dave away from us, and as I got elevated to commissioner of the fantasy football league which features craps dealers — exclusively — at the casino I work at, it was the idea of one of our members to rename the league in his honor. And so it is: The Dave Lewis Hot Water Fantasy Football League.
I used to deal craps on the day shift, and surely there was from time to time a busy game to navigate through. But it was not until I stepped foot on the swing shift and dealt with the Dave Lewis’s of the world, the veterans who spent time in old school Vegas, and Lake Tahoe, and Biloxi MS, and Atlantic City NJ, etc., who made me feel like finally I was home. They took a kid and turned him into a bonafide dice dealer, and ever since I returned to the day shift and the casino subsequently got rid of day shift craps, I have felt a void inside of me. The one that says no matter how happy I am, and that no matter how much money I am making, I will be unfulfilled so long as I do not feel that pressure of being on a craps game when there are eight players on either side and the action becomes overwhelming.
And I remember being a 24 year-old kid starting out at this particular casino and being on the smoking patio around 2:00 A.M. PST and all the craps dealers would come out, and Dave was one of them. And I was real quiet and shy back then. I’ve always been, like, confident in my abilities, but around these handful of giants I always deferred. They intimidated me. Gave me something to aspire to. And throughout all my days of dealing craps on day shift I never really accepted myself, or believed in myself, until finally I was able to show the swing shift craps dealers what I’ve got, and who I am, and of all the giants I once saw it was Dave Lewis who made realize that I was a giant of my own.
Just as I must keep applying the pressure in my own everyday reality, so too must I welcome the pressure that for these last few years I have been longing for. I fear that returning to the craps table is the only way I may be satiated such.
I saw Dave at a Christmas Party last December, 2023, and it was obvious that he had been slowing down. It wasn’t terribly long after that when he got admitted into a hospice type of facility, where every couple weeks I would ask how he was doing from my friends who were visiting him regularly and taking care of everything that he needed taking care of before his time came. And I regretted not having the strength to abandon my important fucking life for even an hour or so and asking the question of where he was staying, and if I might be able to see him.
Because Dave and I, whenever we saw each other on the smoking patio, were always like peas and carrots. If I was reading a book — which I do whenever I am on the patio, to stave off unwanted conversations — I would gladly drop it to listen to him tell me stories about his time at this casino or that, or work he did in this city or that, just to make ends meet, and I would pitch in with my irrelevant life experiences, and he would listen. And he really liked me. Not as much as I liked him, but he respected that I was a young man cut from the same cloth.
And so when the fantasy football league draft got going, and everyone was there, I was kind of up in front of everyone — all my friends, that is — and I started talking about how we were going to have a good year, a fun year, together, and one of the guys — the one whose idea it was to name the league after Dave Lewis — told me to give a commissioner’s speech, and even though I hadn’t really planned on it and still felt strange giving any sort of speech whatsoever, even in front of my friends, all I could think of was Dave, so that’s what I said.
That Dave made me feel, by virtue of his acceptance of me on the craps table, like I was one of the guys. That he was the original. That made me that much more confident in my abilities. That he was always there.
And it broke me when one of my friends, one of the ones who was helping check in on him and care for him during his last days, when Dave was on his way out, told me one evening on that same smoking patio, that Dave’s ex-wife visited him and that when she, this friend of mine who was helping care for him, went to visit him one last time, that Dave and his ex-wife were lying down together in his hospital bed listening to the song they danced to at their wedding. It was both the saddest and most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.
° ° ° ° °
Kansas City Chiefs 22, Atlanta Falcons 17
Let us not waste too many words talking about this one, as the final score pretty much says it all. Who scores 22 points and wins a football game? Who scores 22 points at all, ever? 22 is such a stupid number.
I do think it’s funny, though, how this was dubbed as one of the most important games in modern-day Atlanta Falcons history, what with their owner self-inducting himself into the franchise’s Ring of Honor, and how they were giving away free hot dogs and shit, and how the Chiefs essentially played their C- football game and could have lost at two different opportunities in the 4th quarter, and yet, alas, all they do is win. Kansas City, that is.
There will be a time to take a sober look at the performance of the offense, where the Chiefs possess very little in terms of a running game and very little — aside from convicted-felon-to-be Rashee Rice — in the passing game. Travis Kelce has been non-existent, which is right in line with why I refused to draft him in fantasy, because I figured he would do the exact same thing he did last year and fuck around during the regular season only to turn into TRAVIS KELCE again during the playoffs, but it is still too early to toot my own horn.
The Chiefs are 3-0. I’m having a hard time giving a fuck until something arises that actually matters.
Future Bets 
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