Gabriel Mizrahi

Your command of the family business, Jordan, is incredible.

I see you've really brushed up on your agriculture.

This guy wheats hard.

So she goes on.

Somewhere before the homelessness, my sweetheart had a daughter, but he lost all parenting and visitation rights to her by the time she was three years old.

She's now 15 and lives in another state.

All these broken relationships and losses have really haunted my sweetheart his whole adult life, and he still ruminates on the relationship with his father and the loss of his daughter on a regular basis.

Through some combination of boys' wilderness reform schools, expensive for-profit rehabs in three or four states...

jail dry cell torture, mental hospital stays, AA 12-step work, and probably just aging out of crime.

My sweetheart eventually got to a place where he could more or less hold a job, keep housing, and stay off all drugs except THC, which he is still heavily reliant on to cope with any type of mundane stress, anxiety, or trigger.

What a journey this guy has been on.

Meanwhile, I grew up poor, often in trailer parks.

Gradually put myself through a BA and MS over the course of 16 years while working retail and barista jobs.

and never did drugs harder than the occasional joint and a couple of mushroom trips in my early 20s.

I was raised by a violent, six-foot-tall mom who had undiagnosed bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, so I have a hyper-attuned ability to navigate people who have a lot in common with grenades and landmines.

Though I myself was pretty emotionally chaotic and troubled in my younger years, educational opportunities, a decent work ethic for self-examination...

and a love of rational thinking and Buddhist-type takes on life have helped me find my way to a pretty peaceful state.

I'm also fascinated by intelligent but troubled people.

I used to teach college classes in a prison, and my students were lifers.

Fascinating.