There were three of us: me, Dom, and Matt. No real responsibilities. Between sessions we played FIFA on a PlayStation 3 and flicked cards into a hat for dumb punishments. Loser barefoot across frozen sand in winter and then pelted with eggs. I won once and the relief of throwing instead of shivering drowned out how stupid it was.

The insulation was not just the money. It was the smoke. I was high whenever I was not at the table. Back at the condo the air was a stagnant soup of weed and glowing screens. Counter-Strike was Dominick’s life and when he was not at the monitor he was a haze more than a person sermonizing about manifestation and alignment like the universe was a customer service department that just had not gotten back to him.

Despite living like a total asshole for seven years—a period defined by fermented hops, basement rot, and a general refusal to participate in the human species—I still had more money than any reasonable god would allow a man like me to keep. Meanwhile the physical reality of his life decayed in real time. Dog shit sat in front of my door because Dom could not manage even that. The dog clearly wanted him and I pointed at it.

“Yo. There’s dog shit.”

No apology and no movement. Just the glow of the monitor and the smell of neglect. I drifted back into my own fog. I was winning money in the real world and living in a place where abundance meant a full grinder and a floor no one cleaned.

Janine, Dom’s mother, moved through it all without comment. She worked out relentlessly and sculpted herself into a layer of armor plating because she had to protect the image of her precious child; otherwise, the reality of his decay would change how she looked in front of the powerful people she was starting to move among. She did not flinch and she did not enable loudly. She just existed as an adult moving through an environment she refused to let define her.

When the grind hit silence descended with hoodie up and headphones in and The Black Keys on loop while I kept climbing. The work was solitary and the hours were odd with half-mile walks through biting cold to the bus stop where I sat on cracked vinyl seats in the gray dawn with a backpack that never left my grip. It held everything I had and I slept with it within arm’s reach.

The only real interaction came during smoke breaks when I stood outside the casino doors fifteen feet above the escalators flicking a lighter next to people I had been trying to bankrupt. For ten minutes the mask dropped and we were human but that connection never followed me inside.

One morning near Tropicana heading for the Jitney I wore old Gucci sneakers from my New York days. Five Black guys walked straight toward me on the cracked sidewalk and one locked eyes.

“Hey, nice shoes.”

They passed and nothing happened. Later I realized the only weapon had been my imagination because I had built a life around isolation and started feeling entitled to connection without risking it. Fear was easier than openness.

Thanksgiving came early that year. I wanted to stay back at the condo quiet and empty but Dom insisted I come with him instead. Going home was not an option because home would have meant being alone anyway just with a longer history.

At the house I recognized the Caesars executive immediately because Janine was dating him and it felt serious. This was not a small gathering but his entire extended family of thirty people with kids running and aunts and uncles whose lives were already placed. I stood there holding a drink I did not want while three kids ran around my legs laughing and one slammed sticky hands into my knee. My eyes burned and it was not the noise but the vacancy.

Months earlier Eréndira had invited me to New York and I said yes and then I disappeared without explanation or anything but silence. Standing there watching those kids move freely through a life with witnesses I felt the weight of that choice. It was not guilt but recognition because I had chosen disappearance over presence and dressed it up as independence.

Their lives were embodied and mine felt provisional. At least at the casino dealers nodded and floor managers knew my name which was not intimacy but a familiarity and a connection that did not require me to stay. Home was isolation with memory while this was isolation with witnesses. The money grew and the condo stayed the same but something essential never arrived.

Dom and Matt disappeared deeper into their screens while utilities went unpaid and I covered them without comment because we were all checked out in different directions. One afternoon I was hitting a pipe on the patio when Janine walked out. Like a good mother she scolded Dom but she looked at me differently without saying anything because she did not need to. The look carried disappointment without contempt and it told me that I was there but I was not living. That landed harder than anger ever could.

Later during car rides to the casino Dom and I talked and those were the only moments I did not feel completely alone. It felt like connection but in retrospect it was stalling and just two men passing time in motion without direction.

Years later I ran into Matt and he had a wife and a life of ordinary continuity that I used to mistake for luck. He never paid me back the money but he did say he was sorry and he meant it as he ate an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s straight from the carton. It was not restitution but it was something else and I accepted it. Years later we crossed paths again in borrowed houses and borrowed arrangements where nothing had changed and problems sat untouched while comfort stayed protected.

Before one tournament Dom asked for a small piece of me and I said yes. Afterward I handed him his share in cash and scattered it at his feet because it was not about the money but about power since I did not know how to ask for what I needed so I reached for leverage. He took it without a word.

There was a stretch of years where from the outside we looked the same as smart and capable and funny people who were both drifting and old enough to know better while still waiting for something to force our hands. Eventually I stopped waiting and motion replaced fog and structure replaced drift. The repetition felt like building something even if no one saw it because it was isolation upgraded and forward but not outward.

Dom stayed where he was and from a distance it looked that way while I moved but moving and leading were not the same thing. I valued motion and had little patience for stillness that felt like avoidance so I drew lines where once I had let things blur. Sometimes that felt like clarity and sometimes it felt like ego but I could not always tell the difference. Our relationship ended without ceremony and not with anger but with distance as silence did the work.

Years later I heard Dom was teaching pickleball which was close enough to my age to register and close enough to sting. I had changed. What I had not learned yet was whether change without connection was movement or just a more disciplined way to disappear.

At twenty-seven, though, reading stopped being something I admired and became something I needed.

Before that, my only rituals were getting drunk every day or getting high enough to forget the passage of time. Those were not hobbies. They were anesthesia. When I finally stopped, there was nothing underneath them. No routine to return to. No people to share the ordinary texture of a day with. I had variance. That was my native language. Other people had friends to talk to.

So I read. Incessantly. Compulsively. Like my life depended on it more than the count of the books.

Ninety-nine in a year. One short of the resolution, which did not bother me. Goals are meant to be aimed at, not used to exhume your psyche if you miss by an inch. I moved through cognitive science and mental health first, trying to understand what had gone wrong mechanically. Then I drifted into Buddhist teachers like Jack Kornfield and Ram Dass, people who spoke about suffering without treating it as a personal failure. After that, into stranger territory. Joel Salatin. Agriculture. Why systems meant to nourish people so often strip the life out of them instead.

I moved in another way too. Five miles a day, up the same dirt and gravel road, mosquitoes thick in the air, a dog pulling ahead. Walking in New York had been about stimulation. Walking in Vale was about integration. Turning sentences into something my body could carry.

The contrast between Vale and New York City was more than apparent; it was a physical displacement.

In Manhattan, I was one of seven million; in Vale, my only witnesses were the seven dogs scattered along the gravel route. The shift in volume was, ironically, deafening. In the city, the jackhammers provided a relentless, percussive rhythm, a desperate attempt to maintain the pristine illusion of 2nd Avenue against the rot of traffic and salt. In Vale, that roar was replaced by a hollow silence, broken only by the low, mechanical rumble of a cattle truck rolling through to collect the herd for the feed lots.

Even the air changed its loyalty. The cold, metallic fog rolling off the East River was gone, replaced by the thick, sweet-sour scent of Dunn’s dairy wafting over the fields, a smell of life and ending, all at once.

I did not know where the search was going to land. I was not chasing a degree; I was trying to see if words could fill the hole where the high used to be. Previously I only knew intoxicants; now I knew what depth really was.

I found Kevin Kelly through Tim Ferriss’s podcast.

That sentence probably gives more credit to podcasts than they deserve.

Most podcasts are a waste of time. Drunk or high comedians telling themselves how brilliant they are.

Endless self reference. Inside jokes you have to listen to every week to understand. Navel gazing dressed up as insight. Self glamorizing monologues performed for people who started playing to two drink minimum crowds and never stopped needing the validation. As if writing a dick joke with a tag line were difficult. People confusing repetition with insight and confidence with profundity. Non history podcasts are especially bad. At least history podcasts are closer to audiobooks. They point outward. Everything else folds back in on itself. More takes, more guests, more proximity towards the view count gatekeepers at the top, less joke preparation.

Still, once in a while, something useful slipped through.

Kelly spoke in aphorisms. Not slogans. Words you could actually live by if you were willing to wait long enough for them to make sense. He was fascinating to me because he did not fit anywhere I recognized. He lived among the Amish, deliberately, while having once been the editor of Wired.

Deeply embedded in the future, then choosing proximity to people who had opted out of it almost entirely. That tension felt honest. He was not rejecting technology out of fear or nostalgia. He was choosing limits.

Limits mattered to me. Poker rewarded removing them. Always the persistent need to increase volume to decrease variance. Kelly talked about restraint as a feature, not a failure. About compounding interest that was not financial.

About staying in place long enough for something real to form.

Kelly mentioned once that Shantaram was his favorite book.

That was enough. I picked it up not because I needed another recommendation, but because the overlap mattered. A man who lived among the Amish and had edited Wired choosing that book told me something before I had even opened it.

I loved it in a way that surprised me. A broken Australian man, who literally broke himself out of jail in real life, finds himself no longer chasing the highs of his past. He must confront the humanity innate in all of us, if he will just allow himself to do that.

It was not the adventure or the scale. It was the attention to the humane detail found in the non city sections. The way the book lingered on people who would never be optimized. The way care showed up without being framed as virtue. Though the book starts and ends in Mumbai, the calm of rural India stayed with me most. Not peace exactly, but steadiness. Life happening at a human pace, even when it was hard.

That steadiness exposed something in me. I was living in swings. Up forty thousand. Down to three.

Heart racing whether I was winning or losing. Poker taught me how to tolerate volatility. Shantaram showed me a life where volatility was not the organizing principle. Stability was the guiding force.

The contrast was uncomfortable. I had built my identity around navigating chaos efficiently. The book asked a quieter question. What if chaos was not something to master, but something to soften by staying?

I did not stop playing poker because of it. I did not change course. But I copied passages out longhand, in cursive, because they moved me to tears. Because slowing my hand down was the only way I knew how to stay with what the book stirred up.

Kelly’s patience, the walking, the reading, Shantaram, they were not answers. They were pressure. A different kind than I was used to. The pressure of seeing a way of living that did not depend on extraction, and realizing I did not know how to inhabit it. At the time, loving that book felt like growth.

Looking back, it was recognition. Recognizing that this book was more a mirror to my ego than a path I even knew how to impart on my life. It was saying, here, look at how people actually acknowledge one another if you let the generations pass among themselves through care, not through the chase of monetary gain.

The truth, though, is my favorite book from that period was not philosophy or fiction at all. It was the American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition. I carried it like a tool. Every time I encountered a word I did not fully understand, I stopped. I wrote the word out. Then its phonetic spelling. Then the entire definition. Then its etymology, in brackets, tracing it backward through languages until it lost its modern sharpness and became something older and more honest.

I was trying to slow language down until it could tell me the truth. Trying to see how words actually worked instead of how I wielded them. Now I know the opprobrium, public showing of shameful conduct, that was my life when I was around people. I knew the words. I could define them. I just did not know how to live inside them yet.

Reading did not fix that. Walking did not either.

But together, they gave me something I had not had before. A way to stay with myself without needing to escape. A way to notice how far removed I was from other people without immediately anesthetizing the feeling.

At the time, that felt like progress. I was a thief of fire, a Prometheus dragging down the phrases of the gods to see if they could burn away my own rot. Or more fittingly, I was one of the fallen, looking for a map back to a heaven I had never actually inhabited. I found those maps in the pages, mythological walls of phrase that felt like sanctuary.

But transformation is not found in the map. It is found in the walking.

It was only when I stepped outside those walls, when I stood in the silence of the gravel road, that the little things began to speak. A dog’s persistence. The heavy lidded patience of a cow in a trailer. The way the light hit the Dunn’s dairy silos. These were not just background noise anymore. They were affirmations. I had spent my life playing a game of extraction, trying to take what I wanted from the world. Observation was the opposite. It was a way of finally acknowledging that the world existed without my permission.

Reading did not fix me. Walking did not either.

But they gave me a way to stay. A way to notice how far removed I was from other people without needing to reach for the anesthesia to kill the feeling.

It was not transformation. Not yet.

It was orientation. I had finally stopped moving long enough to see where I was standing.

What I had learned was an illusion of my own psyche—independence masked as virtuosity, never tested by contact, never physically touched.

I hadn’t learned wisdom. I lived in a kingdom of thought regression, insulated from the very heat that could have melted the ice around me.

One afternoon at The Strand, I looked up a word and stumbled instead into Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.

I flipped to its used pages, breathing in the musk of decades—paper softened by hands long gone, glue drying into dust. Printed in the 1970s, it smelled the way only something aged without reverence can.

The definitions were sharp and merciless—cynical without apology, funny without warmth. I stood there longer than I meant to, flipping pages, feeling understood. Eventually I went to the counter and asked a clerk to help me find a copy. He climbed a narrow ladder, ran a finger along a dusty upper shelf, and pulled one down.

I found:

REALITY, n.

The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.

I laughed. Not loudly. The kind of laugh I still edit out of polite rooms.

I bought it without hesitation.

Years later, that same worn copy would hold the ticket stub from The Book of Mormon on Broadway—the hardest I have ever laughed, period. It premiered in 2011 and won all the Tonys that year. It is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Theatre or not. The satire felt perfectly tuned to the city’s frequency: irreverent, loud, self-aware. I didn’t go alone. I took Eréndira.

We walked to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre through Midtown’s electric blur—horns, neon, tourists pausing mid-sidewalk like stunned livestock.

We both lived at the basement level, with only two doors separating our apartments. Cockroaches skittered along the hallway baseboards; garbage bags piled up outside our doors on collection nights, leaking sour smells into the narrow corridor. The space was dim, damp, the kind that made you wonder how anyone kept going, but it was ours—close enough that we could hear each other moving around through the thin walls.

Yet we met on those narrow back patios almost every night—hers a concrete slab barely big enough for two chairs, mine right next to it, no less makeshift. Metal scraping concrete, the East River air thick with humidity and exhaust. We’d order in most nights: plastic containers sweating through paper bags, chicken and rice from the corner spot, sometimes something fried and salty we told ourselves we’d balance out tomorrow.

She would bring out a bowl of ice pudding, spooning it absentmindedly while we talked.

The spoon clinked softly against ceramic as it began to melt.

She had anemia. She knew it. I knew it. She spoke about iron levels and fatigue casually, like a recurring inconvenience. I would watch her reach for another serving of pudding instead of the chicken and rice and sometimes I would knock her hand lightly away.

“Eat this,” I’d say, nudging the container toward her.

She would grab her hand back, annoyed but not angry. “I know,” she’d mutter, taking a few dutiful bites before drifting back to sugar.

I didn’t push it further.

Even I had a heart.

Though if I’m honest, part of that concern was aesthetic. I cared about her energy, her health—but I also cared about how she looked leaning against the railing, city lights behind her. I told myself I was helping. Maybe I was. Maybe I was just managing an image.

I never examined it too closely.

⋅ ⋅ ⋅

At the time, I told myself I just didn’t want to sit in a theater by myself. I needed company. That was the story. But I chose a show I knew she would love. Eréndira had a degree in theatre from Michigan State and was only a few years older than me at age 26—something she’d pursued with the kind of reckless optimism I secretly envied and openly dismissed. “It’s not about money,” she’d said once, shrugging off my half-joking questions about job prospects. “It’s about the work.” I filed that away as naive, picturing her forever in the shadows: stagehand, lighting tech, maybe a costume stitcher if she was lucky. From where I sat, her body and background made the spotlight impossible anyway.

Yet when The Book of Mormon tickets went on sale, I thought of her immediately—the irreverence, the musical numbers, the way it skewered everything sacred. I told myself it was practical: she was right next door, she wouldn’t flake, and Broadway would mean something to her. Even if it meant I got to see the South Park guys’ work for myself. I didn’t admit that I wanted to see her face light up in the dark, or that picking her felt like borrowing her enthusiasm to feel less alone in mine.

That evening started with a meal at a Russian restaurant a few blocks from the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. I don’t remember what I ordered—whatever it was, Russian cuisine features a lot of cabbage, so it was probably something heavy with that unmistakable sour, earthy taste. We sat in a dimly lit booth, the air thick with dill and beets, talking the way we always did on the patio but with the low hum of other diners around us. She spoke about a refugee family she was helping, the small bureaucratic wins, the exhaustion behind her eyes. I nodded, asked a question or two, but my mind was already drifting toward the show.

We walked the short distance to the theater together, the Midtown energy buzzing around us—tourists, neon, the pre-show rush. Inside, the house lights dimmed, and the show began.

We dropped into the maroon seats—thick velvet, slightly sticky at the armrests. I was already a bottle of wine deep and had to piss immediately. The pressure sat heavy in my gut. But I stayed. I wasn’t leaving.

In the dark, during the most outrageous number—“Hasa Diga Eebowai”—our glances fervently exchanged at the absurdity of it all. The missionaries arrive in a war-torn African village, where the locals teach them their coping mantra: a gleeful, profane chant that translates to “Fuck you, God!” The irreverence of my atheistic nature then made me laugh until my sides hurt—loud, unfiltered, almost defiant.

My shoulders shook. I bent forward, elbows on knees, trying to contain it. I could feel my bladder threatening betrayal, but I held it, jaw clenched, thighs tight.

Eréndira’s eyes met mine in the glow of the stage lights, wide with shared delight at the sheer blasphemy and boldness. We both lost it, shoulders shaking, trying not to disrupt the people around us.

That sideways look—the one reserved for the person closest to you in a dark room. Our knees brushed. We leaned into each other without admitting it.

The rest of the show rolled on. When the curtain finally fell, the applause was thunderous.

We filed out with the crowd into the bright, chaotic night on West 49th Street. And then… nothing.

What remains instead, sharp and ungenerous, is how chubby she was. The most decent woman I had ever met—genuinely kind, quietly courageous, someone who acted on compassion while I only observed—and all my mind salvaged from that night is the shape of her body in the theater seat, the way her coat hung, the way I noticed. I hated that then, and I hate it more now. I shut out everything else.

Detachment was already my default.

⋅ ⋅ ⋅

New York was possibility incarnate.

But a sponge absorbs everything.

The city offered grandeur and decay in the same breath. I soaked it in indiscriminately.

When Occupy gathered in Washington Square Park, I went down one afternoon to see it.

I stood there in clean sneakers on gum-streaked pavement, nodding like I might join.

I didn’t.

I walked the perimeter instead. Observed. Hands in pockets.

One afternoon I bought a copy of The Financial Times and flung its pink pages across the sidewalk in front of a Citi branch. Charts and derivatives fluttered against the glass. One page stuck briefly to the door before sliding down.

My heart pounded as if I’d detonated something.

No one looked up.

Later that night I sat on the patio between our apartments.

Then I broke.

All day she worked with people who had lost countries.

I had lost a gambling platform.

She reached across the table and touched my arm. Just contact.

I cried harder.

Even then, with her hand on my skin and the skyline cutting black against the sky, I was thinking about myself.

Scottsdale, Arizona, felt like a beginning. My brother was finishing his master’s in actuarial science at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff—close enough to matter. Family still counted for something then. I was impatient and took the first place I saw: a house in the far northern reaches of Scottsdale, rented from a man working at a tech startup I barely understood. The neighborhood was gated, quiet, sparsely populated—more Newell, South Dakota than city. It took twenty-five minutes just to reach anything resembling life.

The first year hollowed me out. I burned money on the move and invested heavily in that startup without diligence, mistaking proximity for trust. I drank constantly. Sat behind a computer all day, anesthetized, isolated. My connection to the world came through voices—comedy blasting through headphones: O&A, Burr, Maron, Rogan. Men talking like they lived unfiltered, insisting that comedy wasn’t just entertainment but a way through. I believed them. At the time, belief was enough.

Online dating went nowhere. Poker, once my anchor, lost its gravity. I stopped playing entirely for months and let alcohol take over the hours. I wasn’t broke. I had money sitting untouched—enough to start over almost anywhere. That was part of the problem. Capital removed urgency. I could drift indefinitely. I was free in the same way a homeless man is free—able to go anywhere, but rooted nowhere. Money had once felt like meaning deferred. Now it felt like meaning dissolved.

I moved to Tempe because I wanted noise. Most people want a quiet street. I wanted one loud at three in the morning. Sirens. Music through thin walls. Voices bleeding into the night. Quiet made my thoughts louder. Chaos matched me. I rented a beautiful condo with high ceilings and a persistent plumbing issue that sent sewage back up through the dishwasher line. The place was immaculate and empty. I never had anyone over. The only constant was my brother, who was slowly realizing that the life he’d trained for wasn’t going to save him either.

Days blurred into blackouts and unpaid bills—not from lack, but neglect. Saturday mornings I drank alone at ASU bars. The bartender didn’t know my name, and I didn’t offer it. I existed as a pattern, not a person. That suited me.

Something shifted without ceremony. I started walking more. I noticed the homeless population along Mill Avenue—their permanence, the way the city bent around them without seeing them. I recognized myself. If not for timing, for poker, for a thin layer of capital, I could have been there too. I started helping where I could. Sometimes that meant a bed. Sometimes money. Sometimes just sitting and listening. I didn’t think of it as charity. I thought of it as proximity. We were operating under the same freedom—mine just had insulation.

What struck me wasn’t desperation. It was structure. They had rituals. Stories. Each other. I envied that. My freedom had stripped me of obligation, belief, and guilt. Without faith—religious or otherwise—there was no ledger to balance, no reason to stay, no cost to leaving.

Comedy didn’t arrive as inspiration. It surfaced because it was already living in me, a rejection of the polished lies I saw everywhere. One Tuesday night I stopped drinking early and went to an open mic in Scottsdale. I signed up with no plan. No polish. I bombed for weeks. Then one night, after silence swallowed a joke, I admitted it out loud. The room laughed—not at the line, but at the exposure. For the first time, my voice landed when I wasn’t hiding behind it. Performance, in its truest form, wasn’t about crafting illusions or deceiving the audience with clever masks—it was about stripping them away. Anything less was heresy, a betrayal of the raw truth comedy demanded.

I chased that feeling. Fifteen sets in, my lease ended. I told my brother I rolled dice on where to go next. That was a lie. It was always New York. I wanted friction. I wanted bodies and resistance and misreads. I wanted to be reshaped by contact rather than corrected by reflection.

I didn’t know anyone there. I didn’t know how to rent an apartment. I found a sublet on Craigslist and paid a year upfront—no lease, no name on paper. I had a bed. That was enough.

The place was grimy—basement-level, backed by a shared concrete patio littered with neglect. Cockroaches. Trash. Dog shit no one cleaned up. I didn’t mind. I wanted movement. Noise. I walked the city endlessly, smoking, listening, watching. For the first time, people noticed me. I noticed them back. It felt like reentry.

The city didn’t hide its damage. One day on the subway, a homeless man urinated openly down the middle of the car. People recoiled, pressed against the walls, eyes fixed anywhere but forward. I stepped toward it instead, walked deliberately through the stream, let it touch my shoes. Bodily fluids didn’t bother me. Biology never did. What disgusted me wasn’t mess—it was performance. Polished normalcy. The quiet agreement to pretend nothing was happening while everyone looked away. That was the true filth: deceit dressed as decorum. I hate heretics like that—those who twist reality with their masks and lies. In darker moments, I’d fantasize about wiping out those deceitful souls who twisted reality with masks.

I drank constantly but talked more. Did stand-up wherever I could. Sat at random tables. Looked people in the eye. I missed signals. Misread invitations. I was learning late, clumsily, publicly. But the learning itself felt like movement, and movement felt like life. On stage, I learned that real performance wasn’t deceit—it was defiance against it. No scripts, no facades, just the brutal honesty that could cut through the pretense everyone else clung to.

Near the end of that year, a sewage backup flooded my room and destroyed most of what I owned. I didn’t fight to save any of it. I’d already abandoned a car and most of my belongings in Arizona without looking back. Possessions had lost their grip. Nothing anchored me.

Eventually, I fell in love—not wisely, not well, but honestly. It was my first sustained intimacy, and it mirrored my own stasis more than I understood at the time. That reckoning would come later.

Chapter 3 (predating 2026 for divorce reasons)

Here’s the thing about mental hospitals: I’ve been to them across the country. Two in Utah. One in Missouri. One in Colorado. Most recently, December ’25, Wisconsin. Curiously, never in the states I actually lived in—South Dakota, New Jersey, Michigan—but always wherever the police happened to send me after deciding I was no longer fit for “polite” society.

I am a veteran of the grippy-sock circuit. I’ve spent time in group therapy rooms filled with the broken and the discarded—the underclass that the rest of the world prefers to keep behind locked, heavy-gauge doors. Most of us were Millennials, people who signed themselves in or were signed in by others out of a desperate, clawing hope for a life raft, only to find ourselves treading water in a sea of institutional apathy.

I’ve only ever been committed involuntarily. I’m not delusional; I understand exactly how far I went. But what intake forms never capture—what charts don’t ask—is how life circumstances can grind a mind down until sleep becomes impossible.

There were nights I didn’t sleep at all. Not because of manic energy, but because I’d been betrayed by people I trusted most, and my brain simply refused to shut off. One of those betrayals still sits in my chest like shrapnel. I once lent a close friend, Dominick, thousands of dollars without hesitation. No contracts. No pressure. Just trust. When the tables turned and I needed nothing more than a couch to crash on—no money, no drama—he told me he couldn’t help because he “didn’t know how to ask his grandparents if that was okay.”

That was the moment something inside me fractured. Not cleanly. Jaggedly. Slowly.

Sleep deprivation does strange things to a moral compass. When you stop sleeping, the world begins to feel staged, artificial, like a poorly constructed set piece. Consequences blur. Edges dull. That’s when vandalism and theft started to feel victimless. Sometimes it was mailboxes. Sometimes it was packages left in unlocked cars. It wasn’t about need. It wasn’t hunger. It was the reckless thrill of crossing a line

when the world had already crossed you.

I’m not a knight in shining armor. I’m not a philosopher laundering chaos into theory. I became deranged. And people were hurt because of it. Society decided it was time to remove the glitch from the machine. Fair enough.

What struck me, though, was the difference between those of us on the floor and the high-priced gatekeepers who hold the keys.

The Saints in Scrubs

If there is one unambiguously good thing I can say about psych wards, it’s this: the nurses and techs are the only ones who haven’t lost their souls.

These are people making less than $40,000 a year, working twelve-hour shifts in a powder keg, yet somehow retaining more humanity in their pinky finger than the hospital CEO has in his entire portfolio.

Their care isn’t a billable hour; it’s embodied. They remember your name. They ask real questions. They notice when you’re spiraling before you do.

They are the front lines, the ones who actually touch the tragedy. In the American medical machine, the closer you are to the patient, the less you are paid. Status is measured by how many doors you can put between yourself and the suffering.

The Overwhelmed Sentinels

It’s easy to cast the psychiatrists as the villains of the ward—the cold, aloof gatekeepers in designer loafers. But that’s a lazy narrative. The truth is more tragic: The doctors are being crushed by the same machine that is warehousing us.

They aren’t malevolent; they are exhausted. They exist in a state of permanent triage, spending hours in windowless conference rooms, locked in pointless, circular meetings about the “high-acuity” cases—the truly psychotic, the violent, the souls so shattered they require constant, minute-by-minute liability management. While they are buried under mountains of charting and legal defense paperwork, the rest of us—the “functional” glitches—become invisible.

Because I can quote Jung, because my vocabulary is intact, I am dismissed. I am not a fire to be put out; I am a low-priority ticket in a system that only has enough water for the three-alarm blazes. The expert psychiatrists, the ones who could actually engage with the architecture of my inner self, are too busy trying to keep the facility from being sued to actually see me. Instead, they send the students.

I get the med student—the green-horn with a fresh stethoscope and a deer-in-the-headlights stare. I am a training exercise, a safe patient for the beginners because I won’t bite their ear off or scream at the walls. The actual expertise is locked away in a basement meeting, discussing a code-red patient while I am handed a script and a handshake by someone who won’t remember my name by the time they hit the parking lot.

The Paperwork Purgatory

Then there are the social workers—the harried middlemen of the soul-trade. If the doctors are the burnt-out sentinels and the nurses are the saints, the social workers are the bureaucratic wardens of Purgatory.

They didn’t start this way. Nobody enters social work dreaming of a windowless office and a $42,000 salary. They began with a spark—a sincere desire to reach into wreckage and pull someone free. But the Machine has a way of grinding sparks into fine grey ash.

They are the human shock absorbers, navigating the frayed egos of psychiatrists who are one bad shift away from snapping themselves, while facing patients who are one bad sentence away from a meltdown. They translate articulate ramblings into ICD-10 codes just to keep the lights on. They signed up to save lives; they ended up documenting the drowning.

The Crime of Seeing Too Much

My last encounter was with a psychologist—let’s call him Dr. Teepar. He didn’t look at me with malice; he looked at me with the vacant stare of a man who had nothing left to give. I asked him if he was familiar with the anima and animus, basic Jungian concepts. He didn’t look up. He didn’t scoff because he was evil; he scoffed because he was intellectually bankrupt from a decade of staring at symptom checklists.

“Of course I don’t know that,” he said. To him, I wasn’t a psyche to be explored; I was a data point to be stabilized and offloaded so he could get back to the Everest of insurance paperwork waiting on his desk.

Modern psychiatry rewards compliance and punishes depth. The system doesn’t want transformation; it wants a “return to baseline.” It wants the glitch to stop making noise so the machine can keep humming.

We warehouse the sensitive and reward the numb, and in the process, we burn out the very people we trained to help us.

In Utah, one high-priced doctor—white beard, wise-sage aesthetic, budget Freud delivery—told me I sounded like the Unabomber because I dared to rant about the spiritual rot gnawing at our tech-obsessed society. The irony is brutal: the better adjusted you are to a hollow, profit-driven world, the more successful you become. If you can ignore suffering while charging $2,000 a day for a bed, you get a corner office.

The Cigarette Break Communion

The real truth of the grippy-sock circuit isn’t found in fluorescent-lit group rooms. It happens outside, during the three daily cigarette breaks. These ten-minute windows are the only times the hierarchy dissolves into a fellowship of the forgotten.

While the psychiatrists huddle in thermostat-pampered offices, thumbing through journals on pharmacological wizardry and wondering how they ended up so far from the “healing” they imagined, we stand in the cold, shivering like abandoned penguins. It was during the final break of the day—that desperate scramble for one last hit of nicotine—that Geoffrey shared the Gospel of the Discarded.

Geoffrey told us about a seventeen-year-old kid he’d known in prison who developed a feral obsession with ramen noodles, eating them dry out of a toilet bowl. We laughed—the sick, perversely humorous laugh of people who have seen the bottom.

The boy eventually hanged himself. When guards found his body, protocol required them to handcuff his dead hands behind his back before they would even touch him.

Handcuffing the Ghost

That image—a dead boy in handcuffs—is the American underclass experience distilled. It is a system terrified of the humanity it cannot quantify. The doctors, the guards, and the inmates are all trapped in the same metallic heart. The professionals hide behind credentials because empathy is too heavy a load to carry for ten hours a day without breaking.

The Saints of the Smoking Pen

That’s where the nurses revealed who they truly were. In a Green Bay winter where the wind chill hit -15 degrees, they stood outside the locked doors with us.

They didn’t write behavioral notes. When Geoffrey finished speaking, they agreed—quietly, honestly—that we live in a callous state.

There is a profound difference between treating a patient and caring for a human being. The system “treats” us with a flick of a prescription pad and a student’s interview. The nurses care for us. In the frozen darkness of Wisconsin, their compassion was the only thing that didn’t feel like it was designed to break us.

About the Author

Wesley Ismay is a 39-year-old writer with a background in high-stakes online poker, where he spent nearly two decades navigating probability, pressure, and the psychology of risk at elite levels of competition. Though successful at the tables, he became increasingly estranged from the culture of chips and minds, ultimately turning away in pursuit of the written word. His work explores mental illness, institutional power, and life on the underside of American systems. He would like to have a literary agent someday and be published somewhere.

It was my monastery. A digitally lit cave where I played poker, lurked on TalkingPoker, and slowly fermented into a person with loud opinions and no witnesses.

But poker wasn’t my only text. Like every other socially maladapted male with an internet connection in the mid-2000s, I found the gospel of Neil Strauss. I didn’t just read The Game; I studied it like Pot-Limit Omaha. I memorized the scriptures of “Mystery,” a magician in a fuzzy hat who taught that the key to female affection was “negging”—the art of the calculated backhanded compliment.

The logic was intoxicatingly stupid: lower a woman’s value just enough that she scrambles to prove herself to you. Tell her she has lipstick on her teeth or that her nails look cheap. I detested small talk, despised performative rituals, and would have found a vapid model boring within ten minutes. Yet there I was—a basic incel with a six-figure bankroll and zero social skills—memorizing scripts to entrap women I wouldn’t even like, just to prove the theory worked.

I needed social skills the way a starving man needs food, but I had no idea where to begin acquiring them. I had skipped every tutorial level everyone else seemed to get for free. So I experimented the only way I knew how: like a scientist dropping variables into a chaotic system to see what reacted.

I started going to bars alone. Not to drink heavily or to hit on anyone—I barely knew how—but out of sheer, directionless curiosity. I would walk in, scan the room, and just… sit down at a random table occupied by strangers. No opener, no plan. Just plop into an empty chair and wait to observe what happened.

Most of the time it was innocuous. A brief awkward silence, then someone would ask, “Do we know you?” I’d mumble something noncommittal and listen. People were surprisingly tolerant. They’d include me in small talk about sports or the jukebox. Nothing to be afraid of. Interesting, even—like watching a foreign culture up close. But nothing to connect with either. No spark, no recognition, no sense that I belonged in the same species. I’d leave after one beer, data collected, no closer to understanding how normal humans turned proximity into conversation into friendship or more.

One night in Las Vegas, I decided to actually try the scripts. I sat next to a woman at the bar—Asian, composed, minding her drink—and deployed a line I had rehearsed alone in my head like it was a clever theorem.

“Your hair’s too straight,” I said. “Why don’t you curl it, like any reasonable person would?”

She stared at me. Not offended. Not amused. Just… blank. As if I had spoken in a dialect meant for no one.

We sat there for ten minutes without saying another word, sipping our drinks in total silence. Then a man—mid-forties, white, confident in the way only the uncurious are—walked up, handed her a $100 voucher, told her she was beautiful, and walked away.

It dawned on me then. The voucher. The silence. She wasn’t a civilian; she was a professional. And the older man knew the one rule I didn’t: you don’t trick the dealer; you just pay the ante.

The universe had negged me so cleanly it felt surgical. I wasn’t the manipulator in that moment. I was the lesson.

Those evenings confirmed what I already suspected: the rules were written in a language I had never been taught.

The PUA scripts at least offered a phrasebook. But there was still the logistical problem: you had to leave the house. My arena was a dark room lit by dual monitors. I could study the theory of negging supermodels, but I had filtered real women out of existence. The strategy fell apart entirely when the only audience was a plastic Randy “Macho Man” Savage doll.

“She’s insecure, brother! Snap into a Slim Jim!”

So I turned to online dating, assuming my stats would carry me: wealthy, smart, “science-adjacent” attractive. But the digital marketplace had a filter Neil Strauss hadn’t prepared me for: the 6’0” rule.

I wasn’t six feet tall. Which meant I was erased. My carefully crafted openers vanished into the void. The few responses I got were from people who seemed less interested in living a life than in decorating one.

I resigned myself to the void.

Until yosoyveneno.

I didn’t find her on a dating site. I found her where I found everything else of value: the poker blogs. She played in Wil Wheaton’s weekly $22 tournament under the handle yosoyveneno—Spanish for “I am poison.” A rational man would have seen the warning label. I saw reprieve. Poison tasted better than nothingness.

She was thirty-seven. I was nineteen. When she invited me to California, I accepted immediately. I told myself “experience counts as experience.” That is the lie men tell themselves right before making a mistake that will haunt them for a decade.

I landed. She picked me up. I had not previously seen a photo of her.

The mismatch was total: she was nearly twice my body mass—I was a twig who had stress-starved himself into a new tax bracket; age, life stage, everything. The tequila was excellent. The sex was… educational. I did not climax the first time, which I blame entirely on the Jose Cuervo and only partially on the collision of fantasy with unairbrushed reality. But I acquired a story. And in the economy of the lonely, a story is the only currency that spends.

The trip included Disneyland, because of course it did. While waiting for Space Mountain, her ten-year-old daughter looked up at me and asked if I had kissed her mother.

“Yes,” I said, trying to sound sophisticated. “And more.”

To this day, that remains the most cursed sentence I have ever produced.

I used to be ashamed of that story. Now I see it for what it was: the perfect initiation for someone like me. I didn’t get romance; I got reality—the awkwardness, the desperation, the absurdity of bodies colliding without souls attached.

Will Rogers never misses: “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

I didn’t just pee on the fence. I grabbed it with both hands, shook it, and waited for the shock to make me feel something.

And it did. It taught me that the isolation of my poker cave wasn’t a prison. It was a quarantine. But every time I broke it, I came back infected.

As I sat back down in the blue light of the monitors, the Macho Man doll watching from the desk, a new, cold nausea set in. I couldn’t tell anymore if I was disgusted by the chaotic world I had just visited, or by the desperation that had driven me to it. The chips were stacking up, the logic was sound, but for the first time, the sovereign nation didn’t feel safe.

It felt empty.

I started to question why a life built on winning felt so completely, terrifyingly hollow.

Holidays—holy days—were once meant for rejoicing, for gathering, for warmth. In my life, they were reminders of the opposite: a stage set for people who were physically there but spiritually vacant.

When my mother gifted me a bicycle-tire inflator as a twenty-seven-year-old—despite the fact I couldn’t ride a bike and wouldn’t learn until I was twenty-eight—I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t even surprised. In truth, I don’t remember a single “good” gift from her. There was never a moment where she saw me, thought of what I needed, and acquired it.

Her gifts were always artifacts of indifference—objects scrounged from the back of a closet where they had sat for years, gathering dust and the stale scent of neglect. She would wrap up these musty afterthoughts and hand them over as if they were new.

But then again, the Jensens—my mother’s maiden name—seem to lack an olfactory sense entirely. They move through the world nose-blind to the decay around them.

The rot started with Hazel, my maternal grandmother.

I only saw Hazel during her rare, ritualistic appearances, where she floated around like a ghost in her own life. Looking back, I suspect it wasn’t just emptiness; it was likely PTSD, the kind rural South Dakota women developed after a traumatic birth or a hard life, leaving them permanently severed from their former selves. She wasn’t just quiet; she was broken.

But the true depth of that family’s repulsion was something I learned secondhand. My father later told me an anecdote from when he was dating my mother—a story that became the definitive legend of my maternal lineage’s dysfunction.

He described a Thanksgiving at Hazel’s. After the meal, in that strange rural detachment, hygiene became an afterthought. They didn’t put the food away. They simply left the turkey and the sides out on the back porch, eating off the cold, congealed leftovers for weeks. The smell didn’t seem to register to them—just like the musty smell of my Christmas gifts never registered to my mother.

I never attended those dinners myself, but hearing my father tell it confirmed everything I felt in my gut. That family was disgusting. Repulsive. They were cold, but not in the refrigerator sense—they didn’t preserve things; they just let them sit and spoil.

Knowing this was my heritage, isolation became a sanitary measure. My childhood security blanket wasn’t people—it was distance from them.

The Clean World of Odds

If my mother’s bloodline was a study in messy, irrational decay, poker became my sanctuary of order.

It was the one place where logic, instinct, and judgment weren’t liabilities—they were currency. When the Moneymaker boom hit, I didn’t just play; I studied. I became a man-child glued to forums and strategy discussions, obsessed with the architecture of the game.

I started with a free $50 on Empire Poker. By nineteen, it was over $100,000.

I remember the night I won $7,000 in a Bodog tournament. I told my father at 4 AM, and for a moment, I saw pride flash through him—something rare, something sacred. But what I loved most wasn’t the money. It was the filtering. Poker is a ruthless meritocracy. You cannot fake it. You are either a winning player who controls their emotions and understands the math, or you are a fish who complains about “bad beats.”

There was no room for the Hazel-like drifting in poker. You had to be awake. When Cole South—a god of the online game—invited me into a private channel to ask for my advice on his videos, it felt like lightning. I had value. My mind had purchase on reality.

I thought, naively, that if I could just bring this level of success to the real world, the isolation would end. I thought the problem was me—that I was just the quiet kid in the corner while the loud, obnoxious guys got the girls.

Then came the night in Nisland.

The Chrysalis Cracks

Around age twenty-one, after a classmate named Coy Price died in a car accident, the peer group gathered at the Nisland bar.

By this time, stress and discipline had sculpted me. Thirty pounds had evaporated from my frame. Suddenly, I wasn’t the invisible observer; I was attractive. The same girls who had ignored me in high school, the ones who chased the loud drunks, now fawned over me.

I sat alone at the bar with a beer, listening.

“Yeah, I’d fuck him—maybe get pregnant,” one of them said.

Cackling laughter followed.

Inside, I didn’t feel flattered. I recoiled. It was a moment of absolute clarity. They hadn’t changed. They hadn’t grown. They were the same people they were in high school, just three years older and none the wiser.

They didn’t see me. They didn’t know about the poker wins, the strategy, the discipline, or the mind I had cultivated. They saw a piece of meat. It was raw, unvarnished ID. Sexual opportunism wrapped in lip-gloss.

I realized then that the “party” was a lie. The “fun” they were having was just a biological impulse loop. They were operating on software I had uninstalled years ago. I was God’s unwilling witness to the spiritual dead.

It scarred me. It confirmed that I was defenseless among people who lacked souls but played at having them. It pushed me right back into the isolation of the trailer house, because trusting anyone in Butte County became impossible.

The Theology of the Remnant

Only years later did the pieces click, and John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination gave language to what I had lived.

Calvin taught that not all respond to the call of life equally. Some awaken; others remain spiritually inert. A remnant possesses inward depth, judgment, and conscience. The rest—the reprobate—wander untouched, untroubled, and unelected in the deepest existential sense.

He wrote that the elect are bound to God by an “indissoluble tie,” while the others live externally among the faithful but never internally belong.

I had seen this my whole life. I saw it in the stories of Hazel, eating rot on the porch, unaware of the decay. I saw it in the girls at the bar, mimicking human connection but seeking only friction.

Calvin insisted that the mystery of who awakens and who doesn’t lies in God’s hidden counsel. All I knew was that some people were alive on the inside—and most weren’t.

Predestination didn’t explain everything. But it finally gave me a frame for why the world around me looked so damned—and why I felt so fundamentally separate from it.

I wasn’t a sociopath. I was just the only one who could smell the meat turning.

Looking around that bar, I realized those Butte County women were just the soulless leftovers of a society devoid of functioning logic. Like Hazel’s turkey, they’d been left out on the porch too long—unpreserved, room-temperature, and waiting for some drunk idiot to mistake them for sustenance, never realizing they were already spoiled.

Chapter 1: The Calculus of Vengeance

I have never remembered my life in stories. My memory arranges itself in data points and debts.

My earliest data point is sensory.

I am under a scratchy wool blanket in a Motel 6. My brother is huddled next to me. We are technically on “vacation.” I am clutching a box of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cookies, the sugar melting on my tongue, while the air in the room vibrates.

My mother is raging. Again.

She was a petrifying force—a hurricane in a floral blouse. She slammed doors, she screamed, she hit. I didn’t know then that she had once slapped my brother so hard his teeth cut through his gums. I didn’t know yet that she would one day slam a car door on my pinky finger, nearly crushing the bone—not out of malice, but out of a chaotic negligence.

I looked at her, and I learned my first lesson in physics: Rage is inefficient.

Rage is messy. It alerts your enemy. It wastes energy.

I realized then that I was not like her. She was weak. She was a slave to her own storms. I am calculating. I do not process emotion; I process strategy.

Around age four, I developed a habit that baffled everyone. I would just topple over. I would be standing in the Newell grocery store, surrounded by canned goods, and simply decide to hit the floor.

Thud.

People thought something was wrong with me. They were right, but not in the way they thought. I wasn’t falling because I was frail. I was falling because I realized that if the world is going to hurt you, you don’t give it the satisfaction of knocking you down. You do it yourself. You control the pain.

By the time I was ten, the world confirmed I was right to protect myself.

We lived in Vale, South Dakota, a town that felt like it was stuck in a time loop. My father treated animals the way most people treat stocks—assets to be traded, leveraged, or discarded. He didn’t see pets as attachments that lick your face; he saw them as inventory.

There were always dogs chained up outside our house. I cared for one immensely. I don’t even remember his name now—which tells you everything you need to know about how I process grief. I loved him for about three weeks.

Then one day, my father hitched up his team of horses to a wagon to ride around town. The dog was in the back of the wagon, chained to the bed.

My father started driving. At some point, the dog got excited—maybe at a squirrel, maybe just at the movement. He jumped overboard.

But he was still chained.

My father was oblivious. He was focused on his horses, his “stock.” He didn’t hear the struggle. He didn’t look back. He just kept driving, dragging the dog by the neck against the side of the wagon until the animal was strangled to death.

I found him later. I cried, but the tears felt useless. The dog was dead. The chain held. My father viewed it as an operational error. I viewed it as a confirmation of the truth I had felt in that grocery store years earlier: Emotions are weak. Attachments are liabilities. If you love something in a chaotic world, you’re just giving the driver a rope to hang you with.

So, I stopped giving the world ropes.

In high school, I tested this. I remember sitting in the front row of biology class. The pretty girls—the ones who were richer than me, “better” than me—sat in the rows behind me. I didn’t turn around to look at them. I didn’t care.

Instead, I put on a show. I would be crude, loud, and obnoxious to the teacher. I knew she hated it, but I also knew my guy friends were watching. I would say something cutting, something mean, and I would hear them snicker. It usually worked.

The teacher, an obese woman who clearly despised me, did nothing. She couldn’t stop me. And that was the lesson: Authority is a myth.

My own mother—Barb, as we called her—couldn’t stop me either. I didn’t care about Barb. I didn’t care about the teacher. I certainly didn’t care about the pretty girls behind me.

I remember thinking: My own mother I don’t care for, what makes you think I give a damn about any of you?

I excelled at things that allowed me to dominate from a distance. Math. History. Writing.

And then, I found poker.

Poker became my drug because it is vengeance personified.

Civilization has rules against hurting people. You can’t carry a “boom stick” like men did in the 1800s. You can’t challenge a man to a duel because he disrespected you. But at the poker table, you can take everything he has, and he has to shake your hand when it’s over.

I remember playing Heads-Up No-Limit back in the day, before solvers ruined the game, when hero calls were rare and terrifying. I was up against a guy who was trying to run me over. He was betting pot on every street, trying to drown me in aggression.

I looked at my hand. King High. Effectively nothing.

A normal person folds there. A fearful person folds there. But I knew the math, and more importantly, I knew him. He was way over-bluffing. He was desperate.

I didn’t care that I had nothing. I knew I was right. I clicked “Call.”

He turned over a busted draw. My King High was good.

The chat box exploded. “How dare you do that?!” he typed. “Are you stupid?!”

I watched his chips slide into my stack—a pure transfer of power. “Stupid with your cash, loser,” I typed back.

It felt better than sex. It felt like justice.

I kept a spreadsheet of my net worth, and every time the number went up, it wasn’t just money. It was a scoreboard.

I am smarter than you. I will outthink you. I will crush you.

I sat in isolation, clicking buttons, extracting value. I had no binder for human connection—no compassion, no warmth, none of the “feminine” qualities that Jung says are necessary for a soul. I had deleted those files the day the dog died.

I only had the drive to win.

But the problem with vengeance is that it requires an enemy. And when you live in isolation, staring at a monitor, clicking buttons in the dark, you eventually run out of people to fight.

And that is when the crosshairs turn inward.

1. Why this, why now

Think of it as a mini personal manifesto.I’ve spent years in my own sovereign nation—population: one—hiding behind monitors, negging the universe, and turning emotions into liabilities. From the calculus of vengeance that started with a dead dog and a indifferent father, to the rot of family holidays where gifts smelled like forgotten leftovers, I’ve been the observer without action. But after Black Friday nuked my poker world, and the pull of cities like New York exposed my fragility, why now? Because the crosshairs turned inward long enough. This Substack is my way out of the quarantine, sharing the jagged fractures from betrayals, mental wards, and electric fences I peed on myself. It’s not therapy; it’s a scoreboard where I outthink the silence.

2. This isn’t for the reprobate—the soulless ones drifting through bars or systems, mimicking life without the spark. It’s for the remnant: the ones who smell the spiritual rot, who’ve been ground down by indifference but refuse to comply. A fellowship of the forgotten, like those cigarette breaks in psych wards where hierarchy dissolves into raw stories. We’ll talk poker as meritocracy, mental health as institutional apathy, and isolation as both prison and sanctuary. No performative normalcy here—just unfiltered collisions, where you can lurk or engage, but either way, you’re not alone in the noise.

3. Be specific (so sayeth substack prompt)

Expect chapters from my narrative of becoming—autobiographical data points on vengeance, decay, and reinvention. I’ll drop new ones irregularly, whenever the unknown pulls me to write, but starting with the first six already parsed from my site:

• Chapter 1: The Calculus of Vengeance – Where rage gets efficient, emotions turn into weaknesses, and a kid learns to control the pain before the world does.

• Chapter 2: The Elect and the Reprobate – Holidays as theaters of vacancy, poker as a clean world of odds, and spotting the soulless in a bar full of mimics.

• Chapter 3: Grippy Sock Circuit – Betrayals that shatter sleep, psych wards as warehouses for the sensitive, and the saints in scrubs who actually give a damn.

• Chapter 4: Population: One—The Fedora Messiahs, The Art of the Neg, and The Electric Fence – Declaring independence in a trailer, bombing with PUA scripts, and grabbing the fence to feel the shock of reality.

• Chapter 5: The Pull of the Unknown – Ditching South Dakota’s absence for urban chaos, bombing open mics, and envying the structure in homeless rituals.

• Chapter 6: Observer Without Action – Serendipity in bookstores, fragile connections in basements, and Black Friday collapsing the rebellion I called a career.

Free subscribers get all chapters and occasional rants. Paid? Deeper dives—maybe unedited drafts, I read the version for you ADHD people or people with lives behind a wheel, or Q&A on the underclass grind. No schedule worship; life’s too chaotic for that.

Trust me on the “subscribe” button! It’ll be worth it!