I think every year in some form or another I write that Labor Day is my favorite American holiday, because it carries with it the most meaning. As much nostalgia as I feel every Christmas, opening presents with my family, or as much as I long for the old days spending Thanksgiving with all of my cousins, and aunts, and uncles, and my late grandma, for me holidays were more about the people I was surrounded by than the actual holidays themselves.
Labor Day, on the other hand, isn’t just some arbitrary date in February signifying love — such as Valentines Day. It isn’t about the supposed resurrection of a character from a fictional story book — such as Easter. Neither is it the celebration of colonizers breaking bread with Native Americans (90 percent of whom died after Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492), nor the alleged birth date of a child apparently born in a manger to a virgin mother. We, as a people, had to invent our own meanings for those holidays.
Labor Day actually came about as a concession from politicians who hoped to curry favor with the American workingclass after many violent strikes that cost men their lives. Red is the color of labor, because it represents the blood that was shed by ordinary people in their battle against capitalists — whom whenever shit hit the fan would call upon government-sponsored goons to break up their strikes. And, yeah, sometimes kill them.
The sacrifices of American labor during the late-1800’s all the way through The Gilded Age and into The Great Depression laid the groundwork for why we still have unions to this day. They are responsible for why the government allowed us, as Americans, to have a national holiday. We take many things for granted in our humble lives day by day, such as a 40-hour work week, or more generally having a week-end, but I find it’s important once in a while to appreciate that they didn’t come about because of magic. They had to be fought for, and earned, and it was never easy.
If you slugged through Chapter 20 — when I made the argument for a large swath of millionaires in their perpetual battle against the billionaire class — I trust that it was not lost on the readership the fact that we are all fighting this battle. The Major League Baseball Players Association represents an infinitely small group of people, speaking comparatively, to the masses I typically drone on about. But the idea resonates just the same: The MLBPA symbolizes just a tiny slice of what all of us as workers are going through.
American labor, and American unions, were once a major preoccupation of mine. I would argue that they became such a specific preoccupation that, like the American political system as a whole, I got bored of it. I got bored of referencing author Thomas Frank in the many books of his I consumed about the relationship between workers and owners; I got bored of seemingly begging both my Republican and Democrat brothers and sisters to give a shit about labor issues that affected all of us; I got bored of caring, like truly, about this singular issue that no one around me really pieced together in the same way.
The natural response I experienced from this boredom was to give up on the subject altogether. I had nowhere else with it to go: I realized no matter what I said, or no matter how strongly I felt, everybody I came into contact with was already decided on their beliefs. Yes, everybody agreed that billionaires suck and that workers deserved more. Everybody to varying degrees nodded along when I said the obvious — that we, the labor, were getting screwed.
But when push came to shove the Republican friends of mine believed that Democrats were the problem and that the solution was more conservatism. Democratic friends of mine believed that Republicans were the problem and that the solution was leftist economic policies were a bridge too far. My fledgling attempt at recruiting both sides to my team was a failure. Because to almost everyone else it was the simple binary equation of Red v. Blue, or Left v. Right.
What I realized only very recently was just how much labor issues are still a major part of me. It’s, like, the only subject that gets me excited. Surely I could pump out thousands of words at the drop of a dime about the Kansas City Chiefs upcoming season, or the consistent and prolonged mediocrity of the Texas Rangers, but that’s just for the love of the game. It allows me to treat sports as if they are art, as if my opinion and observations mean something (which they certainly do not).
I imagine the reason worker issues, and/or unions, spark me in a similar way is due to the fact that they are much science math than art. There is a particularly direct set of breadcrumbs that led us (as Americans) from slavery, to a hundred years later The Gilded Age, to another hundred years later where we happen to be on this very Labor Day. The ink is dry on the story of the American Labor Movement: There are things that really happened, that are irrefutable, and they brought us to this moment where everyone agrees in the old adage that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
It is my calling in life, I feel, to play a role in the wars to come. That is why I am going to be a labor lawyer someday. And that’s it.
My arrogance led me to believe one day I could just show up, willy-nilly, to the admissions office of some law school and notify them that: Okay, I am ready now — I am ready to start law school. I had no idea that one must first earn a bachelors degree, or at the absolute minimum an associates degree. As a veteran of the labor force and someone who hustles for a living and uses words and charm to get everywhere he has ever been, I was foolishly under the impression I could simply be and act as myself and they would give me whatever I wanted.
It was much to my dismay to find that that is not the case. I have survived and in many ways flourished by operating within the grey areas of the professional universe — at least my own specific profession — as well as the mundane day-to-day interpersonal relationships that make a man’s world go round. What I have never been able to topple or like transcend with mere words and charm are (1) law enforcement and (2) academia. Those two specific institutions of American life never cared much for characters like me.
But that’s okay, you know? While I was arrogant enough to have believed I could get away with knocking on the door of law school and getting granted entrance without any reputable paper trail, I am not so arrogant to admit that my next (and perhaps final) foray into higher education will be easy. It took me the better part of the last 20 years, but I do understand it now. I understand what it means to actually work for something.
And I couldn’t have known, half of a lifetime ago — when I was 18 rather than 36 — what it meant to work at all, let alone work hard, or with a purpose. Many times before I’ve opined that my great failure at a place such as Virginia Tech, or to a lesser degree a couple community colleges in Southern CA, was that in my upbringing with public education I never learned, and was never taught, how to study. It sounds dumb, but that’s really to say I was dumb, and so my lack of know-how vis-a-vis studying was my downfall.
It calls into focus an old cliché that my 10th grade World History teacher, Mr. Butterfield, used to say: That one’s greatest strength is their greatest weakness. My great strength from from K-12 was my so-called god-given natural abilities. I was so good at everything public education had to throw at me that I was rarely forced to ever, like, dig deep. One need not fight to improve themselves when there existed no signs that improvement was necessary.
I was coddled and enabled by both of my parents, but also when it came to school they never had to worry about me — because I really enjoyed it. School, that is. I saw as a little boy how my older brother would lie about doing his homework, or the grades he got, and to me it just seemed so obvious that I would do the opposite. And I was rewarded by hardly ever getting nagged, or given a hard time, which created a quite nice and stress-free and comfortable experience for me as a youth.
It would not be until much later in life when I understood that the unintended consequence of being smart enough to coast through school, and getting grades one could consider good enough, and being rewarded by getting into a university that most would deem pretty solid, generally, was that no one ever, like, pushed me to do better. I think some of my teachers tried. They would try, and I would placate them to their faces and make them feel as if I had seen the light. But I never changed because I was always playing The Game.
So it was fitting that I was never humbled for real until I dropped out of Virginia Tech and moved back in with my parents in Southern CA. The way I tell it today is that I was trying at the time to make it work with my girlfriend back home — and that isn’t, like, untrue — but the reality is I was not ready for the challenge that college presented me. And I cowered at the first sign of adversity.
For many years I assumed my life experience was a special one, and I have continued to tell myself the same story — over and over — about how I got to be where I am sitting currently. There were many cornerstone moments that have acted as the pillars to prop me up, to make it all make sense to me as if I was living out my own novel, or whatever. But one can only see such a path in retrospect; because very little that I have ever accomplished felt intentional while it was happening.
There does, however, seem to be a parallel between beginning on a path to law school and the most intentional, life-altering decision I ever made — which in 2013 was going to dealer school. It did not feel like a choice inasmuch as something I absolutely had to do. My best friend and I made all this money playing blackjack one night, and I’ll never forget being in line at the McDonalds on 40th street in San Bernardino CA and feeling excited about the prospect of being a dealer.
The following day I handed the owner of the school, Peter, $1,300 in casino winnings and told him that I would start the following Monday. I didn’t know how long the school was going to take. I didn’t know what it would require of me in terms of learning or being coachable. I just knew I had literally nothing else going on in my life — I was unemployed and wasn’t going to school — and so it had to be done.
Dealer school was the best decision and investment I ever made and nothing else is even remotely close. That is what going back to school to earn my bachelors degree, and ultimately parlaying that degree into admission into some law school, feels like. I don’t know what it’s going to take in terms of time, or money, or work ethic. I just know I have to do it.
And it’s hard for me to contain my excitement about the future. My adult life can be broken down into all of these stages, from going to college to dropping out to working a dead-end job to beginning dealer school, to working in that field for the last thirteen years, and all the while I knew I wanted, er, needed more. I always whenever I looked at myself in the mirror saw somebody other than just a dealer at some casino. The work has provided so much in every way one can conceive, whether financially or emotionally or offering a sense of self-worth, of giving me the confidence to know who I am and that who I am is just fine, he’s great, so I am not shitting on my occupation.
All I am saying is the naïve romantic dreamer I was when I took that initial flight in August, 2008, from Ontario CA en route to Roanoke VA, died somewhere, whether before he touched down or after, but that his skeleton still exists. It was Mr. Stowitts, my 11th grade History of the Americas teacher, who once told me, in front of the class after I said some condescending and/or cheeky remark to him: ‘Eric, you’re a smart guy. Maybe if you work hard, and go to college, one day you’ll be as smart as you think you are.’
I am blessed to be able to say I have coasted forever. I coasted through public schooling to the point where it was more about the pageantry of grandstanding in front of the other students and getting better grades than most, and talking back to teachers, and getting to see my friends every day, and I only ever was rewarded for it. My bad behavior was punished only very rarely. When I became a professional in the casino at age-23 I immediately began coasting once more. I started making more money than both of my parents and any of my friends and none of it felt like work.
Somehow, at age-36, I still feel like I am in my youth. It doesn’t seem much of an impediment to start anew the challenge of fulfilling my promise of higher education and doing something legitimate with my life. I just know it’s going to be a process that starts in the spring of 2027. Even though I don’t much appreciate the fact that I can’t get away with going to law school the easy way, by getting rewarded once more for my bad behavior, and my short attention span, and my preference of instant gratification, something whispers to me in the back of my head that the real fruits of this endeavor will be in its process inasmuch as whatever outcome is manifested.
What makes me happiest right now is that I am awake. Almost every aspect of my life over the last decade has been executed on complete autopilot; my output (in terms of labor, and brainpower) has been minimal and my input (in terms of monies) has been, for a mere high school graduate, significantly better than average. I have neither worked for nor earned anything — as in: In my soul — and it’s as if the hardest part of my last 13 years was making the simple decision to begin dealer school. Everything else has been a byproduct of that decision.
But my soul has been yearning. This entire time it has been calling out to me that nothing I have accomplished hitherto is genuine, or acceptable, and all these years it has weighed on me like an millstone around my neck. I have never been able to escape that feeling. I think growing up and telling myself what it was going to look like, and how it was going to be, and who I was going to be, has like a fucking Disney movie clouded my perception of my own reality. Anyone could look at me and say I am doing just fine. But what is that really worth if I don’t feel it myself?
At the end of all things, I know what dealing in a casino has done: It has created for me a safety net. That is all. It provides a soft landing spot if one day I decide law school is a goal entirely unobtainable, and that I cannot do it, and that the work is too much, and the investment is too great for the ultimate payoff. The casino allows me to be good, forever. But it will never let me be great. And being great is the only reason I do this. Being great is the only reason I want to be awake.
Future Bets 
Leave a comment