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“Someone I once loved, gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

–Mary Oliver–

I Love that quote! It’s so fucking deep. There’s just so much depth in the ways that I can view, interpret and connect with it. At my core, I see that quote not just from a standpoint of the female that I love, but also on a more meaningful level of life. I can actually see that quote as a way to try and look at all the dark clouds that have ever covered the skies of my life. From childhood, to teenage years to adulthood and now into older age, there have just been so many boxes of darkness, so much pain from so many different moments in this thing called life,  And If I allow myself to take all those things, all those dark moments with people that I loved, that in some painful way gave me a box full of darkness……as I now look back at my life, I can now see that the only true way to survive those trials and tribulations and any other future dark cloud is to find real meaning that those dark boxes of my life were really just gifts in disguise. I don’t know if I will truly ever get there with all of the dark boxes that life has given me…. To truly be thankful for all the dark painful moments of my life is truly not an easy task….. But this I do know….. whatever doesn’t kill me, will only eventually find me reason to get back up and grab my sword and give me resilience to try again to find the beauty that my life deserves. And in that… within every dark moment, there truly is a box… a true gift of beauty, It’s just up to me to find it. Even in the dark.

#Believe

Todays date: Thursday January 18 2024

Time: 11:35pm

Place: Club in the ATX

Song playing as I begin this post: Shaka Laka by 6ix9ine Feat. Kodak Black Y Yalin

Last time I wrote was on Thanksgiving. That was definitely a dark moment. And truth be told, that whole time was really a growth moment. It was just a painful growth moment. As I may have mentioned in a previous post, every year during the holidays, I do Christmas for the girls at my job. And this last Christmas just didn’t feel like all my work and effort was truly worth anything that I did. Unfortunately here at my job, I just can’t really say anything about certain emotions simply because I so desperately need the job. This job is 100 percent the thing that funds my ability to work on my 4plex. So until I have enough apartments to no longer need my job, I am pretty much always going to shy away from certain aspects or thoughts about my job.

But what I will say is that the feeling of family definitely felt different this year. And add that with my own personal journey in life and it becomes a very disturbing mix of feelings.

But enough about work, and instead lets focus more on the journey to a million and beyond. Since my last post, there were so many things that I had “actually” hoped would come to fruition by the time of this writing, and sadly almost NONE of it has come to pass. There are things like my truck. It has been at the mechanics for almost two years and I was (and currently) keep being told that it is “almost” done. And although it finally does seem as if this current phase of the “truck repairs” is actually at it’s tail end, it leaves me with the new problem of how much I need to pay the mechanic for the work. And currently the mechanic has not yet given me a price for what I currently owe. And although the mechanic is a honest person, it has me worried simply because more of my life hinges on me truly being financially prepared for everything that I do.

For example, the platting of my property. Well after speaking to the engineers, the platting is now about 3 weeks from being completed. And this means that within a short period of time, I will need to find a way to shit $7000.00. This currently does not also include any of the work that is or was being done at the 4plex. Nor does this include food, gas, or any living expenses. And as the years move forward I am trying my best to understand financial costs. Even at this moment, I have checks to the IRS that I need to write. And with all these bills weighing on my mind, to have my mechanic not be able to give me a ball park dollar amount is painstaking. Then, while on the subject of vehicles, I literally finally paid off all my credit card bills. This included a balance transfer from a loan. A loan that was used to purchase my motorcycle. This motorcycle is strictly used for me to drive to work. And as for the last few months I have been noticing some changes from within my motorcycle. And after my last oil change, the dealership mechanic told me that the engine of my motorcycle is leaking oil. But no leaking from anywhere exterior. But instead it is a interior leakage. It turns out that the pistons in the engine are leaking oil. And worse, this is something that I can super easily smell EVERY time I turn on the motorcycle.

This motorcycle was purchased used. it is a 2006 motorcycle. and it cost me $15,000. And as of one week ago, I literally paid off any remaining balance of that motorcycle, and now my motorcycle is literally on its last miles. How many miles are left on my motorcycle? I’m not sure, but by the strong smell of oil (every time I start the engine) I can only assume that I have anywhere from 1 month to 6 months before the motorcycle is completely unusable. (Super upsetting) This means that after finally paying off all credit card and loan debts, this means that I now must incur a whole new debit! On my last motorcycle I was able to get a smidgen over 364,000 miles on it. And with this motorcycle, I “might” get 210,000 miles. That’s a loss of over 100,000 miles. Picture this…. currently I ride about 32,000 miles a year on the motorcycle. And so this now means that I just lost about 5 maybe 6 years of use with this motorcycle. My last motorcycle was used and it cost me $15k and this current motorcycle was also used (exact same model and year) and it also cost me $15k. So by my numbers, this means that I just lost a lot of money.  This motorcycle should have lasted me more years. Now let’s not forget all the other financial aspects of my life, not just including any money for my real estate projects, or any money to get my truck out of the mechanics, but on top of my current financial endeavors and financial obligations, I now must find a way to pay thousands of dollars for another motorcycle.

Beyond the idea of money to ensure that I have dependable transportation to work, there is also the object of me needing to get a loan to build the apartments. I have been in contact with a loan officer from Oklahoma. As of a few days ago, she asked me to do a personal financial statement. And truth be told…. WTF is a “personal financial statement”? Like I am intelligent enough to know the definition of each of those individual words…. (Personal) (Financial) (Statement), but when you bulk them together as “personal financial statement” hood people literally don’t know what the fuck that means! And funny as this sounds, the guy that I built the last two houses with told me that I should probably get my CPA to do a personal financial statement for me. And I put that on my to-do list with my CPA. I just didn’t know when I should have gotten with my CPA about this. However, in some small way I am happy that the need for a personal financial statement came in the way that it did. It turns out that the loan officer that asked me for a PFS (Personal Financial Statement) was kind enough to send me a excel template. And although the template looked foreign to me, after about 30 minutes to an hour, I was able to understand how fill it out. It turns out that it was basically the same thing, or at least was the same outcome that the Mint app (by Quicken) would do to tell me about my net worth.

And in order for a bank to give me $400,000 loan to build the apartments, I must look as financially stable as possible. The bank is going to want to not only see a good credit score, but they are also going to want to see any and all debt that I may be carrying. And they will also want to know about any money that people are paying me. So for these EXACT reasons, the mere thought that I will HAVE to buy another motorcycle puts my mind in scared as fuck mode. It puts me in “scared as fuck mode” because there are questions about my current financial endeavors that I have no understanding of, and that scares me… For instance, How much money does a bank need to see in my accounts in order to lend me $400,000? What is the maximum amount of debt that I can carry and still be able to get the loan? These are just a couple of  questions that I do not have answers to. As for my credit score, that isn’t a problem. My current credit score is just over 800. but its just the fact that the person that I currently am has NO idea about the amount of money needed and the amount of debt I can carry and still be able to get the loan to build 4 apartments. And worse, I just don’t know all the factors that affect my ability to get the loan. And I am someone that wants to know ALL the details. The more details I have, then the better that I can plan things.

By now hopefully you can get a small sense that my ability to understand my spending habits is EXTREMELY critical to my future. but don’t get things twisted, this is not just about understanding my “spending” habits, but instead it is a holistic way of understanding my financial life. Understanding what amount of money do I need to survive mentally, emotionally, physically, and financially are all the important questions to ensuring that I not only stay alive, but that at the same time, I somehow must also figure out what does it take to “thrive” mentally, emotionally, physically, and financially. The words “thrive” and “survive” might seem like simple words in these sentences, but when thinking about life, those two words, thrive and survive are completely polar opposite. They don’t even live on the same planet with each other. Just writing these last couple of sentences, puts my mind in a frenzy and almost makes me feel lost on which door of thought I am supposed to be opening or which window of thoughts I should be looking at.

Let’s move subjects for a moment. This idea of money and how badly I need answers just makes me feel uncomfortable and being at work and feeling uncomfortable is not a good thing.

There is also the idea of love and loneliness in my life. This is a reoccurring theme that at some point will be resolved. Currently the woman that I love is not actually in my life, but instead she makes herself known to me when it is convenient for her. I recently saw her. She ended up showing up at work. And later her and I met at a hip coffee bar to talk. I have really been thinking about how I still seem to have this reoccurring issue with her and I am constantly asking myself, “How do I get out of this whirlpool” of emotions that I have with her. A part of me does not want to give up on what “could be” but the other part of me sees more and more that I MUST allow myself to live. allow myself to find someone to love me. And one of my largest hangups with the woman I love is the sheer fact (that at least when it comes to her with me) that she is a liar. She has lied to me more times than any human should have to endure. I have come to realize that her only reason for lying to me (in the way that she does) is not because she actually wants to lie to me, but instead because she also lies to herself. I can now see that it was something that was unfortunately taught to her at a young age (for survival purposes) and now has become a part of her personality. I can see that the best version of her doesn’t want to be someone that lies to themselves. But like for all humans, bad childhood habits are very hard to break. Childhood habits are what we needed to create for ourselves to ensure that we felt loved (even when love is seemingly void)  And for her, lying is just one of those bad childhood teachings. So when we last met, I finally told her that she is a liar. I did everything possible to ensure that I came from a place of love, a place that truly wants to nurture something important to them, a place of knowing that who she really is on the inside is not someone that wants to be a liar, but instead, her current bad habit is what she did as a survival mechanism. Not everyone is born into a perfect family. So it’s no surprise that many of us carry bad habits from our childhood.

I can only assume that all these emotions that I have for her are allowing me to really analyze what I want and deserve for myself in my own life. It allows me to see what I want surrounding me at all moments in my life. (Especially in my close circle). And so sadly I am no closer to being “un-torn” from having feelings for her. But instead, I think I can say that I am finding peace with certain emotions. Rather than ripping away feelings, I think it is more important to use a different picture frame to hold my feelings, so I am working to understand how to hold emotional space for her in my mind, but still allow myself to walk and find someone that actually wants me. IDK, maybe I just have a deeper belief in loyalty than some people. I am a true believer that every human was born needing and wanting to give and receive love. And that it’s our surroundings and the teachings of our surroundings that either cultivate a positive and productive way to look at life or just fucks our life to horrible despair. And so for me, in my last conversation with her, I made it clear that I love her, but that I also know that she is a liar to me and also to herself.  And in all honesty, I truly hope that she goes Goggins. (as in decides to have a hard look at herself and becomes bluntly honest with all her internal flaws). If she chooses to really dive into this “Goggins” way of thinking, then the only outcome will be for her to actally become the very best version of herself…… aka…. The woman that I see in her. And as for me… Well, I may randomly text her, and or if she texts me, I may randomly or instantly respond to her. She understood this by the end of our conversation. And for me personally, I know that my biggest challenge is not whether or not that I can meet someone. Nope, meeting people is now actually pretty easy. Instead the hard part is having the time to go….to literally go and socialize in a atmosphere that allows me to meet the woman that I will spend my life with.

The sheer fact that I am still stuck at this type of job (at the club) is a big scar that keeps a good woman from wanting me. And then add the fact that when I am not at this job, that I am literally either doing personal things like eating, sleeping, exercising, washing clothes, or researching, or doing all things related to my 4plex and the apartments that I am trying to build. All these things literally take up a lot of damn time. In order to truly eat “healthy” I must eat at home 95% of the week. and in order to live a long time, I must truly get at least 8 hours of sleep, but preferably 11 hours of sleep. And sleep and time is just a large factor on how and when I can go to places to meet someone. For instance, most places or social events tend to gather after 6pm. And for me, by 6pm I want to be winding down my mind. By 6pm I want my mind to begin thinking about sleep. And if I am going somewhere at 6pm, then my mind will be thinking it is in work mode, and so my mind will want to stay awake well into a.m. hours of sunrise……. And I can’t allow that to happen. So how the hell do I do this? How do I make time to meet people and still get enough sleep? How do I meet someone while being at my night job and also living a day time life? I can’t help but to think/believe that if my life was all “day” or all “night” that my ability to meet someone would be easier. My circadian rhythm would find some form of balance, It would be easier because she would either be a daytime person and we could easily plan time together or she would be a nighttime person and again…. Circadian rhythm, we could easily plant time together. But because my life is split, and because I MUST take care of my health, it makes it super challenging to not only build up the strength to meet someone out side of my work environment, but it makes it even tougher simply because my health requires that as long as I am at still tied to needing to work at the club, that I have to have 60% of my life happening while the rest of the world is sleeping. And notice that NONE of what I just said has anything to actually do with the woman that I currently think about. Instead it has everything to do with me not being able to be around women with the same goals and emotions that I have.

Beyond money and love…… What else is happening in the life of Maxwell Stone? Well there is the idea of how to get my mind off of my problems. When I was young, I was deeply involved with learning and doing music. Specifically in the field of music production. Little did I know that this music passion of mine would really turn out to be a hobby. Then in my late 20’s I did the alcohol thing. Sadly I did that phase of drinking for way to long. (more of that on a different post) Bu now, now as I am somewhat a changed person, about 7 to 10 years into personal development, and after watching hundreds of videos and books of people that teach personal development, I can see how detrimental it is for a human being not to have a hobby…. And when I say the word “hobby” I don’t mean something that hinders you from becoming the best version of yourself (like drinking, or marijuana, or other narcotics). Rather, I am speaking of hobbies that allow people to develop themselves (their mind, their body and or their spirit) in a positive way. For me making music was a great way for me to get lost and still develop myself. But these days I just don’t have enough time to sit in the studio and make music, and worse, working at the club and their constant demand for me to FIND “new” music for the club simply un-inspires me to be creative in the studio, and because of work at the club, I no longer get to “enjoy” music. So these days, I am now using my music studio to do 3D printing. 3 or 4 years ago I bought a 3D printer but never really used it. But now I find myself trying to learn how to use it. The plus side of 3D printing is that is allows me to learn new things and also find new ways to be creative and design and print some cool things, the downside is that it is in some way also geeky and just not something that the general population of people talk about. It is so much easier for me to go to a bar or restaurant and talk about basketball or football with almost anyone, but to truly talk shop about 3D printing with someone at a bar or restaurant is a lot more challenging and harder to find.

But I still enjoy the “idea” of 3D printing and I am finding it to be a hell of a lot more difficult than I first predicted. I seem to have a lot more printing failures than I do successful prints. And I seem to have to buy parts and spend more time fixing the printer than I do making prints (or at least that’s what it feels like)  And I am having to spend a lot of time learning on “what software” that I should be learning in order to create my own 3D prints. That in itself is one of my most current time consuming issues with 3D printing. Ugh!!! The hobbies that I decide to pick up. SMH.

Beyond the 3D printing hobby, I now find myself also binge watching TV shows. I don’t truly know why I am doing it other than I get bored and want to do something other than “learn”. I have truly spent a lot of time learning. Learning in the sense of “understanding myself as a human being” and Fuck!!!!! That in itself is super time consuming. But on the bright side, the years spent in personal development has truly allowed me to understand myself  and my life better. It has allowed me to understand other people better. I truly feel that it has made me a better person. I am just hoping that soon it will allow me to be financially richer to the point that I have free time to meet people without me suffering financially to maintain or grow my lifestyle. But yea…. Binge watching TV shows and movies is now something that I do… I do it while eating alone, while laying in bed alone, while showering alone. Notice how I used that word “alone”.  Fuck! I even do it while driving to work on the motorcycle. I can only assume that it goes to show how void my life is of human connection. Hopefully this will eventually morph into something that will get me closer to the friends and loved ones that I need in my life. It’s funny, but in a painful funny way, funny how I never really looked at how much time I now spend binge watching TV. Like I knew that in the past I was watching WAY too much news. But I didn’t know what else to watch. My mind was filled to the brim with personal development, I didn’t want to watch YouTube videos on personal development. (I just felt overly absorbed with those types of videos.) My brain needed a break from all that learning. And watching hours and hours of news on repeat also wasn’t healthy and was something that I needed to change. So now I do the TV shows which, currently may or may not be healthy, but at least its a distraction from the constant learning and also a break from the constant cycles of negative news.

Time to close out this post…..

Over the recent weeks, my plumber charged me an enormous amount of money to do a job. The the tune of $5000.00 This was about 3 or 4 weeks ago. Since that time I paid him almost half of the money he wanted, and about 2 weeks ago he got sick and as of today, he is still not back to work and currently he is the major contractor I need at the apartments. My last two apartments that I am remodeling both need the sewer line to be torn out and redone. When those units were first built, the original plumber did not properly give enough venting to the sewer pipes. This has caused a major problem between the top and the bottom unit. And as I have mentioned in a past post, I am also changing out all the water heaters to be tankless systems. So in the end, the money I gave this plumber has been very expensive for me, not including any supplies for the project, and as of to date, I still have yet to see him get work completed. I literally cannot have any other contractor come in and do the final touches to the apartment until this plumber gets his project completed. And two weeks ago the plumber sent me a photo of himself in a hospital bed.  Something about pneumonia or his ability to get air in his lungs. Since that time I have been debating on how long to wait for him to get better. Remember I gave him a lot of money for a job that he has not yet started. Last thing I want to do is give a different plumber more money and lose out on the money that I already gave the current plumber. So on Tuesday I spoke with my current plumber and he says that he is feeling better and should be back at work this week. So tomorrow I will give him a call and see if he will be ready to get the project completed.

Side Note: Over a week ago, he was wanting another payment to pay some of his bills, since he was not working. However I had already paid him a lot of money for a project that he had not started, I told him that I don’t feel comfortable giving him more money for something that he hasn’t yet started, and worse, since he is sick, there is still a chance that he could literally die. And I am not giving more money with a real possibility that he might die. So fast forward to this Tuesday, and I am hopeful that he will be back at work this coming week. And if not, then I will need to call Cesar and get a quote from a different plumber to get the job completed. I just know that I am going to be super pissed if I have to pay another plumber to do this job. Again…So much of life just seems to be boiling down to money and time. More money on top of more money and less time to get everything done. At some point I must learn to be more creative on how to get things accomplished without being mean to people and without people leaving me with empty pockets and without completed work.

The saga continues.

Wish me luck,

Love,

Max.