NotTheJungleMan's Blog

I grew up in South Dakota, a place defined less by culture than by absence. Wide land. Quiet lives. Alcohol filling the space where meaning might have gone. People learned how to endure rather than how to engage. When I decided to leave, I didn’t want novelty. I wanted pulse. Density. Noise. I wanted to…

I eventually moved out of South Dakota—out of the trailer house I had declared my sovereign nation. Population: one. GDP: poker winnings. Culture: insomnia, message boards, and a profound, theoretical obsession with “The Game.” It was my monastery. A digitally lit cave where I played poker, lurked on TalkingPoker, and slowly fermented into a person…

The Grippy-Sock Circuit – Final Version Chapter 3 (predating 2026 for divorce reasons) Here’s the thing about mental hospitals: I’ve been to them across the country. Two in Utah. One in Missouri. One in Colorado. Most recently, December ’25, Wisconsin. Curiously, never in the states I actually lived in—South Dakota, New Jersey, Michigan—but always wherever…

Holidays—holy days—were once meant for rejoicing, for gathering, for warmth. In my life, they were reminders of the opposite: a stage set for people who were physically there but spiritually vacant. When my mother gifted me a bicycle-tire inflator as a twenty-seven-year-old—despite the fact I couldn’t ride a bike and wouldn’t learn until I was…

I will be re-posting what I consider better drafts of the ones I put out roughly six weeks ago. This is Chapter 1-4. 5 is maybe salvageable but the rest were very mediocre and will need to go a different direction. Chapter 1: The Calculus of Vengeance I have never remembered my life in stories….

I have never remembered my life in stories. Other people recall childhood through events, scenes, episodes. My memory arranges itself differently—less like a timeline and more like a room full of silhouettes. Just shapes and moods and impressions, not neatly labeled or ordered. When I look back, I see figures more than moments, and many…