2025: Chapter 16

October 5th:

Lost in my pathetic pity-party-sounding Chapter 15 was a minor (but probably significant sort of) detail: A few weeks ago I somehow managed to injure my right calf, and it’s only worth mentioning because today/tonight is the first time since where I haven’t, like, felt it grabbing me. I don’t know exactly how long it’s been, which is also an admission that I don’t know how I hurt it initially.

Naturally, as a man — whose general philosophy when things go awry is to utilize brute force and ignorance — upon realizing that my calf was fucked up the first thing I did was run some two-and-a-half miles on it. As an allegedly smart guy, I’m a huge dumbass when it comes to things like that. There was a time, as in all the way up to my mid-20’s, probably, where if something hurt all I had to do was use it (whatever was hurting) and the pain would subside or go away entirely. That’s how I remember it, anyway.

That’s why I’ve never been quite prepared for dealing with my own mortality. I didn’t know what hangovers were until my early-20’s, and I didn’t know that hangovers actually cost me two days until I turned 30. When I cut myself I’d just throw some dirt on it. When I stubbed my toe or something I’d just keep moving, or running around. Stuff like that.

So it’s my mentality that this is the way it always works, and the way it always should work. That’s why I went running on my bad newly-injured calf and probably re-aggravated the fucking thing. The problem with calves (or legs, in general) is that I have to, like, use them. To stand. To walk, and shit. My fundamental responsibility at work is to be upright, and breathing.

But it’s not just the injury, per se. It’s the fact that running has always been my cheat code to deliver me a better attitude, a better overall outlook, and keeps my mind right. Without the ability to run over the last few weeks I’ve just been coming home, undressing, showering, and going outside to stew while I write. It’s in that cycle where I’ve sort of been trapping myself — focusing on everything that’s been going wrong rather than what I love and appreciate.

I’ll be keeping that in mind when I do get back to running, which should hopefully be in a week or so. For reasons that have been spoken about ad nauseam on this blog, I’ve over the course of the year allowed my body to get into some poor sleeping habits. For a time I was really good at waking up and running before work, rather than rolling the dice on waiting until after — with all the tricks one’s brain convinces them of after a potentially hard potentially long night.

October 6th:

At the end of the day it’s all about mindset, anyway. It’s kind of like The Shawshank Redemption, or the recent Dune (film) saga: Some of the dumbest people I know and some of the smartest people I know agree that these movies are fantastic. It’s the same with one’s mindset. Whether you are dumb, or smart, or into astrology, or believe in God, or happen to be a professional athlete whose sole mission in life is to win, or work in the medical field dealing all day with moribund cancer patients, most agree that one’s mindset accounts for a lot — even if there is nothing scientifically quantifiable about it.

On Friday morning I dropped like three thousand dollars paying rent and a couple credit cards, because I really wanted to embrace the pain. There’s something freeing about zeroing myself out, in a manner of speaking. Knowing that these items were going to have to be paid, anyway, it didn’t matter whether or not work had been shit for the last couple months. If I prolonged the payments (with particular respect to credit cards) the interest was going to end up costing me more in the long run. So who the fuck cares, you know?

The point is, taking such a bite out of my bank account somehow made me feel better. Maybe that makes me sadomasochistic. Immediately I had a pleasant sensation, and decided then that I would stop caring so much about the inadvertent bullshit I’ve found myself on the wrong side of with my estranged friends at work. I washed my hands every which-way I could.

Then on Saturday I looked at myself in the mirror before going to work and didn’t hate myself. I mean, I think my barber did a good job on my haircut. The so-called hard part he cuts in — to separate the hair on the top of my head to that on the side — was just, like, sharp. I shaved my face. Not like I grow a ton of facial hair, anyway, but I shaved. Okay?

As if by some divine intervention, I probably made more money that night — on Saturday — than in my entire month of September. I wish I could take credit for it, like I’m just so fucking great and amazing that customers couldn’t help but tip me all their monies, but it’s all blind luck. I’d estimate roughly that my personality and charm are worth about 15 percent of my annual income; the other 85 is simply being in the right place at the right time, pulling the proverbial lever on a slot machine and hoping that bitch comes up 7-7-7.

Still, it’s weird how these things sometimes go. There have been times I’ve had a really great night (or week, or paycheck) at work and then suddenly some unforeseen catastrophe took place and I had to spend everything I made. Other times — like these — the opposite occurs, where I drop a bunch of money and then I go to work and make it all back. Call it the universe taking care of me, or God, or mercury being in retrograde, or whatever. I prefer to credit, if it must be some intangible force, the power of the mind.

October 8th:

Last month Nohemi asked why I never write letters to her anymore, and I told her I retired from writing love letters. But a couple nights ago I decided I can’t retire from writing letters in the same way I can’t retire myself from her, period, so I wrote her one. At various times in my life my letter-writing was fucking prolific; for Nohemi I’ve probably written four or five, in total, over the last year.

I don’t know how else to say it, but to me letters are, like, cute. Yet after the fact — i.e. after they’ve been delivered and are no longer in my possession — I immediately find them to be very un-cute. I find them corny, and lame. I become insecure about them. About what I wrote, or if they will be received as warmly as was my intent. With something as personal and intimate as the words I write, I am equally as harsh on myself on how such words will age. (This was particularly a thing when I wrote letters while I was drinking and/or drunk and/or high and couldn’t remember what exactly I said in the letters.)

Nonetheless, I dropped off Nohemi’s letter into her locker. And, by some coincidence, I was on break while she was getting off work, so she asked me to see her outside. I agreed, of course, because our interactions are incredibly fleeting. It’s a ‘Hello’ here, or a glance there, and during the off chance when we see each other in the hallway or whatever we’ll hug.

We sat outside on one of the benches. A lot of eye contact. Sometimes I look her in the eyes and my brain stops working. It just shuts off. She asked me if I would read my letter aloud, to her, and although that’s not something I do… I agreed to it. I got a couple sentences in and she stopped me and asked me if I would hold her hand while I read it, and I guess I was in a mood that was very goddamn agreeable so I agreed to that as well. I held her hand. I haven’t held her hand in a long time.

So I read her the letter, and she said it was quote beautiful. I didn’t get too intrusive with it. I basically wrote that I appreciated having her in my life. And I recalled the first day we met — when I trained her — and how I went out of my way to keep it professional even though I felt her sort of coming on to me. She asked me what I was doing after work that night, and I told her ‘Running and writing.’ I don’t have to lie to kick it. Then she told me she could really go for a glass of wine, and in my stupid guy brain that was, like, a signal that I should ask her to go out for a glass of wine. She denied me, of course, said that she had to get home to her kids. Then I was mad at her in a playful sort of way that it took her only like seven point five hours to get the upper hand on me. I hated that.

After I read her the letter we spoke for a few minutes — on the bench — before I had to go back to work. We held hands the whole time, and when time became of the essence I got closer to her and wrapped my arm around her waist. While we sat on the bench. We were so close that, in that moment, we probably occupied only like twenty percent of the bench. That’s how close we were. Then I had to go in so she kissed me on the cheek and said good-bye.

I don’t consider myself a cute-shit type of guy, but Nohemi brings the cute shit out of me. She makes me want to write her letters. Last year during Christmastime she briefly came over because she had fifteen minutes to spare on her way home — before she had to get back to her two young children — and so we slow-danced without music next to the fake Christmas tree in the corner of my bedroom. We had a date one afternoon/evening and we just stayed inside all day watching movies. She cooked spaghetti and we drank a bottle of wine together. I turned off all the lights and lit a lavender candle and put it on my dinner table while we ate.

And I remain unaware if this is ever going to work out between us. Whenever she speaks hypothetically about the future it always involves me finding a woman and making a bunch of babies and living happily ever after. Or finding a sugar momma. One or the other. I’ll tell her she’s dumb, she’ll laugh, and it’s probably just her defense mechanism against confronting the reality that I am sincere about her.

October 9th:

I had a dream the other night and I don’t remember anything about it other than a song being played in the background. It was ‘Daisy,’ the title track off Brand New’s Daisy (2009), and of all songs in the world I have no idea why I dreamt about listening to that one, or what it means, but it goes like this:

I’m a mountain that has been moved
I’m a river that is all dried up
I’m an ocean nothing floats on
I’m a sky that nothing wants to fly in
I’m a sun that doesn’t burn hot
I’m a moon that never shows its face
I’m a mouth that doesn’t smile
I’m a word that no one ever wants to say

[I don’t wanna be,
He wasn’t finding anybody when he was on the shelf
I saw him in my dream]

I’m a mountain that has been moved
I’m a fugitive that has no legs to run
I’m a preacher with no pulpit
Spewing a sermon that goes on and on

Well if we take all these things and we bury them fast
And we’ll pray that they turn into seeds, to roots and then grass
It’d be all right, it’s all right, it’d be easier that way
Or if the sky opened up and started pouring rain
Like he knew it was time to start things over again
It’d be all right, it’s all right, it’d be easier that way

Well if we take all these things and we bury them fast
And we’ll pray that they turn into seeds, to roots and then grass
It’d be all right, it’s all right, it’d be easier that way
Or if the sky opened up and started pouring rain
Like he knew it was time to start things over again
It’d be all right, it’s all right, it’d be easier that way

Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the song. It’s good and everything. It’s just random because Daisy is easily my least favorite Brand New album and ‘Daisy’ is probably only my forth or fifth favorite record out of a fairly forgettable compendium of songs. I haven’t listened to Daisy in (at least) five solid years.

In fact, over the years I have probably listened to my own version of the song — produced by yours truly on Garageband like four laptops ago over an EDM-style remix ‘Daisy’ that Trey and I found on YouTube in the early 2010’s, or something — more than the actual thing. We titled it ‘Excellence’ (2012), which I can only imagine was a response to me being in the phase of my life when I tried ecstasy a handful of times. Anyway, our song is terrible. Completely embarrassing stuff. The whole thing. I think we just wanted to rap over an instrumental that was different. It’s not indicative of most of what’s left on our Soundcloud.

Some of the funniest shit happened around then. Trey and I played a few shows in San Bernardino CA and Riverside CA, but one night we were in Colton CA and one of Trey’s friends — I can’t remember his name — invited us to his hip-hop set at a bar called Liam’s, which was right around the corner from the apartment we shared. Trey and I must’ve been involved in some capacity because before we went I burned a CD with a few of our instrumentals, and the EDM remix of ‘Daisy’ was one of them.

So after our buddy was finished he called us up and Trey and I did a con-job of a freestyle set over our instrumentals, because they weren’t really freestyles. We gave off the impression like everything we were rapping was off the top of our heads, on the spot, but in reality it was just bars — eight or sixteen at a time — off of other songs we made in year’s prior. (By then our catalogue was quite vast.)

For whatever reason the audience was absolutely fucking with us. It was an Irish pub so it was mainly white people (to be fair), but it had to be the closest thing to real-life 8 Mile they had ever seen. Of all the shows Trey and I played this was hands-down the best reaction we received, which is kind of pathetic considering every other performance of ours we were really, like, trying. I remember getting off stage and everyone was dapping us up. People were asking if we had any other shows coming up, or if were coming back to play the following week at Liam’s. I shit you not. That really happened.

As genuinely embarrassing at it may seem, or is, that I once spent as much time as I did not blogging but writing hip-hop songs over instrumentals on the Internet, I look back on it with an unmistakably warm appreciation for the era. Trey and I were just fucking around, killing time. It was a labor of love for the two of us, one where we were always aware that we weren’t going to be famous artists, and thus we would be able to tell people we didn’t really care about it. But on the inside we both enjoyed the whole process: writing, recording, making videos, editing, and having something to show for the mostly pointless juncture of our lives.

October 12th:

Sometimes I write these with a theme in mind. Like for a couple months I was all about sobriety and how it was impacting my life. When that got tired I started quoting books and shit. When it was time to get negative, I got negative. Now I’m here, mainly saying that life is good, so I’m kind of just writing about whatever.

I started listening to Taylor Swift’s Midnights again. ‘Bigger Than The Whole Sky’ started playing on a random Spotify playlist/mix, and it made me think of Niña because the whole fucking chorus says: ‘Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,’ and it reminds me that that’s the one goddamn thing I was never able to tell her. Goodbye. Goodbye, Niña. It still eats at me, that she didn’t let me say goodbye.

My grandpa told me the same thing about his best friend — Bill Smith — when I saw him on the Fourth of July. How he carried a lot of anger for Bill because he killed himself and didn’t let my grandpa know. Didn’t give him a chance to make things right. Didn’t allow him the opportunity to say I Love You one last time. I told him I understood the feeling.

Yet I’ve also played that game with myself, wondering if Niña did, in fact, let me know of her intentions, and my ego is so large that I imagine — er, I’m confident — I would have been able to stop it. That Niña would still be here.

And at the same time I’ve wondered also how many times, even unwittingly, I did stop her from taking her own life. That maybe if I wasn’t here, or hadn’t been there for her, she would have done it a long time ago. These are the What If questions that satisfy both sides of the operation. Could I have stopped it? Probably. Had I already stopped it? What’s the number on how many times I stopped it?

These are the questions I am left with, and they will never go away. The only certainty is that Niña is no longer here, and that the odds are overwhelming she did not want me to stop it. That she made her decision and stuck to it. I’ve never been upset with her over that; all of my reasons for being upset have been selfish ones. They all stem from being that kid playing in the sandbox and realizing that he can’t play with one of his best friends anymore.