2025: Chapter 18

October 26th:

Don’t ask me why, but the percentage of every number divided by 9 is actually just that number multiplied by 11. For instance, 1/9 = 0.11, 2/9 = 0.22, 3/9 (also known as 1/3) = 0.33, and so on. Conversely, the percentage of every number divided by 11 is actually just that number multiplied by 9. So 1/11 = 0.09, 2/11 = 0.18, 3/11 = 0.27, and so on. That’s math.

Most people know the most common number to roll in craps is ‘7’. But what many people don’t know is that the top and bottom of every reputable six-sided die adds up to 7. The 6 is on the opposite side of the 1, the 5 is on the opposite side of the 2, the 4 is on the opposite side of the 3 — and vice versa. If ever you have two dice and want to proposition somebody, you can say that you bet you can add up the top and bottom of both dice before they can, because the number will always equal 14 (7 + 7) regardless of what number the dice land on.

The words ‘farther’ and ‘further’ are used colloquially more or less interchangeably, but there is a meaningful difference between the two. Farther is used properly to describe literal distance, such as: The drive from Southern California to New York is farther than the drive from Southern California to Texas. Further, meanwhile, is used properly to describe metaphorical distance, such as: The two parties in the railroad negotiation are further apart on a deal than they originally assumed.

November 2nd:

Sometimes I wonder if everyone is just in a race internally to get back to their one singular moment of trauma. The one that stands above all the rest. The pinnacle. There are traumatic times, and traumatic events, but there seems to always be that one thing that is so goddamn tough to think about that your mind spends so much time working against it, as if it didn’t even happen, because it remains too close no matter how long ago it occurred.

For me, it was Virginia Tech. I have no idea how I recently got into a discussion with one of my friends about on-campus dining, but I did. In 2008 the top-ranked on-campus dining in the entire United States of America was none other than Virginia Polytechnic and State University. A quick Google search told me that it is now (in 2025) ranked number two, behind only UCLA.

Anyway, for the first time in I couldn’t even tell you how long… I thought about Virginia Tech. And it’s weird because making it into (and thus attending) VT is such a huge part of my backstory, but I really don’t talk much about it anymore in real life. It involves equal parts pride — having earned the right to go to my dream school — and shame — having dropped out and fumbled it away — which makes the way I feel about the whole experience in retrospect so complicated.

Even talking about on-campus dining was tough. Because I was right there again. I was walking down the stairs from my dorm room at West Ambler Johnston to the food court at West End. I was picking up some London broil, or a couple slices of pizza, before I took them back to my room. I was walking in the snow. I was slipping on the sleet and catching my balance. I was going across the drill field, again, while the wind penetrated through my snow jacket.

I was on my phone talking to my girlfriend, making laps around Lane Stadium in the cold. I was counting the days before I got to go back home for the holidays. I was messaging one of my professors on Facebook, letting her know I couldn’t make it to class today, or the next day, or the next week, because I was too depressed to leave my dorm. I was opening up care packages in my room, eating as much snack food as my body would allow me. I was looking at myself in the mirror at a gaunt young man who put on the freshmen 15 before losing 40 pounds.

And it sucks, because Virginia Tech made me so happy. It was validation to my teachers, and my schoolmates, and my parents, and my brothers — everyone to whom I declared that I would do big shit with my life. So it sucks that, in spite of that, what I remember most vividly about Virginia Tech is the month of February, in 2009, when I lost so much weight and learned for the first time what depression felt like. That’s my lasting image, or memory, of the school I once dreamt as a nine year-old.

But I suppose half the story was the relationship I was in at the time. The intense love I had for that girl. I can’t really divorce how I feel about Virginia Tech without the parallel of being three thousand miles away from my first love. Intellectually it’s so dumb — like I was so dumb — to believe I had any fucking shot at making it work. I mean, her and I used to talk about her moving out to Virginia to live with me. When her mom moved to Texas, we spoke about having me transfer to the University of Texas at Austin.

In the middle of talking about on-campus dining, and my dorm setup, I had this epiphanic realization where it felt almost, like, shocking in a way that I was ever there in the first place. At Virginia Tech. I mean, knowing how I am as a 35 year-old — where I’m as minimalistic as they come, where I go grocery shopping like once a month, and I won’t even leave the house unless I absolutely have to — and contrasting that against my 18 year-old self who just went for it. All by himself with no safety net on the opposite side of the country.

It’s an overwhelming thought, which is crazy because I already did it. I think it must do with how much more knowledge I have now — about the world and myself — and how I have dealt with so much depression and anxiety over the years. I don’t honestly know how I made it out of there. I assume my own ignorance worked to my benefit, because when you don’t know what it feels like when the walls are closing in you can pretend it’s something else. You can cling on to some hope. I’m still not sure how I managed that, but I did. Somehow.

People ask what your greatest fear is, and for a long time I didn’t know. Drowning would suck. Burning to death would hurt a lot, I think. Public speaking? Eh, I can fake that just fine. When I got older I understood exactly my greatest fear, and Virginia Tech is responsible for it. Shouting from the mountaintops that I got accepted into a semi-prestigious school ended up defining my experience in public education. It raised my bar. It leveled me up.

It is thus how my greatest fear is failing to live up to my own expectations. Virginia Tech made me feel like I was somebody, and dropping out of Virginia Tech for the first time in my life made me feel extremely ordinary. I’ve spent every day since, even though it hasn’t been entirely conscious, chasing the high I had as an 18 year-old and, in turn, trying to right, or correct, the trauma I dealt with when I crashed back down to earth.

I could live and die doing exactly what it is I am doing now, being a dealer at a casino, and live a fair if not comfortable-ish kind of life. I’ve always thought if this is as good as it gets, I’ll be fine. And I will. I’ll be fine. But there exists a lot of daylight between that and where I need to be. And that’s kind of the mission I am now on, even if it’s moving at a slower pace than I’d probably prefer.

November 3rd:

But this is what I was talking about earlier with what was essentially my original trauma. Virginia Tech was my own personal prime mover, the individual experience that shot me out of a cannon and was responsible for laying the foundation of my life. Going into it I obviously thought it would lay a different sort of foundation, one of those cliché ones where I graduated, got a job as a sports journalist at the fucking Roanoke Times, or whatever, before parlaying that into a regional gig and being so great at it that I hitched my wagons to a national media source.

Instead it was very cut-and-dry, and I ended up a divergent cliché. Drop out of school, get broken up with by my first love, become depressed, use drugs and alcohol as coping mechanisms, get hired as unskilled labor making minimum wage, etc. I was that line from Jack’s Mannequin’s ‘I’m Ready’ when they say my life has become a boring pop song and everyone’s singing along.

As much as I was built to be what Virginia Tech was supposed to make me — a so-called grownup, with a respectable profession — I know I never would have gotten there if I stayed on that path. Which is really to say: I spent most of my formative years being a cunt to my parents and my brothers. What dropping out of Virginia Tech (and by extension getting my heart broken) really taught me was humility. That I’m not the center of the universe. That I don’t get everything I want all the time. Things of that nature.

There are tertiary reasons why dropping out turned into a benefit for me. Most importantly the fact that one year of out-of-state tuition (along with room and board and all the other bells and whistles) came out to around $50,000, which took me ten years to pay off. You can do the math on how much it would have cost if it took me four years to graduate before getting placed in a dying industry such as journalism where we’re probably talking about a $40,000 per year salary.

It’s a long and winding road, of course. Nobody knows what would have happened if I was single when I attended school. Nobody knows what would have happened if I graduated. I can only speak on my experience because it played out exactly the way it did, where a specific chain of events educated me on what it’s like to get knocked down from a particularly high place, and made me learn how to appreciate my family, and forced me to figure out how to go from an unskilled job making next to no money to finding an actual career.

What I imagine it’s really all about is that I coasted — whether from natural ability or because the San Bernardino bar was so low — from K-12. I never learned how to work hard at something, or for something. So when I got accepted into Virginia Tech it was kind of like I accomplished what I set out to do, and thus the hard work was over with. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t have known, that that was just one small step before the real work began.

November 6th:

Bringing things back to my current reality: I’m still learning. It may come across as some kind of copout to blame my overall angst, and general frustrations with the year I’ve had, on Niña’s death last December. Although still not a day goes by that I don’t think about her in some way, I’d estimate I was ‘over’ the worst parts of the grieving process by, like, March.

I think honestly why my year has been so rough is that every other issue I’ve confronted has been compounded by the grief. For whatever reason — including good old-fashioned randomness, which accounts for more than we usually give credit — 2025 has featured a lot of unnecessary bullshit. Some years the bullshit comes in the form of various women, and I can blame myself for a lot of it. Some years the bullshit comes in the form of family, which can be complicated and weird, anyway.

This year it’s come in the form of my interpersonal relationships with people, which is ironic only because that’s one of the only things I’m generally good at. It’s what I can count on being there in a healthy like functional sort of way while I’m struggling with women and/or family in the background. It had made this year the first of my life that I haven’t looked forward to going to work — which is and always has been my favorite distraction.

As such, this rut I’ve been mired in has been extended significantly longer than I anticipated. Don’t get me wrong, the dark days of being stranded without a life jacket in my dorm room in February, 2009, are long gone. I’m not force-feeding myself fruit roll-ups and Cheez It’s in the ten-minute allotment my body allowed me every day and crying myself to sleep. My appetite is fine, actually. So is my sleep.

It is more the sensation of feeling stuck. Of knowing the essential thing to do is get away for as long as I can (which I think is only a couple weeks), but then being punished by losing 80 hours of vacation time and receiving a paycheck that’ll easily set me back at least a month. That’s besides perhaps the most crucial detail of all: I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have anything that I want to do.

So it all manifests itself on my blog as the same old song. The audience hears it on repeat and laments: You know what to do, so just do it. It’s tedious and tired and boring. Shit, even I’m bored of writing it. I utilize this thing both as a form of therapy and a means to workshop how I intend to solve my problems of the present to find a smarter, more efficient way of ushering in my future. Right now it’s just a fucking blob.

I know things will get better, because they have to. I have to figure this out — this being my life. Even though I don’t know what the future looks like, I’m certain if I don’t change and maintain this untenable pace I’m going to end up snapping and losing my job over it. In other words, I can either make these decisions now or they’re going to be made for me.