A couple months ago I had a random thought, in private, about how much I would like to visit the place my family used to vacation at once or twice a year — Solvang CA. It couldn’t have been more than a day later that I was on the phone with my mom when she told me that my older brother, Robby, was soon to be taking a few weeks off work and that he planned on spending a couple days there. In Solvang, I mean. I didn’t want to take any shine off his imminent trip — by saying Hey! That was my idea! — because it would have sounded pretty stupid since Robby and I hadn’t spoken about it.
Still, in a playful sort of way I was jealous that he was going. I would have really liked to go with him, even, which is strange because I don’t usually want to do anything with anyone. Perhaps more strangely is how it has been at least 20 years since either of us, my older brother or I, had been to Solvang, and here we were, independently, without any knowledge of each other having such a thought, arriving at the same conclusion — almost as if our childhood vacation destination was beckoning to us.
At any rate I finally found the nerve to physically go into Paycom, my place of work’s preferred digital one-stop-shop for such items as open enrollment, checking paystubs and, yes, requesting time off, and so at the end of June I’ll be taking a week off, and I don’t have any earthly idea how I am going to occupy nine whole days (two two-day weekends plus a full five-day work week in between), but I do know for at least a couple of them I will be making the five or so hour drive to Solvang.
We used to go there as a family when I was a kid, because that’s where my mom’s parents took their family when she was a kid. Naturally I found it a pretty lame place, but only due to the fact that I came from the whitest family in America and we would spend the whole ride listening to oldies and everything about us was, in my eyes, incredibly lame. My need for returning there may only be an admission that I am getting old.
But it’s also to say that Solvang is actually pretty awesome. I mean why in the world is there a small Danish-themed town in Southern California? Who does that? I’m really under the impression that Solvang will only be like the home base of my brief vacation, because I’m probably more interested in visiting Santa Barbara (roughly an hour ahead of Solvang) and Pismo Beach (roughly an hour behind it). It’s just beautiful country out there. That’s all.
I assume having worked the night shift for the last 20 months, I simply have this inherent like physiological need to be both in the sun and nearer the ocean. It may seem somewhat ironic, in a way, that I have lived in the desert for the last two-plus years and still have a yearning to see more sunlight. It only makes sense when you consider that I am generally falling asleep when the sun starts shining and waking up and going to work when it’s disappearing.
And I lament regularly my dissatisfactions with certain aspects of my life, and my need to get away, in a manner of speaking, but I never do anything about it because I do love to work and if I am not working I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do with myself. Another, more practical excuse is that I get paid a sub-minimum wage — $9.50 an hour, roughly half of the current California minimum wage — and being off work for a week means I’ll be making only $76 per day for five days, essentially nothing after taxes.
Always I have allowed myself to be trapped by such an economic truth: That it isn’t really worth it to take time off because I will be spending the following paycheck (or two) making up for the lost wages. Even when Niña died and I could have legitimately used the necessary time for myself. Even over these last handful of months when I have been in and out of depression and a handful of days off could have made a difference. I never did it, since I imagined the financial cost to be too high.
It could perhaps be the byproduct of having more money than I have ever had, it could be that right now I don’t particularly care about burning 40 vacation hours and all the potential earnings (via tips) that come with it, or it could be some combination of the two. What I know to be imperative is that I leave. I either want to enjoy it so much that I pat myself on the back for making a good decision, or I want to get so bored and sick of myself for taking a week off work that I am kicking and screaming to go back.
Sort of impossible as it may sound, I haven’t once taken a real vacation since I became a full-time dealer in 2018. In eight years the longest stretch of time I took off was a leave of absence (which lasted two weeks). Other than that my idea of a vacation was putting in for an occasional Sunday during the NFL season so I could watch the Kansas City Chiefs — and that was back when I had Mondays and Tuesdays off such that it gave me a three-day weekend.
I had some beers on Tuesday, June 16th, ending a fairly illustrious and fruitful run of sobriety. In journalism they would say with such a statement that I buried the lede, but the truth is I quite enjoyed all my Solvang/vacation talk, and my blog is nothing if not a linear progression of events. The beginning section of this blog predates my decision to go to Burgers and Beer and indulge in a few Corona’s, in other words.
I stopped drinking on March 22nd, of course, after I made some silent pact with myself that after taking a brief vacation to Arizona (at the beginning of March) and after my mother came to visit me in the desert (on my birthday: March 20th) I would hop back on the wagon. So that is what I did.
As it were, the last 90-or-so days — leading up to breaking my pact — were productive. Despite falling somewhat short of my larger ambitions towards running at a greater frequency and to longer durations, I remained consistent on my treadmill, averaging a few days per week. I began purchasing foods in the produce section and can honestly say, since I bought my blender, I have made a smoothie each and every night with no exceptions.
Amidst this brief wrinkle in time I have also presided over the biggest bank account in my own personal 36-year and 3-month history, which is and always kinda was the object of my sobriety’s secondary (or tertiary) affection. I can drone on and shed my crocodile tears ad infinitum about my life’s struggles, both interpersonally and intra-personally, but we on Future Bets tend to be more consumed with that which is tangible. We certainly speak in theory. We undoubtedly keep closely to our hopes and dreams. But as Pusha T once said so eloquently:
No D-league, I’m like these clothes
’88 Jordan, leapin’ from the free throw (yeah)
Ballers, I put numbers on the boards
Ballers, I put numbers on the boards
We don’t care about my feelings. That’s what I’m saying. Even I don’t care about my feelings, and I’m the one who has to feel them. For the better part of the last 20 years I have used drugs and alcohol literally on a daily basis to silence the way I feel — whether it’s about a woman I love, the immediate fate of my family, and even failures at living up to my own expectations — and I did it so often (see: literally on a daily basis) that one might call me something of an expert on the subject.
The great (and perhaps only) victory of my experimentations with sobriety is in understanding that I am allowed to get fucked up without compounding the issue by going to a casino and further exacerbating my problems. It’s in being able to have a few drinks on a random Tuesday in June because the casino I work at gave me the option of going home because they didn’t have the necessary floor people to open the craps table, and not having to drink on the subsequent Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. It’s in realizing that I have so much fucking money — on an incredibly relative scale, of course — that it didn’t feel like the worst idea in the world to pick up a couple tall boys at the local Circle K on my way home from work on a Saturday, and drink in a celebratory sort of way while I paid off the remaining $9,386.90 on my Honda Civic.
But yes, I will be totally square with you: The prospect of Solvang CA did play a role in my decision to break up with my sobriety girlfriend. I imagine I decided having some beers was something I deserved at the exact moment I put in for the week-long vacation, let alone when it became approved. It just seemed like a good idea is all. I feel sort of arrogant saying so, knowing that I had a similar it’s-not-such-a-big-deal feeling the last time I decided to start drinking again. Now, like then, as I sit here I can’t help but think that This Time Is Different.
Earlier I was going for a walk on my treadmill, via the iFit app, listening to trainer Tommy Rivers, and he said, ‘I am really good at abstinence and I am really good at addiction, but I’m not so good at moderation.’ I am (obviously) not alone in believing, er, knowing, that such a sentiment is how I, too, would classify myself. I am really good at just not doing something — such as drinking. I am also really good at doing everything — such as all the fun stuff that created my identity over the years.
Where I currently reside feels a lot like I am trying to accomplish some semblance of moderation, which I don’t particularly think is a thing for me but it’s where I am. Is it possible that I can be an occasional once or twice per month drinker? Would I only be opening myself up for one crazy night to remind or like reinforce how impossible moderation is? Could I have just some fun instead of all the fun?
I highly doubt it. In December, 2025, after six months of sobriety I opened myself up once more to the pitfalls of addiction, and it was a costly three-month stretch of my life. Rather than simply calling it quits and starting anew with sobriety, I made these weird bargains with myself — such as agreeing to start after seeing Sarah in Arizona, and after my mom visited me for my birthday — rather than doing what was necessary at the time.
And here, too, I fell into the trap that I made for myself when I put in for vacation. It’s not like I wanted to go to Solvang just so I could drink. But it nonetheless felt intrinsically as if it were a package deal: I could not go on vacation and choose abstinence, or I could go on vacation and choose addiction. Once I executed the decision to put in for the time off I had already made up my mind.
I reckon my next phase of sobriety is to not be so concerned with future plans, and to operate by my own standard rather than negotiating with the terrorist that lives rent-free inside my head. He isn’t even that good of a negotiator; he just knows his customer all too well. I am not cheap, but I am easy. And so long as I remain open for business, so to speak, the terrorist is going to win.
My ambition a few months ago was to outlast the year of our lord, 2026, without having another drink. I was well on my way. I have actually grown quite adept at eating shit, emotionally anyway, and enduring the nasty feelings in the pit of my stomach, and the poison which runs rampant through my neurotic brain, but I’m also exceptionally impatient and uncannily impulsive. I am pretty much the worst sort of substance abuser you can imagine.
And so in spite of my prowess for endurance I did in fact succumb to my own momentary whims. I must’ve had a day that I did not appreciate more than some of the others, and so that night when I got home I went into the aforementioned Paycom I put in for an entire week and it was then when all of this drinking bullshit started coming back and I knew what was in store for me.
I’m not proud of it, but I also know that, with me, there’s this weird breakeven point where on the one hand I negotiate through all the losses in wages and losses in vacation time and the potentiality/reality of breaking sobriety, and on the other I have to consider my own emotional wellbeing and the potentiality/reality that being away, and taking time for myself, outweighs so many of the negatives that so regularly thwarts me from taking such drastic action.
I suppose we shall see. I am honestly afraid of it — having nine days off, I mean. I’m afraid that I am going to hate it. I am afraid that after a day or two I’ll be so bored that I won’t know what to do with myself and enter into the old agreement of idle hands being the devil’s playground. I am afraid also that I will enjoy myself and that I won’t want to enter back into the shit that I have been eating willfully over these last handful of months. I am afraid.
And I am afraid of what it is I am going to look like on the other side. I am afraid of what my sober friend once told me about how when you start drinking again after a layoff that all of your demons have been doing pushups and that I will revert back to my old ways. I am afraid that this love I have been trying to make sense for so many of these months is gone and dead forever and that I may convince myself that nothing matters anymore — yet again — and that I will repeat the same cycles that I have made a habit of repeating over so many of these years. I am afraid.
And I am afraid of seeing my family again, which is certainly going to happen over these next nine days, and letting them know that I have been drinking again, and allowing them to enable me further because if anyone knows anything it’s that Eric Reining is Much More Interesting when he is, in fact, imbibing on certain extracurricular activities, and since nobody ever gets to see Eric Reining, and particularly his own family members, they are going to cheer him on when he’s sober but they are also going to light the match when he isn’t. I am afraid.
But who knows? Maybe it won’t be so bad.
Future Bets 
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