The “Managed” world loves the concept of the default. They want to believe that a child is nothing more than a pre-programmed machine, a biological output that can be predicted with the same accuracy as a weather report. When I was a kid, the glove was already set before I even put my hand in it. Because we were my mother’s children, the “small, controlling masses” around us—the family members, the neighbors, the school system—assumed we were, by default, just bad people. They didn’t see potential; they saw a discarded bloodline. They looked at the source and decided that the cards were already built, the deck was stacked, and the result was inevitable. To them, we were a hit stay away from, a group of kids already tossed into the trash because of the name we carried and the womb we came from.
My organic father’s wife made this reality crystal clear with a look that carried more venom than a snake. I remember the way she would hiss the phrase, “Oh, he’s just like Bonnie,” as she discussed my future in rooms I wasn’t supposed to be in. She never gave me a single chance because, in her mind, my value was disqualified by association. To her, I was an “ole” to her “ha,” a breathless entity born from a source she found repulsive. She didn’t see a boy; she saw a genetic liability. It’s a specific kind of spiritual arrogance that allows people to sit back and watch children rot in the manure of their circumstances while they whisper “oh well” to one another. Nobody stood up and said, “Let’s go pick these kids up and try to make a better life for them.” Instead, they just watched the decay and felt justified in their judgment, as if our suffering was proof of their own superiority.
The school system and the extended family operated on the same cold “oh well” frequency. They watched us struggle and patted themselves on the back for their own stability, treating our existence like a cautionary tale they could use to feel better about their own managed lives. Then, my organic father finally crawled out of the woodwork. It wasn’t a rescue mission; it was a guilt-driven extraction. You would think that a man with his resources would fight like a lion to pull his own blood out of the gutter, but for him, the “hit” was more about his 401k than my soul. While a real architect would have dropped fifty thousand dollars without blinking to save his legacy, he treated an eight-hundred-dollar legal fee like a catastrophic blow to his retirement plan. I am thankful for the extraction, but I never forgot the price tag he put on my survival. It was the first time I realized that even your own bloodline will audit your worth before they offer you a hand.
That audit follows you for the rest of your life. I look at my two brothers now, and I see the result of the “Default” mindset. My middle brother, Nick, is still out there delivering water door-to-door, making fifteen dollars an hour as the “Culligan man.” My little brother, Ryan, spent his time grinding out an hourly wage in the soul-crushing machinery of a collection agency. We all came from the same source, the same womb, and the same house of abuse, yet they stayed in the “Managed” class of hourly wages while I pushed into the “Primary” class of management and salary. I sat there making more money than some of those bastards ever dreamed of, and it wasn’t because I was “given” a better deck. It was because I realized that being Bonnie’s kid didn’t make me a piece of shit—it made me a survivor with a different kind of engine.
How am I different? I’ve wrestled with that question for fifty-seven years. I have the genetic markers of my organic father, but I possess the hidden, gritty qualities of my mother that we don’t openly discuss. I act just like my stepfather, the man who actually raised me, but I have the “Asperger’s” focus and the cold logic of my biological line. I am a psychological cocktail of every person who ever tried to define me. The environment tried to default me into a criminal or a failure because of my neighborhood and my name, but I realized early on that the only way to win was to break away from their rules entirely. I knew I had to do the complete opposite of what everyone told me I was destined to do. I saw the way my mother operated, and I made it my life’s mission to move in the polar opposite direction. I didn’t become a criminal, and I didn’t become a cop; I became an architect of my own reality.
The irony of the “Managed” world is most visible in my organic father’s side of the family. They lived in a cult of the pedigree, emphasizing college and degrees as if a piece of paper was the only thing that granted you sovereignty. Yet, for all their talk of education, they never offered it to me. They squeezed me out at sixteen and never looked back, never questioned my survival, and never offered a cent for the “pedigree” they worshipped. They built a deck where I was supposed to be the loser, while their own children got the degrees and still ended up two or three steps lower than me on the ladder of actual result. Even now, as I navigate the “Expat Exclusion Zone” of Vietnam and rebuild my engine at fifty-seven, I have out-built them. I’ve done more with a “discarded” life than they’ve done with all their pampered advantages.
The greatest lesson I ever learned was that people—including your own parents—will build a precondition for your failure just to keep their own world-view intact. They want you to stay in the manure so they can feel clean. They want you to stay hourly so they can feel like the “Management.” Once you realize that these motherfuckers, whether they are blood or not, are actively trying to undermine your potential to justify their own “Default” settings, that is the moment you find your power. You don’t ask for a new card; you kick them in the nuts, burn their deck, and build your own. You realize that you are the primary heir to your own legacy, and your “native” land is the output you create, not the womb you came from. I am fifty-seven, I am in Vietnam, and I am still re-dealing the deck because I refused to be the “bad person” they all assumed I was.
