Game 7. The Dodgers. The World Series.

This World Series has been absolute magic.

These two teams have gone head to head, back and forth, trading leads, emptying out their tanks every night and it has been euphoric to watch as a fan.

I have been a Dodger fan all my life. I'm not going to pretend that I have this wealth of baseball knowledge, I'm not going to pretend I can recite stats, or whatever. But I can tell you that much of my childhood is colored by Dodger blue.

My grandpa, Larry, was an avid baseball fan. He had season tickets to Dodger games and he and my grandma, Donna, would take my brothers and I often. When we were in fifth and sixth grade, discovering music, we would try to sneak AM/FM Walkmen into the game to try to liven it up with Power 106 or 92.3 The Beat. His rule was, if you're listening to anything but Vin Scully while watching the Dodger game, it's getting turned off.

We didn't think he'd actually check. But he did. And he turned it off often.

This is not a bad memory. This is a good memory. He wasn't religious but he understood the merits of boredom. You have to be present for life's moments. You also don't want to get hit in the face by a foul ball in the orange lodge seats, right field side.

Just how often my grandparents picked us up for games is astounding when I think about it. So much of our young lives were spent at Dodgers games. I'd get ice cream malts and peanuts, Dodger dogs and more peanuts, cotton candy and more peanuts.

My favorite players moved from Orel Hershiser (that one was easy, I was 2 when he was the hero and the glow never left him), Eric Karros, Mike Piazza, and Raul Mondesi over the years. I saw myself as a catcher when I was a kid even though I never played the position. I was a wimp. I couldn't handle the stress of guarding the plate. I was so untalented defensively that I was relegated to right field or left field where I would just throw my mitt in the air out of boredom. That's why I chose Raul Mondesi as my favorite player as my Little League career stagnated. I was a decent hitter, though. So was Raul.

When my grandpa was killed by a drunk driver in August of 1998 while my brothers and I stayed at his house, the Dodger game attendance slowed down. We no longer had season tickets but we continued to watch on TV and listen on the radio. Every year was our year. And we came close a couple of times. We continued to go to Dodger games as often as we could which wasn't very much.

When my wife and I first started dating in 2011 on our very first trip back to California to visit my family, we went to a Dodger game. I remember saying to her jokingly, "I am okay with you not being a Lakers fan but please, please, please be a Dodgers fan." I bought her a Dodgers hat before that trip.

We're married now and she regularly updates me on the score when I'm at work and don't have time to devote attention to games. She's become quite the Dodgers fan.

This year my mom texted my brother to tell him she bought plenty of beer for game 1. He didn't have to buy any. If you know my mom, you know this is crazy. She doesn't drink and she certainly doesn't buy beer for anything. When my brother got home to a house filled with 10 people, my mom had purchased a 6 pack. Baby steps.

This World Series is different. This World Series is exciting. When I'm watching the Dodgers and the Astros go toe to toe, I'm filled with excitement and I can just imagine being a kid and watching this series. I can just imagine how my grandpa would feel. I get glimpses of his spirit here and there through pictures of my dad and my brother attending game 2.

When I was in college, the bunny ears would be tuned to Dodger baseball constantly. James Loney was group favorite at the time. We were good in those years, too. Those years felt like our years. Elizabeth, Jack, and I watched a hell of a lot of them in our apartment on 10th and Stanley in Long Beach with our friends coming in and out to drink cheap beer and play ping pong. Shortly after college, I remember my friend, Mark, calling me to tell me to turn on the game. The game was already on, duh. He was behind home plate waving at the camera. I don't know how the hell he got those tickets but I know I took a picture of it on some janky digital camera that is lost forever. 

This year, I went to a Buffalo Wild Wings for the NLCS because I couldn't be sure any local joints would care about the Dodger game nor could I be guaranteed anyone knew how to change the channels. I'm positive that's part of the training course at Buffalo Wild Wings. Nina and I were the only people watching the biggest screen as the Dodgers put away the Cubs.

Now picture this: a man freshly shaved with a brand new devastating mustache with his wife over four or five empty baskets of chicken wings wearing Dodger blue as the rest of the crowd watches the Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Raiders. Picture this man weeping in joy at a gosh darn Buffalo Wild Wings. It's pretty sad, right?

Now picture this same man in his Dodger blue pajama pants, hunched over a keyboard, weeping in joy at the mere thought of tonight's game 7.

Win or lose, this series has been incredible. This series encapsulates why baseball is America's sport.

Go Dodgers.

Post-script: one of my first decent stories featured Orel and Kershaw, named after two Dodgers from different eras. Read it here

Millennial blah, blah, blah

If I never moved to Texas, I may have never become a fiction writer. Then again, I may have.

I tell people that the first year of living in Texas was the most depressing year of my life. I didn't know anyone in San Antonio and it was so sprawling that there was very little hope of meeting many people. I could have tried harder, yes, but I didn't.

It was a wonderful opportunity for growth to come out to Texas. I had a great job that enabled me to learn a ton of new skills I would have never learned. But I was the only employee for the grand majority of the time I was there and the grind of working alone and then going home to be alone started to turn me into a very emotional and lonely person. I have always been prone to depression and I think it is a genetic strain that runs through my family but I can say with total honesty that San Antonio was my lowest point. I'm very grateful for the opportunity I was given there. I learned a hell of a lot. I learned that you could be so depressed that your body physically hurts. 

But I also learned how to write beyond amateurish poems. My catalog of poetry published before Texas still exists and is still searchable on the internet much to my horror. In fact, only recently have my stories begun to replace the poetry. I'm a huge fan of poetry but I will be the first to admit that I cannot write it. Sometimes I got lucky and wrote something worth saving. Most times I was not.

It was in times of depression that I started to explore absurdity. My poems were becoming more narrative. They were getting longer. They were turning into very short stories. I ran with it.

Sure, I'd been writing short stories long before I came to Texas. But I was aping other people. I was trying to be a voice that I couldn't write with. Bukowski is great but it became clear that I was not honest when I imitated him. It was only when I was totally alone with my thoughts that I became free to write bizarro/horror/absurd-weirdo stuff. I was no longer worried about appearing as a serious writer. My work ethic proved I was a serious writer but my work probably wouldn't be talked about at a party where people discussed The New Yorker and ate gluten free crackers. 

I'm happy I moved to Texas and spent a year in the thresher. I've always been a writer but Texas helped me sound like myself.

Folks ask me if I'm ever moving back to California. The honest answer right now is, "I don't know." I love California. The Dodgers are my favorite sports team. I miss the beach. I grew from childhood into early-adulthood in California. But Texas has become a home. It could have killed me. I could have run back to the comforts and safety nets (social and financial) in California but I didn't. 

I stayed in Texas, quit my job in San Antonio, and moved to Austin without the promise of employment. I lied on my apartment application saying that I was employed and made $800 a month, they didn't follow up on that information and paired me up with a meth addict to live with. After 7 days of unemployment I got hired at a bookstore and became a proud member of the working poor, paying minimums on my credit card debt just to be able to use them at the grocery store again when my paycheck money ran out. I picked up odd jobs to help make ends meet. 

I made friends, I wrote a lot, I wrote advertorial blog posts for luxury watches I had never even seen in real life for $4 a post and wrote 5-10 a day until I couldn't bang my head against my desk any longer trying to figure out synonyms for luxurious. And still, I was constantly feeling the creditors' noose tighten around my neck.

So I got a part time job on top of my full time gig at the bookstore. And things finally started to fall in place. Now I'm back to one full time job but it's not at the bookstore. 

It's very easy for a person to think they've accomplished nothing and I am prone to thinking that I'm worthless and have nothing to show for, but I've come out the other side. My relative security may slip out from under me at any moment and I know that I will be able to make something work. I already have made things work and it's gotten me to some great places.

I may have grown up in Southern California, but Texas made me figure out who the hell I was. It gave me the reason to pursue whatever I wanted to pursue. I escaped comfort for chaos and I ended up doing okay for myself. 

Bret Easton Ellis wrote a piece on his idea that Millennials are Generation Wuss.  Sometimes I agree with him. Sometimes I look at my social media accounts and want to gouge my eyeballs out in terror about my own generation's whiny and petty over-agonizing over very trivial "outrages." We jump from one outrage to the next and think that verbalizing outrage is enough. Sure. Sometimes I believe we are a vapid generation. But we graduated in a time of economic chaos, we were raised in a culture that told us college was the miracle water that would cure all of our ailments, we were raised in a culture (created by the generations before us) that told us we were the most important and now we're becoming adults and everything has crashed and burned. Much of our adult years were spent in a sharply divided country at constant war. Maybe we do whine too much but every person I know is hard working, juggling multiple commitments at once, and making things work. We don't have the luxury of Generation X negativity that is belied by the knowledge that the only reason to be negative is to be counter to reality. 

As a child, I remember "news" stories and opinion pieces asking "Why is Generation X so lazy?" They turned out fine. Bret Easton Ellis has a nice life. Everything worked out okay, despite their perceived laziness. The same will be for the Millennials.

I look forward, in fact, to someday complaining about Generation Z's insistence on touching cow's assholes. Seriously, why do they do that?!

I'm still not where I want to be. There's a lot more struggling to get there. I may never get there but I am starting to realize that I am happy with things as they are. I will have more goals to replace goals that I've either given up on or attained. There will always be a new struggle. And there are plenty who have struggled far more than I ever have. I'm not saying I'm the boss-struggler here.

Struggling is real. Struggle is what makes life worth living. Struggling is how you find out who you are. There are no rules in life so do not box yourself in because of somebody else's perception of you or how you should be. Just go out and struggle, dammit.

So there it is. A very me-centric defense of Millennials.