November 2024

Aside from the normal life schedule adjustments (which are ongoing) from switching shifts at work, and negotiating through a pseudo-type of a relationship where neither side is, like, officially committed to one another but where we also aren’t looking for anybody else, I have struggled to find any topics that are worth talking about for the November 2024 edition of Future Bets.

A part of me hates that, this idea that nothing is going on in my life that I must put the time in to discuss. Another part of me — a much larger one, I’d argue — kind of longs for these sorts of breaks in the action. Because as much as I enjoy projecting my thoughts and my feelings onto this screen, there is a lot to be said for the old cliché that No News Is Good News.

While I am fairly certain over the course of the coming days and weeks that something will arise, something family-related or work-related or interpersonal-relationship-related, such a day is not today. Today we will spend our time appreciating this minor glimpse of contentedness that signifies everything is all right. Everything is okay. The fires we spend our time making and the fires we spend the rest of our time extinguishing need sometimes not be there.

I was out last night, coincidentally, with two of the people I mentioned in last month’s blog — Spencer and George — and perhaps it was the beers we were consuming and perhaps it was aided by the weed pen Spencer had on his person, but I was met by what felt like the first spoonful of true inspiration I have experienced in so long that I can’t even remember when the last time was.

Ironically enough George and Spencer were sort of spewing their various conspiracies of the Covid era, of which we all agreed that during quarantine it was kind of awesome, and then I chimed in to say that I don’t believe in any of the government control nonsense, nor do I believe it was all some grand experiment. My name is Eric and I am no fun, in other words.

The ironic part is that they, Spencer and George, are both conservative but were talking about the benefits of collectivism, and how smart foreign cultures are when it comes to pooling their money and resources once they are living in America, and that Americans themselves are so individualized that they are actually at a disadvantage when it comes to buying property and are disconnected enough from their own family members to do something so clever as to pooling money and resources, etc.

And so as they went on about the Armenian culture, and the Native American culture — as two examples — and how they can live together and run businesses together, for the betterment of everybody, and when we all hypothesized about executing a similar sort of community, only with Spencer (a black guy), George (an hispanic guy), and I (a white guy), and how we all make X amount of money, and that they would look out for me, and I would look out for them, and that everybody would look out for everybody, etc., it really did make a helluva lot of sense. Like it is an idea that is obtainable, given the trustworthiness of those living in such a community.

This was where I produced a wry type of smile on my face. This was the moment I gained my ever elusive sense of inspiration. Because when again I opened my mouth to speak I told Spencer and I told George that this idea they/we were speaking of was indeed a form of Communism — the logical conclusion to my own personal philosophy of Socialism. That when you hurt, I hurt. When I hurt, you hurt. We all share in the fruits of abundance, and we all share in the common and collective plight. The original socialist position is that We Are All In The Same Boat.

And they didn’t necessarily like that I invoked the word ‘Communism,’ because it is at the end of the day such a dirty one to most people, but that was essentially what we were talking about. Communism, that is. They were using this collectivism topic as means of realizing personal enterprise — Capitalism, in other words — and I was using it as a way to describe how my worldview is the only way for regular workingclass people to get there.

I don’t care to talk too much about politics anymore in everyday life since already I have been there and already I have done that. To me, politics are tired and boring. And it isn’t as if I don’t pay attention anymore. It isn’t that I don’t, like, care, anymore. Because whether or not I want it politics are happening; they affect each aspect of my life (and everyone else’s). The beauty of being a socialist is that I don’t agree and don’t side with either political party. I think the differences between them — Republican Party and Democratic Party leadership, I mean — are as small as the differences between working people, those who never seem to agree on anything.

It is thus how I view each and every political issue as us vs. them, the workingclass versus the ownership class, the labor v. the capitalists, while in the meantime those at the top spend virtually all of their time and resources convincing the rest of us that our differences are actually massive and that we should waste all of our time fighting amongst ourselves. That ain’t me, baby. I am the mutherfucker who listens to all the crazy shit both sides have to say and still I make my attempts at bringing everyone together on our common ground (which is vast).

This is what reinforces the idea that, in my adult life, I find that my two brothers, Robby and Jeffrey (who go by adult names of their own to everyone else), are my two closest friends. For over these last ten years or so we have already gone through the political battles of disagreeing (but mostly agreeing), and hilariously enough I happen to be the most conservative among the three of us.

But the beauty of our mutual bond as brothers is that we have transcended politics, knowing that nothing is going to change and that it doesn’t matter which party is in power because they are just two sides of the same coin. So we spend our time on our group chat trying to make each other laugh with bullshit sports stuff, or we find random highlights of some random baseball player from our childhood, and everything else is for the birds.

When I was over last Sunday watching the Chiefs and 49ers game my little brother was in San Diego CA visiting one of his high school friends, so I had a few hours where my older brother, Robby, was in the living room with me watching the Lions and Vikings game, and we had a great time. And then he ate a burrito and went to bed (because he works the graveyard shift at the casino he works at), and then my little brother got home and he and I watched the remainder of the Chiefs game. And we had a great time, too, even though I was on the verge the whole time of falling asleep.

We have a day every week, my brothers and I, where we go on Facetime and try to guess the point spreads of the NFL games for the upcoming week, and afterwards we will talk about whatever is going on. Sports stuff. Work stuff. Shitty movies that I have been watching. Etc. And I can see it on their faces and hear it in their voices, each time, that they are just as excited to see me as I am to see them. I know I have mentioned on several blogs that I didn’t get like ‘closer’ to my brothers until I came home from college, but I would argue that the three of us have never been as tight-knit as we are now.

As the resident black sheep of the family, to know my brothers is to know that I make no sense standing next to them. And I don’t mean that necessarily in the physical sense, given that my older brother is north of six feet tall and that my younger brother is what one would objectively consider obese — while I am both short in height and slight in stature. I mean it more so that I have experienced more in life, from drugs to alcohol to gambling to women. It is both to their benefit and their detriment that they aren’t at all like me in many ways.

Yet when I talk about being the ‘black sheep’ it has also to do with all the positives my life experience has given me. Chief among them is that being a hardcore gambler in my early-20’s delivered me unto a career in the casino dealing industry, and although it took me like five years to finally convince them that my way was the way, they joined me. And such a career surrounded me with an overwhelming amount of adults twenty and thirty and forty years older than I am, which made me the patron saint in my family of learning how to save money (through every retirement avenue [401K, Roth IRA, etc.]).

A time will come when my brothers will have to join me in this pursuit of sustainability and longevity. I simply didn’t know how to go about it until my recent conversation with Spencer and George.

What I mean to say is: I have finally a blueprint for the longterm success not only of my two brothers whom both of them I love and adore but for my own self. We must be in this together. We must figure out how to, together, own property and pool our money and our resources if we hope to compete in the future’s game. It doesn’t need to sound corny in a three musketeers All For One And One For All bullshit way. It must instead be a fact of life.

I acknowledge that there is some degree of a god complex flowing through me in saying such a thing, but just as it was the truth, and just as it was correct, in how I guided them to becoming dealers, I feel as if I have accrued amongst them a certain amount of credit in the Real Life department. I can’t imagine the pair of them — my two brothers — are content with living as they are and as they have been as rudderless ships.

And it isn’t their fault. Our father was (and is, as far as my brothers are concerned) not only absent but ignorant to everything that does not currently and immediately impact his life. Our mother is not only an enabler and an alcoholic but equally as ignorant about building towards the future. As such it is my own personal responsibility to drag all of us to the finish line. Together.

Such an idea of collective prosperity will not be easy to convey from my end. Just as my soft jabs and inklings over the years that inevitably got both of my brothers to become dealers, I am aware that this is going to be an undertaking. It will likely require multiple years of work from my end. Of getting them to move out to the desert. Of getting them to work at the casino that I work at currently. But the inspiration is there. The inspiration I have.

I know I am going to see this through and I know I am going to get what I want out of this for no other reason than usually I get what I want. And I know there’s a silence among my two brothers that they both like know. They know that I am right. They look to me, silently, for a certain kind of leadership that they can’t get from either of our parents. They are looking for someone to tell them what to do. They are looking for someone to show them the way.

My own personal problem in these latter stages of young adulthood is that I didn’t myself know the way. It took a conversation with Spencer and George, of which both of them disagree with my philosophy on lefty economics — and in fact are each of an outlook that is the polar opposite of mine — to teach me.

But here I am. This ink cannot be erased. This toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube. My brothers are going to have to be successful in life, and comfortable, because I am going to be successful in life, and comfortable. I used to believe I wouldn’t get to where I need to be unless I found a partner of the female variety who makes a similar amount of money as I do, who shares somewhat in my general worldview. Now I know. Two heads are certainly better than one. But three? Three is even better.

The reason this can work, and the reason this is going to work, is because already both of my brothers agree with me philosophically. Not about the straight dope that Karl Marx wrote about in the Communist Manifesto, nor even what I personally prescribe to in Leon Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution. In other words, this is not about Communism and it isn’t about Socialism. This is about three brothers, and three sons, from two parents who themselves didn’t know any better, finding a way to make it, together, in the Capitalist environment of the United States.

And I know I can do it. I know I can get us there. Because let’s face it: I might not be The One, but when it comes to my family who else is it going to be? Who has a better idea? Who is making an attempt to execute any idea?

I don’t have a fucking clue how eventually I intend to broach this topic with my brothers, because I feel like they are going to be so goddamn defensive about it. They are going to see it as such a drag. Oh, here he comes. Here comes Eric. All arrogant and shit. Trying to tell us how we should live our lives. Trying to tell us what is best for us. As a means to get what’s best for him. It’s going to be uncomfortable, all of this. It is going to take actual work.

The thing is, I once went to an engineering school. In my mind I am an engineer, even though in college I wanted at the time to be a writer. And in 2009 there was this really cold streak that happened upon the east coast and the state of Virginia in particular. And something like 13 or 15 or however many goddamn schools shut down their classes for the week because it was so cold and because the ground was so hardened and so slick with snow and the residue that snow leaves, which makes things such as walking dangerous for students, where the various collection of colleges didn’t want to catch a lawsuit for a kid slipping and cracking their dumbass skull, or whatever, but not Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was an engineering school, so none of our classes (much to our dismay) were canceled that week.

What they did, Virginia Tech, I mean, was to preemptively salt down the roads and the pathways that led and carried the students to their classes. And lugubriously we did walk, us students, that week. Knowing that the kids at fucking James Madison University and Liberty University and UVa all got to stay home, we walked. And we wore our snow boots and our snow jackets and then we went to our 8:00 A.M. classes to learn about Communication Theory from a professor who went to Ohio State and didn’t at all care about VT football but instead around her entire fucking office had nothing but Buckeyes paarifinallia.

And so I will have to salt them down. My brothers, that is. They will be the roads, and the walkways, and the paths, those which both take us and keep us away from Point A and Point B, and I will be the engineer that I always have been. I will be the one to salt the roads, and the walkways, and the path — the ultimate path — that which was true when I first convinced my brothers to become dealers, and that which will be true when finally I convince them, my brothers, that all of our destinies are intertwined, that what is best for them is what is best for me, that what is best for me is what is best for them, and that we can actually do this. Together.

That last word, the final one, is the only word in this article of any import or consequence. If we are to make it in this life — this one life of ours — it can be no other way. For everything is forever working against us. The policies of our corrupt leaders. The ignorance that has been handed down to us from our own loving workingclass parents. Who, then, can we possibly rely upon but each other? Could it be some random woman in my life? Could it be some rich guy or gal to save us? Could it be me, personally, striking gold from some stock that I believe in or some parlay that I hit while I am gambling? Could it be the lottery?

No. That is the answer. In lieu of such a miracle, the truth lies in what has always been true. That family is the answer. That togetherness is the only way. Until I am blue in the face I must keep asking: What is the alternative?

I guess I used to have grand ambitions, once my parents divorced some six or seven years ago, that all of us in our once-nuclear family unit would end up in better positions in life — financially, spiritually, emotionally. That my dad would have no choice but develop better relationships with his three sons. That my mom would be happier by not having the burden of her marriage hanging around her neck like a millstone. That we could all take a deep breath. That the hard part was over.

But I fear I am the only one among us who present-day takes these accounts. Of the depressing reality that envelops constantly the loneliness of my father’s life, where neither of my brothers are in any sort of communication with him and where I am the only one who makes a concerted effort to visit him and make him feel just a little bit more human. And even I could do so much more for him.

Where my mother never did become happy, following the divorce, but instead held tighter onto the bottle of white wine that she once used to help get her through the night and that now she consumes as if it were itself a part of her. Where she enables further my younger brother’s weight problem, and my older brother’s laziness, or fear, for doing basic and necessary things such as renewing his goddamn car registration. She doesn’t want to deal with it, so she drinks.

As for my brothers, I wish I could say that they are doing the best they can. They aren’t. But they are doing at least the bare minimum of what is required of them. They have jobs. They pay the obligatory items that are due at the end of the month. There exists amongst them, however, very little by way of plans for growth. There is zero momentum ongoing for the future. Simply getting by is seemingly the extent of their efforts.

A different way of putting it would be to say that my parents are far less content than they were when they were unhappily married, and that my two brothers are forever sort of captive to the extremely low bar that such a fractured marriage and post-marriage demanded of them. To say I was wrong with my initial prognosis, that we would all be better off, isn’t only an understatement but the opposite — given the veritable slides each of us have experienced.

All of this goes without stating the obvious external factors that have impacted (and continue to impact) all of our lives. I.e., the price of literally everything has gone up over these last six or seven years — rent, groceries, gas, etc. — and the collective pool of money we’ve had to work with has more or less stagnated. My retired father’s Social Security goes up by a certain percentage every year, but not nearly enough to offset the annual rises in his rent, groceries and healthcare. Operating on such slim margins as he has been, a time will come where he will be taking a deficit each month.

And, so, selfishly I realize already the endgame of this dynamic. My dad has almost no money in the bank. Like more than half of Americans he doesn’t have a thousand dollars in savings in case of an emergency, which is why every time he does need a couple hundred bucks here or there I am the only person he goes to. (I am the only person he can go to.)

Short of an outright American revolution — which likely will never happen again — this concentration of wealth amongst the greedy pigs who own all the money and all the property and all the corporations that we are enslaved to will come eventually for my mother and two brothers, as well. After all their rent, too, rises every year. Groceries aren’t getting any cheaper. And wages? Wages remain the same.

As for my plan, the one I have spent this time writing about, it is not only a good idea but a necessary one. I know if I maintain my lifestyle, I can get on with the business of buying a house and having something to show for my labors. But so long as my dad’s Social Security money burns at the alter of paying rent to some cheap yet overpriced apartment complex in San Bernardino CA, and so long as my mom and brothers continue scraping by year-by-year as the rent goes up at the house all of us once shared in Riverside CA, of what good is my own personal situation in life?

Because, like I said, it’s going to end up costing me when my dad inevitably falls underwater on a month-to-month basis; it’s going to end up costing me when my mom and brothers can’t make their financial nut at the end of certain months. Who, then, is there to turn to? Who has just a little bit of security? Who was the one who left his friendly apartment in Downtown Redlands CA some handful of years ago to move back in with his family the last time this happened?

I truly despise portraying myself as some hero or protagonist in this story, but I would literally die for these people of mine and nothing I do for myself will ever be good enough to satisfy me unless they are at least okay. Right now we, together, aren’t there.

I also don’t mean to dramatize everyone else’s discontent. I am merely illustrating my own. In a way, I find that to be the biggest problem. That there seems to be very little thought amongst anyone but me in my family to move forward the ball. That everyone is in their own bubble, so to speak, sort of pretending that everything is all right even though it isn’t. My dad uses conservative news. My mom uses alcohol. My brothers use the idea that they are working and making money and fulfilling their monthly financial duties.

In the meantime I am perhaps the most stable and the most fucked up of us all. The one who occasionally navigates through various squabbles with the opposite sex. The one who from time enjoys a gamble and a strip club and a drink and a drug. The one who falls in love too easily and falls out of it even easier. The one who never appreciates the present because he is so committed to a vision of the future that still has yet to come.

Yet I am also the one, among us, forever this one family unit of mine, who gives the most and asks for nothing. The one who took the risks and experienced enough errors to be able to say I’ve Been There and I’ve Done That and I’ve Seen What It Looks like. The one who can tell you that being a dealer is the best we can do — right now. The one who can tell you how to save money, and invest in the stock market, and put a little bit away for retirement. The one who went to college and saw how the other side of the country looks. The one who doesn’t issue blame for these faults. The one who doesn’t judge for this perpetual lack of action. The one who himself has screwed it up enough times, and to such unfortunate magnitudes, that lets everyone know he won’t be the one to throw any stones from his glasshouse.

As for my brothers, I know they are smart and helpful and good workers and each have certain boyish qualities about them insofar as general enthusiasm for life is concerned. I wouldn’t dream of circling the wagons with them, so to speak, if I didn’t believe in them. No two men would I rather have by my side than my two brothers.

The challenge, the struggle, and the undertaking (that I mentioned earlier), is simultaneously the simple part and the hard part: It is getting them to start, with me, the process and the journey. It will be the art of convincing them — again — that they have the potential and the ability and that there exists between them both, and among them individually, something special which has yet to be tapped into.

It is to that end, specifically, where my duty as a brother begins. Not in imploring them to do what I say because I know it is right, but by instilling in them the confidence that they are allowed to believe in themselves. That this future we inherit doesn’t only belong to everyone else, but the three of us, too. That life doesn’t have to be as pointless as we sometimes feel that it is.

I can’t help but think that was our father’s most egregious error in raising the three of us, that the pride he had for his sons was a silent one, and that seemingly all we ever heard from him were the negatives. Our mother, on the other hand, was the opposite, which is why we always confided in her: For her pride was very public, even when we weren’t doing anything worthy of praise, and the negatives she kept far too silent.

Every child requires of their parents, especially at the earliest stages of development, these various acts and expressions of positive reinforcement. And I am not trying to imply that our dad was in any way a bad father, insofar as those early childhood days, because I think all of us (including our mom) would agree that that was when he, our dad, was at his best. He took us swimming and taught us how to throw a baseball and helped with our homework and all that shit. He lost his touch when we all grew old enough to have opinions of our own. So it goes.

But I think I knew I was my father’s favorite child when I was, like, five years old, likely due to the fact that I required of his three kids the least amount of maintenance and oversight and positive reinforcement. I came out of the womb with a cocksure nature about me, so my self-esteem was never a problem. I had a clear goal in mind when I was nine years old that one day I would go to college and so neither of my parents needed ever to harass me about doing my homework because I was always happy to do it. I also talked to the most shit and challenged my dad more than anyone in the household so I imagine there were times he was kind of afraid of me.

My brothers, however, aren’t (and never were) anything like me. They required more attention from our dad, not only because they needed it — self-esteem-wise — but because they deserved it. And over the years all of these little fractures in our family, having a father so disconnected from his children, and a marriage that wasn’t, like, healthy in the way that a partnership ought to be, pushed each of us into our own separate rooms and in front of our own television sets and gaming consoles, and when our dad started working nights and we had nothing but our mother around to tell us how great we all were, there was very little by way of actual guidance.

At this stage of my life I feel in a strange way as if I am playing the role of father figure to my own parents, pushing each of them softly in different directions such that it may, perhaps one day, deliver them closer to the peace that they desire. With my dad I tried to get him to move out with me — to the desert — such that it would take the burden away from his financial struggles. With my mom it has been like a constant battle to help with her alcoholism, for it is an objective fact that until she quiets it down or knocks it off completely she will be an unhappy traveler on the road she’s on.

My brothers I am less worried about. Unlike my parents I feel as if I do not need to help bring them, my brothers, out of some insurmountable hole, but instead aid in propelling them from ground level up to whatever potential they are capable of. And I don’t know if I’ll be successful at that. I mean, I wasn’t successful at getting my dad to move out with me and I have yet to find any success whatsoever in getting my mom to quit her drinking.

But also I have nothing to lose, save for the pride I feel in thinking I have some control over my immediate surroundings. Spencer and George and I had a conversation about collectivism, and we were drunk and high and going through the hypotheticals of what if we tried something like that. The high and drunk version of myself is a lot like the completely dead sober one: Where I believe absolutely anything is possible.

It was my sober thoughts that brought me back to my brothers, for they are at the end of the day all that I have. And when I think about my own personal ideal vision of the future, I don’t think about anybody but my family. The trials I share in with my parents will continue either until they are accomplished or when the moment arrives when I am standing alongside my brothers at their funerals. In other words: Never will I stop trying.

With my brothers, though, I feel as if I have more time to work with. May they continue, in the meantime, working their casino jobs and making money such that their monthly duties are satiated in my former household, where they parade around being called such names as ‘Rob’ or ‘Robert’ and on the other side ‘Jeff.’

To me, though, they will always be Robby and Jeffrey. They will always be my brothers. They will always be the two and only two who share in it with me the blood of our mom and dad, who have done the best that they could.

As the middle son, I will be the one to remind them that regardless of where we are, or how far we have come, there is more out there. There will always be just a tad further we can go. Together.

° ° ° ° °

Fuck it, it’s November. Let’s give some thanks:

I have been known during the hard times to take things poorly. To take things so goddamn personally. When I did an open mic in Downtown Pasadena CA last year I had this line where I said:

I ain’t that fly
But I do get high
And when I get down
I tend to get more blue than the rest of you

I hope we can forgive the simplicity of my Dr. Seuss-style rhyme scheme; that specific verse wasn’t, like, the crux of the free-form I was delivering; it was just a straightforward message. All of my outcomes — how high I rise and how low I fall — are nothing but the natural response to my lust for life.

Part of this programming that has been hardwired into me arrived (just as it does with everybody) at the earliest stages of both my memories and my development. Whether it be competitive spirit, pride, the expectation of success, a love of both learning and knowing new things, etc., these were all instilled in me by my parents and my brothers and my general surroundings before ever I could even conceive what was happening or what it all meant.

And it does from time work to my detriment, when I am experiencing so-called downswings, for it is true that one’s greatest strengths indeed are their greatest weaknesses. But in the same way I am such a critic of my parents, it’s really to say that my expectations for them are merely a reflection of their expectations of me, and it’s an extreme compliment to each and all of my family members that I am privileged in feeling so highly of myself — which in turn makes me think so highly of them.

Unintentionally this actually kind of dovetails with the original stanza of this blog, about coming from a workingclass family yet never truly exhibiting the intrinsic characteristics of a quote poor kid. As an example, my parents didn’t make me feel dumb, or like it was a farfetched idea, when I said as a nine year-old that I was going to attend Duke University one day and as a career I would end up as the head coach of the school’s basketball team.

Don’t get me wrong, those vibes were similar to a little kid who does some dumbass finger painting that ends up being showcased on the refrigerator while his or her parents laugh at it behind his (or her) back. And it’s not like they were ever going to tell their nine year-old son that I wouldn’t do it (go to Duke), or that I couldn’t do it (become Duke’s basketball coach), but there are countless families who have a hard enough time simply getting by, and have no use for such dreams.

It is thus that I always believed. I grew up believing. I still do believe. Not anymore in the dream of going to Duke University or being their basketball coach, but in the endeavor of life itself. Earlier I said that I have experienced so much more of it, life, that is, than either of my brothers, and how that is both a good thing and a bad thing, for them and for me, personally, and yet as I sit here I can’t help feeling a certain admiration that after all the beatings I have taken and all the times I got absolutely crushed — by life — whether from failing at my dreams, or getting broken emotionally, or experienced various forms of depression that probably would have ended me, or at least gotten the best of me, if I had to relive them again, never have I lost this irrational belief of mine. That I am going to get all the good that is coming to me. That it is always just right around the corner.

I have my parents to thank for that. They didn’t know it when I was a child that they were giving me such a gift, because they were busy getting phone calls from my teachers and spanking me and when that stopped working they made me put my nose against the wall (which I guess was a thing a long time ago). None of it got through, and nothing would get through until life humbled me finally — which didn’t come at any point in my childhood.

I must also give thanks to my two brothers, whom neither of them really had any inducement to accept me back into their good graces save for the fact that they were my brothers — and even at that I would have understood it if they made me work a lot harder for their love.

As a youth I never understood why my older brother and I grew so far apart, why we hardly spoke to one another. I imagine we were just different people. That we were both busy pursuing separate paths, and the further he went in his direction, and the further I went in mine, one day I realized inevitably that we were complete strangers — despite living under the same roof. There may perhaps have been some involuntary and natural psychology involved, given that he and I were divided in age by two years — a small yet substantial gap, during our formative days.

My nature wouldn’t allow him to become close to me in any sort of reasonable way, what with how poorly I treated our mom, and younger brother, or how I would grandstand about how well I was doing in school, or how I was dating the prettiest girl at Cajon High in San Bernardino CA, or how I eventually got accepted into Virginia Tech. In the darkness he, Robby, this is, remained so humble and I always took his nature of being reserved and quiet and not caring much for schooling as if he wasn’t very sharp, when in reality he had many answers about life that I wouldn’t learn for myself until much later down the road.

As for the disconnect I had with my younger brother, Jeffrey, who was (and forever will be) six years younger than me, I didn’t only drive the wedge between us but plowed through it with a fucking semi-truck. I know it’s probably somewhat natural for an older brother to pick on his younger brother, but given how strongly I did pick on him there were several years (much later on) where I wondered if I had done to him legitimate emotional damage. The worse he did in school, the harder after him I went. The more weight he gained, the more I shamed him. And we fought and fought and fought. Not until our mother came home from work did he feel any sort of protection against me, which further made me go after him for needing such protection.

But, like I said, for better or worse my personal life experience offered me deliverance with my family. Despite my corny generic-white-guy exterior, the city of San Bernardino CA turned me into something of a white-collar criminal of my own. This was likely due to being from such a good family, and being such a ‘good’ kid, ostensibly, and being so insecure that I felt a need to be recognized/validated for who I felt I was beneath the surface. So I attached myself to thieves and graffiti artists and gang members — dudes who, later on, beyond their teenage years, spent real time in various jails for assault charges and gun charges and drug charges — and I learned about an entirely new world that neither I nor anybody in my family had any clue about.

So I partook — as an accomplice, mostly — in the thievery, and the graffiti, and partied with the gang through my associations within it. They spoke a different language, which was both simpler and simultaneously more advanced than my super white and super academic foundation. And they all seemed to like me for the same reason I liked them: Because we were all so opposite. I came from a middle class (nowadays considered workingclass) family and most of them came from true poverty. It is where my politics originated from, these people, even though I didn’t yet know it. Because the whites and the blacks and the hispanics, all of us, shared in a commonality which had nothing to do with skin tone or education or family dynamics, but was instead a class issue. We all were in San Bernardino CA, living in the shit, eating the shit, and finding a way to survive.

What’s so funny — and what so few people in my current reality understand — is that some of the smartest people I have ever met were the same ones who stole shit, and wrote on city walls, and did criminal things that put them behind bars. In other words they didn’t always make the best choices, but it didn’t make them bad people. They may not have used the fancy four-syllable words I spoke with. But they also didn’t think of me any differently, for I, like they did, spoke the only language that ever mattered. Of respect.

During my original bout with depression, in 2009 (which bled all the way into 2011), my younger brother one day took a butterfly knife to school to show his friends and it was one of those days where the police department showed up to do random backpack checks of every kid — this had to be a San Bernardino thing, since it’s so horrible there — and they found his knife and the school suspended him and sent him home for a week and had a face-to-face meeting with he and our mother and they threatened to send him to a continuation school where all the city’s delinquents hung out at, and it was a very trying time in the family.

Luckily for my family, they had me. And even though my younger brother and I had the closest thing to no relationship whatsoever, I took it upon myself to approach him one afternoon in his room — knowing how hard he was taking this new potential reality he was dealing with — and I told him, straight up, that nothing was going to happen. That he was going to be just fine. That he would finish out his week on suspension, and that he would go to school the following week.

So then my mother talked to me about it, about the conversation I had with Jeffrey, and I broke it down for her. I said, listen, San Bernardino has bigger fish to fry than some kid who brought an illegal butterfly knife to school. That most parents of the kids who do such things don’t even show up to such meetings because they aren’t involved in the lives of their children. That they, the police and the administration at Golden Valley Middle School of San Bernardino CA, would be in communication with his, Jeffrey’s, teachers, and that the teachers would all say he’s a good kid, and so on. And that his alibi for simply wanting to show off a cool ass knife would say enough.

If I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t have had such perspective to offer. After all, I knew what real criminals looked like. I knew that none of my friends, those who participated in all manner of gang activity and mischief, would have been afforded, or rewarded, with the same benefit of the doubt. Had they done what my little brother did, and brought a butterfly knife to school, the San Bernardino Police Department and teachers all alike would have assumed that they, my friends, produced such a knife with intentions to maim, or kill, somebody.

Even though it has been many years since I have congregated with these particular friends of mine, or spent any meaningful time with them in the so-called streets, I’ll never forget the lessons learned. Do not let the haircut and the smile and extreme level of whiteness fool you: In the moments at work, and real life, when certain hardened individuals approach and enter with me into some form of communication, the switch goes off in my brain and I become once again that same old kid from San Bernardino CA. Where the friendliness maintains. Where the respect endures. But where the tone changes, and the lexicon evolves. It evolves backwards, into a complicated simplicity, to a certain language unintelligible to anyone who knows me present-day.

And as they say, in some form or another, you can take the person out of San Bernardino but you can never take the San Bernardino out of the person. One never forgets not to mistake kindness for weakness. One never forgets that the best defense is to go on the offensive. One never forgets, even in the times they know better, the power of pretending to be ignorant. That’ll generally get you (at least) one get-out-of-jail-free card, in a manner of speaking, with bosses and authority figures.

What it boils down to, the main lesson of each and all of the lessons, is that as long as one minds their own fucking business everything will be just fine.

To make a long story longer, my younger brother and mother both cite this specific example — of the situation with the butterfly knife that was such a big deal but wasn’t really that big of a deal — as a sort of turning point in our family dynamic. That I happened to be the one to calm everybody’s nerves. That all of my own personal nefarious activities within a world they have never known in some way helped to offer peace to this handful of such generic white people, the types who assume if they don’t show up for jury duty, or some weak ass shit comparable, that the next day the police will be beating down their door.

I could be wrong, but I imagine when my first love broke up with me, and when I dropped out of Virginia Tech, and when my best friend and I parted ways, all over the span of like a month, when I was finally for the first time in my life humbled, and depressed, there had to have been some schadenfreude involved among my two brothers. It’s a good word (especially for sports fans), you should look it up. I mean they had to have enjoyed it. Seeing me that way. After an entire childhood of dancing all of over them. And perhaps ironically, or perhaps unironically, it may have been the one thing that brought us back together.

Over these last ten or fifteen years my brothers and I have been on a type of mend that is an excruciatingly slow burn. I sometimes play the role of the clown amongst them where I make fun of myself for how pathetic I am at dealing with women. I sometimes play the role of the veteran dealer, who listens to their litany of stories and scenarios at their casino jobs, and tell them what I have done, and what I do, in similar situations.

And so when I talk about life experience, I’m aware that I am learning from them, having diametrically opposed points of view, as much as they are learning from me. Never will they be burdened or consumed by the same trials and errors that I have gone through. I imagine their first girlfriends will eventually end up as their wives. They don’t have to hang out with criminals to get the life experience they require. The things that satiate me are not the things that satiate them.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss such a world, where I was surrounded by so-called thugs and criminals, which is obvious given that excited feeling I feel whenever I do encounter a group of guys who look and talk and act like people who could have once upon a time been my friends. Every time it happens it feels like I am coming home. The people who get me to talk like I used to talk. The people who after a few sentences are shared can’t help but ask me where I’m from. And always I feel a certain pride whenever I respond.

My two brothers are the furthest people from that world, which is probably why they impress me as much as they do in spite of possessing such a lack of knowledge of how this other half of society lives. In other words, in the days when they had no relationship with me and when I had no relationship with them it would have been incredibly easy for them to shuck me away and decide this or that about my character, and how I am unworthy of their love, or that I should have to put in the effort to ascertain their affection, but that was never how they treated me.

Perhaps they felt as if the universe had already delivered me enough punishment. Maybe in all the days I was waiting for them to catch up with me in the department of life experience, they were waiting for me to crash and burn, and fall precipitously off the cliffs I had built for myself in my head. Maybe they cared more about family than I could have conceived of and would have accepted me regardless of my behavior over the two decades prior. I will probably never know.

When I think about November, however, and giving thanks, I cannot help but think if my life and if it had been run a million times through a simulation, how many of those my brothers would have accepted me for who I am. It may sound dramatic, and again nobody who knows this current iteration of who I am as a person could imagine me capable of hatred, and being hated, by my brothers, but I can’t stress enough that that was me. So it goes.

Honorable mentions:

To Spencer, thank you for being who you are. At different points over these last seven or eight years — but more specifically the last two or three — I have looked to you for guidance as a father figure, and as a big brother, but what you provide my life is much simpler: You are my best friend.

And we used to spend our time arguing about politics, me being the socialist and you agreeing with most of my shit except for all the times I shoot down your so-called conspiracy theories. I find our relationship the funniest-looking, a tall black dude and a short white guy, and also the quintessential example of what America should be: Two people with differing points of view who listen to one another, and accept one another, and don’t look at the other any differently for having such points of view.

Despite my selfish nature, wishing you had come with me to swing shift, I know now what I knew then — that nobody would be capable of replacing you. There is a void in my life not having you around anymore, at least not like it was, but that’s just the dramatics speaking through me. Like any beautiful kind of friendship, a thousand years could pass without a word spoken, and you and I would get right back into arguing about dumbass shit that doesn’t matter on our way to realizing how much we missed the banter.

To Alan, thank you for being such a standup guy. I am proud of you for having your first child and being a good dad even though it very much goes against your nature to be a settled-down type of human being. Thank you for playing chess with me and being part of my fantasy football league and playing pool with me and finding a way to humble me at all three.

To Sarah, thank you for being one of my closest confidants during a time when those were clearly lacking. Part of being a writer is having experiences worth talking about, and using a medium such as this one with which to share them, but whereas so many of these entries on Future Bets have been processed and diagnosed and curated months or even years down the road — where I can in some way take the emotion out of it, and in another way put the emotion back into it — Sarah got to hear my future blogs straight from the horse’s mouth, as they were happening, in realtime.

I still remember the first call I made, unannounced, while I was outside smoking a cigarette at Casino Morongo is Cabazon CA and I don’t know why Sarah was the first person I thought to call but there she was. I didn’t like mean for it to be her, but if it wasn’t that night specifically then it would have been another, or another after that. Whether or not either of us liked it somehow we would have ended up in that exact situation.

And how strange it was, thinking back on it, where semi-regularly I would be out in public drinking away my pains in the most cliché of fashions and I would be driving home bouncing my feelings and inebriated thoughts off of Sarah, and she dealt with it. Based off the standards of my life and my regular behavior, I was out of control. But she got to hear it all. Sarah did.

When I began to come to, and wake up, in a manner of speaking, Sarah and I began using our time not as a therapy session but just as two friends who were able to talk about life as we knew it. Of all the strange and bizarre occurrences of these last 18 or so months of mine, perhaps the most bewildering was how Sarah went from being this tertiary-type figure in my orbit, to being some character in the background, to being someone I could rely upon completely, and become one of the best of individuals I classify as my friend, all in a very short time.

° ° ° ° °

I try to be respectful of (and towards) the rules of writing, where I don’t end sentences with prepositions and shit. Where I don’t start sentences with such words as ‘and’ or ‘but.’ Where I use adverbs correctly and implement the proper usages of semicolons and colons and em dashes. At the same time I am also aware that I break these stupid fucking rules, constantly, because that which supersedes such rules is this idea that if one is good enough at understanding the rules. . . then they need not use them.

Last December during my Year In Review I announced that 2024 was going to be the year where I treated each month as if it was in itself a Year In Review, and somewhere along the way I mentioned — if I didn’t then I’ll mention it now — that 2025 is going to be the year where I write one singular blog. It’s going to be a whole ass story.

And I have wondered what type of story I want to tell. A love story would be too predictable, right? Something about the past, where I could use like nostalgia to put people in a certain time and place would be pretty cliché, wouldn’t it? Some vision of a dystopian future, for that is obviously what we are headed towards, could be interesting, but it also could not, you know?

I think my brain broke by reading/finishing Infinite Jest. Because while the story possessed very little in terms of payoff, it being 1,088 pages and everything, I think in a way that was the story. That it kind of just started and then it kept going and then it was over, like a newborn who catches their first breath and doesn’t get to decide (after hopefully many, many years) when the lights go out. One reads a book without any structure and then they read a book that does have a starting point and a legitimate conclusion and they think, wow, what an amazing story!

With that in mind, I have wondered in all these days and months since I finished Infinite Jest if maybe the best possible story to tell is that which isn’t about anything at all. Where the main character is simply listening in on background conversations — such as we all do — while they are on their way to doing whatever it is they happen to be doing at that time. Where the main character is, like, stuck in traffic — such as we all do — while they are on their way to doing whatever it is they happen to be doing at that time. Where the wind blows. Where the rain falls. Where the sun shines. Etc.

Because my philosophy as a writer has forever been entrenched in the idea that writing about the moments that are so mundane, and so inconsequential, and that somehow grow to become so specific to the human experience, offer the reader a perspective that is even more universal than all the popular self-help books that are only popular because they don’t say anything. You know those books. The ones that exist only to make stupid people feel smart.

To that end, I will take a page (of which there are many) out of the spirit of Infinite Jest and carry on the tradition to obtain universality not from being basic and superficial but rather complicated, and absolutely specific, for life is always about the details. I don’t write to make stupid people feel smart. I write to make smart people think, in hopes that they’ll get something out of it.

Although I know I am decent at this shit — writing, that is — I still find it somewhat embarrassing whenever I mention to people that my true labor of love is writing, or that I am a writer, for I can never help but compare myself to the greats who have come before me, whom I look up to, who through no fault of their own (because most of them are dead) make me feel so amateurish.

And I have stolen material from each and all of them on my way to being the writer that I am. Never forget: The good ones borrow, the great ones steal. My style bends towards being pretty accessible and conversational, almost as if I am directly in front of you, spewing these words and ideas. I’ll get heavy-handed every now and again with the punctuation, but the one thing that I can’t shake insofar as my writing goes is that it’s always me at the end of the day.

When I was blogging on the ESPN Sweetspot Network about the Texas Rangers it was incredibly regular for me to post a blog per day, even if it was only 500 words or so. When I left for WordPress I was reduced to once per week, or so, on average, over the last 10 years. And then in December 2023 I called my shot and said I would only write twelve blogs in the year of our lord, 2024. The logical conclusion to all of this was to condense matters even further by cutting myself down from twelve to the loneliest number.

To be honest, it was everything I needed and expected it to be. Writing this year, I mean. Because I can’t count how many times over the last fifteen years — whether I was on Xanga, or FanSided, or ESPN Sweetspot, or even on here — where I posted a blog and read it the very next day, or the day after, or a couple years later, and wondered what the fuck I was thinking in posting such a thing (whatever it was). By limiting the frequency, in 2024, I have been afforded the luxury to write and edit as I go. So the final product, although it’s never perfect, is at least the cleanest possible version it could be (at the time).

Honestly, that is the thing I most look forward to during my 2025 campaign: The idea that I will have an entire year to accomplish something similar. After this year, 2024, I have had enough of giving my life — personally, emotionally, etc. — any more introspection than is deserved. We all are born, and we live, and then we die. Nobody really gives a fuck about anything that happens in the meantime.

And I will obviously miss it, you know? Posting, that is. I don’t want anyone who is a semi-regular visitor on this particular website to think I’m, like, dead or anything. (But who knows, maybe I will die sometime in 2025 and Apple will have to unlock my computer to get access to pictures of mine that can be displayed during my funeral and one of you who knows me will ask them to get access to my blog so that they can read the forever unfinished story that I wrote on here and maybe it’ll turn into a Modern American Classic and then I will count on y’all to spread the rumor that I overdosed [on hopefully some super hard shit, just make it up] and that’ll only add to the mystery and intrigue.)

Assuming I don’t — you know, die — then I’ll come back around in 2026 and take it from there. Just as I needed as an 18- and 19 year-old to blog on Xanga as a means to practice my craft, and just as I needed in my early-20’s to write about the Texas Rangers on various websites, and just as I used WordPress to write about sports and politics and whatever else was on my mind, this year, in my age-34 campaign, I used writing to challenge myself in a different way.

The challenge of my 2025 is to take this year’s challenge in the department of longform a step further. To essentially write what will be my first novel. Something I can be proud of. Something that I’ll probably even submit to like Amazon or whatever and charge people $0.01 USD to read. After all I am a man of the people. (If I can do it for free then I’ll just do that.)

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. Probably because I’ve been so self-absorbed over the years, and my petty rituals of writing about sports and politics (of which neither I have any control over) bled into my own personal struggles of everyday life — which further required my attention. I got content out of both the rise and the fall of my life, and have spent the last year wasting words on what is an objectively common experience. Life, that is.

All the while, I have this strange feeling in my bones about being — right now — in the absolute prime of my life. Where my physical health, which is perhaps as strong as it has ever been, is intersecting with my mental health, which by virtue of being older than I have ever been and thus possessing more experience than I ever have, has created this monster that is ready, finally, to use all these good vibes and turn it into a (probably depressing) story.

Since November is the final month of the year before my annual Year In Review, which will really just be a condensed version of everything I have already spent the last eleven months writing about, this’ll be like my pre-goodbye post. I’m sure at some point next month I’ll get sentimental one night and issue my official goodbye, but even at that it is more in the vein of ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ or ‘I’ll be seeing you soon.’

Or, y’know, I’ll be here in the morning.