What was Eugenio’s? That’s not a fair question. It pretended to be a café, bar, and restaurant, it wanted to be CBGBs, it should have been a bootlegger’s paradise during prohibition, and on weekends, it imitated a rock star’s going away party. If audited, I’d swear to the IRS that Eugenio’s sold intimacy amid epically tasty food.

Eugenio’s was the world’s first and last club where the club buys more of your drinks than you do and also often feeds you for free, and when you are worried that this might not be the best business model, they take their tip money and give it to the musician who played, who makes more money at his real job than the restaurant ever would, could, or did. How do I know? I managed Eugenio’s for four years.

Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines using this hack approach as an intro to an essay as the most offensively lazy cliché, yet I will stubbornly evoke it: “Serendipity” (n.) is the phenomenon of finding a valuable thing or things that one has not sought.

Regarding serendipity, I can claim only two events in my thirty-five years on Earth:

1. Meeting my wife.
2. Working for Eugene Gray at Eugenio’s.

I’ll tell the wife story in some future week when I’m busy and need to mail it in (it’s easy to tell). The Eugenio’s story—however—it’s the hardest story to tell, because it’s not a story; it’s a process of a wise man lovingly chiseling a young man’s world view, without that young man perceiving that it was happening, so the young man would learn to recognize happiness and stop chasing false senses of security.

My former boss, Eugene Gray, is the closest “fake relative” I have ever had in my life. To explain my relationship to this fellow Space Alien is impossible, but we can share a look that tells it all to each other. Eugene corralled me through my twenties. He did not raise me or father me, but he made damn sure that I didn’t become a bastard.

I am about as disciplined and type-A as they come. You want me to work for you, but not live with you, because I pressure myself to do a job correctly more than a boss could, and I can’t ignore an unfinished job. Ask my wife; she’ll gladly loan me out.

Ten years ago, I was 25, a year into the job, and 20 minutes late to open the café for breakfast. At least four regulars had assuredly come, banged on the door, and left in disgust, sans morning coffee and breakfast, and it was all my fault. I was despicable.

I parked my bike around the corner and ran, panting and sweating, towards the 400 square foot cupboard parroting as a restaurant, reciting my apology for failing. But as I rounded the corner, I saw the front door wide open, and I was greeted by a searing, palpable wave of bacon smoke that made my skin sweat, but tantalized my nose.

My brain could not compute the ‘fact’ presented as I entered the café: Eugene, owner and boss, humming away, evidently happy to do my job. He finished making one of our ‘Second Best Latte’s,’ said good morning, dismissed my apologies with a smile and paid me to sit outside and drink the latte while doing the crossword for half an hour until I learned two lessons: 1. Nothing is that important. 2. This includes you.

My parents are the best people I know. Not literally, of course. They don’t volunteer weekends helping contagious lepers feel loved, but they have never for a moment let me feel unloved in a seemingly obtusely unloving world. Eugene is the other “not literally best” person I know, but it’s because he makes nearly EVERYONE feel loved.

Don’t get me wrong; if Eugene is in a bad mood and you repartee him with some Portland art-student hipster snark, you are in for a painfully indefensible subtle innuendo-laden slow served revenge attack on your ego. But, so long as you aren’t a jerk (And why are you being a jerk?), Eugene is everyone’s fake-real-fake-real friend (The closest adjective is the predominant characterization of the noun).

Eugene is a fellow Space Alien because only Space Aliens do unearthly things like open a business when they have no business going into any business.

Generosity is a curse.

I learned this from watching Eugene give away at least a quarter of his profit day after day after day (after day), but—get this—it’s because it was ‘the right thing to do.’ Eugene wanted people to have a family, so he opened a family that sold food.

Eugene hired vagrants to help with odd projects, but if (read: when) they tried to rip him off, he’d fire them, but pay them anyway. He’s the biggest loser in the history of winners. Twice, he tried to force me to take more pay for managing his café than IT firms were paying software developers. I had to negotiate to lower my own wage. Bernie Sanders thinks Eugene’s fiscal policies are unsound and over the top.

The food at Eugenio’s? It was the best food I have ever had in my life. I still miss and crave it. I ate it six days a week for two to three meals from November of 2005 until August of 2009, never once gaining any weight nor getting tired of any of it.

When you describe Eugenio’s menu, it sounds like a normal “hole in the wall,” but that’s also what it sounds like when you describe to your friends the person you have fallen in love with, so take my word: Eugenio’s menu until death do we part.

Eugene taught me how to: friendship, generosity, patience, tolerance, sensitivity, insensitivity, musicianship, and apologies through actions, not words. He also taught me about: metaphorically love and hate thy neighbors while making them chicken-salad salads and ‘The Second Best Latte In Town,’ with love. He taught me to nourish my silly self; to misuse grammar to amuse myself in my own column, for example.

Writing schools charge thousands of dollars for one piece of advice: Show, don’t tell. (Also: you will make more money and be happier eating shit.) Eugene paid me to live my life in a time when I only wanted to watch others living theirs. Touché!

Eugene forced me over and over again to talk to people I didn’t want to talk to, to be nice to sadistic sociopathic sycophants (“They need the most love, Mikey!”), and to listen closely to the stupidest people I had ever met.

Eugene taught me that practice makes more practice because nothing is perfect, and everything tastes better when it’s on the verge of being burnt, but not actually burnt, and if you don’t make something correctly, you toss it, and start over, with no apologies. And after you mop, it’s important to step on the black squares only, ’cause white squares show dirt.

Eugenio’s is closed, but Eugene is still open, thank god, because Eugenio’s made family, but Eugene makes sage advice. Thanks to Eugene, I have downsized my commitment to the nine to five, and I’m living more and working less. But most of all, I learned: When worried, stop, go home, and find Zen. Life is too long to be short.

Three weeks ago, I watched one of my least favorite people I don’t know, LeBron James, use this very hunger to conclusively defeat some of my favorite people I don’t know, the 2016 Golden State Warriors, in a do-or-die, winner-take-all game 7 of the NBA Finals.

Since this loss, I have awoken countless times to vivid, haunting visions of a silently-stunned arena echoing the sounds of balls clumsily clunking on the rim, while this one man, this bastion of me me me-llenial, South-Beach-talent-taking ego manhandled ‘my boys’ to feed himself a championship.

As much as I hate LeBron, who is and always will be bigger, better, stronger, more successful, more attractive, and more I-have-run-out-of-superlatives than me, I grew wiser watching him hunger for something more than my guys could—even though this experience hurt so badly.

There are two kinds of hunger: literal and metaphorical, but unless you are scared of Chicken Little, you have undoubtedly experienced the latter form of hunger, so you know it’s not a figment of imagination: it’s intangible and ethereal, yet plausibly palpable.

I have had an impatiently patient hunger for success since I was young, but I have had doubts about what it was, what to do with it, and how to harness it. I have an inconsistently consistent track record of personal success followed by dormancy.

I don’t understand myself, but I understand the feelings (signs, if you will) that my body sends my brain when it thinks “I” am ignoring one of its basic needs. I easily recognize fatigue, thirst, hunger, sexual desire, and a boat load of other fun and not-so-fun stuff.

But I possess more subtle feelings that I often struggle to communicate with. They speak a language I didn’t bother to cultivate when I was younger. The two feelings that irk and confuse me most are interconnected feelings of boredom and passion.

When I get bored, I don’t know what to do, yet I know exactly what to do: create. However, “creating” is a vague directive, so it confuses me. Sometimes talking or playing guitar is what I crave, but mostly, “I” want to do what I’m doing now: write.

Seven months ago, I started forcing myself to write every day for at least an hour, and often for three. At first, it was difficult because when I force myself to do something, I resent that thing, since I “have to do it.” Being my own parent sometimes sucks.

But after a month of my new routine, I agreed to do some overtime work, which meant going a week without writing, and that was the worst week I’ve had in this calendar year. I was unhappy. Petulant feelings abounded, screaming, “I want to write! I want to write! I want to write!”

I did not ignore that voice. I dropped the overtime work and my happiness returned. I avowed to adjust the MikeyOpp hierarchy of needs. I realized that I don’t care so much about what I’m currently successful at (teaching); I care about what fulfills the part of me I dare to call my soul.

I have a hunger to write and be rewarded for writing with “not working a different job.” I have been hungry for a decade, but instead of trying to feed myself, I’ve been lurking by kitchens and dumpsters, waiting for handouts and scraps. I have never once been afraid of failure, but I’ve always feared wasting time.

Writing is not a waste of my time. I have enjoyed creative writing since my earliest memories. Reading and writing stories has always been my favorite thing to do. I love hanging out with friends because it is essentially story time. My best friendships feature the best stories.

So if literal hunger is an instinctual emotion, the big question is: “what is creative hunger?” I discovered the answer in the week I worked overtime and starved myself from writing: “creative hunger” is a basic instinctual emotion; humans have an instinct to create.

Engineers, doctors, lawyers, realtors, scientists, mathematicians, businessmen, teachers, counselors, retail workers, restaurateurs, and parents—depending on who you are, these are jobs, careers, or creative posts of passion—you decide! You don’t have to make a painting or write a song to be a creative person. Creating kindness is probably the highest art.

LeBron James has lost more championships than he has won (thankfully), but he has also won enough to prove he’s a winner. I watched in horror (and rewatch in nightmares) as he manhandled “my” much better team, but I was ironically rewarded and inspired by his dagger-in-my-heart performance.

LeBron James humiliated me, but I’m thankful because I saw three consecutive performances of “what successful hunger looks like.” I saw what it’s like to ignore and disprove a nation that nearly unanimously ridicules your chances of victory. No one is rooting against me, but the odds are, yet I don’t care; I share LeBron’s hunger, and I’m going to feed it.

I never would have predicted that instating mandatory writing hours would make my hunger grow stronger, not weaker. This shocked me; after all, if you are feeding a hunger, and the hunger grows stronger, you usually have a thyroid issue.

I don’t have a creativity thyroid issue. I have a “stop pretending you’re okay with a different life than the one you actually want” issue. My body is telling me the same thing it’s been telling me for decades: Try harder. Try longer. Try more often. Don’t listen to anyone, including yourself. Don’t worry but don’t relax. Just do it. You can’t build Rome, but you can write it.

A year ago, after turning 34, with my wife “safely” five months pregnant, I looked in the mirror, and my spare tire’s burgeoning spare tire angered and embarrassed me. Additionally, I didn’t want my impending son to think he would be “hereditarily fat.”

I won’t broach the topic of fat shaming and its hullabaloo; people should explore their unique relationship with their body and act accordingly. Me? I like the way my body feels when it doesn’t jiggle, and I like liking my body. That’s my prerogative.

I love experimenting with my body and mind. I am often “on” some cognitive behavioral project, working on patience, sleep, etc. Hence, instead of a classic diet, I chose something “out-there,” by my standards: The Slow Carb Diet. The title sucks, but the marketing does not, for it features “Cheat Day.”

This diet appealed to me because I am a chronic goal-addict. The rules are simple: six days a week, you must avoid sugar and starch (yeah, yeah, hurry up; get to the payoff!). In return, you EAT HOWEVER MUCH OF WHATEVER YOU WANT, one day a week, for “Cheat Day.”

What is a “Cheat Day?” It’s your birthday and Christmas combined, but weekly. It’s a completely non-restricted day when you eat as much as you want, for as long as you are awake, even if you eat until you throw up (I did this twice to test the diet; it totally still worked).

My average Cheat Day featured 12 mini peanut butter cups, a full baguette with a half pound of brie cheese, and a big bag of chips for breakfast; a Vietnamese pork sandwich with a chocolate bar for lunch; a cheeseburger with fries and a few beers for dinner; and 50 roasted almonds and four scoops of ice cream for dessert.

I regularly lost two pounds (one kilo) a week eating this much each Saturday, and I lost more than 60 pounds (28 kilos) over seven months, recording everything I ate and all the exercise I performed in an Excel spreadsheet (because I nerd science that much).

All humans need oxygen, sleep, water, and food to survive, and in that order by temporal urgency. But, many humans, like thumbs pointed at me, LOVE food to the extent that “they” would overdose if their body’s results didn’t embarrass them.

My yo-yo body’s track record reveals two glaring facts: A) I am great at gaining and losing weight, but B) I am terrible at maintaining weight. I thus started my diet one year ago with two goals: 1) to lose 60 pounds, before 2) maintaining a normal weight for-EVER.

I started my crazy slow-carb diet in July of 2015, lost 60 pounds by February of 2016, and today, July 3, 2016, I am ecstatic to report that I weigh the same as I did in February, without any see-sawing, an all-time consistency record. I have discovered the final imperative!

I have hacked my body and learned how to hide among the normal humanoids while still indulging my addiction to a substance that humans, ironically, need to survive. Oh, and I still celebrate each week with a cheat day, and I will for the rest of my life.

So how did I re-train myself, 34 years into a lifetime of beyond-pathetic self control?

I redefined hunger.

Hunger is a bullshit word, connotation-ally speaking, because it is relative, yet treated as specific. Hunger is not “real,” unless emotions are “real.” Hunger is a feeling that you can obsess over, ignore, or tolerate, with any variance you choose.

My whole life, I have been binary-blinded, focusing on ignoring or obsessing over the ‘pang of hunger,’ when the key is tolerating hunger. Hunger is like its cousins, anger, loneliness, and fear: they haunt you because you invite them in and listen.

I learned fairly early on in life to look at and analyze emotions, because in the light of analysis, they are often scoff-worthy, but what I never realized until very recently, is that hunger is an instinctive emotion, but an emotion nonetheless. It is not real.

Earth just lost an epic woman, Pat Sumitt, who said, “When you choose to be a competitor you choose to be a survivor. When you choose to compete, you make the conscious decision to find out what your real limits are, not just what you think they are.”

The key to healthy weight is ignoring everyone’s silly and stupid recommendations for “how often” one needs to eat “how much” food. One must follow human nutrition rules, of course, but even those are totally variable based on one’s body and lifestyle.

After losing weight, I spent two months experimenting with what I ate, how often I ate it, and when I ate it, and I discovered that I do not need and should not eat breakfast. My body loves to fast, so I give it what it wants. I skip breakfast and I don’t gain weight. When I want to indulge, I skip breakfast and lunch, either that day or the next; it doesn’t matter–I control food in, and my body does the accounting.

I love self-competition and self-experimentation because they are fun ways to test myself without facing death. Some people have no addictive tendency to food, but everyone has to control some monkey on the back. My monkey has always been food, and photos from my past prove this.

Food addiction is utterly conspicuous; the body shows its addiction by getting fat; the waistline never lies. Life sucks for those who are slaves to any addiction, be it crocheting, cocaine, or chocolate chip cookies because compulsive behavior is the most insidious agent of negative self-esteem.

Losing weight is fun: you get accolades as you succeed, as opposed to gaining weight, wherein people overtly or clandestinely ridicule your lack of self control. But being healthy is a totally different trip—it delivers self-respect. Alas, my quest for peace never ends, for now I must monitor the major side effect of accomplishment: not being a sanctimonious prig about it.

I give myself a State of the MikeyOpp Address every birthday.  This year, I am happily reporting a blissful recognizance of what I deem to be my significant insignificance.  But, it wasn’t always this way…

Humans are each the protagonist in the story of their life. My adolescent protagonist experienced turbulence trying to mitigate his narrative’s seeming importance with the disheartening truism that people do not care as much about other people as they care about themselves.

Check in with your mother, father, spouse, child, or lover, and you will discover that these humans probably love you in the truest sense of that word, but this love cannot and will not ever approach the love you have for your own precious life.

This is good! It means you are free to love yourself and sculpt a life that renders you the bliss you seek. If you are out to please others, you are out of luck. The return on that investment is worse than an Edsel that runs on New Coke at Euro Disneyland.

I am delighted with my nostalgic reflections of my thirty-four years of significant insignificance, because I choose to feel that way. There have been times when I wanted to declare that my life was a struggle, but I can easily juxtapose those times with my fickle ability to declare my life a joyful journey full of ice cream and candy bars.

A key aspect of happiness that I have discovered in recent years is that I am happiest when I lower my expectations. I am no psychologist, but I play one on the Internet. I suggest that a key to happiness is cataloguing experiences as “better than expected.”

The other adage I would bequeath to an earlier version of myself is that “practice makes perfect.” If you practice bitterness, you will get very good at being bitter, but if you practice happiness, you can get good at being happy. Feelings have muscles.

Your body and your mind are not as separate as you think. Just as running every day conditions your body to run better, you can condition your attitude and make amazing changes that seem impossible in life’s dour moments.  Wise dogs master old tricks.

My culture recognizes patience as a “virtue.” I prefer to see virtues as “tenets of happiness.” Seeking virtue to gain public or self- respect is misguided. I seek virtue to shut down my negative conscience. Virtuous is a fancy word for “not being a jerk.”

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” He was a poster boy for not being a jerk who wisely understood how timing is everything, and now I do too.

So here I sit, on the ledge of thirty-five, ecstatically married with a toddler and a dog, pontificating happiness to an audience of diverse ages and interests, and I no longer question what I am doing in life; my inner peace is significantly insignificant.

Magic America was all about fighting an enemy who hated freedom. The enemy was also magical; magically evil. It was a simple time. We liked Levi’s jeans, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and freedom; the enemy did not have these nor value these.

Our cars were the best cars ever. Our athletes were the best athletes ever. Our computers were the best computers ever. Our music was the best music ever. Our movies were the best movies ever. Our comedy was the funniest comedy ever.

We had wide open roads, dirt-cheap gasoline, fair-as-square retirement plans, SR-71 Blackbird supersonic jet fighters that could intercept any enemy at anytime, and a standing army that could stand up to numerous, simultaneous communist threats.

We made the music, and we let Japan figure out how to make the music portable. We flew into countries and deposed bad people and let the natives figure out how to stop the bleeding. We bombed first and contracted second, with no questions later.

We had all the fruit and vegetables we wanted, and we had magical contracts devoid of pesky tariffs that ensured that all this wonderful food was a word that transcends affordable. The banquet was within our borders, but the garden was everywhere.

We let the rich get richer and we told the poor they would get richer too; it would come from working hard, and from a drip-drip trickle from the top down. It was the magical American way, and it had always worked because of our goodness.

Our leaders were special people; they came from a generation that was unquestionably historicized as “Great.” We didn’t question the sources of our fortune; our narrative replaced gift horses with boot straps and manifested destiny.

This omnipresent, magical feeling began to corrode in the 1990s when the American media, along with the world’s media, started holding up a different mirror to the American people. This mirror harangued have’s and have not’s, and the halves were heavy to handle.

The pension plans didn’t fit into a changing paradigm, so we “downsized” and “layed off” and hired “contract workers,” but these were modern cowboy decisions; decisive decisions in an emerging global market where you had to be brave.

Then a president said he did not have relations with a woman he did have relations with, but later told us he was sorry he did it, but not that he lied—he never really admitted that he lied. That wasn’t important; apologies solved problems.  Besides, at least he could remember what he was accused of.

We nevertheless continued to magically pillage and plunder, for democracy, until European leaders started to question our magical ways; we then were told by U.S. leaders, “sorry” for either lying or being wrong about Weapons of Mass Destruction, not sure which.

Then we found out that the freest and bravest nation on Earth, the magical nation of liberty and justice for all, had a well organized government program using high school drop-outs to monitor the private affairs of U.S. citizens.

The government did not apologize this time. This time, the government was indignant. How could one of its own citizens air the family’s dirty laundry? Off with his head; he is a traitor! We are safer when we obey and do not question our elders.  Perfunctory planned protection.

The water in Flint is magical. The 50% increase in earthquakes in “Let’s frack!” Oklahoma is magical. Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, Iran-Contra…magical! Three Mile Island, Exxon Valdez, the pacific garbage vortex, and the B.P spill…magical.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Then he discovered America. The next thing he did was to capture and force six natives back to Spain and brag to the Queen that he could easily dupe and enslave all the natives he had encountered.  He would go on to joyfully kill natives for gold and sport.

In 1776, a group of brave men signed a Declaration of Independence, but before signing it, they removed a crucial, divisive paragraph that condemned slavery. This was a magical moment: it set the tone for a magical sweeping of pertinent issues under a magical rug of obsequiousness.

I used to believe in magic. I believed that I had inherited a magical culture in a magical era with magical technology, magical morality, and magical momentum from being on the good side of bad wars. I believed in a magical, manifest destiny.

I don’t believe in magic anymore. I believe in men and women. I believe in listening more than speaking. I believe in patience, forgiveness, and love. I believe in letting anyone believe anything they want to believe, no matter how much it scares me. And this scares me.  A lot. But so do airplanes, snakes, and shadows in the dark.

I believe in America and I believe in its people—after all, I am one of them. I believe that we are better than we used to be, and that we can dutifully acknowledge and digest our troubled legacy so we can unify and help to make the world great.

There will be more rampage. There will be more tragedy. There will be more carnage. There will be more opportunities to jerk knees and fly into fits of fistful fear and fury, and in these moments, there is always a test: Are you human?

I don’t believe humanity needs anything except attitude.  Every day, each of us can always try harder.  We can and must try harder to listen, try harder to learn, try harder to trust, try harder to debate civilly, and most of all, we must try our hardest to be nice; nothing short will suffice.

Kindness feels magical, but it’s actually ‘as real as it gets.’

I am an Accomplishment Junkie. I get off on making lists and crossing off items. It doesn’t matter if they say, “buy batteries” or “get into an M.F.A. program by writing a story about a guy who kills a kid with his car and lets a teenager go to jail for it”; both get me high. Crossing finish lines is my life-force.

I have always drawn incredible inspiration from reading fiction. In my twenties, I read about 40 novels a year, which directly contributed to my creative output. A new vocabulary word usually makes my mind wander with wonder for days on end.  Last week, for example, M. Somerset Maugham helped me acclimate to concepts like prepossession, execrableness, querulousness, perfunctoriness, demureness, obsequiousness, urbanity, superciliousness, and perspicacity.

In recent years, career and family goals have appropriately reduced my ability to tune out and tune in to the great history of fictitious philosophy I crave. To make matters worse, as I have shelved my reading time, I have stared at a shelf of heavy, long, famous, and intimidating “classic novels I have yet to read.”

As an Accomplishment Junkie, this book shelf has been taunting and corroding my self-esteem for years.  In 2015, “The Shelf of Yet-To-Read” became the longest-running item in MikeyOpp history to remain on a list.  Was this my Waterloo?

Sadly, It wasn’t just unread books that ate into my sense of self in recent years.  Last July, on the verge of raising my first child, I took stock of my life in order to clean house, which led to all sorts of obvious accomplishment-friendly lists of self improvements and adjustments to mainline into my veins!

I started eating better, complaining less, being nicer to strangers, and ignoring the negativity that permeates our culture. But I also got literal and started giving away unused stuff, which is when I almost threw out my “yet to read” classic books.

“Don’t do it!” screamed Cervantes. “You’ll be sorry,” Sir Walter Scott cried. “I’ll out you at a party someday,” Dumas warned. “You’ll never get every joke,” Proust smirked. “Your life will be marred with all war and no peace,” Tolstoy chided.

The Accomplishment Junkie realized that by giving these books to charity, I would not only be giving up in my quest to “read everything famous,” but I would also be informing my dignity and Diana Ross that there are mountains too high to climb.

Naturally, I MikeyOpped my way to my favorite tinted glasses and dubbed 2016 “The Year of Removing Yet-To’s.” Beginning in January, with immense help from my wife, I was able to budget 15 hours to writing and reading each week. I reclaimed inspiration!

I gave myself homework and deadlines, and I had to sacrifice many things I love, but finish lines aren’t often crossed without sacrifice, and gains without pains feel stagnant and empty. I sacrificed free time, but the R.O.I. paid off: by reading about humans, I have become more human; I’m a better father, friend, and human.  I care more and worry less.

Reading fiction helps me understand non-fiction. When I am allowed to unattachedly hate and love fake people, and when I see what jokes have and have not expired, I recognize the patterns of humanity, which helps me slay the panic, dread, and ennui that can easily consume us all.

When I read Don Quixote the month before War and Peace and one month after Catch-22, I saw a deep connection between 16th century Spain, 19th century Russia, and 20th century America.  “Electricity will replace all human jobs!”  “No one can stop Napolean!” Trust history: Trump and Clinton are anything but novel. Every time is differently the same.

I love fiction because it helps me deconstruct the hysteria of our modern life by relentlessly demonstrating how every generation has labeled their time as ‘modern’ and ‘hysterical.’ Humanity is a circle of impending doom, and the specifics change but the clichés do not. You have nothing to fear but more people telling you there is nothing to fear.

I didn’t vote against anyone; I voted for someone, and I felt a rush of good, but also bad emotions as I mailed in my ballot, because even though I liked my decision, there is a part of me that will never die, but I really wish would: Recalcitrant Mike.

I define recalcitrance as: “A stubborn or obstinate defiance of authority.” I used to be an entirely, and still am a very-much-so, recalcitrant jerk-face. My only saving grace is that I am not a contrarian, thankfully, but, I’m darn close to that too.

I hate authority. I can and have read Farnheit 451, Brave New World, and 1984 in one day, and I’ve read each at least three times. I loved Obama until the moment he took oath, and then he became “the man.” I’m hate-ably and laughably insufferable.  I hate myself for being right all the time, wink emoticon.

Recalcitrant Mike sees that Team Red has democratically elected a man who is feigning recalcitrance while embodying everything I hate about authority, and is thus running one of the most impressive long cons in American history, so far…

Team Blue, which ironically doesn’t believe in Democracy, is super-delegatedly confident about a woman who is unabashedly running on anti-recalcitrance and “more of the same.” New Coke tasted bad, so let’s save some time and keep drinking Coca-Cola Classic. Never mind what it does to pennies, slowly, over time.

Meanwhile, an “old” (by six years!) man is mocking how undemocratic Team Blue actually is, and I am having a ball watching a party that famously pretends to value “equality for all” try to argue that equality comes best from rich, powerful people making decisions for us common idiots.  Start your day with Hypocrite-Flakes!

Recalcitrant Mike has thus become enamored. I wrote and circled M.O. + B.S. in hearts in my notebook all week (bullshit joke goes here), and I hung a poster of a frosty haired Jewish man above my bed until my wife took it down and told me to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm instead. (And I did sleep much better, thanks Hon!).

I live in the Bay Area of California, which is the capitol of American Neo-Progressive Liberalism. The same way I learned to hate Neo-Cons and then the Tea Party, I’m locally learning to hate the Left Wing’s Newtonian cookie-cutter reaction to both. Blue or Red, intolerant opression of opinions suck.  #BlackLivesMatter has, sadly, become #SupportOurTroops.

Aggressive Trump-protesters fail to understand that when they tell me, with authority, that I must hate Trump and must vote for Hillary, they are causing a spike in my recalcitrant blood. I will not do what you command, Big, Non-Gendered Sibling.

Luckily, I’m an adult, so I don’t vote and act with recalcitrance; I won’t vote for Trump to disobey the fake authority of those who seem to think it’s bullying when the person telling you what to think wears red, but it’s “educating and protecting America” when the person wears blue.  But when I was a teenager, I would have.  And I don’t think that most recalcitrant Americans are like me, so I see a lot of “unintended consequences” occurring across this nation of 220 million eligible and 145 million registered voters.  Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign made a lot of Americans curiously recalcitrant. A lot. You’re reading one of them.

I’m recalcitrant because I read history, watch movies, talk to people, and I have a heart and mind. I’m recalcitrant because the history of authority is pretty blandly evil; show me an authority that didn’t rot from the inside out, and I’ll show you…

I have spent a lot of time in my life mulling over, “What would be worse, a society with no recalcitrance and a government that punishes any trace of it (North Korea), or a society with ubiquitous recalcitrance (an average U.S. penitentiary)?” But this is a silly question, like asking, ‘What is better, dying from the heat or the cold?’  Different process, same result.

We need a middle road! We need a true compromise! We need a system that is flexible; a system that yings to the yang and yangs to the ying.  We need people who understand that getting some of what you want is much better than no one getting anything they want.  We need a boat with wheels, a phone with a camera, we need whatever happens when you mix blue with red.  But alas, such things are impossible!  Everything is so awfully binary. There is no third way out; nothing rhymes with purple.

Some people use the word karma to explain and justify why good or bad things happen to people. I understand this banal attempt to demystify the human experience, but I think it’s a total cop-out, since I never see evidence that supports it.

Maybe, on a level I can’t see, people really do suffer and benefit in direct proportion to the evil and goodness they generate, but in the reality I do see, I see the opposite: I see good people often losing out to those who are good at not being good.

In sports, I especially do not believe in karma. Murderers, rapists, and all sorts of other evil people have won sports titles, and I have seen these clear-as-day sociopaths get highly praised by talking heads inhaling their rear ends.

When it comes to my relationship to “my” teams, I am so insane that the word insane is insanely offended. Last week, for example, my beloved-since-childhood Warriors of the NBA lost two playoff games, and I felt awful, not only from the losses, but because they win playoff games when I run two miles the morning of their game, before sunrise, and I failed to do so on the mornings of both games.

MEA CULPA SPORTS-GOD!!!

Last week I suffered ligament damage in my right knee. I couldn’t use stairs for five days. So we lost two road games and I nearly ruined the season. However, inspired by loyalty and love, I persevered and went online and researched, created a rehab program, and I was able to run before both games 5 and 6, which we won, duh!

Yesterday at 4 p.m. PST I reinjured my knee jogging in an airport while wearing my toddler in one of those kangaroo carriers (ESPN somehow missed this story).

Tonight, my Warriors are playing the most important game of the year, and they need me, so I woke up at four a.m. today, stretched for twenty minutes, and then did what any champion does when they feel tired, injured, and like giving up: Just Do It.

So I ran. And I ran more than two miles, just to prove that you can give us any task, and we will exceed it. Because that’s what it takes to be the best, and we are the best. We won 73 games and lost 9. We hit miracle threes, plural. We did this by trying harder when it gets hard, and by believing in an inner strength that is real.

I’m writing this column because I do not actually think that anything I do matters (Fact: When I do not live in California, when the Pittsburgh Steelers play in the Super Bowl, we always win, but when I live in California and we play in a Super Bowl, we lose). Seriously, I don’t actually think I have any causality with sports.

But, when my teams lose big games, I get sad—not “grandpa died” sad, but “don’t wanna wake up” sad. When the Warriors got TRAMPLED twice last week, I felt like I had made a pathetically bad life decision to give sports this power over me. (Fact: The Pittsburgh Penguins always make the Stanley Cup Finals when I leave the country for a destination south of the 40th paralell for more than three weeks.”)

OH SPORTS-GOD! WHY FORE DIDST I GIVETH MINE PRIDE TO THOU?

You can’t just say, “get over it,” and feel better. To get over something, you have to get over the thing by working it out, emotionally. So just how I would tell a friend to get out of a relationship that makes them emotionally unstable, I spent most of last week wondering if I should “get out” of my toxic relationship with sports.

But then a funny thing happened: I started to think about not only the downside, but also the upside. And then, the upside happened: the Warriors won a really fun game at home, which set up a really scary game on the road, which they won, and now, I have the best Memorial Day ever: the chance to see us become the tenth team in NBA history to win after being down 3-1 in a best-of-seven series.

We might lose tonight, and that might is REALLY possible: the team we are playing is very good, very excited to play us and beat us, and they have proven with no excuses that they know how to beat us. But they don’t know how to defeat us, only how to beat us, and this is why I’m not quitting my addiction.  I am addicted to inspiration, and that is neither pathetic, nor a bad life decision.

The upside of fanship (of anything) is tremendous. Watching my favorite team win the last two “must-win” games when most counted them out has been compelling motivation for why giving up is for losers, and why I’m not a loser. I have been inspired to try harder at being better and to love the intensity of chasing dreams.

We all have dreams, and to dream is the most human thing you can do. If you don’t have dreams, or even worse, if you do have dreams but you aren’t taking them seriously, then you are pissing all over the banquet that is life. That is toxic.

Wake up and snort the pixie dust. It’s all around you. There are six-foot-three, never-should-be, first-time-unanimous MVPs taking and making outlandish 35+ foot game winning shots. There are kids dropping out of college to start companies that are slaying the blue chips. There are musicians refusing to follow the scales and rules, and kids are buying (or streaming) their music and shunning the calculated pop.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade? EFF that. When life gives you a lemon, don’t call it a lemon. Don’t let people tell you it’s sour. Just do whatever you want. Throw it away if you don’t like it. Eat the rind. Do what feels right. Just don’t give up and don’t pout, because when you do that, it’s instant karma; you are a loser.

(Fact: my purchase of a guitar to satiate my dream of playing music in the Spring of 1990 ruined the Oakland A’s chances of ever again winning a World Series. Sorry.)

G’n’R were considered Led Zeppelin-level $ell outs, charging massive fees to see them live and treating their fans like shit, often showing up very late or even canceling shows at the last second, with no refunds nor apologies. So rad!

Nirvana, during an equally brief reign on the charts, were considered the antithesis of G’n’R, writing open letters to bigoted fans telling them to not support them, and taunting the industry with song titles like “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.” Ka-Pow!

The truth is that both bands made a lot of money working within and for a system designed to make a lot of money, and what they did with their fame and clout was up to them. I learned that $elling out is relative, and throwing it around as an accusation is about as relevant and practical as calling someone a hypocrite.

Opinions, assholes, $elling out, hypocrisy, death, and taxes, OMG, like, amirite?

This week, the pre-teen inside the teen inside the twenty-something who is battling mid-thirties-MikeyOpp is campaigning heavily against a recently-arisen life-changing opportunity to $ell out.

I am a private person who dislikes public money-talk, but I gotta do it to present my dilemma: I own a home that if $old at current market value, after all fees and paying the bank, would garner me five times my annual salary.

Three years ago, I bungled my way into a fantastic investment, not knowing it was an investment. With a bank loan and savings, I bought a condo in Oakland, California for hella way more than I thought it was worth, and now, it is worth hella way more than that. How much? In three years, its value has doubled. 2(x) = hella $.

Three years ago, about to get married, my wife and I planned to have one or two kids, so we bought a “could-work-for-life” 2 bed, 2 bath condo located in the second most popular location in the Bay Area thanks to Twitter, Google, Facebook, Apple, Square, Zynga, Uber, Oracle, Cisco, PayPal, HP, Ebay, ETC…

The mortgage rates in 2013 were at super-model 30 year lows, so I was eager to sign up for Team-America and assume debt and play the game that feeds those starving kids on Wall Street (You’re welcome $ally $achs).

So what’s my issue? Obviously, we should sell and laugh with the bank, right?!

The issue is that if we $ell out, we are out. There is no room for “us” in the Bay Area anymore. In 2013, two teachers bought tickets for “the Bay Area” when tickets were barely-affordable, but now, that same ride costs double, if not triple the 2013 fee.

The only homes we can afford that are big enough for our family are located at the corner of “schools with graduation rates below 75%” and “drive-by shooting rates that rival Chicago.” They are also more than an hour commute away from my job.

I have called the Bay Area “home” for 25 of my 35 years, and I feel at home here more than any other place I’ve lived or visited (I have lived in six states and visited all 50 and 25+ countries). I don’t love the culture, but I grok it, which matters a lot.

All grokking aside, the culture is changing in a way I don’t like, and I cannot afford to do much here; menu prices, subway fares, parking, and the stress-cost of a tripled population size in twenty years have left my jaw swollen from smacking the ground.

All millenial-hipsters aside, I love my condo, job, mortgage, and the weather, but most of all, I love my friends; I live among a dozen ‘friends’ that have been like family for decades.  These aren’t casual acquaintances; these are people for whom I would sacrifice nearly everything I have without any hesitation; these are my brothers and sisters.

-The weather: I hate heat and cold. I thus hate 99% of Earth. Oakland is the 1%.

-The condo: we can walk to more than thirty restaurants featuring every major cuisine.  From Cambodian to Cajun, we have—and eat—it all. We don’t even need a car or a bike to do anything.

-The job: I walk three minutes to the best transfer station in the local metro’s web, which provides me with a twenty minute commute to a station one minute from my favorite job I have ever had (I have worked non-stop, excluding college, since 1992).

-The mortgage: I pay half of the ‘going’ rent; I’m that grandfathered guy, earning teacher’s pay, but living with lawyers and tech savvy millionaires.  The police protect these people and their property!

So, my friends are family, but I also have a literal family, and thanks to Adam Smith, I have to pit friend-family against my son’s future since the public schools are dangerous, and I can’t afford the private ones, and unless you foresee Google and Apple going the way of Sears, my teacher’s pay is not a long term solution to anything here.

If I $ell out, I have to move out, and where we can afford to move is not remotely near.  To quintuple my annual salary with one pen stroke, I must deprive myself of family, weather, and my favorite job, but if we don’t $ell, we can barely afford to be a family.

“In game and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s).” – Wikipedia

I am evidently playing a zero-sum game against myself, “all in” for both teams.  So, Axl, Slash, Duff, Izzy, ghost-of-Kurt, Chris, Dave, and NOT Steve, What to do?  Do I cancel the show and party alone in the green room, or do I scrutinize the status-quo, looking for a “Nash Equilibrium?”  Can you $ell doubt?

According to hack scientists like Stephen “self proclaimed smartest man” Hawking, Someone out there has already programmed a robot with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is capable of self-evolving beyond the intelligence any human is capable of.

Many futurologists (people with a title that rivals my self-proclaimed doctorate in Chips & Salsalogy) claim that robots with higher-than-human intelligence ‘could-might-probably will-will’ enslave and/or kill us all (I’m scared of both).

So I’m afraid of robots, yet I regularly trust and use Siri, airplanes, and subways. This means I am a hypocritical robotophobic robot user; future progressives will remove my face from currency. History is not on my side. Please smug-shame me.

I obsessed about robots all week, and when I explored why I have been obsessed with and fearful of robots for most of my life, I realized it’s because (timpani roll): I am a robot (and so are you)!

“Hey Mike, what do you like to eat for breakfast?”

“Well, if it is a workday since 2005, then I joyfully ate two hard boiled eggs. And if it was a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday between 2009 and the present, I ate them after jogging 2 miles, which was after arising at 4:32, or 5:04, without any alarm.”

“Um, OK…that’s weird. I mean, seriously, that’s strange. What are you, a robot?”

This happens to me, a lot. If I had a more robotic mind, I’d tell you the exact percent. But, I can’t help my robotic roboticness (and so can’t you). Humans have been programmed to be programmable. Who or what-ever programmed me, coded me to hate decisions, for they give me what experts call “fatigue,” so I eliminate them.  You might love decisions, or at least, you were programmed to think so.

Education is a ritualized, state-sanctioned programming program.  “Arrive on time, dressed appropriately.  Pledge allegiance to a flag.  Memorize and reproduce stuff.  Don’t ask why.  Perform!  Perform X to achieve Y.  Get Y to procure Z, but you cannot do A, B, or C in the process.”  And it starts before this, with a baby’s guardian.

Until this week, I didn’t see the blatant evidence for how human lives are robotic exercises in programming and re-programming.  Fortunately, I have mostly enjoyed my coding options, and I hope my son enjoys his, whatever they may be.

When I was eighteen, I was quite overweight (How overweight were you?). I was about 100 pounds overweight, because I had programmed myself to thinking that food was a source of pleasure, and I had programmed myself to believe that the amount I consumed was “normal.”   I had to reprogram all of this, and it sucked.

When I was in my twenties, I had programmed myself to believe that cigarettes, moderate fame, and a beautiful, smart girl at my side would bring me infinite joy. Ugh.

In my thirties, I got married to a beautiful, smart woman, without cigarettes and fame, and this success was owed to reprogramming, which didn’t end there. I persisted in believing that my twenty-something diet and exercise rules still applied to my thirties, but my casing disagreed, so I had to re-code bagels as “poison.” Woe is me.

The less you are aware of how you make decisions and the less you think about what I am tediously preoccupied with, the more robotic I think you are. If you think you are not a robot and make decisions without self and external programming, I think you should buy my bridge, you free-thinking automaton.

My bridge connects “There are only two parties” to “Don’t waste your vote” to “I don’t vote” and back to “you have to vote against X to stop X, even if you hate Y.”

My bridge connects “if you legalize marijuana, what’s next, legal crystal meth?” to “First the blacks asked for equal rights, then the gays, and now ‘trans-gender’? What’s next, trans-racial and cyborg rights?” (Yes, yes, and more yes—change is good!)

I am currently being reprogrammed, we all are, to abandon certain programming language that has been rendered obsolete for very good reasons. Say farewell to “nigger” “slut” “retard” “faggot” “Trump” and many other words that corrupt the AI. “’Jesus,’ did someone just turn up the tension? I feel bad just reading those words!”  Yes, and you were programmed to react that way.  It’s brainwashing, but washing cleans things, so it’s not always bad.

When I was a teenager, there was this funny line from a not-so-funny show called “Martin.” Referring to racial tension, the comedian, Martin Lawrence, famously lamented, “Can’t we all just get along?!”

Because we are robots who have been programmed with billions of heterogeneous algorithms, the correct answer to Martin’s salient question is “Absolutely not!  But, this does not mean we have to kill each other.”

The more I teach and the more elections I witness, the more I become convinced that external motivation is weak at best (science agrees). Internal motivation, however, is probably the source material for the elusive god particle. It’s what’s for breakfast.

As we watch the 2016 robots give robotic speeches to the robots about the future of the robots in the unites states of robots, perhaps we should tune it all out and search within instead for motivation that produces results. There is no code that works for us all.  You cannot download or upload an OS that will “save” the world.  Reprogram yourself, reprogram the world.