The mountains look like great white-tipped anchors dropped from above, chains cut, doomed or destined to rest in place for eternity. I watch their peaks cut swathes through the clouds out the car window. These things look less real in person than they do on the postcards- Postcards are the only place where monoliths such as these make sense.

We roll along a soft curve, climbing one of the picturesque summits toward the resort town. I shift my attention back inside the car. A cozy sleepiness has fallen over the trip. Our luggage crowds each of us into distinct bundles of warmth. Other than the driver- humming faintly along to whatever tune the radio spills into the snowy air- everyone but me snores. I turn back to the window. 

As we reach our destination, I am struck by how utterly faithful all the media around skiing towns has been; Little lodges with smoke billowing out of unseen chimneys, signs hanging on the front advertising $3 beers and firmly outlawing ski boots indoors. Great trees with snow hanging from their eaves, leaves so darkly green they look black. A white blanket on every roof and sidewalk and people walking by in clothing that from inside the car seems disproportionately bulky to the amount of sun now pouring over it all.

The first day is less of a lesson in skiing and more of a crash course in crashing- Down the mountain, across the mountain and most embarrassingly, waiting in line for the ski lift. I feel suddenly alien in my own body. The long planks dangling from my legs glide against my will across the fresh snow. But there is the welcome sensation, as I am rising up the lift with a friend, our limbs dangling and the lodge shrinking behind us, that the world is suddenly new to me in a way it hasn’t been for years.

After several hours of falling, the day comes to a close with little fanfare. We watch college basketball in one of the few bars that pepper our sparse little ski town. There is drinking, smoking, laughter, and ill-placed bets. We find our way home and go to bed early with the intention of waking up near dawn to make a quick breakfast and cruise to tomorrow's mountain. 

Upon waking, I am aching and sore. There is already someone cooking in the kitchen, and I feel a small pang of guilt at not having made any effort to help. I examine my ski gear and see that I have badly bent the pole I used the previous day during one of my many struggles to rise from the snowy ground, which does not help the nerves that flood me as I consider the new mountain. It is larger, more popular, and somehow more real than yesterday's practice runs. I am promised bunny slopes, but as we plan and examine the map it is clear that my friends will not have the patience to babysit me to quite the extent they did yesterday. This means I will have to leap into the greens, the lowest level difficulty of the real trails. The one green I tried at the back end of yesterday's runs took me close to two hours to tumble down.

As we drive up a further incline towards the mountain, each breath I take seems to drizzle down my ribcage. The feeling reminds me of a rain stick my grandmother used to have when I was younger.  I remember turning that stick upside down and hearing the small beans within patter against the wooden container like rain on a sidewalk. I remember the transfer of weight within the stick as I rotated it over and over. Before we’ve gone too far, I ask to stop at a nearby store and buy a supply of oxygen, stuffing the green and silver contraption in the communal backpack. 

Though we’ve only just had breakfast, we’re on a ski trip in the mountains and so there’s a flask being passed around the car and within the backpack are several joints to be smoked at a greater elevation. I stare at the summit as we approach- It is mammoth in proportion and appears misleadingly barren. We end up having to travel to an adjacent lot due to the crowds, where we are forced to trek the distance in our anti-ambulatory ski boots. 

We disembark from a gondola that looks like something out of a storybook onto a mountaintop that is flat and large and home to several cabins that may or may not serve food. Hundreds of other skiers and snowboarders are here and they cruise around this scene with the same ease I might walk down the sidewalk. I struggle to clip myself into my skis and have to stab my poles violently into the ground to keep from floating away as the rest of our group gets ready. 

We start down our first green of the day and to my utter surprise, things are going quite smoothly. My friends had said over and over again that the green we did the first day was closer to a blue and I am beginning to suspect that their words were not entirely empty reassurance. I still crash every so often. I still can only really turn one way, and I still can feel the tiredness in my legs, sore in places I’ve never been from straining muscles I never use. But I am gliding along the mountain and my friends are crossing beside me and in the distance is a view I would’ve hiked a hundred miles for.

Most of the morning passes in similar fashion. There are difficulties- The worst crashes are when my skis, beginner skis designed to do this, detach from my legs as I eat complete shit due to my inability to brake. One of my more experienced friends collects my lost gear while I lay in a heap on the ground, huffing and puffing. It is difficult for me to reconcile the time I spend in the gym with how outclassed I feel on this snowy precipice. I am forced to lean on my more talented friend in embarrassing fashion as I struggle back into my skis. And it is a struggle, with the powder clogging up the auto lock mechanism and the angle of the mountain and my own inexperience making it all the more difficult. These crashes can take ten, twenty minutes to recover from. As horrible as the experience is for me, I cannot imagine it is any more fun for my friends. 

As time goes on, I become increasingly capable and eventually I am able to “lead” the pack as we slice our way down a green. One of the others who is also brand new to the mountains and has opted to snowboard is taking a bit longer to get the hang of it. My friends say that they will wait for him and catch up with me and that I should continue along the trail, which will lead me back to the “village” below. 

I accept this offer and begin careening down the mountain at a speed that feels entirely out of my control. I do not care. I am gliding. I am flying. I glance behind me and I still do not see anyone and I realize that I need to stop. I do this in the best way I know how, a somewhat controlled crash into the side of the mountain. Sitting down now, panting, I squint through my goggles towards where I expect my friends to emerge. I wait. I wait. I pant. I wait.  After ten minutes, I grow concerned and call them. They are already down the mountain and wondering where I am. And now so am I. 

I continue skiing down- That is the only direction I can go- Until I find the trail ends at a ski lift that looks entirely unfamiliar. With nothing else to do, I hop on. To my dismay, the lift rises higher and higher into the clouds above the mountains. I am in the heavens. I am floating above it all. My lungs rattle with apprehension.

When I arrive at the top of wherever I am going, I do not see a higher peak around in any direction. It is freezing and windy and I am exhausted and alone. The surfaces of the peaks and valleys throughout the surrounding range are deeply textured. I gaze at the summit nearest the one I stand atop and find it impossible to believe that I might be in such a place. That I might hope to ever be anywhere else.

There is a map a little ways away from the lift. I drift towards it and to my horror the few jagged lines down from this point are marked with black diamond after black diamond. This cannot be. I will need to be tobogganed down. I will need to be careflighted. I will need to be buried. I approach two people I see wearing orange vests who I am hoping work here and ask them what the easiest way down is.

To my surprise, they brush a bit of snow off the map and point to a previously hidden green path that should snake all the way down to the village below. Though green, the path is incredibly long and I begin my way down it with a resigned sigh. There is a series of now familiar ups and downs, crashes, successful turns, a minute of getting the hang of it followed by fifteen minutes of struggling back into my skis. I feel resentful of the four and five year olds I see casually drawing S’s in the snow ahead of me. It takes over an hour, but I make it down the mountain and to the village, where I quickly hike inside the nearest lodge and order a beer. 

We end up at the same bar that night. I do not feel very good and decide that I am done drinking. My friends down round after round of house brewed mules while I pick at the chili I’ve ordered. We head back home and watch some movies before separating into our own rooms to sleep.

But I cannot sleep. I lie in my bed sweating what feels to me to be a ludicrous amount. At first, my only thought was that this was due to the alcohol. But the sweat is overwhelming. And the coughing- I have a cup on my bedside table that is full of the brownish phlegm that has escaped my guts. I empty it in the bathroom sink and refill it, empty it and refill it. I take a shower at 3 AM, wondering if that will somehow clean whatever it is in me that needs to be cleansed. The warm water is welcome. My brain has never quite felt like this before. It is as though I am constantly on the cusp of remembering something. It is as though each thought is the first I have ever had. I sit on the shower floor for half an hour before turning it off and shivering in the cold of the air, relayering myself and climbing back into my still damp bed. 

I do not sleep for the rest of the night and at 8 AM I rise like a breathless zombie. The rest of the group and I prepare to re-ascend the mountain. There is nothing in me that wants to do this, but it feels as though it is something that I must do, that if I were to skip it I would somehow be ruining everyone else's day. There is another part of me that thinks my skipping it would make the others days much better, that they would no longer have to babysit me as they have in the past and somehow, both of these parts convince me to go.

The flask is passed around the car once again and I refuse it. I watch from the backseat as everyone else takes a turn downing the burning liquid. It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to get into my gear. The walk from the parking lot to the ski lift feels insurmountable, and it is only after we finally arrive that I realize I do not have my ski goggles. I look everywhere. I cannot find them. Two of our friends are leaving later today and are still at the condo. I call one of them and beg him to bring me his goggles while the rest of my friends disappear up the mountain. 

It is snowing hard and the flakes are frigid on my face as I trudge back towards the parking lot. I am gasping for breath. The distance back seems to be double what it was on the way there. My balaclava is snot filled and disgusting. I cannot imagine how I will ski today. I am bruised, drained, out of breath, and have yet to board the gondola. I wish I had asked for the oxygen in my friend's backpack prior to parting ways.

I sit on a snow covered block of concrete within the parking lot and lower my balaclava. I am desperate for oxygen. Families pass me by, certainly wondering at the vile, pudgy faced cretin taking all the crisp mountain air for himself. It seems to me children gawk and point openly. Each breath is open warfare against the altitude. There is another mountain to my left, this one not owned by the resort. Through the snowstorm, I glimpse a dark figure against the white precipice, not skiing but falling. He crashes down the slope, limbs flailing, slamming into the mountainside again and again. My own heart thuds with each impact. A few minutes later, my friend arrives, offering his goggles. I throw my gear in the back and ask him to please just take me back to the condo.

We turn out of the parking lot and begin our way up an icy incline when suddenly the car stops moving. My friend floors the gas pedal and still we don’t move an inch. He holds tight to the brakes. We glance around, in a bit of disbelief at the situation. There is another car a bit behind us that has drifted into a snowbank beside the road, so at least we are not alone in our idiocy. I get out of the car and attempt to push it from behind. All I have to wear are ski boots and they do little for traction. I fall again and again to the frosty floor behind the car. On my sixth or seventh slip I remain there, beaten, a snow angel to be.

Instead, a kind looking local man passes by us and stops his own car, which seems to have no trouble on the slick hill. He quickly assesses the situation and pulls a length of rope from the back of his car, which he wraps around the undercarriage of our rental before tying it to his own vehicle. He pulls us out of the scrape with the ease and regularity of someone who has done this same good deed hundreds of times over. He does not seem to know how profoundly I mean the thanks I give him.

We get back to the house and the friends that are flying home that day leave a little later, offering me some Dayquil before they part. I take it and lie on the couch, feeling like a summertime cloud. Sweat drips from my forehead though it is still snowing outside. After a few hours I muster up the energy to go downstairs to my room, where I once again begin soaking my bed in sweat and hacking up phlegm. 

Around this time, my mother texts me to ask how it is going. I tell her that I do not feel good. She is worried by this, as I have been to Colorado only once before and was hospitalized. I tell her not to worry. This will all pass. Surely I just need to drink even more water than I have been. Surely the Dayquil will set me right. Surely this is some sort of prolonged hangover, the effects of which I have never experienced even on the mornings after my most indulgent nights.

Each and every thought I have feels as though it is stuck within a pile of goo in my brain. When I finally manage to force one free, it flies through the empty canvas of my consciousness at so great a velocity that it is difficult to hold onto any one idea for long. I am sort of awake. I shower again and though it helps, I have a vague notion that it would be very embarrassing to be found dead while naked. I reclothe myself. I text my friends telling them that I am not feeling well and ask them for soup. I’m not sure what time it is when they reply and tell me that the soup is upstairs. I hadn’t even realized they had returned, but it seems they’ve left again for the same bar. The soup is some sort of indeterminate cheesy mass that I don’t feel up to ingesting. I head back downstairs, breathing hard, wishing I had remembered to ask for the oxygen. 

Around this time, my sister begins to text me. She works as a nurse and I trust her more than most doctors. She begins asking me specific questions about how I am feeling and though I can’t seem to remember much outside of the last five minutes, I try to answer honestly. She begins freaking out. She calls me. I tell her not to worry. She and my mother start asking for my friend's phone numbers. I refuse. I do not want them to bother my friends. And then my sister asks if I have been coughing up fluids and for some reason, this question momentarily clears the fog in my brain. I glance over at the side table holding the glass of brown phlegm that I have filled and dumped into the bathroom sink a dozen times. I have been coughing up fluids. Quite a few. Is that a bad thing?

Yes, my sister assures me. It is a bad thing. You need to go to the emergency room. My friends arrive back and while I am mustering up the strength to go see them, they get into the hot tub. I go outside and they ask, are you feeling any better? I say no, and then turn to my closest friend and ask if he can take me to the emergency room. He tells me that he is far too high and drunk to take me. I say ok. He says that my other friend, who is currently showering, can take me. I say ok. I go inside and call an Uber.

It is still snowing and as I wait outside for a silver Toyota Corolla license plate K8V-something, I think about how wonderful it looks. There is a split in my brain- Rather than a lack of awareness, it feels as though I now have two awarenesses, as though my subconscious has risen to a previously uncharted level of wakefulness. My conscious thoughts are the ones I have as I glance around, looking at the beauty of the glassy creek surface against the precious white of the snow, wondering at the residents who must live here full time, feeling grateful for the warmth of my sweatshirt. Conversely, my subconscious seems to scream at me, seems to bite its nails, tells me over and over again that I am in a great amount of trouble. 

The Uber arrives. I clamber in the backseat without a word and try to hold in my coughs so as not to bother him. Thankfully, the driver does not speak to me. He pulls out of the collection of condos and heads down the long road to the nearest emergency room. As we travel along, I realize that the man driving could take me wherever he chose. I know neither where I am coming from, nor where we are going. Each landmark in this foreign world looks like the last. 

About halfway through this drive, my showering friend calls me to ask where I am. He tells me that he would’ve taken me after his shower. I know this is true and can’t really explain to him why I called an Uber as I don’t know myself. Still, it is okay. I’m in a car now. People go to good places in cars. 

The man driving does not seem to speak English well. He looks at the entrance to the emergency room parking lot, which has a big red sign outside of it that says “DO NOT ENTER” and drives right past it. He dumps me off near the front and I walk inside, almost amazed that I am here, amazed that with a credit card you can conjure someone willing to take you wherever you please. There is another man talking to the sole woman at the front desk. He seems angry about something. I sit down and wait.

Eventually, the red-faced man is taken away by a very pretty nurse. I stand up and talk to the woman at the front desk. I tell her I am here for altitude sickness and that is all. I say it sheepishly, so that she will know that I know how ridiculous this is. I add that my sister is a nurse and she suggested I come, hoping to add a little validity to the goofy idea that I would need to be taking up space in this hospital. She nods and eventually I am taken by a short, matronly looking woman towards Examination Room 1. They sit me on the bed and hand me a clipboard to fill out with my insurance information and social security number. I focus very hard and manage to complete the form. I’m wearing a mask out of politeness and having great trouble breathing. 

Eventually they stick a bunch of metal things on my chest, put an oximeter over my finger, and plug an IV into the crook of my left arm. My oxygen levels are at 58. I am told this is not so good. I am told that I am remarkably lucid for such levels. I am sure they are just flattering me. There are three nurses in the room and they all seem to be doing everything and nothing at the same time. My mother and sister keep texting me, but I feel rude whenever I glance at my phone, as though I am ignoring the nurses’ performance. The faces that come to peer over me, the hands that poke and shift seem to belong to one great creature, a mother nurse somewhere deep within the bowels of the hospital controlling each of these caregivers like limbs. Eventually, they all exit stage left. Eventually, the doctor comes to see me.

The doctor is anywhere from 35 to 60 years old. He wears rectangular glasses and a constant smile. His goofy grin and the way he speaks to me, with a lot of dudes and bros and for sures, makes me certain he took this job up in the mountains only so he would be able to ski as much as he wanted. He asks what trails I hit yesterday. He asks if I’ve ever skied Keystone. He asks how long I have been up here and I have trouble remembering. They hook some clear tubes around my head, then decide that that is not enough and cover my face with a mask that pumps cool oxygen into my brain. The number on the screen beside me starts to slowly go up.

My friends and family are texting me and I try to respond but I also need a charger. My family is trying to coerce my friends into bringing me a charger. Instead, I ask a nurse and the pretty one brings me a very short charger that means I will be incapable of responding for some time. That is ok. I take deep breaths. My mother calls the doctor. The doctor makes the astute observation that I will either get better or have to go down in altitude. My mother relays the information to me and I am grateful for my physician's years of medical training.

Eventually, they move me into what they call a more comfortable room. It seems to be the exact same room, except this time they give me the remote for the television. They try taking the mask off of my face and my oxygen levels plummet. I am watching The Office. I haven’t seen the Office in years and I remember it being much funnier. I do not sleep very much. Hospital beds are uncomfortable and I prefer sleeping on my stomach which I cannot do with the things poking out of me. Nurses come in to check in on me every now and then. They unhook me from oxygen and then a few minutes later return to hook me back up. It seems I am not really getting better. It seems my lungs are still full of fluid. It seems I still have high altitude pulmonary edema. 

In the morning, I am told that I will need to be sent to Denver. I ask if I can have my friends take me. They say that I cannot be without oxygen during the drive. This means an ambulance ride, which is going to cost me several thousand dollars. However I am on vacation, which is hardly the time to worry about money.

 I call my friends to bring me my things. My things are packed into the ambulance along with me. A young man with a moustache who looks as though he grew up on a wheat farm binds me into the gurney as I am wheeled into the back of the van. Another man, whose face I never see, is loaded in behind and above me. Soon, we are off.

The ride is long and uneventful. The ambulance seems to be one of the newer models that has done away with suspension entirely. The mountains bounce up and down as they recede through the rear twin windows. I am still being fed oxygen, and so at no point do I feel any differently than I had before, though the country singer disguised as an EMT asks if I am noticing the drop in altitude and I tell him yes so as not to disappoint him. I would very much like to be at the hospital already. My father is flying in to see me. It all feels a bit dramatic.

When the ride ends and the doors to the ambulance open, it is as though we have traveled from another world back to the one I recognize. I get wheeled into an emergency room that looks much more the part of a television emergency room than the one I have just come from. They ask me the same questions I have already answered and tell me that I should start getting better now that I am at lower altitude, though their attempts to take me off oxygen are still quickly rescinded. Eventually, I am brought to a room in the “ED Observation” section, which I know will elicit a joke from my father once he arrives.

A new nurse comes and tells me that I need to try to walk. I say okay. They stick a mobile oximeter on my finger and send me down the hall. I am trying to breathe deeply but my lungs seem to be telling me that they are currently full and to please try again later. I turn back around and walk to the waiting nurse, who looks at the display on my finger and purses her lips. 

They stick another IV in me, this one even more uncomfortable than the last. I am once again covered in little metal stickers. My oxygen is rising, though apparently it is slow going. They are talking about sending me on a plane with a tank. I have already missed my scheduled flight. My boss is taking my absence better than I would’ve thought. He generally sees me off on every trip with a warning not to get hospitalized or arrested, so I feel that perhaps he is taking a bit of joy in my rebellion.

My dad arrives. I am unreasonably glad to see him. I suppose I felt alone. We eat food and discuss things for a while. He makes a joke about ED Observation, then flags down a nurse so that I can shower. The water is freezing and I am unable to remove most of the things covering my body. I get back into bed less than satisfied. 

I ask my main nurse if it would be possible to change my IV as the way they have stuck it in is causing me constant pain. She says she guesses so. I say only if it is not too much trouble. She comes back with the materials for a new IV and says that it should be a cinch because I have easy veins. My dad tells her she jinxed herself. He is right. Eventually she brings in someone else to start the IV for her.

Every thirty minutes or so, a new nurse comes into my room and tells us something different about the steps for my future dismissal. First they had ordered me a mobile oxygen tank. Then of course they had not, it is impossible to order the tank. Then, they did order the oxygen tank but they ordered it to my Texas address. Then, I do not need any oxygen at all and would I please stop making such a fuss about it? Then, a pair of nurses comes in: a tall man I have never seen before holding a clipboard with my main nurse shadowing behind him. The man asks me if I am satisfied with the nursing at this hospital as my main nurse stares daggers at me from over his shoulder. I tell him it has been without flaw. 

I am discharged. They make me go in a wheelchair, though I feel fine. My dad insists on wheeling me through the airport. It makes things irrationally difficult. They have very few elevators around. We make for The Admirals Club, of which my dad is a member. The Admirals Club is crowded, dirty, and seems worse than the rest of the airport but at least we belong.

My dad has booked us adjoining seats on the airplane, but when we go to board we find that we have been separated. He is upset by this since I am no longer on oxygen and we will be rising in altitude, as planes do. They do not seem to care. I feel fine though. Certainly, I feel nothing like I did a few days ago, when my head was less an extension of my body and more a detachable part. 

When we touch down in Texas, my dad no longer wheels me around. Those luxurious days are over. We go to where my mom is waiting in a car outside with my dog and have a little reunion. Now that I am home, I feel a bit silly. I feel everything has been a bit silly- Not just this trip or this emergency, but my family, my friends, my attitude, my life. It is all just a bit of fun, it seems to me. There was never any reason to get so worked up. 

I’m 26 now.

And uninsured. I’m not sure if there’s any sort of grace period once you pass out of your parents' bosom and into the pock-marked and kleptomaniacal arms of Aetna, but if there isn’t then I desperately need my HR lady to get back to me. Apparently, turning 26 counts as a “qualifying event”, which means that I can switch to my employer's health insurance mid year. Other such events are a permanent crossing of the eyes, a slipped disc, and the first and last time you lose a tooth. 

Being that my main goal for this year is to become the healthiest version of myself I can be, getting this insurance updated is a major need. I have doctors appointments I need to begin lining up, pokings, proddings, practices, and surgeries. I need my ears examined for Batman and my nostrils canvassed for Robin. I need knees hammered, spine straightened, and eyebrows plucked. My elbows need a break from tennis and my guts are turning primary growth.

The reason for the goal, simple as it is, is that this past year has been one of my worst in terms of health. In essence, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends and snorting the leftover wax. Brain fried, bones ache, and my livers out on PTO. Bamboozled, star struck and that ain’t the least of the things that plagues me. If you’ve got a cure for what ails friend, I would be buying if it were not that my financial health took the bulk of the damage.

Let’s see- I ended my last post with some writing about having just received a new job in Texas. That was true. I ended up moving back into my parents, a fun thing to do at 25 years old when your girlfriend lives in a college town across the country. The job is with a manufacturing firm in Carrollton, Texas, a major producer of sunscreens, lotions, oils, and other rub-on-your-bodies. I went to the first two days in person and haven’t been back since, though I was told that I need to be in the Dallas area just in case; That is, until six months later, just before my girlfriend was moved back, when I was informed that supposedly I could’ve been working from up there with her this whole time. I can’t write much else about my job, as in my third interview with them they revealed to me that they actually found this website. They can’t have looked through it too thoroughly, as my second blog post is little more than a lamentation of what I do on a daily basis, but they did seem quite concerned that I would be making Tik Tok videos on the side. I let them know that those glory days were well behind me and surprisingly, it worked. Maybe they thought I was really funny.

The first few weeks after I moved back were all good fun. I joined my old soccer team, happy to have a new home after rejecting my Morgantown one. I realized I was 25 and so decided that I should enjoy “going out”, which is a lot of wandering from bar to bar, dangerously inebriated on the streets of Dallas, spending money I don’t have and watching other people try to hook up with one another. Cold, underdressed, and overly intoxicated. The bars have names like Skellig, Chelsea’s Corner, River Pig; Truck Yard, Tequila Social, Old Monk. They’re attended by attractive men and women wearing the same uniform and not minding the noise. I drank hot toddys, espresso martinis, and most of the beer. I celebrated my friend's birthday in his Dallas house smothered in the smoke from his twin fog machines and squirted a bouncer with a test tube shot at KSP, which he didn’t seem to like. I spent dozens of mornings bleary eyed and hungover in exchange for a memory or two. 

I took Finn on a few hikes around Dallas but after a while I found I just couldn’t muster up the energy or will. The sights were so mundane, the weather so foul, and I didn’t have a car, which can be a real deterrent when it comes to transporting your dog. For all my time in Morgantown, I was able to bum off of Cassidy, but now that we were separated and she had selfishly decided to keep her Subaru with her, this put me in a tough position. My first day of work, I had to tell a few weaselly lies in order to keep my coworkers from realizing that I didn’t have an actual mode of transportation (My dad both dropped me off and picked me up, similar to my first day of middle school).

 First, my uncle loaned me his car, a Ford Escape he had lying around for some reason. That was excellent, and I used it for a few weeks before he remembered that his son wanted it and I had to give it back. Then, my grandparents let me borrow their car, a cherry red Ford Expedition older than I am. I had to keep the gas half full or it wouldn’t start. I had to take the keys out of the ignition a certain way or it would keep running and eventually die (This happened more than once). There was no radio and the AC worked only in theory. When my grandma came to reclaim it, I was hardly upset (though remarkably grateful).

 Now that I had well and truly run out of relatives to borrow cars from, I realized that maybe I should get some wheels of my own. I spent a few days perusing Facebook Marketplace before my parents told me buying a new car would be smarter. They didn’t really explain why, but they seemed sure about it and I liked the idea of having something shiny in the driveway. In the end, I got a 2022 Toyota Tacoma from a dealership that had parked it on the corner of the lot on a concrete slab a few inches above the rest of the ground, as though they knew it was their premier vehicle. The man who sold it to me told me he had several other interested parties, but when I offered to buy it then and there he agreed right away. I still feel sorry for those poor suckers who missed out.

I spent far more of the year than I would’ve liked or anticipated working on a side hustle- Reselling things on Amazon. My little brother has an entrepreneurial streak nearly the size of his ego, and he spoonfed me instructions every step of the way. And to be fair, although this leech based business feels like the furthest thing from fun, it does feel productive. The little bits of money trickling in manage to fool me into thinking that I’m working on something. I suspect that that is a major reason as to why my writing fell off so badly. I was spending all my free time running to the Nike store, searching for things online, updating my prices. I was ungating and printing labels, destickering and packing boxes, taping and sourcing items. I bought subscription after subscription, all of which kept telling me I was making a profit while my bank account seemed to think otherwise. Meanwhile, my brother and my parents were making money hand over fist; Finally, I decided to do something about it. 

I purchased some products from Walmart.com with less than stellar reviews to resell them on Amazon. This was a risky play, as the Walmart marketplace is set up exactly the same as the Amazon one, and so likely I had just shipped the products from one teenager's garage to my own. A few weeks later, a court ruled that Amazon could be held liable for products sold on their marketplace and Amazon decided they had better get serious. My account was immediately flagged, suspended, appealed, and has since been deactivated. A long year, with many long nights, wasted thanks to my own stupidity. In the end, I believe I probably lost money and to toss some salt on that injury,  I spent so long away from what I really like to do: Writing. And look. See how bad I am now. I don’t know halfway here know now how long sentences should be. I hardly really even understand what they are.  

In February, I headed off to New Orleans for my best friend's bachelor party. The Airbnb we got was one of two gentrified houses in an otherwise wholly un-gentrified area. We hit Bourbon Street and Frenchman Street, watching jazz acts, eating dozens of different kinds of fried fish, and trying to avoid stepping in anything especially rancid. We went on an airboat tour and saw a bunch of alligators, though my friends almost caused us to miss it. Rousing thirteen horribly hungover people at 8 in the morning with the promise that they’ll soon be on a loud fan boat in the middle of a swamp was as difficult as it sounds. I like to think that they believe it was worth it. After the tour, we ate food at an Irish place, being that it was St Patrick's Day, then headed home for some rest. Seth changed into the leprechaun outfit I’d bought him and we headed back out to the casino for the third time in that short weekend (I probably should’ve listened when he told me he wanted to go to Vegas). When I finally managed to drag them from the craps table to the dinner I had booked that I swear looked much fancier online, I was coming to the realization that I had spent a considerable amount of time and money planning a trip that for the most part could’ve been handled by a spacious backyard and a rented blackjack dealer. After dinner, we went out to the bars again and found one with a band doing oldies. I can’t remember the name of it but watching Seth shamelessly dance with a crowd three times his age made the whole trip worth it to me. And isn’t that what his bachelor party is all about? 

Directly after this trip, I took my SIE, the second latest in a long series of financial exams which have so far resulted in no change whatsoever to my income. I spent about a month studying for it, which was probably overkill, and in a strange way was my route to avoiding studying for the much harder, much more important CFA. I passed the exam easily and the only sense of relief I felt was that I could now get back to focusing on my less than burgeoning Amazon business. 

I flew to West Virginia for Cassidy’s graduation. We tore apart chicken at El Pollon and poured white wine into plastic cups with her family that had flown up to celebrate with us in our cozy apartment. Cassidy was stunning in her graduation gown, beautiful and accomplished and a little intimidating. I’d hardly have had the gall to speak to her had we not been dating for four years. I felt immensely proud of her. The day after, my mother called and told me that my uncle had died and I would need to fly home early. 

My Uncle Marc was the oldest child of my mothers parents. He was born severely mentally handicapped and given only a few years to live. Thankfully, doctors are mostly just guessing and Marc lived well into middle age. He was enthusiastic, loud, and a hugger. He loved to be read to. My mother told me a story about a time when she was babysitting him. She looked away for a moment and suddenly Marc was taking an out-of-control cruise on a tricycle down a long, declining street in nothing but his underwear. He wound up literally crashing a wedding that was taking place on the front lawn of a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Despite the oath she had taken as a babysitter, my mother let the wedding guests enjoy Marc for a good long while before my grandma arrived home to collect him.

My grandma told me another story about Marc’s graduation. Marc’s favorite word was “Hi”; He couldn’t say a lot, but he had that one nailed down. When it came time for him to walk across his graduation stage, he took the diploma from the principal and turned to face the crowd. With one great big wave he called out, “Hi!” loud enough for them to hear him in the rafters, to thunderous applause. My grandma called it one of the most spiritual things she had ever seen.

A week before he died, I went to visit him at my grandparents house in Honey Grove. All of the energy I was used to seeing from him had been drained by pneumonia and cancer. He was always small and on the skinny side, but there was a surprising strength to him that had clearly gone away. I read to him one more time, a short book about trucks, and said goodbye. 

The Friday following Marc’s funeral was Seth’s wedding. I approached it the same way I had approached everything around being his best man- Nervously, and at the last minute. I didn’t have a best man speech written until two days before, and I was certainly less than satisfied with it. The thing was, hard as I might’ve tried to remember, I couldn’t actually think of any real memories with Seth. He was always just there, same as I probably was to him. What better reason for two people to be best friends than proximity? 

Their wedding was absolutely gorgeous, and really took a lot of the pressure off planning my own future wedding, as it would be near impossible to one-up. It was held in an old mansion with a dying vineyard out front and a spacious courtyard of white stone. I was nervous the entire day- Nervous for my speech, for holding the rings, for sitting at the table. Similar to the bachelor party, the most important thing was that the day went well for me. My friends told me that the key to nailing my speech was to get super drunk, and the longer the day wore on the more I started to believe them. 

Finally, the big moment came; My speech, not their marriage. I realized, as I was sitting at the table with my dinner in my throat and desperately short of wine, that I was going to have to read it from my phone. Despite the time I had spent trying to memorize it,  I knew for a fact that standing there in front of all those people would have the words flee from my head like so many hairs. And so, when the microphone passed from the maid of honor to me, I swallowed my nerves and opened my notes app.

The speech went pretty well, though I hardly remember it. The only pictures I have from it are of me looking at my phone. I would advise anyone who is writing a speech to do better at memorizing it than I did. I had many people come up to me afterwards to compliment it, including some of the staff working the wedding, which made me feel much better about the whole thing. Afterwards, I decided to take my friend's advice and quickly drank as many whiskey cokes as I could stomach.

The following week, I flew back up to West Virginia to move Cassidy back home. I was, of course, extraordinarily tired. Throughout all of this I had been working, doing Amazon, and studying. There was so little time or energy for reading or writing that whatever little I did get done hasn’t seen the light of day since. In West Virginia, when I wasn’t working, I was taking things apart, packing them away, labeling them. Amazon had prepared me well. We spent time at all of our favorite restaurants and bars. At the Apothecary, I tipped my favorite bartender some amount and he ran out after me to thank me. I told him we were moving away and that he was my favorite bartender and it was all rather heartwarming, until we showed up there again three days later. He gave me quite a strange look.

The move back was a multiday process, first assisted by my dad in stowing everything away in our Uhaul and then alone together, trundling down the road in our convoy of two. I drove the UHaul. She had the car with the cats. We stopped in the worst state in the Union, suffering through a night in a Kentucky hotel before making it back home late the next day. There was still so much unpacking, organizing, reorganizing. Storage units to be bought, art to be hung. I still couldn’t afford to take any days off. My brain and body both felt as though they were melting or maybe that they had already melted and someone was playing in the puddle.

After we had moved in, I realized that I had only two months until my third CFA exam and I had really hardly studied at all. For the next two months, I did little outside of work, studying, and unpacking. I was irritable and exhausted. My Amazon account got banned. My dog went practically feral on a groomer. I had next to no money and several trips to pay for. 

The next of which was a trip to Port Aransas during the summer with Cassidy’s family.  Her extended family, which made it feel much more serious for some reason. The beach was beautiful, if crowded, and the weather was wonderfully warm. I saw Cassidy look at another man, which is probably the second biggest driver behind my newfound health goal. I listened to her mother and aunt drunkenly scream along to songs I didn’t recognize that were clearly classics in their family. It felt strange being a guest at a different family reunion. It was nice. 

I went to FC Dallas games and wondered why I don’t go to more. I went to my first and only WWE event in box seats provided by a friend's girlfriend who was wealthier than the two of us combined. I visited my brother in Houston, where I bought a $130 NASA jacket I have yet to wear. I was treated to fancy dinner parties, barbecues, and a solar eclipse. I celebrated my friends in a Broken Bow cabin, standing waist deep in murky lake water, faces red and bloated from beer and sun. And a few weeks before my birthday, I took my third CFA. Sitting in the waiting room outside the testing center, the man in front of me turned around and smiled at me. “What’re you in for?”

“CFA.”

“Oh yeah? What level?”

“3.”

“Oh no way! Me too.”

“Really?” I asked, offering a weak grin. “You as nervous as I am?”

“Nope”, the man said, turning back around.

As unconfident as I was going in, I felt that it went okay. Perhaps this will age poorly- I still won’t know for another month. 

I went to Door County the week after my CFA exam. As much as I love it up there, I found myself wanting to be home. I didn’t have any PTO to take, and so I spent most of my days indoors, working as I would at home but without the comfort of my pets or my girlfriend. The hikes were just as beautiful, the people just as pleasant, but I was simply too exhausted to enjoy it all, which was certainly in theme with the rest of my time as a twenty-five year old.

This whole year has felt busy, but it hasn’t been a pleasant sort of busy. It’s an obligatory sort. Obligatory despite so much of it being things I volunteered for, things I signed myself up for. I guess that is sort of what I want to be healthier about too. I want to say no to things, not everything, and maybe not even most everything, but at least some everything. I want to have time for what makes me feel like life is worth living: My girlfriend, my family, my friends, my writing. I want to get smarter and grow as a person. I don’t think I can do another side hustle. I don’t know if I am cut out for it. It doesn't feel right to have a job after my job when all day all I think about is being finished working. My younger brother keeps urging me to appeal to Amazon again and in the practical sense, I know that he is right but I just don’t think that is what I want to spend my time on. I want time to reflect, to think about where my life is going and where I would like it to go. I want to focus on the few things I like to do and do them intensely. I want to feel better when I wake in the morning. 

I have a whiteboard that hangs beside my desk. It lists things that I need to do- Truck lock, shave Finn, joint account- Along with dates I need to remember- Oct 4, A&M vs Mizzou, Nov 29, Atlantis. In the rightmost corner of this board is the number 372. This number represents the number of hours I am behind my goal of writing 2 hours everyday this year. There was a point, around a third of the way through the year, where this was a manageable number. Now, even if I wrote for three hours a day everyday for the next year, I would still be seven hours behind where I wanted to be. I don’t know what it says about me that I have kept up with that number, diligently adding to it every day while failing to curtail the damage. Perhaps that I am a glutton for punishment. Perhaps that I am really good at counting. But I think that there is also a part of me that is hoping that having now moved, changed jobs, taken my last exam, done my best man duties, reunited with my girlfriend, started a failed business, and partied far more than I ever intended to, I can now, finally, sit down and get to work.

I’m 26 now.

I'm 25 now. 

There goes a third of my life, assuming modern medicine comes up with a cure for my terminal case of the sillies. If 24 felt bad, 25 is surprisingly painless. I think maybe 24 was the age at which I first felt truly old, and from here until 30 I can pretty much settle into the idea of being pre-middle age, having already accepted my failure in terms of having any sort of precocious success. This is, of course, if we choose to ignore my top 5 finish in the fourth grade spelling bee, that one TikTok I posted that got a lot of likes, and how well I taught my dog to play dead.

The YOY results are in and the story the data tells is one of unfortunate stagnation. I still went to BJJ, for a period, which also forced me into physical therapy. My physical therapist turned out to be another member of my BJJ class and I have a sneaking suspicion that he failed to heal my shoulder in an effort to reaffirm the class pecking order. Sadly, I was forced back to the dry world of Texas before I could get my hands on that elusive blue belt, not that I was even close. As it turns out, I am pretty terrible at jiu-jitsu. They want you to think and move at the same time, two things I’m already quite poor at when attempting them separately. Even when I managed to win one of my many bouts, I would inevitably have to endure my opponent breathlessly remarking: “Wow, you’re strong.” BJJ is one of the only sports in the world where this is meant as an insult. 

In terms of something resembling progress, I finally quit my much hated job. It took about two months to muster up the courage and one thirty minute phone call to my manager in which I watched her go from faux-cheerful, to crestfallen, to indifferent in a matter of minutes. I spent the next two weeks paradoxically working harder than I ever had before in an attempt to teach the post-teens who would be taking over my workload everything that they needed to know. Hopefully, when they watched back the recordings we made of those Zoom calls, they laughed a lot more at the few jokes I cracked than they did the first time around.

I tried to join the Morgantown City Council, only to be rejected for “not knowing what I want”. Of course I don’t know what I want Ixya- That’s why I’m sitting in a sterile and abandoned waiting room in the town hall with my shirt inside out, trying to join some random city council. I’d been hoping my youth and Excel skills would make me an attractive candidate for doing mind numbing governmental work in exchange for a few morsels of friendship, but instead all I got was one follow up Zoom meeting where I learned why nothing ever happens in government (No one is trying). 

I took a writing class that my parents gifted me, and the encouragement I received there is probably the only reason I am still writing at all a year later. The timing though- Late night Tuesdays- Unfortunately coincided with the only soccer connection I had managed to make in Morgantown, which led to my participation in the league fizzling out and me once again meandering through the college streets in search of friends. This is a lot more pathetic to do at 25 than it is at 18.

I went to New Orleans for a week with the same friends I’d ventured to Miami with. We were flush with live jazz, breaded fish, and more alcohol than any one man could want or need. I met a mysterious stranger at the Pittsburgh airport bar, a retired army veteran named Lionel, who as it turned out was also heading to New Orleans. He asked the woman sitting beside me on the plane to switch seats with him and proceeded to ply me with vodka sprites the entire flight while he demonstrated his expertise around army radio equipment and later invited me to a crawfish boil that weekend, which my friends very rudely were not interested in. I hope he’s having an excellent time on whatever flight he’s taking now. 

I got another cat, Juni, who I treasure. I spent many afternoons reading in our small patio with Jones and Juni mewling in the catio and Finn panting at my feet. Many more were lazed away stretched out on our living room couch, Juni’s labored breaths a sort of comforting white noise as she rested her calico mass on my chest. I would die for her.

My older brother moved to Pittsburgh and quickly became my only friend for several states in every direction. We hiked and ate and explored a small portion of the city together. He lived in a large high rise apartment along the Monongahela river with tall ceilings and floors of cold stone. When someone on his floor or above tossed something down the garbage chute it sounded as though the building were in a fight with another building. It took several months for his cat Harpo to warm up to me, just in time for Tanner to decide that Pittsburgh sucks and move back to Texas. 

I went ziplining, visited Maryland for the first time, and was named my best friend's best man. I flew back to celebrate and plan the bachelor party, but ended up mostly drinking and riding jet skis. We decided on New Orleans as the destination for the bachelor party, where with any luck I’ll manage to run into Lionel again.

I started running a little bit, though you wouldn’t know it from my recent soccer performances, and I got a sort of a mullet from my wonderful haircut lady Destinee, who is probably my favorite part of Pittsburgh. I visited Washington DC for the first time and was blown away by how open everything is. Although I’m sure there are countless security measures in place that I don’t have the expertise to spot, it was a little jarring to be able to walk right up to the White House lawn and peer through the perforated fence. I even caught a glimpse of Joe Biden being very intimately shaved by one of the Secret Service agents. Cassidy and I went moonlight kayaking. Tanner and I went to the arboretum. 

My family visited West Virginia for the holidays and absolutely hated it. It didn’t help that they came during the coldest week of the year, when we couldn’t drive anywhere and didn’t want to. I’m sure they felt a little silly, flying all that way just to get absolutely thrashed in Bananagrams the same as they would've in Texas, but hopefully they enjoyed it regardless.

My parents bought a vacation home in Door County, Wisconsin, which is one of the richest things I’ve ever gotten to say. Door County, featured heavily in this year's trail reviews, is a beautiful area within the peninsula of Wisconsin that doesn’t allow chain restaurants and seems to pivot mostly around drinking and hiking, two of my favorite activities. There’s also a pickleball court in the complex, so I was able to keep up with that nationwide trend. 

I visited a lavender farm, got my bitters card, and read a terrible book loaned to me by a terribly kind woman. We watched the sunset over Sister Bay and gawked at the goats grazing atop Al Johnsons. We partied in Husby’s and needed two hands to count the number of bachelorette parties that swung through town every Friday and Saturday night. When I got back to Morgantown, I'd been unemployed for several months and was desperately in need of a job. I applied anywhere and everywhere and was rejected hundreds, if not thousands, of times, before finally landing a job at a company back in Dallas. The job is largely remote but they “want me to be around” so I was forced to move back to Texas after accepting. Suddenly I find myself once again living at my parents, with my girlfriend halfway across the country, and little prospects for reconciling either of these things and I have to wonder- What have I been doing for the past year?

When I first wrote this, I wasn’t really sure if I should mention some of the sadder things that have happened this year. In some ways it feels to me like stolen valor; These things hurt me deeply but I wasn’t the “main” recipient of the sadness, and that has made me feel like a bit of a fraud for presuming to approach the subject. It also worries me that it might look as though I’m cheapening the magnitude of these events by writing about them on my shitty little website, but part of what these blog posts are, the annual ones at least, is a way of keeping an ongoing, big picture look at my life and what was/is going on in it. So I feel that it would be untruthful to leave out how either end of my year seemed to be colored by death. 

My uncle Brandon killed himself in September. I remember him for being a perfect bridge to the world of adulthood for my siblings and I when we were younger. He showed Tanner and I video games and probably significantly hurt our personal development by introducing us to Reddit. He was great at cards, the only cigarette smoker I spent any significant time around as a kid, and served in Afghanistan. He had brown, curly hair and wore rectangular, IT guy glasses. His beard was only just starting to go gray. He had one son, Sean,  who he loved more than anything in the world. He was my dads only brother. 

This was my second funeral for a suicide. It was also my second funeral, period. I'd never been to a military burial before. At the gravesite we were met with an honor guard, I can’t remember how many- Anywhere from six to ten people, maybe. It was very difficult to speak. The day was gray, bleak, and hinting of rain. The honor guard turned their guns toward the road, upon which cars were actively racing by, and shot. I couldn’t help but to think how horribly that would’ve scared me, had I been one of those in the street. 

The funeral was held in Wisconsin, only a few weeks after I had made the cross country trip to move to West Virginia. I drove eighteen hours to Mukwanago. Cousins I hadn’t seen in years were there, all getting torn up by mosquitoes. People were laughing, joking; It felt somehow wrong, even if it was the only thing that brought any sort of comfort. I don’t actually remember at all where I slept. After one day there, I turned and drove back to West Virginia. On the final left into Cassidy and I’s driveway, I scratched her car. 

The second death of the year came over the summer as yet another gut punch to my father. His best friend Eric, who he has known since childhood, was riding one of the mopeds they had loaned my dad and I only two weeks before along the side of one of the flat and long Door County roads when he got into an accident that sent him into a roadside culvert. I’d met Eric before but we’d never really spent any significant amount of time together. That changed in the summer of 2023 when I went up to Door County with my dad. Eric alternated between living in Milwaukee, where he worked as an art teacher, and the Door County condo that had been his father’s before his. He had long brown hair he wore pushed back from his friendly face and one of the worst cases of a Wisconsin accent I’ve ever heard. He seemed to know and welcome conversation with every person within a 50 mile radius. You couldn’t meet him and not want to talk to him. He was funny and knowledgeable and had an energy about him that told you this was how life was meant to be lived. I liked Eric a lot. I saw a lot of my dad in him.

My dad had drifted apart from Eric when they went to different colleges after highschool. In a coincidence that invokes something divine, both of our families happened to be taking separate trips to Disney World fifteen years ago. He spotted one of us, me or another of my siblings, and asked if we happened to be Sieverts, which would've been a very strange thing to do had he been wrong. Whoever it was led him back to my parents and reignited a childhood friendship that was long since thought snuffed.

When I heard from my mom what had happened I was once again across the country. I called my dad and said a few empty, pointless things, platitudes that I was always certain I would be too sharp for when the time came. The phone clicked dead and I sat there for a long time, staring into space. 

I’m not sure how my dad made it through the past year and I don’t want to speculate. I already feel I’ve somehow overstepped my bounds writing about this, though I am happy to have known both of these men. It feels hollow and vaguely senseless that I’ll never talk to them again. In his eulogy for Eric, my dad mentioned that there are no silver linings and it’s true. There aren’t. 

Over the next year, I’ll try to listen to my friends a little more closely. I’ll laugh a little more loudly at how funny my sister is and cherish the authenticity of both my brothers. I’ll urge my mom to tell me more stories and hug her a little harder. I’ll ask my dad for more help and I'll always be there when he needs mine. After all, there’s only so many years left. 

I’m 25 now.

It’s 5 PM and for some reason I haven’t eaten. 

4 PM in work hours, being that I live in EST and work in CST but my body doesn’t know that. My stomach is quiet, hunger pangs having been successfully staved off by caffeine over and over again, though with each battle coffee loses more ground. My head feels incredibly light and my body is supernaturally heavy. I am not glued to my chair; I simply weigh too much to rise.

My day started at 7 AM, an hour later than it usually tends to. I let myself sleep in, moving my gym rest day from next Sunday to this Monday with the idea that I would be able to log on early and begin to work. I spent the weekend dreading waking up this morning and now that it’s here, I try to put off reality for as long as I can. I walk my dog. I make my coffee. I allow myself thirty minutes of reading. And then it begins.

My job is not ‘hard’ in the way that medical school is hard. It’s not hard like roofing, or creating a hit song, or like customer service. My job is hard in the way that working in a factory assembly line, taping boxes of wet wipes shut and letting them glide down the belt to my coworker, again and again and again, is hard. My job is hard like the post office, like a tollbooth, like the concrete wall you slam your head against.

I settle into my chair at 8 AM my time. I already have several messages from coworkers who, like me, have to pretend our work is urgent. I lower my work desk down from standing height. On slow days, of which there are many, I stand but today there is too much to do to do it healthily. Beside my work computer is a spiral with a list of my to-dos along with their status. Top of the list is taking one report I do in Tableau and moving it over to Power BI. Usually, I will download data from some government website that looks as though its creation may have predated the Internet before dumping it into my previously made excel model. I update the date to this week. I publish the dashboard the data feeds. I email the distribution list. Six months ago, I tacked an extra question onto this email- Hello, does anyone use this dashboard and if so for what purpose? We are trying to rationalize as many reports as possible in the interest of efficiency, thanks! I got three replies, all asking to be taken off the distribution list. This information did not impress my boss.

Then, a week ago, I was charged with transferring the same dashboard from Tableau, a dashboarding service, to Power BI, a dashboarding service. The reasons are not clear, probably because they do not exist. It is not my place to question but to google- “Power BI Query Editor equivalent to Tableau measure”. “Power BI Table Formatting Guide”. “Power BI world's fastest speed run GONE SEXUAL.” It doesn’t actually matter what I google. The answers are never there but hidden somewhere within the hours I will spend clicking around my screen in a way that isn’t quite random until something finally works. 

That is what I spend my morning doing. I click, I click, I refill my coffee, I click. The Power BI dashboard is beginning to look like the Tableau dashboard. This is progress. There is a meeting at 10 AM in which we discuss the many ways in which finance is modernizing. I’m 1300 miles away but I still need to tear myself away from the computer and throw on a polo. During the meeting instead of listening I study the faces of my colleagues in their tiny little boxes. The metaverse has already arrived and its barrels of fun.

The meeting ends and it’s back to the real work. I have a few other dashboard updates and reports that need to be sent out as well and I do them on my second monitor in thirty second increments while Power BI is refreshing the query, refreshing the query, refreshing the query. Data populates. The time I have left to live dwindles and dwindles. Eventually, Power BI is ready for me once again.

I have another meeting at 1 PM. It’s now 12:55 and I’m not sure what I have accomplished. My focus has been absolute, my goal clear, the way there relatively simple and yet somehow I have not managed to scratch the first item off my to do list. I throw the polo back on in about twice the time it took me to tear it off and review what I have to present in the meeting. It’s a small meeting, just one other participant. I am going to show her the solution I have come up with to automate the credit for different revenues to different people based upon the timing of these revenues. I do this in Alteryx, a ‘workflow’ tool; Programming for dummies. I have completed the solution and I demonstrate it and wait for questions. None are forthcoming. She tells me to put a hold on implementing it and to have a nice day. The meeting lasts eight minutes. The workflow took me four hours last Friday. The polo comes off again.

I haven’t had a manager for about three months now, maybe longer. I still have a ‘team’, technically, though the only member of it I regularly speak to is a woman older and smarter than me who, as far as I can tell, has been manager in all respects other than title and compensation in the time we’ve spent without one. It’s not clear when we will get a replacement manager but it is clear that we will get one and I await the day impatiently. The last few months there has been a hole in my heart the size of a biweekly one on one that I am eager to fill.

It’s been plain to me for about a year and a half that the concept of working hard to get ahead, at least at the company I work at, has diminishing returns at best. Much more relevant to moving up the corporate ladder is the length of time you have spent at your current position. I’ve just been promoted, so it will be quite a while before my name bubbles to the top of any lists. Despite this and despite the lack of a manager to note any extra work I do, I have privately decided that after completing the Power BI dashboard (which I manage to do just after my 1 PM meeting) I will then automate the weekly process in Alteryx. I’m not sure why this is. It could be for myself, so I don’t have to spend fifteen minutes every Monday monotonously copying and pasting, verifying, publishing. It could be so that when I send the dashboard over to the manager of the adjacent team I have a reason for having taken a week to build it. It could just be that I know that the work is fit only for a robot and so decided to build a robot fit for the work. Regardless, and with multiple other, more pressing items on my to do list, I set to task. 

The process is ridiculous. There are four, maybe five steps to updating the data before it is ready for the dashboard and at each and every one of them I run into problems. A data type has transformed for no discernible reason. Tableau crashes. An excel file is corrupted. I google an error message and this time I do find a response- “Sometimes it just does that.” My dog, lying on his bed behind me, stares at the back of my silhouette with accusing eyes.

It’s 4 PM now. My girlfriend has gone to two different classes, the gym, and has just left for some sort of local cultural event but its 3 PM CST and I have a lot of work to do. My phone lights up and I see I have been rejected from yet another job. My to do list stands strong, the workflow sits in front of me unfinished. My head feels tenuously attached to my body at best and my neck lolls to the side dramatically. I notice my hands are shaking. That is when I realize that I haven’t eaten. 

My job is not easy like a laugh with friends. It’s not easy like floating a river, or reading a book or taking a walk. It’s not easy like falling into bed, feeling the breeze or singing along. My job is easy like sitting in traffic, like getting older, forgetting to eat. It’s easy like skipping the gym, like holding your tongue, drinking too much. My job is easy like drowning and every day I feel the water close over my head.

I’m 24 now.

I wish I wasn’t. 24 is basically 25 which is basically 30 by which point you might as well get used to sniffing dirt. It won’t be long now before a doctor asks if he can stick his hand where the sun don’t shine and give my sphincter a squeeze. It feels so very strange to be 24. At the age of 20, Alexander the Great had been tutored for several years by Aristotle and ascended to the throne. By age 24 he probably also had a stand up special and a couple novels published. I believe these are the most apt comparisons I can make to myself- Ancient noblemen, groomed for greatness, mythologized throughout history to the point of inhumanity. The greatest accomplishment I can point to in my own life thus far is perhaps winning Most Valuable Defensive Player my senior year of high school(not Most Valuable Player mind you- That’s far too high a bar).

I’m being dramatic of course, both about my lacking list of accomplishments and the lack of potential for furthering that list, but even still. Twenty-four years old. Just look at all the SPACE it takes to type that age of antiquity. Compare that to: Two. Now there’s an age!

I was worried, when I was younger, that I would keep pushing back the age I wanted to be successful at, constantly shifting the goalposts so that whatever age I was at the time would still be ‘young’ enough for any accomplishments to be impressive. The last time I truly thought this, I was 22. Now that I am 24, I can see that I was worried about nothing: The goalposts remain firmly in my past.

With all of this though I am still happy. Day to day, with a belly full of food, a job that pays me for sitting on my ass, a clean bill of health, and an overwhelmingly wonderful girlfriend, I somehow manage to find happiness. Hey, if I can do it, anyone can; Chin up, beautiful. But then, what is this emptiness that plagues me? And will the lack of accomplishment that seems to hang off my form like a shadow forever prevent me from feeling fulfilled? Is there a way to circumvent this? Should I even try to?

It is hard to consider whether or not you have the potential for anything great; Harder still when you’re not really sure how to define what ‘great’ is. These are the questions I ponder fervently as I talk to my cat in a baby voice and play my daily six hours of video games- Am I great? I dare not shake the Magic 8 ball and receive my four word answer(Here’s a hint: It starts with ‘Outlook’ and ends tragically).

Wisdom! This is my great trade off for the toll the years have taken on me and my weathered face. Let’s see, what wisdom have I been granted for my storied time on this earth… Hmm… That’s… Hmm…

Well, anyhoot, there have been some exciting changes over the past couple of years since I graduated from college. I somehow survived the deadly coronavirus, as well as roughly 600 different car rides and countless lower back injuries from lifting with someone stronger than me. I got a tattoo, had it removed, and lied about both those things just now. I got my first real job and found it to be simultaneously much more stressful and much more simple than my previous fake jobs. I’ve spent too much, saved too little, drank too much, and laughed just the right amount. I’ve tried and failed at writing and at comedy, at least in a half-assed way. I’ve read voraciously and remember almost none of it. No lessons for me please- Just words and the passage of time! My best friend and I moved in together and then moved our girlfriends in as well to keep up appearances. I’ve gone on hundreds of walks and spent more time than I would’ve liked to at the dog park. A truly strange place, the dog park- It’s like fight club for people’s children.

I’ve had a number of therapists who have succeeded in bestowing upon me the knowledge that men do not make good therapists. But I’ll be damned before I pay one penny to the pink pocketbook. I decided to take a little break from therapy after one of my therapists told me that he thought excessive drinking was actually good for me, and then recommended I try ayahuasca. Another stuck needles in my ears. He was actually the best.

I’ve gotten weaker, skinnier, and started to bald. I also tried to grow a beard; I failed, but it was nice to not have to look at my face for a while. I was drinking tuna smoothies for a time, in the hopes that a healthy dose of Omega-3 would be the kicker I needed to turn this franchise around. It doesn’t taste as bad as it sounds. Still pretty bad though.

Outside of that, my already meager cooking skills have taken a hit, but the quality of my meals has gone up. I have only my girlfriend to blame for this discrepancy. I fell out of love with music, though we have since started up an on again, off again relationship. I played on a few soccer teams, tried my hand at a particularly exclusive volleyball league and even took part in a DnD campaign in which my character, Grumble the Dwarf, died quickly of leukemia.

The only celebrity I unequivocally enjoyed, Norm Macdonald, passed away. It should’ve been someone else, perhaps Jimmy Fallon. I would’ve killed Stone-Faced Fallon myself if it meant the old chunk of coal lived, wrangled his pencil thin neck with my bare hands and felt his stomach churn beneath the solid knee I had planted in his gut until his skull turned blood and his breath became air. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but I would’ve done it.

I went to the Ren Festival and learned two things but forgot them both because I spent the entire two days awake and intoxicated. I saw fights and plays and castles and had a wonderful time. I guzzled mead and gobbled turkey legs but didn’t quite feel like a medieval peasant despite getting gouged just as badly. I also bought my girlfriend three separate gifts, each more horrendous than the last(One was a surprisingly expensive, metal, artistic portrayal of a ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ scene, a movie that has no meaning to either of us whatsoever). It’s possible she would’ve preferred flowers.

I lost three rather excellent friends and grew apart from several others. I still naively hope to find them again one day.

I moved across the country- Almost 1300 miles!- but then I remembered I had a job, so I had to fly back. I have been turned down on the labor marketplace more times than I can count, though I’m sure Indeed and LinkedIn are keeping active tallies and are both impressed and depressed by my perseverance. My dog turned 2 and got slightly dumber and much fatter(he takes after his father) and I went to Miami. My favorite part of Miami was the people I hung out with, who had come with me from Dallas. My second favorite part was the plane ride home. I can’t recommend the place enough to anyone who has too much money.

I decided I wasn’t failing enough and so got into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and chess. No one can get the shit beat out of them both physically and mentally like I can; I’m a regular Everlast. It is remarkable to me how welcoming the BJJ community is. The same can’t be said for the chess community, but social skills are difficult to learn when you’re trying to memorize the King’s Indian to a depth of 30.

I passed the CFA Level 1 exam with flying colors, if those flying colors were skywritten into the word ‘BARELY’. (What clever writing- Who the fuck is this guy?) Studying for the test was a long and arduous process and I am proud of the accomplishment, which is rather backwards considering it is within a career path that I wish I’d never gotten into in the first place. Nonetheless, maybe I can parley this into a successful career and then die.

I’ve had my opinions change so many times on so many different topics that I have opted out of having them at all. Think of me as an amorphous sponge with a weak stomach, vomiting up the beliefs of whoever I heard speak last. Or don’t think of me at all. Most people prefer not to.

All of this is to say- I’m 24 years old. I have a million cherished memories and wish I had millions more. Perhaps all of this dissatisfaction and uneasiness is borne out of a love for life that runs so deep it threatens to cut all the way through. I’m happy, I think and I’m working on being happier and better, which is the important part. I like that I can look back on the life I’ve lived so far and say one thing for certain- I sure am trying my darndest.

I’m 24 now.