2026: Chapter 1

We were opening presents together in Lake Elsinore CA c. Christmas day, in the year of our lord, 2025, when finally my younger brother got to his final gift — which by design was the very last gift any of the four of us (my mom, my older brother, my younger brother and myself) opened. I was leaned back with one leg crossed over the other because my back was hurting having been lunged forward for the previous hour while the gifts-opening process was taking place. I was also nodding off pretty aggressively like an old man because I had only gotten a few hours of sleep.

Then suddenly my younger brother sort of gasped, like it sounded like a gasp would sound but it wasn’t really a gasp — because actually he began crying. Such a sound as it was awoke me abruptly from the stupor I didn’t know I was in. Frankly, I didn’t have any knowledge of why he was crying, which is really to say I didn’t have any knowledge of the final gift that he was on the verge of opening.

As it were: A framed photo of he and his dog, Rudy, who passed away in April 2025. The frame was made from a beachy-looking type of wood, something giving off a faded and rough shade of green or blue. It seemed appropriate for whatever reason. The photo itself was of my younger brother and his dog sitting in the chair he used to sit in in the backyard at our old house in Riverside CA.

My younger brother began mumbling and blabbering apologies for his crime of shedding tears in front of us, and we all sat back and told him it’s okay, that everything is okay. Then he said he didn’t think it was going to hurt this much, spending his first Christmas without Rudy since like 2010. And that he was sorry. He was sorry that he knew what was to be of his final gift and that it didn’t matter one single iota.

As I sat on the couch, leaned back all too comfortably with one leg crossed over the other, I felt it coming. I felt the heat rush up my neck and on to my face. I felt my bottom lip begin to quiver as if I, too, had to somehow do the very extremely innate manly thing by not crying, but then I gave up because the way Jeffrey (my younger brother) feels about Rudy is the same way that I felt a year ago, and still, about Niña. I just let myself bawl out for a minute or so with my younger brother because that shit hit me like a mutherfucker.

I also felt, in the moment, being like particularly upset with myself that in a way I was stealing some of the shine off of Jeffrey having his moment. That was his dog. That was his time to hold onto something tangible, and cry in a very cathartic way, and grieve his loss. If I had any knowledge of what Jeffrey’s final gift was I would have been prepared to let my own lion’s lie, in a manner of speaking, and keep my own goddamn tears to my own goddamn self.

There is just something so incredibly universal about hearing phrases such as ‘I never thought it would hurt so much,’ or ‘I still think about him (being Rudy) every day.’ Because all I could muster in my own teary sadness was to say that I understood, and that it sucked. I think I said both of those things like three different times. I understand. And It sucks.

There is nothing we can do about it. That’s why it sucks. That’s also why I understand. My mom back in April, when Rudy passed away, ended up apologizing to me over the phone when she said 2025 had been such a hard year — given Niña’s death at the end of 2024 and Rudy’s death at the start of 2025 — because she felt bad for comparing a human life to a dog’s, but I knew what she was getting at. I wasn’t going to have a dick-swinging contest about it.

I never had a strong relationship with Rudy, to be fair. He never seemed to care very much about me, either. But what we did have, he and I, was a mutual understanding. Because for whatever reason the very good boy always came rushing to me in lieu of everyone else whenever fireworks went off and he was scared. Always, it was my room that he ran to and my bed that he jumped on. And so the two of us, Rudy and I, forever had this specific unspoken acknowledgement. We would give one another the side eye whenever we saw each other in real life, but then when noises started getting too loud for him I knew what my assignment was.

I hadn’t seen either of my brothers since my birthday in March, 2025, and I hadn’t seen my mom since her birthday in July, 2025. During football season my brothers and I Facetime every week because it has become tradition over the last handful of years to Guess The Lines — er, the point spreads, an idea I stole from Bill Simmons and Cousin Sal that I used to do by myself all the way back in like 2010 — and my mom I talk to over Facebook video a couple times every month because her Facetime sucks, or whatever.

Yet seeing them all in real life is a very different sort of experience. I became suddenly hyper, and happy. Even though I had never up to that point visited their house in Lake Elsinore CA it did feel like I was back home. And I didn’t even get to see them for that long, really. I chopped it up with Robby (my older brother) for about a half-hour before he and Jeffrey went to work on the graveyard shift, and then around 6:00 A.M. Pacific Standard Time I got to talk to my mom for an hour or so. By the time I woke up in the afternoon hours the only time we had left was to open presents.

It’s probably ironic that I see my dad more than any of them — and by a long shot — since I’m the least close to him. But that’s only due to proximity. It’s also about the idea that my dad really truly like needs me so much more than any of my other family members, because my dad doesn’t have anybody to visit him while my mom and brothers each have one another under the same roof.

Ostensibly I have in the desert (where I reside) everything that I need. My place of work is like 10 minutes away. I have friends and all that. Yet at the same time all that was required was a tiny glimpse of the familiarity that my family offers to realize how much I miss them and need them. A half-hour conversation here, an hour-long conversation there, and a sympathetic moment with my younger brother over his dead dog while he was opening a Christmas present. That’s my memory of how 2025 came to a close.

° ° ° ° °

In a perfect world I never would have moved away from my family in the first place. Yeah we were renting a house together, and yeah I was living an hour away from work, but we were always a legit unit. I think honestly the only inducement that got me out of that house was the pressure I had been putting on myself.

Although in retrospect I always sort of blamed them — my mom and my brothers — for why I left my apartment in Redlands CA to move back in with them in Riverside CA in, like, 2017 — because in a short time they couldn’t afford their house anymore and needed me to help out financially — I was more than happy to do it. I wasn’t exactly thriving at the time on my own. But I allowed it to become part of my backstory that I didn’t actually want to live with my mom/brothers, but that I had to, for their benefit.

I’m not saying such a backstory was a lie. More that… I typically left out the fact that I didn’t put up any fight whatsoever when the call came for me to move back. I didn’t try to negotiate or like politick to figure out another way. I just packed up my shit and came back one day, and always I felt whole when I lived with them.

It’s not as if everything was fucking perfect or anything. When we lived together I would bitch along with my brothers behind my mom’s back because of her drinking problem, and I’d team up with my mom behind both of my brother’s backs to bitch about them not saving enough money, or not handling their necessary obligations, and so on. I’d bet my bottom dollar that the three of them found reasons to bitch about me behind my back as well, but that’s nothing. Just usual family business.

This pressure I speak of I have been putting on myself forever. All the way back to high school I was borderline ashamed of myself for only being accepted into various Cal State Universities, like Fullerton and Humboldt State, because I had been talking such a big game since I was in like 5th grade about one day going to Duke. When I quit my first job at an auto auction company I talked a big game about becoming a dealer. When I became a dealer I talked a big game about moving out. When I finally moved out (after a couple years) I started talking a big game about buying a house.

Just like everyone has their own bitcoin story, about how they’d be worth such and such if they had gotten in on it at the right time, I have my regrets about not buying a house when I easily could have. I just didn’t. I didn’t put enough pressure on myself, whether out of complacency or simply believing it was never the right time. I just know how many times I’ve told people that the only reason I moved back with my family was to help them out, rather than simply saying I wanted it, too. And because I made it such a significant part of the story of my recent history, I started anew in a race to move away.

Returns have been positive and everything. I am legitimately able to save money and not put so much stress on my car and all my friends are out here and any woman I could ever wish to see is out here and overall it’s a pretty easy life on paper. It’s only in the way that the grass is always greener am I confronted by how comfortable and complete I feel in only a handful of minutes spent with the people I love the most.

To be completely one hundred, I do think it’s healthy in its own way that I do feel such pressure on myself. I think generally I put on a strong persona but that I am really a coward in a lot of ways. If I didn’t put pressure on myself, in the sense that my word is bond, and thus I need to pay off so many of the things which spout from my mouth, I fear I would be just like every other dickhead who just talks all the time without any action. Those have never been my people.

And so my way of having respect for myself is by acting, and being, a person that I personally would accept… if not altogether admire. It is probably a fucked up way of going about life, but one must never forget that so much of my identity is tied down dripping wet with my hometown of San Bernardino CA. And not in the way that a person says it because they happened to be born there, or that they lived there for a couple years. I mean I was born there, and I did live there until I was like 25. The point is, the threshold for being a man of one’s word is a lot higher there than it is in most places.

So I’ve got that going for me. I’ve got that meaningless self-induced pressure. The voice in my head does happen to be a particularly loud one, which probably also contributes to why I needed to learn roulette after I learned all the other table games, and why I learned craps after I learned roulette, and why I needed to be really fucking good at craps once I learned it, and why every single step along this road of life I’ve needed to be more successful than the average person from San Bernardino, and then more successful than the average person from anywhere, and then more successful than even those who are much better than average. That’s been the mission.

I could obviously say the usual cliché that suggests over the years I have learned not to care about what other people think, or that I have only ever been in competition with myself. Those things aren’t, like, not true. It has been liberating to sing my own tune and grow evermore comfortable in my skin.

But simultaneously my nature is very much to be in competition with everybody all at once, and all the time. It is so hardwired into me that I am doing it even when I don’t know I’m doing it — even when I’m not trying. As much as I strive for growth and being a better man, I’m not going to bullshit you and lie about how I feel about the idea of participation trophies (which have been greatly exaggerated over the years; they aren’t really a thing), or that I don’t, like, care about my own accomplishments and failures insofar as winning and losing are concerned.

That’s why pressure matters. The pressure I have put on myself over the years is probably unhealthy, but applying pressure to one’s self in general I find to be extremely healthy. How it relates to my family — which does happen to be the center of this article — is that from my earliest thoughts of having hopes and dreams I always wanted to Make It in life. I found every other conceivable scenario unacceptable.

But life has gotten so much harder on so many individuals over the last 10-15 years that my hopes and dreams have shifted. Because while both of my parents were of a once proud middle-class stature in the 1990’s and 2000’s — more or less up until the financial crash in 2007-’08 — they became part of the tens of millions of Americans making up a veritable graveyard of those who were left behind, and thus they don’t have the necessary resources to make it on their own.

My brothers are each capable members of the labor force, but I generally fear they lack to the bigger-picture focus to save money and do it the way I aim to. They will be fine, of course, but combined with my wishes to ensure the longterm security of my parents is to have my brothers along for that ride. I think the future is going to be even harder to navigate through economically than it is right now, and it’s going to require, if not demand, all hands to be on deck. They’re all going to need me, and I’m gonna need them, too.

* * * * *

I imagine that’s why the newest pressure I am putting on myself is to get out of the casino industry and become an attorney. In many ways I feel I have rolled this ball, in a manner of speaking, as far as I can take it — the one that brought me and has kept me in the casino industry for this long. I have checked off all manner of financial milestones, generating numbers that have impressed me, even, and every year for the last half-decade I have made more than the year before. I have made more, and I have spent more, and yet in some way I feel I was more comfortable monetarily when I was making $10.50 an hour (USD) back in 2010.

That’s how I know that no matter how much I earn as a dealer will never be enough for me. It was more than enough when I was in my early 20’s and middle-20’s and even late-20’s, because I could totally fuck it off six ways to Sunday without any remorse or anxiety financially. It was sport to me. It was a source of pride knowing that I was making such grownup money while most of my friends who went to college and got degrees were working as hosts and hostesses at fucking Chili’s.

And it’s funny to me that these things that were once such a robust impetus for my pride and ego have in recent years crossed over and become a major insecurity of mine. The idea that once upon a time I was supposed to be one of those high-achievers, or college graduates, and that I, too, was supposed to have a career that garnered me some form of fulfillment. Nobody ever likes the smartest person in the room, especially when that person knows it, but I lived many years pinching my little cheeks believing I had gotten one over on everybody that I used to look down upon based on how much work they put in to make half the money I was.

For a long time I have been writing about this unhappiness of mine, this life I have lived that doesn’t quite sit right with me, this omnipresent angst that I can’t seem to avoid. I know I am overthinking it and I should just shut up and be happy. But I don’t think I am built to be that guy who simply takes what is given to him and puts on a smile about it. Because I do compare myself to others. To my brothers, to my extended family members, to my contemporaries whom I attended high school with, to my coworkers, all the way to celebrities and multimillionaires. I might call it pressure. I might call it an insecurity of mine. You can call it what you want.

So I balance all of this pressure, and all of these insecurities, by saying I can only take it one day at a time. I use vague and palatable clichés suggesting that the hardest step to take in the journey is the first one. I argue that I cannot get there, wherever it is that there is, without first starting here (wherever the fuck that is). And you as the reader is supposed to read garbage like that and imagine it as something that is extremely heavy and profound.

In reality, the only idea that I try to convey is that one can absolutely do both. One can allow themselves to keep ten toes down and maintain being present while simultaneously keeping an ear to the ground and an eye looking towards the future. Because it is coming, the future is, whether or not we decide to meet it. I am guilty of caring about it a little too much, but then again my starting point has always been that things will only get worse, and harder, as time moves on.

I wish I didn’t feel such a way, and that I was as naive and ignorant and all of those whom I envy. But that is not the case and that is what makes me entirely who I am: the guy who remains optimistic about his own personal prospects who thinks the world is going to shit. It’s like a basic instinct of mine. It is why everybody assumes of me to be a negative person when really I am all about positivity and exercising some form reverse psychology. If I envision everything sucking, and perpetually getting worse, then that is reason alone to enjoy the present moment. Because it doesn’t get any better than this, baby.