I’m leaning against the bar, looking at a reflection that finally stopped looking like a cautionary tale and started looking like a threat. I’m officially forty pounds lighter than the bloated, water-logged carcass I was dragging around earlier this year, and let me tell you—that weight didn’t just leave; it was evicted under heavy fire.
You want to talk about the “American Dream”? The dream is a gluttonous suicide mission. I went down to California to see the kids and spent the week acting like a man who had given up on the blueprints. It was a high-octane intake of pizza, hot dogs, chili, and burgers, all washed down with enough beer to float a battleship. We were riding bikes on Seal Beach, but I was a walking heart attack in a Hawaiian shirt. The drinking started with the sun and didn’t stop until the lights went out.
By the time I dropped the kids at the airport, the machinery was screaming. I sat down and watched my own legs swell up like overstuffed sausages right in front of me. I was dizzy, fatigued, and vibrating with the kind of internal heat that says the engine is about to throw a rod. I had to fly to Vegas for work that same afternoon, and a guy looked at me and said I looked like shit. He was being polite. I looked like a corpse that had been left in the sun. I spent that first day in Vegas in a hotel bed with my feet propped against the wall, trying to reverse the gravity of my own bad decisions. No food. Just hard-boiled eggs, five gallons of water, and a desperate attempt to reset the system.
I got home and took the blood test. I “studied” for it—drank the water, ate the greens—and the numbers still came back like a criminal indictment. Cholesterol through the roof, pre-diabetes knocking on the door like a debt collector. My body wasn’t recovering anymore. At 320 pounds, the foundation was crumbling.
So I made the call. August was the month the hammer came down. No sugar. No beer. No liquid bread. The fog of war didn’t just lift; it evaporated. My digestive system stopped protesting, my brain sharpened, and the fat started melting off. It’s middle-December now, and I’ve dropped forty pounds. I was just out with the Phoenix Latina, and I couldn’t even finish a beer. My body rejects the poison now. I’ve gone from a size 42 waist to a 38. My clothes are hanging off me like a tarp on a skeleton.
But I’m not done. Between now and February, the goal is another ten pounds. I want to walk onto that plane to Da Nang at 270—a number I haven’t seen since my twenties. I’m going to shave the goatee, get rid of the “gray-beard” mask, and look like the man I feel like inside. I’m 57, and while the 49-year-old I’m currently “marrying” every weekend can keep up, I’m prepping for a different league in Southeast Asia. I’m not looking for the bar girls. I’m looking for the business owners, the doctors, the dentists. I’m going in lean, clean, and lethal.
It’s a unique perspective, standing at the edge of the map. You look at a woman like this one, fresh out of Mexico, and you see an appreciation for a man that American women have completely abandoned. American women don’t appreciate shit. They’re awful. They’ve traded traditional value for a list of demands and a victimhood complex. I have two daughters, so I see the wreckage firsthand. It’s not bitterness; it’s a site inspection. The traditional relationship is dead in this country. We’re just ghosts moving through a graveyard of values.
I’m liquidating everything. The furniture, the fat, the ghosts of the “Michigan” girl and the “Older Mexican” lady. I’m even finishing the dragon. I reached out to the original artist in Thailand. In April, I’m making a run to get the manufacturer to finish the legacy ink. No imitations.
I’m forty-five days from the exit. I’m getting smaller, sharper, and much harder to catch. I’m leaving Tucson with an empty tank and a clear head. I’m going back to the source, and this time, I’m the one holding the hammer.
Watch the sky, boys. The ghost is leaning out.
