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“She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful”

—Terri St Cloud—

==== I chose the above quote…. Not because I know or understand what’s happening in this current picture of my life that is keeping me from achieving my goals and dreams, but instead, I chose the quote because sometimes life just fucks everything up, and rather than try and rebuild/fix/redo/ or even try to undo every tiny fucked up brush stroke that has tripped me up…… let’s just paint the picture again from scratch.====

This post has been written over several days.

Star Date: Friday May 9th 2025

Location: The club in the ATX

Song Playing: Move (Anthem Kingz Private Bootleg) by Adam Port

My mood: Very worried. But that must change.

Max here and I can’t remember the last time I wrote in this online journal/diary.

A lot has happened since I last wrote. Most of what has happened is money being spent and not having enough results, work declining, and my mom’s mental health becoming more challenging than ever before… And my internal joy?? Well, it’s like my first million… Not here yet.

Last time I wrote was in August of 2024 and since that time Trump has become president and like I thought, it just fucked up everything here at the club. Over 75% of the customers are Latin. And at least 50% don’t speak English. (The reason for this disproportion of ethnic diversity at the club is simple: upper management never saw the true importance of diversity over money. And I’m sure that if you never take time to “study” the importance of diversity/demographics in a industry then you will never know the depth of the pitfalls or gains that you can make in your industry. Knowledge on “how” to cultivate diversity is so important for many businesses in this country.

I could go deep into my own personal analysis about things here at work, but it is best that I stay on point about what is happening in my life rather than play pundit about work. The facts are this…. Work is now bad, as in really bad, and doesn’t seem like it is getting better. Between Trumps tariffs and the immigration stuff that he is doing, the “extra” money that people used to have is no longer there, or they are not feeling safe enough to spend it. And the idea that latino people felt “free” to live has become stunted. Latin people in general (with the exception of the MAGA supporters) feel oppressed in some way or form. Even I feel like life has just gotten harder.

I see in my neighborhood more houses for sale with little movement of sales happening. I even see more “for rent” signs than I have in the past. And I suspect this will be the norm until Trump has finally settled down with all that he is trying to do the the government and our constitution. Unfortunately Trump is literally trying to find ways to rip apart the American constitution. And if he succeeds, then it will cause major pain for all those that are not making a million dollars or more a year.

Enough of the pain of Donald Trump and his push for authoritarianism…..let’s dive into the aspects of my life:

My mind today is quite lost. As in not sure what I should be focused on. However let’s try to piece items of my life together. Here’s a quick list of things on the plate. (It’s painfully funny to me how somethings just won’t go away. And they are things that I wish would just not be something that I need to think, worry, or care about)

• Balcony
• 3D Printing
• NAS
• Mom
• Real Estate – New Build/Current 4plex
• Health, Mental/Emotional/Physical/Sleep
• Love/Friends
• Vehicles
• Work

Let’s begin with the balcony. about 3 months ago I finally decided to start the build of a balcony at my house. about 5 or 6 months ago I gave $900 to a architect to help me build some plans for the balcony and the mother fucker just took my money. He took my money but never helped me because he said that there are no plans about how the house was built. So basically the fucker didn’t want to help me, but yet he wanted to take my money. So I felt VERY VERY stuck. I felt like I had no one to help me with this project. So I decided to lean on my welder for help. This balcony is being built out of metal, and when talking with my welder, he was quite confident that we don’t need any design plans to build the balcony. and as time came to begin the build, I could tell that he really didn’t understand the depth or true scope of the construction or engineering needed for a medium to large scale build.  This welder is someone who primarily does gates and fences, and is quite good at gates and fences. But a second story balcony is a totally different subject.

When he set the foundation, he set the foundation as if he was doing a post for a fence and not a actual “foundation footing” After he set the posts, I felt so unsure of the stability of the balcony that I had to call my foundation guy to come back and redo the foundation of the balcony. And sadly my foundation guy charged me an arm and leg (in the thousands just to reset 3 foundation footings) I was seriously upset about the cost but I was feeling pressed to get it completed and told myself “whatever it takes”. Then about 1 day before completion of the balcony, the city came by and stopped us because I didn’t have a permit to do the balcony. That’s when all things just went to shit. Mind you, I literally spent a crap ton of money in changes to the balcony. Just to ensure that the welder knew “how” to build it. And worse, sadly metal is not cheap.

On this balcony I had begun and almost finished some stairs from the balcony to the roof. And even with the stairs, the welder did not properly understand how to build stairs. So I paid a friend of mine to come in and build them out of wood, just so that the welder would know exactly how to do the stairs. I swear, I spent thousands of dollars in mistake after mistake that it is literally super fucking emotionally upsetting. So now where am I with the balcony? well, months down the road the balcony will not have a dedicated stairs to the roof. and it took me over a month to find an engineer that would work with me. In the beginning I called Cesar, he is the one who did half of the construction of my house. ( I did the first half) Cesar tried hard to get one of his friends who is an architect to help me. I waited about 3 to 4 weeks for his friend to finally come to my house, and in the end his friend is a retired architect! FML. I then reached out to my foundation guy, and he knows an engineer who could help me. At this point, I can’t remember if I had to pay him to come and look at things. but if I did, then was probably in the neighborhood of $200 or so. So this engineer came out and seemed like he was going to help me. He was a very nice man, but the only probably is actually getting him to call me back. In the end, either the guy has no true clue about customer service and how he probably should have just said that he has too many people on his plate, or…….. or maybe he just didn’t want to help me. I then finally reached out to an engineer that I used about 10 years ago. About 10 years ago I was building a balcony at my current 4plex and the city again stopped me. and that just took so much damn pain and money to get thru all of it. But I digress, so I called the engineer that I used 10 years ago, I even sent him files of the balcony, and about a week or almost two weeks later, I spoke with one of his secretaries and she told me that he would want $6500 and that he would create all the plans and things necessary to send to the city.

Dude, when I heard that price, I almost fucking fainted. I was like. Fuck that! Yet, in the back of my mind, I told myself that I might need to spend that amount, in the event that I can’t find anyone else to help me. After that phone call, I literally told myself to once again, try to find an engineer that is willing to help me. I went onto Google and tried to find a engineer that had good google reviews and didn’t seem like he had secretaries or a building or a bunch of overhead. With my last engineer that wanted $6500 he has two secretaries, a building for his office and 3 or 4 guys under him. He literally has  ton of bloat and he passes that cost onto his clients, which is the exact reason why I didn’t want to call him. So after getting onto google, I found an engineer with good reviews and I decided to call him. He answered and asked a few questions. he said that he wanted $800 to come out and help me. He said that if everything was structurally sound that he would give me a letter to give to the city so that it would help to get the permit.

So I shelled out the money, and he came by and I seemed to like the guy. Overall he was nice and helpful. His whole premise was to get rid of anything to do with the stairs and get the city off my back. Which getting the city off my back is exactly what I need to do. The balcony itself is basically 85% complete. I just now need to get rid of the work that was done for the stairs and also add a few structural pieces to the project. I even had to pay him an extra $200 to come back out and be very specific about where the last couple of beams go to make the balcony properly structurally sound. And amongst all that I still need to worry about having my welder come out and finish the project. You see, the city doesn’t want me to do anymore work until I get a permit. Yet however, if a engineer gives me a letter and says that the structure is sound, then the city still might want more things done. Ugh. FML!

If I finish it as a balcony, then the city will want design plans and will probably want a lot of other things. and that means that this stairs could now cost me 5 times more than I originally planned! Which, right now, in this economy where money is very difficult to make at work.  This balcony could be almost fucking impossible to finish. So instead of calling it a balcony, I just might have to call it a pergola and not have any access to it. My hope is that I can just leave it as a pergola and not have any access to it. That would be best and make my life much easier.

God, just thinking about the unknown of what I am going to have to deal with on this issue is just straight up anxiety. What’s weird is that in the past I didn’t have this type of anxiety. Like yes, I had anxiety and was worried about the city and all those things, but now in my life, my anxiety seems to be at new levels and now it seems to become unbearable. To give an example, about 2 or 3 years ago, I noticed that now when I ride my motorcycle to work, that I sometimes feel a very heightened sense of anxiety whenever I am driving between cars or when someone is next to me. And years ago, I didn’t feel this heightened sense of fear and panic. This is extremely troublesome for me and I must fix it. Let’s move on.

3D printing…. This is an area that I almost enjoy. I guess in a deep intellectual way, you could say that I enjoy it. or at least now, I can finally begin to enjoy it. Although doing it is very very time consuming. What I can say is that when I first started my journey with 3D printing (now about 4 years ago) I knew literally zero about it. I had no fucking clue about all the steps and the multiple programs necessary to get the designs and prints to work properly. One of the things I love about 3D printing is that I can literally create things from scratch or I can take a pre-made design and alter it to my needs. And as I go through the events in my life, I am seeing that there are many things that I can just print without going and having to buy it. However, the big drawback is the “design time”, and the unusable experimental prints needed to ensure that I get the design printed to my exact specifications for the project that I am doing. for example… when printing holes for screws and bolts etc. it sometimes takes me a couple of prints to get the size correct. You see when printing with a 3D printer, hole sizes change due to the filament and how it is printed. As of yet, I have not yet done enough homework to know exactly to the millimeter about how much I need to alter a hole to get the exact fit. Although what I can say is that now I’m pretty close and by a year or two I am confident that I will have it down pretty well. Now there are those other programs or apps that I still need to properly learn. One of them (which is my main go to) is Tinkercad. It’s a online software for 3D printing that allows me to create and alter designs. It has taken me the better part of almost two years to finally begin… and I mean just “begin” to feel confident in doing basic work within it. I even drew out the balcony for the engineer in this software. As of this week, I could feel myself working faster in Tinkercad. Learning the most used shortcuts is finally coming natural. Although I am still not there, but I am finally able to move faster in the software. And by moving faster with the shortcuts and knowing “how” to use the basics of the software, I am able to focus more on the “creation” of design rather than having to split my brain between learning to use the software and also then using brain power to switch into creative mode on the design.

When I began this journey with 3D printing, I had to go through so much reading and research… from learning how to re-purpose an old ancient laptop and then installing Linux onto the laptop. Which that in itself was a long journey and EXTREMELY stressful. Then I had to learn about Octoprint, which is a way for me to monitor my prints while I am not at home. This is something that I am now doing at this exact moment while writing this post. The journey to get Octoprint working on the laptop was also super stressful. Now what makes those two things super stressful is the fact that in order for me to do the prints that I want and to do them at my convenience, then I have to have a PC and the Octoprint software up and running. Which means that I either had to buy a computer, or I re-purpose a PC that I have. And preferably re-purpose a PC that doesn’t use a lot of electricity, as I will have it on almost 24/7. But now, luckily I have most of those issues solved and I can focus now more on the printer itself as well as the designs and the “creation” of designs. Which again is also time consuming but I oddly enjoy it.

Now what I love most about 3D printing is simply creating something and the fact that I can make almost anything I need. for example. I am building a NAS. (network attached storage device) Basically I am building a personal cloud.  I currently have a personal cloud device by a company called Synology. I bought it about 10 years ago and back then, it cost me about $600, not including the hard drives. It holds 4 hard drives and has a max capacity of 10TBs. which for me is really good. After all these years, I am still learning it and getting familiar with it. Although what I can say is that as of the last couple of years, I seem to finally understand it better. Although I still need quite a bit of learning in order to get the maximum out of it.

Then, about 4 years ago I heard of software called Xpenology, which is the basic programming that my current NAS runs on. After some research I learned that I could make my own Synology NAS. Now back then, it sounded really interesting and I wanted to do it. I even had an old computer laying around that I was going to use for it. But back then, I still didn’t understand it enough to know how to do it. It required a lot of reading and scripting that I was going to have to do in order to get it to work. So I shelved the idea of it for a long time.  I even brought home the old music computer from work. (about 3 years ago the music PC from work, took a dump and stopped working. They ended up buying a new computer and the old one just sat here at work. I one day asked if I could take it home, unless they had a use for it. And of course, here at work, no one knows shit about computers, so I took it home. It sat here at home for about 2 years, then about 3 weeks ago, I finally got to tinkering with it. After 3 weeks and buying some new ram for it, I finally got it running. Although, “got it running” doesn’t mean that I can use it yet. About 2 years ago I bought 4 hard drives that are made for cloud storage. each of these drives are 8TBs and in the end I should have about 20TBs or more of storage capacity. Now, in order to get the PC ready to be a cloud storage, I had to go thru a long process of literally cleaning all the fog juice off all the electronics of the old music PC. Here at work my boss makes us use the fog machine on a constant and very heavy basis. This literally ruins ALL electronics (and not to mention is deeply detrimental to my health, but I digress). So it took me about two weeks and 4 bottles of 90% isopropyl alcohol to clean the PC just to ensure that it was still salvageable.

Now about the 3D printing and the NAS that I am building. The PC is a HP Omen 870-224 and has space for up to 4 hard drives. Although space for the 4th hard drive was probably never meant for a hard drive to be there unless it was really really necessary. I say this because, as I tried to add the hard drive into the 4th slot, the hard drive was a little lose and didn’t quite fit properly. So after hours and hours of research for the tray or caddy for the hard drive slot, I came up empty. I just couldn’t find any information about the accessories needed for that particular slot on the PC. So I said fuck it, I’m just gonna 3D print one for it. So I went thru at least 8 different variations before I got the right design necessary for the hard drive to fit solid. This meant me measuring and designing and then printing. and then doing it all over again, measure, design, and print. Fuck it was annoying. And in the end, I finally came to the conclusion, that all I needed to do was to print small tiny washers about the width of 2mm. I literally wasted so much time, electricity and plastic just to find out that the end result needed to be 4 tiny washers that were printed in 3 minutes and cost me all of about 5 cents for all four of them for me to print!

So my point… 3D printing, I love it, but don’t yet really really love it, simply because I don’t yet know the software good enough, nor do I literally have hours and hours to just sit and design. I think that’s the annoying and frustrating part of all of it. Is that life is not allowing me (or at least the life that I am trying to achieve) is not yet allowing me the time to enjoy the hobbies that I want to have in my life.

Let’s move to the next subject.

My mom….. Boy this is a MAJOR mental and emotional issue for me, and I literally feel like it is causing me to be less in control of my life. So what’s happening with my mom?

well, God, this is such a challenging thing. You see it is one thing to try to learn how to take care of a parent that is elderly, and it is another level to try to take care of a parent that is elderly and with the onset of dementia, but it is a whole new level of pain and complexity with a parent that is elderly, and with the onset of dementia and her being emotionally torn about one of her sons. You see, I have a half brother that lives in her house. He has lived there now for about 5 years. He is (at the time of this writing) about 64 or 65. and has not worked in over 30 years, he is/was a drug addict, and drinks alcohol on a daily basis. He has 6 children from 5 different women. He NEVER and I mean he NEVER got his life together. And because he doesn’t want to get a job, he literally says to himself that he “can’t” work because if he gets a job then the government will take away the little money they give him. They literally give him about $700 a month. And I think it has to do with medication for his HIV. (Which having HIV is by no means a factor to dislike or not care about someone. Many and I mean many, many people live very productive and happy lives while living with HIV) So for me the issue is that my mom loves him and wants him to be happy, but she also can’t live with his behaviors and his way of living in her house. He is unfortunately extremely toxic and doesn’t fully understand how toxic he is. My half brother knows quite clearly that my mom doesn’t want him there, and I’m 100 percent sure that he knows that it is causing her deep mental strain, but he doesn’t seem to care enough about my mom to move out of her house. He cares more about his own life than he cares about my mom’s health. There is deep emotional pain from his childhood. My mom and his dad had a very bad 14 year marriage, and my half brother sadly saw the worst of it. And I think he spent most of his life blaming my mom for all the things and choices he made in his own life. In other words, I am sure that he holds guilt over my mom. Which is probably why life is so difficult for him at home. My mom doesn’t want him there, but she also doesn’t want to see him on the streets. She knows that he doesn’t work, and she knows that he doesn’t know how to get along with people, so if she evicted him, then he would in all probability end up living on the streets. Which is sad, but as a son (me) as my mom’s son, my first concern is to my mom and not to my half brother. Sadly my half brother never made it a point to help me in life. He is my older brother and instead of him helping me and guiding me in life, he instead was the role model of everything that I should not do in life. It is really sad for me to see and finally understand what type of family I come from. It is just so super painful, but all I can do now is to try to undo all family curses. To set my life in a trajectory that is opposite of all the toxicity that was unknowingly taught to me. And most of all to internally resonate with a happy prosperous way of life.  At some point, there must be at least one family member that is able to let go of all the pain of past generations and allow all the ancestors to finally live with love. No human truly wants a bad life. No human truly wants to go thru so much pain. And for my mom and my half brother, my mom went through so much pain as a child, that she literally carried all that pain with her and unknowingly taught all that pain to me and my half brothers. I have a total of 3 half brothers with my mom, but two of them died and all that is left is the half brother that lives in my moms home. When she married my half brothers dad, she (my mom at that time) didn’t even know that she married a man that resembled all the pain of her childhood and that marriage just magnified the pain she had as a child. And my half brother now carries all that pain and is probably finally just realizing that he is carrying so much unnecessary pain of his own, and he is probably finally seeing that our mom went thru so much pain of her own. And that she didn’t mean to cause any pain to anyone. But even though my half brother is hopefully finally realizing this, it still remains that his own views are that he much rather put my mom thru more pain rather than to leave the house and allow her to live in peace.

I have watched my mom sit outside and just cry and cry from despair of not having anyone help her. at the time of this writing, my mom is 90 years old. Just imagine a elderly 90 year old woman sitting outside with her head in her hands and just crying tears of pain. It is just so painful for me to watch.

And all the while, no one can help her simply because it is her house, and her dementia is mild but at times severe, and in Texas since it is her house and her dementia is in the mid stages, and because my half bother has been there for more than 30 days…. now the only way that my half brother will leave and give my mom peace is if she takes him to court and evicts him. But even at that, taking him to court means that he will live in the house for at least 30-60 days while the whole court issues are happening. And this will just cause even more emotional stress on my mom.

This stress, this heavy stress just makes my moms dementia worse. She forgets super easy, half the time, she doesn’t know what to do with herself.. My mom at the time of this writing as I mentioned is 90 years old and now just a few months away from being 91 years old.  My mom can still bathe herself and dress herself and feed herself. However, she had turned her house into a rats nest. She is becoming a major hoarder. I think she is trying to find ways to put space between herself and my half brother. but at the cost of the house being piled high with clothes and other forms of unnecessary junk. My mom has always been somewhat of a hoarder. She grew up in the depression era, and in that era you learned to not easily throw something away. Especially if it could be repurposed. But now with this problem with my half brother, my mom is taking “re-purposing” to the next level with all the unnecessary junk. She will find things (clothes, toys etc) and bring them home, then when I ask her about actually doing something with it, she says that she doesn’t have time or she will say my half brother is causing her so much distress, so much pain that she can’t think straight and that is the reason why she doesn’t do anything with the things she brings home. In the end, all this hoarding, just makes it more difficult to find things in a home that is already unorganized. It literally just makes her dementia worse because she super easily loses things. She now loses her debit card on almost a weekly basis. And she will say that my half brother steals her debit card. But yet at the same time, on occasions,  she will give him the debit card to go and buy something to eat or drink.

It all just gets super frustrating because my mom feeling stressed and lost means that I must watch her go thru this alone. My mom doesn’t know how to have positive friends nor she doesn’t see me as an equal. Two weeks ago I saw my mom sitting with drunks and homeless people at a corner near my house. I was beside myself when I saw this. And it is not like I have not tried to have conversations with my mom about her situation. But my mom is a stubborn woman, now with heavy stress, and elderly and with the onset of dementia. And it just makes it super difficult for me to find the help that my mom needs. Because she is not at a state where she is “completely” incapable of making decisions, it means that the state of Texas cannot really help. I have tried to call adult protective services multiple times. I have had them come out and talk with my mom, but my mom still tries to push the idea of wanting someone to come and take care of my half brother. I have even hired a lawyer to evict my half brother, but my moms emotions got in the way and she saw the eviction paper that I left for my half brother and she said that he didn’t have to leave. She literally flip flops on the feelings. 99.9% of the time she wants him to leave, but anytime she is forced to have to make the decision to evict him, knowing that he will probably CHOOSE to live on the streets, she backs down and just gets angrier. It’s a internal battle she keeps having with herself and it literally tears her apart from the inside out. And now…. now it is really starting to affect me. It is really starting to affect me, simply because of all the letters that she has written to me about wanting him to leave, and me watching her sit outside crying (at the age of 90) and crying because she doesn’t know what to do. She now has bouts of anger and depression on a daily and hourly basis. And as a son I am being forced to watch my mother die sooner than necessary.

It is so emotionally tough for me, because this is my family. It’s a shitty fucked family that I wish I was never born into, but it’s the cards that I was dealt with.  And somehow I must not let it affect me emotionally. The challenge is that my mom never taught me how to not let things emotionally affect me. My mom has always been emotional. And so now I must take extra hours out of my day to constantly notice when I am being too emotional. And now having to go thru this with my mom an half brother just makes my life so much harder and challenging. And on top of that I must now find ways to help my mom thru her elderly years and thru her own pain. Which means that I must not only find a way to help my mom get my half bother out of the house, but I must also help my mom deal with her unresolved emotions about herself as a mother, and I must also help my mom learn how to live life as the most vibrant and happiest old woman possible…. this means, preparing for when she can’t take care of herself, finding friends that are healthy for her, ensuring that she is around environments that will still allow her to grow and live in harmony with herself. Basically it is like having a child and taking them to school and teaching them about life and providing the environment to induce the proper friends the child needs.

Although taking care of an elderly person seems to be more challenging simply because the elderly person already knows independence and has lived the largest part of their life with independence and will fight tooth and nail to not give up independence, where a child is majority dependent on you. (Both are challenging, but elderly just tends to fight more… And that in itself is just painful)

So what am I doing about all of it? well I’m trying to find different ways to get my mom to learn how to make this internal decision battle about my half brother. Recently I took her to her primary care doctor and showed the primary care doctor the letters that she wrote to me about my half brother. I asked the primary care doctor to recommend my mom to see a psychologist. And last week, I took my mom to the city’s mental health department to hopefully get her enrolled to see a psychologist, my mom was deeply defensive in her answers to the person that was asking questions. In the end, that city office said that my mom is not a candidate for them, and that they (the city mental health department) are mainly geared for people that are homeless and with mental disorders. However the lady printed up some names of psychologists that I could call that would see my mom. So this week, I had Lanette, (a friend that helps me 2 days a week) I had her call some of the people and I will be trying to get my mom to see a psychologist and a psychiatrist. My mom deeply needs someone to talk to. Someone to sit and listen to her and “slowly” help her make the proper mental connections of what she is doing to herself. Sadly my mom doesn’t take any of my words to heart. And I assume that for my mom, she sees my as her son and not as someone that actually understands her situation.

Now what am I doing for myself to try to keep my own sanity thru all of this? well, like I said… it’s all affecting me mentally. I have anxiety more than normal. My mom only talks about ONE thing and ONLY ONE THING. (she want’s my half brother to leave) but she won’t evict him. It’s like a broken record and all the while I have to watch the horrible pain that comes with it. So what am I doing to help myself deal with it?

well, I just don’t know what to truly do. You see, I still don’t have friends, I still don’t go anywhere on my days away from work. And especially now that I have less spending money, I now really don’t feel comfortable going out. Now why don’t I have friends? well, I need to go places to meet people. And that requires time, a vehicle and money. And as of this week, I FINALLY got my car back from the body shop. This is the second time that I had to put my car in the body shop. And this second time in the body shop set me back almost $2k! This doesn’t include all of the money that I have had to sink into that damn balcony.  Nor does it include the money that I have spent to get my truck running. My truck is now running… But it is barely running. The more I drive it, the more that I must put money into it to fix it. We’ll save that information for later in this post.

Now about a two months ago, I did my last home session of ketamine. And I have also purchased some magic mushrooms. Now mind you, I don’t care to do hallucinogenics for “recreational/fun” purposes. Instead, when done in the proper way, magic mushrooms and ketamine can be deeply beneficial to the brain and help to rewire thinking. And for me, with all that I am trying to achieve in my life, and with the things that I am having to watch at home, and with the challenges at work, I am choosing to sparingly make time to help my mind. The problem with ketamine and magic mushrooms is that it all costs money. Money that I currently don’t have. If I go to a clinic session of ketamine, then it will cost me $400 per session. If I do home ketamine sessions it will cost $100 a session (but I MUST buy $800 of sessions so that the I can get the discounted price of $100 a session) As for the magic mushrooms, seem to cost about $100 an ounce, with a minimum purchase of 2 ounces. Which again, is just costly at my current financial state. And going out to meet people can easily balloon to big dollars. (as in anywhere from $60 to $300 – depending on where I am and what I am doing to have fun) last time I went out, I went to a small venue to see a band and the entry fee was $40 and by the end of the night, I had spent about $100 on drinks. So for me going out just doesn’t seem to be the best way to deal with my mental issues. But at the same time, as much as ketamine and magic mushrooms are helpful, they are also expensive. And as much as I want to go out and meet people and have fun. I have to find a cheaper way to help my mentality. So after some research I found that I can grow magic mushrooms for much cheaper than buying them. The only drawback …. well, again, there is this phase of having to “learn HOW’ to grow them. that learning curve takes money and takes time, and I mean a lot of time. And apparently growing mushrooms is a 3 to 6 month process. And all of it depends on the type of mushroom, the environment and my ability to properly germinate everything. So after research and finding a online company called Mycoo that sells the mushroom culture in liquid form, and I found another company that sells a bag that the liquid culture goes into that will allow the mushrooms to cultivate and grow, I now have begun to try to grow mushrooms. I am hoping that I be successful in this endeavor. I know that eventually that I will get mushrooms to grow… But the question is…. How long will it take to be successful. How many attempts will I have to try before I actually get mushrooms, and how much money will I also have to spend to get results?

in terms of horticulture, I enjoy gardening, but this is a radically different process than what I cam accustomed to, and it turns out that growing mushrooms in a bag requires not only a lot of time, but that for the majority of the time the beginning process requires that I have EVERYTHING very sterile. (also something that is not normal in regular gardening.)

So recently I purchased a culture and a bag and have begun trying to grow some magic mushrooms…. Will it work? I don’t know. As of this writing it has been about a month and a half, and it seems like the mushroom culture in the bag is starting to come together.  On the way home from work I will need to watch a few more videos about growing mushrooms in a bag, so that I can ensure about how and when to do the next step to help them to grow. I am truly hoping that in a month that I will have some mushrooms. It might even take 2 months to get any mushrooms, and worse case scenario is that I won’t get any mushrooms and I will have gone thru this process fruitless. Although the whole thing will have costed me less than $100. And as I keep trying to grow mushrooms, I will eventually be fruitful, and I’m hopeful that my first yield of growing mushrooms in a bag will cover at least half the costs of past growing mistakes.

So growing mushrooms is what I am trying to do so that I can find helpful, natural medicine. Now what do I do when taking the mushrooms or ketamine? well, I work on “reprogramming” I listen to “I am affirmations”…. affirmations that help me to look at life from a different perspective. Everyone’s problem in life is really all chalked up to the lens that they use to look at life. And my mom unfortunately got a fucked up lens at childhood. And she and her husband unknowingly gave my half brother and his siblings fucked up lenses (at which to look at life) and sadly my mom also gave me a bad lens at which to look at life. So it is up to me to change the way I look at life.  There is a guy named Nick Vujicic. This guy Nick, He literally has no arms, and no legs. He was literally born without arms and legs. He has small things I call webs for feet and arms. He in NO WAY can move, travel or enjoy life the way a regular human can. Yet Nick makes more than I do. And not only that Nick found himself a wife. (And a beautiful wife!!) and not only that, they have 3 children! This man has achieved more than I and has done it without arms and legs. He is literally handicapped and has managed to create an amazing life for himself. And not just an amazing, but an amazing and  happy life. And more so he is revered and respected by millions of people. He is a popular person in the motivation field. Nick Vujicic – worth looking him up.

My point, ever since Nick was a child, his parents worked tirelessly to ensure that Nick was able to look at life and frame all of his thoughts thru the lens of positivity. By looking at life thru the lens of positivity and possibilities, Nick has been able to do all the things that my half brother can’t see or ever do. This is the “lens” that I talk about. The ability to look at life differently, to change perspective, to change the way you think. This is why when I say that I do the mushrooms and ketamine to “reprogram and rewire” my mind, it means that I must ensure that I uproot all the un-positive and all the negative thoughts and ideas about life that was given to me during my childhood. You see, Nick was taught to only think positive about life. I’m sure that Nick’s parents never said he was stupid, never said that he is worthless and never hit him.

So for me, when doing the mushrooms or ketamine, I MUST ensure that I listen to positive affirmations that will allow me to look at life thru a different lens. And just to help truly understand the human mind…. In “normal” circumstances, If you say something mean to another human, it will literally take you 5 positive things that you must say to that human just to negate the one negative thing you said to them. In other words… it takes a minimum of 5 positive things to erase one negative thing. So just imagine how much work a human must do in order to erase a bad life of childhood trauma and unhealthy surroundings and install a mindset of a positive life. So for me, I must work diligently to rewrite things in my mind. One of the things I want to do is to download some videos that I listen to  from TD Jakes (a pastor) and edit the videos for the affirmation parts of the video. Then I will listen to it during one of my home mushroom sessions. To end out this  part of the post, I am now struggling even more with the ability to get proper sleep, and I am also still struggling to get myself to exercise 3 times a week. at best I am now getting about 2 times a week. and even at that I am not “fully” doing the exercise regimen that I want. Usually I exercise for 10 to 15 with heavy weights, then 15 minutes of cardio, then I spend 10 t0 20 minutes of stretching then another 10 to 20 of mindful meditation. But now I’m barely doing the heavy weights and cardio. Ugh.

Let’s move on……

In the endeavor to be the most that life will allow, the idea of love and friendship is always somehow in the mix. Studies show that deep-rooted friendships help to allow you to live longer. And I’m sure with the right type of friendships it also helps to fight against lifes’ emotional pitfalls. As for me, life has been pretty void of love and friendships. I haven’t had love in a very very long time. This doesn’t mean that I don’t love anyone, but what it does mean is that I have not yet learned the proper way to either love myself, love others, find love, or understand the love I need. Now, after many years in trying to peel back my ignorance and learn to be a better person, I now understand what it takes to love myself, I understand the very basics of what it takes to love someone else, and I think I even understand or at least, kinda understand the love I need. But where I am falling short is the part about “finding love”…. For so many years I found love where I work. And to be quite honest, even in this day and age of swipe left and swipe right, it is still quite common to find love where you work. For most of use we spend the vast majority of our life at work, and so it only makes sense that we would “find” love and friendships at work. And for me, I did that (finding love and friendships at work) for so many damn years. and in the end those friendships and that love was never something that really helped me become a better person. So now, over a decade later, I find myself quite void of love and of friendships. I’m no longer doing all those things I did over two decades ago. Back then, in my 20s and 30s and almost even into my early mid 40s. I was still drinking a lot and trying to find ways to “justify” it. Nowadays I don’t care to justify my drinking. Instead, I just don’t need to drink the way I did. What I learned is that I drank so much because I was taught unhealthy behaviors, and my surroundings (the hood) only encouraged and fueled unhealthy behaviors. I was unknowingly taught to self-medicate with alcohol. Now should you NEVER self-medicate with alcohol? I don’t know, but for me, I still don’t see anything wrong with “sometimes” drinking during certain challenging moments of your life. Instead what I don’t want to do is to see alcohol as the first thing to do or the “normal” way to find comfort.

But yea, many years ago, I was a different person and the way I looked for love, found love and loved was very different than the way I now see love and friendships. and unfortunately I have been single for so long that I have forgotten “how” to find love. And most of all, now that I am a different person, I don’t even know where to go to find love. And some so called experts say that you shouldn’t even “try” to find love and that instead I should allow love to find me. Again… I don’t know, maybe that’s the answer (to allow love to find me). But instead, what I think I should be doing is putting myself around people who hold the same values for life and for themselves as I do for life and myself. I just now truly believe that “values” make all the difference in life. I want to grow and become a better person, I want to help people, I (somewhere deep or in a shallow way) believe that I deserve to be a millionaire. And I want people around me who have those same values. There are obviously more values that I connect to but those are just a few of some of the important ones. And what I haven’t done, is yet found the proper mental way to find people that hold those same values. Or maybe I have, but I just couldn’t see those values in them. Idk.  And most of all, I want people in my sphere that hold those values and do it in a way that is literally fun. For some reason this is literally a conundrum for me. And I hope to solve it. Now my only point in mentioning love and friendships, is because I can easily see that if I don’t do a course correction, that I will be headed down the same road as my mom. Living a life with no “real” friends. and no love in her life.

I also think that what makes it even more challenging for me is two other things… one… that not only do I literally work in an environment with extremely attractive women, but that now after almost 30 years in this business, the luster of the human body, finally, and for the most part, finally slightly takes a back seat to what I am looking for on the inside of someone. I am pretty sure that every man wants a “physically” beautiful woman. Almost every man would want a sexual model type woman hanging on their arm and in their bed. But for me, what good is the body if in the morning, I can’t intimately connect with her values or her mind. And in that case, it would just be easier for me to buy the sex and know that I can save my conversations and thoughts for someone who would actually care to connect with me in the same way. But also, two….. I work at night so I have to live both a nightlife and a day life, and this literally just zaps so much energy from me. Especially if I am to also be able to get my real estate off the ground. So yes, I’m battling loneliness, and it’s something that I am hoping to no longer have as a battle, in the near future.

Now since my last post, I did find a friend on Tinder. She is a female. I ended up going to a couple of places with her and a couple of her friends. They are super cool people. The only drawback is that our time together always involved alcohol. Which again, to me isn’t bad. It’s just that after 3 or so weeks of going out with them and drinking, I noticed that I wanted something different. I wanted things that involved more than alcohol. So I haven’t hung out with them since. I should probably reach out them and say hi……. But my search goes on. I should probably try and go and do salsa classes again. And I also think I should see if it is possible to do ping pong classes. I love drinking, but I also love learning and growing….. I am hoping to have myself going places one night a week to be around friends that have the same and hopefully better values than me.

Let’s move on……

Health…. Man, there is so much involved in that 6 letter word. (Health) For me health means physical health, mental health, emotional health, spiritual health and also financial health. All of those are so important to survival as a human (in these modern times) So how has my health been? well, first and foremost, as I mentioned in a previous paragraph, I am still battling with “trying” to get proper sleep. I want to say that it has now been at least 6 months or longer since I have stopped using sleeping pills to go to sleep. Fun fact: Even with sleeping pills, going to bed and getting proper sleep was still very difficult. You see, getting proper sleep for me is really boiling down to letting go of all the thoughts of my day. Letting go of all the thoughts that I have programmed myself to think about. I remember times when I got my best sleep when I would literally do some physically stressful thing for so long that my body would just give out. (Which I think is ok, if it happens in a natural way) But the real deal is the ability to do what life is intended…. And that is to allow yourself to let go of everything you did or thought about or worried about, and just allow the body and mind to go into recovery mode. And unfortunately this is super hard for me to easily do. Although as of the last couple of weeks, I think that I am finally making a couple of small baby steps in the right direction. For some time, I have been trying to listen to “I am” affirmations when I sleep. You know it’s the whole idea of trying to reprogram my mind that I keep talking about. And that seemed to help for a short time, but eventually it stopped working in the way I was hoping for. And I do have a Oura ring (to monitor my sleep) and I also have a Muse headband (to help me meditate) And both of those items are connected via apps on my phone. And for the last few months, I feel like when the moment happens that I finally say… OK go to bed, I feel like I am finally slowly getting my mind to connect with those two apps on my phone. Both of those apps have “stories”, that is to say that they have recordings of someone talking about some made up story, and or just someone slowly talking and telling me/helping me to focus more on my breathe, body, etc which eventually helps me to let go of all the unnecessary thoughts of my day. This has been extremely helpful in letting go and being able to fall asleep. Although this is still not the proverbial “silver bullet”. My sleep is still not in any way or form where it needs to be. and my HRV is totally still in the dumps. I could go into details about HRV but that would take more time than I want this post to be.

So for health, sleep is something that I still struggle with and hope to one day not struggle with. Then there is physical exercise that I spoke of earlier. Studies still show that 3 days with a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise each day is what the body needs. And for me, not getting great sleep really just mentally pushes me away from wanting to exercise. For the last few months I have been exercising about once a week, sometimes twice a week. Which is really bad. but in the last two or three weeks I I have finally been able to work out at least twice per week, and this week I actually worked out 3 times. (So proud of myself!) Now what constitutes as “working out”. well, let’s go a little deeper in detail than earlier, for me a workout goes like this. I do about 10 to 15 minutes of weights (whether it be squats or bench press or some form of pull-ups for my upper back and arms, or even deadlifts with dumbbells) I use weights to where I can only do about 6 to 8 reps. Then after the 10 to 15 minutes, I switch gears and go into cardio mode. I then put on a 60 pound weighted vest and then I also put on 2.5 pounds of wrist weights on each arm and I also put on 2.5 pounds of wrist weights on each ankle. Which give me a total carrying weight of 70 pounds. Once all this is on me, I then put on my VR headset and do a 15 minute high intesity cardio program with a VR app called “Super Natural” The app has something that is similar to boxing but done in a VR way where balls and shapes are coming at you rather than you trying to box someone. And this high-intensity 15-minute exercise app is something that I have been doing now for at least a couple of months. And for me it is so intense that sometimes I have to either pause the app so that I can try to make it thru the program or other times I just quit about halfway thru the app. I have come to realize that my ability to make it thru the 15-minute high-intensity training of that specific program directly correlates to how many times I am able to exercise per week and the amount of sleep that I was able to achieve. As I mentioned over the last two or three weeks I have been able to get 2 days of exercise in each week. and this week, as I mentioned I got 3 days, which by the 3rd day of exercise I was able to finish the 15-minute high-intensity cardio program without pausing or quitting. and in the end I did not feel as dead as I normally do when either finishing the program or almost finishing the program. If I can keep this up for another week or two, then I want to add another 10 pounds of weight to the vest. This would give me 70 pounds of weight when doing the cardio. Which I really think is something that is really great for my ability to do high intensity while carrying and moving with half of my own body weight.

So in health… the other items besides sleep and exercise is the mental, emotional and spiritual things. And for me, A lot of that is tied into all the affirmations and magic mushrooms and friendship boxes.

Let’s move on……

Now let’s talk about money and time…. Money and time to me in many ways is just another way to say “real estate” I say this because currently I am still trying to find the proper mental way to use my money and time and most of all … find the “discipline and effort” to either finish apt#2 myself or just pay a crap ton of money for someone to finish it for me. And right now with the balcony issue, I am just unwilling to throw money into apt #2 until I know or at least have a really really good handle on the financial outcome of the balcony. Getting this balcony is literally a unknown which means that I could spend every damn penny that I have just to finish it (and I don’t mean finish the balcony with stairs to the roof) instead I mean finish it to where it is just a balcony or as the engineer said… Pergola. And the last thing I want is to spend $5000 to have someone finish the apartment, and pay them with credit cards, then go and also have to drain my financial funds just to finish the balcony. I think the only attractive part of paying someone a shit ton of money to finish the apartment is that I will finally have that apartment finished and hopefully I will get it rented. Which means that In 5 months or sooner that I would recoup the $5000. (assuming it would cost $5000 or less to get someone to have it completely finished and rent ready) And sadly this currently doesn’t include the $1900 that I owe my foundation guy for finishing the foundation of apt #2. The initial cost was $2500 but he allowed me to pay in installments. And it has now been 3 weeks and I have been able to knock off $600 off of the bill. And at this rate it will take me 12 weeks to pay him off. This is not what I expected to happen. And the only reason this is happening is because of all the extra costs that I incurred to get the balcony moving and now that the balcony is stalled, I now must plan for the unknown. Which is super hard to do. So I’m really unsure of what decision to make next. Do I just put apt #2 on a credit card? I do have a credit card that sent me blank checks, and will allow me zero interest until about March of next year. But it is a “balance transfer” and I am not sure if the blank checks are only for balance transfer or can I use them as regular checks.

But above that,  my biggest worry is work. Here at work, money is, or rather a better way to say, is that I am now making half of what I made 6 months ago. and this means that EVERYTHING in my life must be cut by half… And this is super hard to do. I have to ensure to not spend unnecessary money… Which does this mean that I do not make time to go and find friends and love? Do I have enough money to pay my mortgage and utilities? Do I have enough money to ensure that my vehicles are working and running properly? What if I end up not properly taking care of my car? My car just got it’s second round in the body shop. And I can now foresee that it will need another round in the body shop. It seems like they did not properly do something that I wanted. Ugh. But beyond that… Once I finally get my car looking descent, the question, Can I not fuck up my car. The issue is that my tires on my car now stick out past the fender and so if I hit a bump too hard then the tires hit the fender and fuck up the car. Which means the thousands of dollars that I spent on body work will have been for not! And I gotta ensure that I don’t let that happen. And I am currently working on solutions, but again, those cost two things…. Money and or money and time.

You see how the previous paragraph was supposed to be about real estate, but the idea of money goes into every facet of my life and makes it super hard for me to make the proper decisions necessary. and the underlying factor that is super unknown is my job…. Will it get worse at work? will it be like this forever? Can I keep my bosses off my back to where they will not want to change the nights I work? This is the painful part that leaves my mind running in circles without knowing the proper steps to take in order to move forward in life….. I don’t know, maybe I should just put apartment #2 on a credit card.

Then there is the build of the new 4plex… As you may have read in other posts, I deeply want to build 4 apartments. But somehow, I have just not been able to properly set myself up to get it done. And even right now, with the balcony hanging in limbo, I am not properly set up to do the new build. And right now I have most of the money set aside to have an architect design the plans for the new apartments… But here comes the same thoughts… what about money at work? What about my bills? What about the costs for my vehicles? What about extra unknown costs? Just how the fuck can I figure out to properly plan and see this financially? Damn this just really mentally causes me to get this anxiety. But not anxiety because I’m scared. But an anxiety because I MUST make a move and I just keep looking at shit go by and I am not able to know “how” to make a decision and or the decsions that I have made have all NOT been in the direction of the apartments. It’s so fucking frustrating.

and there is the idea of getting my general contractor’s license. I had a general contractor’s license for one year, then the city changed the rules on what accreditation I must have in order to hold a GC license. So now I must restructure how I wanted to do things. And even when I last spoke to a bank about lending me money to build, they wanted me to have several builds under my belt before they would allow me to be the actual general contractor on my own personal builds….. Really frustrating. So overall restructure is how I must think and be about things. And now with the economy feeling like it’s falling to shit with Trump and his tariffs and his immigration raids, it again leaves me in such uncertainty about my life. I think that I will eventually end up revisiting a guy who was going to charge me 10% to let me be the general contractor. But 10 percent was super expensive when talking about a 400k build. Which would have ballooned my cost to 440k for the 4plex. That 440k would then get bundled and transferred into a mortgage at 7 percent or higher. UGH

But now after all the shit that I am having to reconsider, I am seriously thinking that I should just do a duplex. and if I do 3 duplexes then I will get at least half of what I need. And maybe in the end I might be able to at least get one of the 3 parcels of land to be a 4 plex.

I don’t know….. Life for me right now is just so uncertain and I feel so damn lost.

Please say a prayer for me.

Love, Max.