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.
I write this as a persona. This is not who I really am.
Chapter 1: The Calculus of Vengeance
I have never remembered my life in stories. My memory arranges itself in data points and debts.
My earliest data point is sensory.
I am under a scratchy wool blanket in a Motel 6. My brother is huddled next to me. We are technically on “vacation.” I am clutching a box of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cookies, the sugar melting on my tongue, while the air in the room vibrates.
My mother is raging. Again.
She was a petrifying force—a hurricane in a floral blouse. She slammed doors, she screamed, she hit. I didn’t know then that she had once slapped my brother so hard his teeth cut through his gums. I didn’t know yet that she would one day slam a car door on my pinky finger, nearly crushing the bone—not out of malice, but out of a chaotic negligence.
I looked at her, and I learned my first lesson in physics: Rage is inefficient.
Rage is messy. It alerts your enemy. It wastes energy.
I realized then that I was not like her. She was weak. She was a slave to her own storms. I am calculating. I do not process emotion; I process strategy.
Around age four, I developed a habit that baffled everyone. I would just topple over. I would be standing in the Newell grocery store, surrounded by canned goods, and simply decide to hit the floor.
Thud.
People thought something was wrong with me. They were right, but not in the way they thought. I wasn’t falling because I was frail. I was falling because I realized that if the world is going to hurt you, you don’t give it the satisfaction of knocking you down. You do it yourself. You control the pain.
By the time I was ten, the world confirmed I was right to protect myself.
We lived in Vale, South Dakota, a town that felt like it was stuck in a time loop. My father treated animals the way most people treat stocks—assets to be traded, leveraged, or discarded. He didn’t see pets as attachments that lick your face; he saw them as inventory.
There were always dogs chained up outside our house. I cared for one immensely. I don’t even remember his name now—which tells you everything you need to know about how I process grief. I loved him for about three weeks.
Then one day, my father hitched up his team of horses to a wagon to ride around town. The dog was in the back of the wagon, chained to the bed.
My father started driving. At some point, the dog got excited—maybe at a squirrel, maybe just at the movement. He jumped overboard.
But he was still chained.
My father was oblivious. He was focused on his horses, his “stock.” He didn’t hear the struggle. He didn’t look back. He just kept driving, dragging the dog by the neck against the side of the wagon until the animal was strangled to death.
I found him later. I cried, but the tears felt useless. The dog was dead. The chain held. My father viewed it as an operational error. I viewed it as a confirmation of the truth I had felt in that grocery store years earlier: Emotions are weak. Attachments are liabilities. If you love something in a chaotic world, you’re just giving the driver a rope to hang you with.
So, I stopped giving the world ropes.
In high school, I tested this. I remember sitting in the front row of biology class. The pretty girls—the ones who were richer than me, “better” than me—sat in the rows behind me. I didn’t turn around to look at them. I didn’t care.
Instead, I put on a show. I would be crude, loud, and obnoxious to the teacher. I knew she hated it, but I also knew my guy friends were watching. I would say something cutting, something mean, and I would hear them snicker. It usually worked.
The teacher, an obese woman who clearly despised me, did nothing. She couldn’t stop me. And that was the lesson: Authority is a myth.
My own mother—Barb, as we called her—couldn’t stop me either. I didn’t care about Barb. I didn’t care about the teacher. I certainly didn’t care about the pretty girls behind me.
I remember thinking: My own mother I don’t care for, what makes you think I give a damn about any of you?
I excelled at things that allowed me to dominate from a distance. Math. History. Writing.
And then, I found poker.
Poker became my drug because it is vengeance personified.
Civilization has rules against hurting people. You can’t carry a “boom stick” like men did in the 1800s. You can’t challenge a man to a duel because he disrespected you. But at the poker table, you can take everything he has, and he has to shake your hand when it’s over.
I remember playing Heads-Up No-Limit back in the day, before solvers ruined the game, when hero calls were rare and terrifying. I was up against a guy who was trying to run me over. He was betting pot on every street, trying to drown me in aggression.
I looked at my hand. King High. Effectively nothing.
A normal person folds there. A fearful person folds there. But I knew the math, and more importantly, I knew him. He was way over-bluffing. He was desperate.
I didn’t care that I had nothing. I knew I was right. I clicked “Call.”
He turned over a busted draw. My King High was good.
The chat box exploded. “How dare you do that?!” he typed. “Are you stupid?!”
I watched his chips slide into my stack—a pure transfer of power. “Stupid with your cash, loser,” I typed back.
It felt better than sex. It felt like justice.
I kept a spreadsheet of my net worth, and every time the number went up, it wasn’t just money. It was a scoreboard.
I am smarter than you. I will outthink you. I will crush you.
I sat in isolation, clicking buttons, extracting value. I had no binder for human connection—no compassion, no warmth, none of the “feminine” qualities that Jung says are necessary for a soul. I had deleted those files the day the dog died.
I only had the drive to win.
But the problem with vengeance is that it requires an enemy. And when you live in isolation, staring at a monitor, clicking buttons in the dark, you eventually run out of people to fight.
And that is when the crosshairs turn inward.