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The show is over.
The lights have gone dark, applause faded, and life snaps back to what it always was.

I wake with that heavy tug in my chest—that low-grade depression that sneaks in once the adrenaline burns off. Maybe it’s the booze. Maybe it’s the weed. Maybe it’s just the weight of hard living pressing down. But really? Deep down? I know what it is.

It’s the absence of creation.

I say all the time that we are all artists, no matter what you do to make a living—and I believe that. But in that moment, in that sliver of my life, I wasn’t living by my own words. If I wasn’t acting, painting, writing—making—then something was missing. The money, the hustle, the parties—none of it filled the gap.

Life turned back into the cycle:
Wake. Hustle. Party. Spend.
Repeat.

September rolled in. That meant harvest season is back. The same outdoor that had gotten me here was almost ready to cut again, and the Country Boys were gearing up. More trips, more igloo coolers in trunks, more stacks piling higher. More money for a kid from a trailer in the sticks.

And it also meant something else:
I was turning twenty-one.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t just dreaming about freedom—I had the money in my pocket to chase it. What better place to spend your twenty-first birthday than Vegas baby.

It never even crossed my mind before. I didn’t really know what Vegas was, not in that big-sin, neon-carnival kind of way. I just knew people called it sinful, like it was a city built for excess. For indulgence. For testing how much you could take in before it all spilled out.

And suddenly, I was going, and I wanted to indulge in it all. I had seven grand that I was taking with me and that was living large. A boy from a trailer in the sticks, spending seven thousand just because, that’s big.

The crew was set. Greene—my chaos brother, always ready to hunt and party. Andy—blood and business, my cousin, my partner. Ryan—the one who first nudged me into selling. Together we were bound to indulge. Ryan is older and been to Vegas a few different times, and he liked to party, so in my mind I’m aware this may be a lot of “first” for me. I was nervous, excited, and the anticipation was killer.

The hotel was the MGM. A three-bedroom suite. A skyline that glowed like the northern lights.

I had no clue what was waiting for me there.

But I knew this: when I came back, the outdoor would be ready. The margins higher. The profits fatter. Andy and I had built our system tight—circulating money between us, leaning on each other’s plugs, keeping the wheel spinning. Like hamsters running fast, never running out of work, never letting the hustle stall.

Each year felt like another loop around the sun, another level-up. And this one? It felt like the one that might break me free.

Maybe not straight to Los Angeles, not yet. But maybe close.

For now, though—
It was Vegas, baby.