2026: Chapter 10

I’ve been more irritable than I ought to be. I am not an irritable dude. Moody? For sure. But I am usually pretty steady, like on the inside. I do stick to a disposition that’s sort of on autopilot the majority of the time while I am at work, which accounts for roughly 99 per cent of my human-to-human contact and/or interaction.

It’s not as if I have been in the wrong. With this irritability of mine, I mean. I think it’s more to do with my presentation. I had a guy on craps last Monday trying to hustle one of our regulars, and he started out by being all cheeky about it, saying, ‘Hey, I’m making you money [referring, of course, to our regular].’ I let it pass because generally I’m not in the mood to deal with it. Then a couple minutes later the same guy said ‘Somebody should tip the shooter,’ which, again, if I don’t really give a shit about anyone on the table I’ll allow the leash to grow a little longer than normal. But because the guy he was trying to hustle is a super like seven-days-per-week regular — an 85 year-old snowbird from Maine named Robert — I felt compelled to step in and let the wannabe-hustler know that: ‘We don’t do that around here.’

The guy didn’t appreciate the insinuation, of course, because nobody ever does. To him it was just some harmless chatter, but to someone who knows hustling it was a clear crossing of a line. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked me. And ‘I don’t need the money,’ he implored. I didn’t care. When I’m irritable, we aren’t having a debate about it. ‘We aren’t having a debate about it,’ I told him.

Then a couple days later there was this young-ish blonde woman playing craps and she was taking goddam forever to shoot the dice. When I was the stick man I let it slide, since she seemed friendly enough. More so, again, I just didn’t want to deal with it. Conflict, I mean. I got tapped out from stick by the next dealer and headed to the base position — directly in front of the blonde woman — and the next dealer (on stick) immediately told the blonde that she had to ‘shoot the dice,’ which was a nice way of telling her to hurry the fuck up.

The woman subsequently rolled a seven — seven out, as it were — before chiming in: ‘You should be friendlier to your guests to provide a more positive experience.’ Normally, if you’ll forgive me for sounding like a broken record, I would let it go and move on with my life — because dealers so regularly hear any and every insult you can imagine. This was not one of those days, however. It wasn’t one of those days where I let it slide, cuz irritability, and it was my Friday and what not. I spoke up after she made her stupid comment about a positive guest experience and told her, flatly, that: ‘Usually we tell players to just pick ’em up and shoot ’em, so we were being friendly to you.’

‘What’s your name?’ she asked, peering in at my name badge. ‘Eric? You’re a fucking douchebag,’ she said. I got a solid 8/10 chuckle out of it because, honestly, I can’t remember the last time someone hit me with douchebag. It’s just not something you hear that often in 2026.

‘I don’t give a shit about anything you have to say,’ I admitted to her. Using foul language probably wasn’t the way — I get that — but also it’s a casino and the language I speak is the language of America, from the redwood forests to the gulf stream waters, so it’s nothing. Plus, when someone calls you a fucking douchebag it kind of opens the door for plain speak. Then she said this, and I said that, and it was all very cute and fun for me because it at least got a little fire burning in my belly. ‘Why am I even talking to you?’ she finally arrived at. ‘I’ll just talk to your pit boss.’

I glanced over at who the pit boss was, and it was a black dude named Louis, who has been in the industry like three times as long as my humble decade. In other words, if I don’t give a shit one can only imagine how many fewer shits Louis has to give. I laughed to myself and told the dumb blonde bitch: ‘I encourage you to do that.’ Ten minutes later she yelled my name while she was leaving and made sure to let me know I’m a ‘faggot,’ which was pretty classy if you ask me.

The point of all this isn’t that I’m some tough guy who is constantly looking to mix it up with craps players. It’s the opposite, really: I am so disinterested in conflict, even though on a daily or weekly basis I have ample opportunities to find it, that it should say something that I had two instances in a manner of only three days where conflict arose. It doesn’t say anything about the public, because the public is and always will be the pubic. People don’t like losing money, and they are generally going to be unhappy about it when they do so. It says something, instead, about me.

And to me it’s silly, given that over the many years I have been dealer — i.e. since January, 2014 — the overwhelming majority of arguments or disputes I got involved in happened over my first two or three years on the job. I don’t find that to be much of a coincidence. I was younger and more insecure and felt the need constantly to defend myself and prove to everyone just how fucking tough I was. The older I got, the more secure I became, and the more I felt I had complete control over my game.

I have no reason to be irritated. That’s the long and short of it. It’s already been written how so much of my life is coming together, what with being alcohol-free and all the money savings that comes from that. With running on a very regular basis for the first time in a long time. With eating mildly healthier, thanks to the vitamin-rich smoothies I’m having every night after I run. Everything is fine.

It’s probably just another in a long line of lessons, or reminders, that I have never been and will never be satisfied. It’s like I can’t be. I don’t know if it’s dissatisfaction with the world that surrounds me or dissatisfaction with myself… whether it’s the outside affecting the inside or the inside affecting the out — to put it another way. However it is shaking out currently is quite obviously disagreeable to me, and that’s it.

I’ve somehow managed to turn 36 years old and everyone sort of treats me like a lovable old curmudgeon. I guess I’m just a fucking walking paradox, as Tyler The Creator once said, this seemingly black cloud that wanders hither and thither with a big bleeding heart and perpetually unfounded irrational optimism for the future. It feels like a schtick even though it (probably) isn’t anymore: I no longer know if the cocky and condescending character I play at work is actually me, or if I am actually it.

Then again, maybe everything is just coming back around to me in a full-circle sort of way. When I was in my early-to-mid twenties I was much less averse to fighting and/or arguing, and then I had like a decade-long stretch of relative peacetime — where nothing ever seemed, like, worth it — and now I have re-arrived at a different point in my life where everything seems worth it, even if I know intellectually it isn’t, or shouldn’t be.

In the meantime my biggest issues revolve around typing into the search bar on Google questions such as: What fruits pair well with cucumber in a smoothie? and Why does my cat jump sporadically halfway up the floor-to-ceiling mirror? Until the middle 2010’s I can only assume these important inquiries had plagued mankind for centuries. But now we know. We know which fruits complement cucumbers in smoothies. We know that cats, particularly young ones, get overstimulated and just need more play time.

Seriously though, I am trying to keep this phase into perspective. I was talking recently to one of my friends who was going through her own version of a downer, and I kind of had to let her know that the older you get the longer these funks can last. It sounds counterintuitive because one would think the older you get, the more experience you have at dealing with various issues, and thus the easier it is to get over them. That’s certainly true in some cases. Most cases, even.

But when it comes to matters of the heart I’ve found that, a lot in the same way a young body heals faster with respect to pulled muscles and other miscellaneous aches and pains, I used to be much quicker at turning the page than I am presently. I actually wonder if it’s directly attributable to what I explained in the last paragraph: If, theoretically, I am more knowledgeable and experienced at this precise moment in time than I have been at any point in my life and, in turn, have more answers than I have ever had, then why do I still feel emotional pain when I have already seen and done and been through it before?

Most of it probably revolves around my ego, and pride. That generally does most of my talking. It’s so easy for me to give up on others when I decide that I no longer want to play in the sandbox, but I go away kicking and screaming when the other party decides I am not the one they want to play with anymore. Half the time I don’t even think it’s about getting what I want, but rather being incapable of accepting when the game isn’t being played on my specific terms.

And, as I said, I’m not, like, naïve about it. I have been here before. When it feels I am being passed on, or strung along, or lead on in some capacity, to me it means only that the other party is waiting for a better prospect to come along or, worse, that a better prospect is already there. Reassurance is a waste of time: It either is or it isn’t.

I think it sucks. My gut already knows the answer and I continue allowing myself a ticket on this emotional roller coaster where the good days only make the bad days that much worse, and the bad days allow even the smallest kernel of hope to seep in and make the good days that much better. High highs; low lows; and it never seems to end.

More than perhaps anything I am sick of writing about it. The only thing worse than having nothing to write about is having one specific topic that seemingly everything either revolves around or comes back to. With nothing, I can at least allow myself the potential to get lost. Most nights, nothing manifests itself into… nothing, but every so often something becomes of it.

With one singular topic, however, there is no escaping. I wake up to it, I breathe it, I eat it, I fall asleep with it. I’d argue that I have been living with this for the last six months, which is why it seems these funks aren’t so easily picked up and discarded as I once believed. The art of growing up is an existential exercise — a game of experience — and while these blows I have absorbed over the years soften the day-to-day grind, it’s been proven that it never goes away completely.

And I am definitely in a fake-it-till-you-make it phase of my life: As much as I would love to dwell and feel sorry for myself (in everyday, public, non-blog life, anyway), I know my salvation will arrive from focusing only on the things I can control. All the overthinking, all the nasty feelings that churn and combust in the pit of my stomach, all the confusion that poisons my mind, doesn’t bring me any closer to my own peace and liberation.

As such, even if I don’t necessarily want to, (1) I am going to remain sober. (2) I am going to continue saving as much money as I can for the purposes of buying a house and going to law school and purchasing a Porche. (3) I am going to maintain this slow ascension of going on the treadmill every day until I get my body where it needs to be. (4) I am going to keep making these smoothies that provide all of my daily nutrients and shit even though I don’t know what most of the ingredients do for me.

Surely those four items are going to make me the best version of myself that I can be right now, and they are fully within my power. I have 99% of my life’s program figured out right now, but just as it has always been, and probably just as it always will be, I am letting that 1% dominate my emotions and wellbeing. It shouldn’t, but it is. And that’s why I have been irritable.