When you reach a certain age, you know who you are, or better yet what you are.

Me, I'm a drunk. I have been since I was 25, or so, something like that. The first time firewater touched my lips I was 22 years old, in Hidalgo, Mexico, taking shots of homemade sugar cane moonshine with a bunch of country ass hombres. I can recollect them strapping a Kevlar vest to a tree and Tio Hernán pulling out a revolver to test and see if it was really bullet proof. Wound up getting carried back to the car to drag my fatass home because la caña me chingué. I flew down to Mexico City on a whim as a young ass man to spend a couple of weeks with a co-worker and her family. Pre 9/11, what a fucking trip. We were close, like family. Hell her kids called me uncle.

Back then, in the 90s, illegals working at restaurants was a fucking punchline, everybody knew it and nobody cared, except me. I learned to speak gutter Mexican Spanish from those women. I learned the value of your in-laws from those women. Hell I had a crush on a married woman for the first time back then. Your early 20s are some formative years for most people, and I had a bit of an unusual sort of influence in that time, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. Surrounded by milfs and jealous men, that's what life really is like.

My father was a drunk, for most of my young and adult life. My mother was a drunk up until she put herself in a box from it. From their parents, three of the four of them were drunks too. My mother's father loved nothing more than taking a case of beer and sitting in the park feeding the ducks. My father's father loved nothing more than drowning worms and drifting on a Wisconsin lake with a beer buzz. His wife would be tipping a bottle of wine waiting for him to get home from the lake with dinner, hopefully. There's no real mystery why I turned to the bottle. Family tradition.

Nowadays, I live in a small house, on a big plot of land, in one of the poorest area codes of the US, 700 miles from where I grew up. Forty acres, a one lane road, me and mine, and not much else. Uncle PG, the wife, her old man, two dogs, and a whole lot of trees. I work a 9-5, white collar, remote, and I make good money. Same for her. Two good jobs makes us upper class around these parts.

I enjoy keeping house. I wash the dishes, and cook, and keep order, because I like it and that's what gives me peace. In between that, I work, and I drink, and there ain't nobody there to stop me on either account. This is my little hunk of redneck paradise.

I am who and what I am. But who cares, right? That's what you're asking. It doesn't matter, is what I would tell you. My story is what it is, and even if nobody cares, I am still me, for all the good and bad that that is. I'm me, I'm here, and nobody can take that away.