2026: Chapter 2

Without exaggeration: I spend roughly as much time explaining the game of craps as I do dealing it. The object is to roll a number and repeat it before “7” — the most common combination that comes up on two reputable six-sided dice. That is the whole game: Roll a number and repeat it before “7”. Therefore, craps is incredibly simple.

‘It’s complicated,’ I tell people. Those who are not in the know, anyway. If you possess the bravery and/or courage to probe the layout and prod me, the dealer, further than that, I’ll be your huckleberry. The majority of the time it doesn’t matter and I will go through my entire song and dance talking about the Pass Line and Place Bets and then they’ll walk away without even saying thank you for the explanation. But, every so often, I’ll come across someone who knows nothing and everything’ll sort of play out exactly how I described, and it’s only then that I’ll feel good about myself for offering someone a positive first craps experience.

Craps is scary, you know? It’s an intimidating game to watch for the first time. I remember how awful I felt when I first got baptized into blackjack as a 21 year-old on a $15 minimum table at San Manuel Casino in San Bernardino CA and everyone at the table like screamed at me when I opted to stay on a goddamn 13 when the dealer was showing a picture card. And that was just blackjack, the most basic game of them all. I left immediately afterwards.

It turned out to be a life-changing moment for me, personally. Because that specific night I went home and learned basic strategy to absolute perfection. I then taught my best friend basic strategy to absolute perfection, even though later on he would make little moves — such as staying on 12 against a 2 or 3, or he wouldn’t hit or double on soft 18 against certain bust cards — that went against the so-called book. But that’s nothing, really. Just the difference between preferring a Ford to a Chevrolet.

The point is, I never would have been a dealer if not for that initial scarring I took. The chain of events that unfolded after were, in retrospect, entirely predictable. Learn how to play. Play often. Develop relationships with the dealers. Glean information about how much money dealers make. Get encouraged one night by my best friend because for some reason the particular table he and I were playing at featured a dealer who could not count cards aloud all that well and so I had to intervene on more than one occasion to let him (the dealer) know how much he had and thus my best friend ignited my fuse when he told me I count faster than they do and I should be a dealer, too.

I still remember what it felt like being the dealer on my very first table, all by myself, at Spotlight 29 in Coachella CA. It was a $5 blackjack game. As a gambler, all the table minimums I was used to at San Manuel were $25, and so it was an extreme culture shock for me when I realized it wasn’t the same way at every other casino.

But I’ll tell you this: those $5 chips hit much differently when you are brand spanking new and on the other side of the table. They might as well have been $500 chips, or thousand-dollar chips. Suddenly the money I began to take (and sometimes pay) became real. My adrenaline was through the roof dealing those games, at least early on. The shit-talking from the players felt horrible.

Fast-forward twelve years, and I can’t even get my dick hard unless someone is betting a thousand dollars a hand. Where I know that the cameras are watching. Where I know that my bosses are focused on my game. Those are the only situations that get me excited anymore. And if such and such player has me along for the ride, tipping me while it’s happening, I am all the merrier.

That was kind of what I was hinting at in my most recent article — 2026: Chapter 1 — about how I have taken this current career of mine as far I can take it. There is obviously the one aspect I just described in the last paragraph, about how impossibly high my threshold is for actually giving a shit, but it’s much more than that. It is also about my own personal skill of game-playing, of being able to work the players, verbally, or psychologically. Some days I put in more effort than others, but always my motivation is to extract as much money (via tips) as possible. And I feel like I have more or less gotten to the point where there isn’t another level for me to aspire to, or get to. I am a master at my craft.

Very regularly the biggest divide between Niña and I, insofar as dealing was concerned, revolved around my comfortability in the casino environment whereas she never seemed to like it. In real life we agreed on politics — libertarian socially and socialist economically, to be specific — which is to say we loved the people. We wanted to live and let live. We wanted everyone to have more. We believed in the romantic idea that ordinary people, when bound together behind a common purpose, were powerful beyond the imagination.

‘Treat them like pigs,’ I would tell Niña when it came to gamblers. But she didn’t have it in her like I have it in me. To treat them in such a way. It was a philosophical disagreement, one that made me feel really good and that made her feel as if she was a bad person for doing so. As always, I tried to tell her that our occupation required of us to be characters within a much larger casino atmosphere; we were not there to be real people.

What I have found is that, with respect to my gambling audience, lots of people enjoy being treated like shit. Many of them get off being talked down to. Most seem to appreciate an authority figure telling them what to do. Sometimes I talk my shit to make people laugh because I can tell they enjoy the banter and it helps me make more money off of them; sometimes I talk my shit and I actually mean it and the customer laughs because they think I’m joking when I’m really not; sometimes I talk my shit because I do want to have beef and the customer wants to have beef and so it’s my way of standing my ground.

This is not an admission that I am dead inside. It’s only my own declaration that there are merely a handful of people in the entire world who know how to hurt me, who know how to get to me, and that I never take my work home with me. I had a player a week ago during the stupid end-of-year holidays tell me that ‘You shouldn’t talk to your clientele that way,’ and I made the whole table laugh when I said: ‘I don’t think you know who I am. I’ll to say whatever I want to say.’

What’s funny is, in spite of all this tough-guy talk, about how I am this and that, and how I do this and that, and how I say this and that, I happen to be much less confrontational now than I have been at any point in my dealing career. Five and six and seven years ago I would go out looking for trouble. Everything for me was a pissing contest. If I was unhappy, I made sure everyone else would be unhappy, too.

I simply don’t get the opportunities anymore. I don’t know if the customers can see it on my face, or if my dealing is too sound, or if I just have my own type of image or aura when I am on my game, but I think at this point everybody just Knows. I am not saying I’m the guy who can’t be fucked with. Just that you should be prepared, because I have seen a lot, and that I have a proven-effective response for almost every scenario, and so it takes a helluva lot to surprise me.

It is thus how work feels more like entertainment for me than actual work. I mean, where else can a person essentially have carte blanche to say whatever they want to so-called guests, or patrons, or customers, all the while dealing cards and/or dice and risking literally none of their own money whilst simultaneously reaping all the rewards from strangers getting lucky? Of course we deal with bullshit, such as unhappy and/or unruly guests. But the drawbacks of the job get outweighed — by several standard deviations — against how easy and relatively lucrative it happens to be.

The trouble I have with it, dealing, that is, is related directly to how un-challenging it has become. When I was 22 I wanted to be a dealer, and that is exactly what I became. When I was 23 I wanted to be a craps dealer, and so I did that, too. Once I became a craps dealer I wanted to be a really good one, and so after a while — a year, two years, three years — I became one of the better ones. Once I felt in my heart that I was one of the best at my particular house, I strived to be better at all of the things that inevitably get hidden within the cracks. My verbal game. My ability to make money off people who generally don’t tip, or don’t know how to tip. My ability to be a politician with my bosses, and managers. My ability to ask for nothing, and at the same time get whatever I want.

* * * * *

The skills I have learned and developed as a dealer have absolutely been applicable to everyday life. Most importantly, probably due to the fact that the money I make is not at all commensurate to the actual work (or lack thereof) that I do, I over-tip no matter where I go. Waiters and waitresses at restaurants. Front desk people at hotels. Anybody at all who can accept cash is going to get it from me.

Of second-most importance, it’s really hard to be an introvert when dealing with the public. I’ll be the first person to say that I spent at least five years pretending, or faking it, and feeling a weird sense of social anxiety whenever I dealt to people. Present day I can have a conversation with anybody, about anything. Old or young, black or white or Hispanic, male or female, gay or straight, I treat everybody the same because the only thing that matters to me when I am clocked in is my own bottom line.

It has also given me a lot of confidence, dealing has, because it has provided me so much reassurance for who I am as a human being. I get reassured by my coworkers as someone who is good at their job, whom they can trust, whom they want to go to war with on a crazy craps game. And I get reassured by the public — the guests — for being a likable, tip-able guy, who is able to run a clean game and give them a positive experience.

That is a big deal for somebody such as I am, because I am not great at anything. I spent my entire adolescence being told I was special, and moving from one school to another because I supposedly needed to be challenged with better programs with other students of my supposed ilk, and then eventually I was rewarded for all my lazy/hard work by making it into Virginia Tech which was another signal that I was supposedly different and reinforced that I was supposedly special.

Then I learned upon returning home from Virginia that there was nothing at all special about me. I was in the same position as every other mutherfucker I went to high school with who never made it into a semi-prestigious-sounding university. I was not a great writer. I was not a great student. All I really knew was meaningless information about sports and dry sarcasm and dark humor and I had a job that paid me $10.00 per hour (USD). There wasn’t an occupation in existence that could reward me for all the things I was good at.

Not until I became a dealer, anyway. Only then was I able to deal to someone wearing a Montana University hoodie and strike up a conversation by asking if the ‘Grizzlies’ were their mascot (even though I already knew the answer), or get a group of guys from South Carolina on my blackjack table and start saying ‘y’all’ and talking all honkeytonk about going to school in Virginia and what not, or pontificating about the NFL, or MLB, or the NBA, or college basketball, or college football, to random strangers. Because those are the things I’m good at. Not in being great at any one thing, but in being very good at a lot of things.

The overwhelming majority of stuff that I truly cared about never worked out for me. From higher education to becoming a sports journalist to loving, and being loved, my personal journey has been a burial ground of what ifs and what could’ve beens. Love and loss and substance abuse and betrayal and being a gambler myself and seeing America for all it is and all it is not: Like many others, that has been my life experience.

Yet it is also responsible for what makes me so good at dealing, and so good at being a coworker, and so good — dare I say — at being a man. Because I can really sympathize with the gambler losing his or her money. I can sympathize with depression and heartache. I can sympathize with sports outcomes, both good and bad. I can sympathize with wanting something so badly and being so close to it and still never reaching it.

* * * * *

I know words. My vocabulary is probably somewhere in the top fifth to tenth percentile of Americans (which is an admittedly low bar, to be fair). I also know how to formulate complete sentences. My ability to properly use commas, colons, semicolons and em dashes is better than most. I can both speak and transcribe the language of professionals, and simultaneously flip the switch and use the diction of the workingclass at the drop of any dime.

‘Communication.’

That was my response when recently a woman asked me what I am bad at. I wasn’t trying to be cute. I even thought about it for a handful of seconds before I answered, because it’s true that I am smarter than most in the conventional sense, and that I am smarter than many in the nonconventional street sense. I am good at throwing items such as baseballs and shooting items such as basketballs. I was a quick study at a trivial thing such as learning how to drive stick-shift. Almost everything I have ever applied myself to even in the slightest I have been good at.

But I overlooked communication because it was so obvious to me. Obvious that I had to be good at it. Obvious I must have always been good at it. After all, I spend so much of my leisure time pretending to be a real writer. My entire bag on this blog — and on every other blog I have ever taken part in — was/is my means of expressing (or communicating) myself to the audience. Not to mention: I literally went to college and majored in the uppercase Communication — known colloquially by assholes in the know as COMM. By any reasonable measurement I was supposed to be really fucking good at communicating.

Among many epiphanic realizations during my six-month (plus one day) foray into sobriety was the idea, or fact, that perhaps my biggest blindspot was how actually poor I am at expressing myself. This was illuminated to me in myriad ways. Of utmost intrapersonal consequence was replaying like a movie the entirely of my relationship with Niña, where I first began to understand that all of those times I acted as the problem-solver between us — with the hope, or intention, that the two of us could simply move forward and not fall asleep angry — I wasn’t actually being the bigger man, or doing the so-called mature thing. That on many occasions it should not have been about solving the problem at hand, but rather letting Niña vent her grievances and allowing her to be seen and/or heard.

I think my ultimate preference for things to be easy, and run as smoothly as possible all the time, makes my brain function in a way that cuts through the scenic route. It says to me that I am not going to care about this (whatever it is) five months from now, let alone five minutes from now, and therefore let us simply get on with it. Let’s move past it as quickly as we can. I don’t care. And I’m going persuade you not to care, either.

This was/is what makes me so bad at communication. Because I was always just so goddamn good at it when it served me. I used to be a teacher’s assistant for one of my elementary school teachers during the summertime and she told her class every year when she introduced me that I was the first and only student she ever taught who negotiated his own punishments. That’s what I did as a 9- or 10 year-old. I was a politician. Or a lawyer. I used my words and my mind to make bad things better, and good things… good-er.

I spent a lifetime using these tricks and tactics to lull myself into believing I was a good communicator, when in fact my so-called gift of gab was limiting me the entire time from being a good and real human being to those who were worthy enough of honest communication. The root ‘com’ literally means with, together, or completely. It is thus why it shouldn’t be any real surprise that I have come on this very blog on innumerable occasion and lamented how every fledgling attempt I have ever made at love has gone by the wayside. For I have never given them, communicatively, what they have given me.

Year by painstaking year I have stacked tens of thousands of words on Future Bets truly, like, believing that I was the best and most honest version of myself. Which is to say: Believing I was the best writer that I have ever personally been. And yet whenever a new year arises, or comes and goes, and I am able to reread what has taken place in the past I am confronted by a sensation that I was never as honest as I thought at the time. I have simply been telling myself the same story over and again.

What I write here, presently, is certainly destined to be no different. But I guess that’s just how perspective works. If I could redo my Niña article from December, 2024, it would doubtless be better organized, and I would be able to say so much more that didn’t involve precisely what I was feeling in that specific moment. If I could rewrite my Caitlin article from the springtime of 2016, it wouldn’t be so raw. Always I have been a prisoner to this direct wrinkle in time.

How it applies to everyday life, and more specifically my interpersonal relationships with the opposite sex — which, whether I like it or not, is what made me realize my lack of communication skills — is that I can no longer get away with doing what I’ve been doing. I mean, I can, but I don’t want to. I am tired of living through this cycle.

The most noticeable instance occurred a few months ago when the girl I love, whom I don’t even know if she loves me back but that’s neither here nor there, heard a rumor that I slept with another woman we work with (on a different shift) and I straight up lied to her — to her face. I said it wasn’t true.

And I spent the rest of my night and the following day feeling like a complete piece of shit, not necessarily for the fact that the rumor was indeed true but that I lied to somebody I love. That is not something I do, even though I did. That is not something I find acceptable, even though I must have in the heat of the moment. It felt like a completely natural reaction because in every other instance in my life when genuine consequences were at hand I did the exact same thing and lived with it. This time I didn’t.

And so I told the truth. I called her the next day and apologized for lying. I didn’t have to, and yet I did. It may sound completely juvenile for me to admit that I wasn’t aware of how much I loved this girl until I felt so compelled to tell her the truth, but that was how the calculus worked out in my head and thus that was the conclusion I arrived at: That I did not want our relationship, even in the hypothetical, to be built or like aided by a lie.

Immediately I was forced into a new era — of honesty. Communication is honesty, and honesty is communication. These may be things that kids learned when they were young, or teenagers learned when they got older, or adults learned when they were… adults. And still for someone like me who has been good at everything for his entire life including mathematics and writing and reading and fucking and generally making those around me happier than they would have been had I never existed or been in their presence, it took me until I was 35 years old. To learn this very simple lesson.

Because when I was a kid I learned how to be a scumbag who negotiated his own punishments. When I was a teenager I got better at it, speaking globally. When I was an adult I kept building, brick-by-brick, on everything that had already gotten me to that point, and that made life so easy. Which was all that I ever wanted. To cut through the scenic route. To get on with it. With the least possible amount of resistance.

All the while I grew evermore convinced that I wasn’t actually doing anything wrong, but rather the opposite. That by simply breathing, and existing, and getting away with everything that I had spent my whole life getting away with, was what made me so good at communicating. Every white lie that hurt nobody and only advanced my interests, every riddle I told that sounded good but didn’t really mean anything, every yarn I spun around that said nothing at all, was not as clean as I believed it to be and did not make me as solid of a man as I thought.

I’m still learning, you know? I said earlier that everything I have ever applied myself to I have been good at. I wasn’t bullshitting. I really am pretty fucking good at what I do.

But I never put much thought into what that would mean if I tried to be good at the virtuous things. Not until recently, anyway. Like over the last few months. What it would mean if I was more honest and direct with my loved ones. Or if I didn’t only do whatever it took to advance my own interests but rather the interests of those whom I love. Things of that nature.

* * * * *

Why this matters so much to me now is random more than anything else. A random confluence of events, that is. From the heightened sense of self-awareness I discovered through sobriety, to lying to a woman I love, to generally understanding how fleeting a feeling love has always been for me, to knowing how poorly I have handled it at literally every other interval with which love has confronted me, to honestly wanting to do things differently moving forward. This is neither a mathematical formula that needs figuring out, nor a stew that each and all of these various items were thrown into haphazardly. It was just time.

And while I offer voluntarily such a sober assessment of how poorly I handle communication, I realize also that I need to get better at giving myself grace. Never before have I written an article, such as this one, boasting about all the things I am good at. Probably because many of my skills reveal a tacit admission that I am quite excellent at manipulating people. It’s heavy word, and it carries with it an extremely, almost like unparalleled, negative connotation. But always I have justified it as my means of making money as a dealer who works in a casino.

Where it feels problematic is in my understanding that the tactics I implement which make me a good dealer — i.e. one who does better than the average — are the same ones I have spent my life honing as a regular ass person. I am essentially reverse-engineering the idea that I am not a good dealer because I know how to manipulate people, but rather than I manipulate people, anyway, and I just happen to be a dealer.

Again, I need to give myself grace. It should be obvious, given how much I fucking care about bettering myself, that I would never intentionally, knowingly, manipulate somebody I love. Only sociopaths and psychopaths get off on shit like that. I certainly have a conscience, and it is my driving force.

At the same time, I can’t deny what the scoreboard has more or less always looked like. I have accrued many losses in my life — some big and others not so big — but insofar as a life experience is concerned I have been extremely blessed by the things I have seen and done, and accomplished. I have fulfilled dreams. I have been in love, and know what it feels like. I cry sometimes proverbially over spilt milk, wishing things were different. But on the whole I could shed legitimate tears over how happy I am, and generally always have been, knowing that countless others have never and will never know what it is like to experience my privilege.