Holidays—holy days—were once meant for rejoicing, for gathering, for warmth. In my life, they were reminders of the opposite: a stage set for people who were physically there but spiritually vacant.
When my mother gifted me a bicycle-tire inflator as a twenty-seven-year-old—despite the fact I couldn’t ride a bike and wouldn’t learn until I was twenty-eight—I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t even surprised. In truth, I don’t remember a single “good” gift from her. There was never a moment where she saw me, thought of what I needed, and acquired it.
Her gifts were always artifacts of indifference—objects scrounged from the back of a closet where they had sat for years, gathering dust and the stale scent of neglect. She would wrap up these musty afterthoughts and hand them over as if they were new.
But then again, the Jensens—my mother’s maiden name—seem to lack an olfactory sense entirely. They move through the world nose-blind to the decay around them.
The rot started with Hazel, my maternal grandmother.
I only saw Hazel during her rare, ritualistic appearances, where she floated around like a ghost in her own life. Looking back, I suspect it wasn’t just emptiness; it was likely PTSD, the kind rural South Dakota women developed after a traumatic birth or a hard life, leaving them permanently severed from their former selves. She wasn’t just quiet; she was broken.
But the true depth of that family’s repulsion was something I learned secondhand. My father later told me an anecdote from when he was dating my mother—a story that became the definitive legend of my maternal lineage’s dysfunction.
He described a Thanksgiving at Hazel’s. After the meal, in that strange rural detachment, hygiene became an afterthought. They didn’t put the food away. They simply left the turkey and the sides out on the back porch, eating off the cold, congealed leftovers for weeks. The smell didn’t seem to register to them—just like the musty smell of my Christmas gifts never registered to my mother.
I never attended those dinners myself, but hearing my father tell it confirmed everything I felt in my gut. That family was disgusting. Repulsive. They were cold, but not in the refrigerator sense—they didn’t preserve things; they just let them sit and spoil.
Knowing this was my heritage, isolation became a sanitary measure. My childhood security blanket wasn’t people—it was distance from them.
The Clean World of Odds
If my mother’s bloodline was a study in messy, irrational decay, poker became my sanctuary of order.
It was the one place where logic, instinct, and judgment weren’t liabilities—they were currency. When the Moneymaker boom hit, I didn’t just play; I studied. I became a man-child glued to forums and strategy discussions, obsessed with the architecture of the game.
I started with a free $50 on Empire Poker. By nineteen, it was over $100,000.
I remember the night I won $7,000 in a Bodog tournament. I told my father at 4 AM, and for a moment, I saw pride flash through him—something rare, something sacred. But what I loved most wasn’t the money. It was the filtering. Poker is a ruthless meritocracy. You cannot fake it. You are either a winning player who controls their emotions and understands the math, or you are a fish who complains about “bad beats.”
There was no room for the Hazel-like drifting in poker. You had to be awake. When Cole South—a god of the online game—invited me into a private channel to ask for my advice on his videos, it felt like lightning. I had value. My mind had purchase on reality.
I thought, naively, that if I could just bring this level of success to the real world, the isolation would end. I thought the problem was me—that I was just the quiet kid in the corner while the loud, obnoxious guys got the girls.
Then came the night in Nisland.
The Chrysalis Cracks
Around age twenty-one, after a classmate named Coy Price died in a car accident, the peer group gathered at the Nisland bar.
By this time, stress and discipline had sculpted me. Thirty pounds had evaporated from my frame. Suddenly, I wasn’t the invisible observer; I was attractive. The same girls who had ignored me in high school, the ones who chased the loud drunks, now fawned over me.
I sat alone at the bar with a beer, listening.
“Yeah, I’d fuck him—maybe get pregnant,” one of them said.
Cackling laughter followed.
Inside, I didn’t feel flattered. I recoiled. It was a moment of absolute clarity. They hadn’t changed. They hadn’t grown. They were the same people they were in high school, just three years older and none the wiser.
They didn’t see me. They didn’t know about the poker wins, the strategy, the discipline, or the mind I had cultivated. They saw a piece of meat. It was raw, unvarnished ID. Sexual opportunism wrapped in lip-gloss.
I realized then that the “party” was a lie. The “fun” they were having was just a biological impulse loop. They were operating on software I had uninstalled years ago. I was God’s unwilling witness to the spiritual dead.
It scarred me. It confirmed that I was defenseless among people who lacked souls but played at having them. It pushed me right back into the isolation of the trailer house, because trusting anyone in Butte County became impossible.
The Theology of the Remnant
Only years later did the pieces click, and John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination gave language to what I had lived.
Calvin taught that not all respond to the call of life equally. Some awaken; others remain spiritually inert. A remnant possesses inward depth, judgment, and conscience. The rest—the reprobate—wander untouched, untroubled, and unelected in the deepest existential sense.
He wrote that the elect are bound to God by an “indissoluble tie,” while the others live externally among the faithful but never internally belong.
I had seen this my whole life. I saw it in the stories of Hazel, eating rot on the porch, unaware of the decay. I saw it in the girls at the bar, mimicking human connection but seeking only friction.
Calvin insisted that the mystery of who awakens and who doesn’t lies in God’s hidden counsel. All I knew was that some people were alive on the inside—and most weren’t.
Predestination didn’t explain everything. But it finally gave me a frame for why the world around me looked so damned—and why I felt so fundamentally separate from it.
I wasn’t a sociopath. I was just the only one who could smell the meat turning.
Looking around that bar, I realized those Butte County women were just the soulless leftovers of a society devoid of functioning logic. Like Hazel’s turkey, they’d been left out on the porch too long—unpreserved, room-temperature, and waiting for some drunk idiot to mistake them for sustenance, never realizing they were already spoiled.