I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

And for the first time in my life, I’m trying to be okay with that.

View from inside a vehicle driving an empty West Texas highway at night, with oilfield lights glowing on the distant horizon.

It is after 3:00 in the morning as I write this.

Boss Global Radio is playing.

The house is quiet.

And my mind isn't.

It rarely is anymore.

There is something about three in the morning that strips all the bullshit away.

During the day, you can stay busy enough not to think.

Phone calls.

Customers.

Emails.

Traffic.

Problems.

Numbers.

Meetings.

Music.

People needing something from you.

You keep moving because that's what you've always done.

But eventually everybody goes home.

The phone stops ringing.

The headlights disappear from the street.

The house gets dark.

And there you are.

Alone with yourself.

That's when the questions come.

What the hell am I doing?

How did I get here?

How much longer can I keep doing this?

And lately, the one that scares me the most:

What happens next?

I don't know.

There.

That's the truth.

I don't fucking know.

And for somebody like me, admitting that is terrifying.

I Used to Know Exactly Who I Was

For most of my adult life, if you asked me what I did, I had an answer.

I was a salesman.

A damn good one.

I knew restaurants.

I knew food.

I knew customers.

I knew how to walk through a back door, shake somebody's hand, look around a kitchen, and understand what was happening.

I knew how to take a no.

I knew how to turn one into a yes.

I knew how to build relationships that lasted years.

I knew how to make money.

There were years when I made more than $140,000 selling food.

Think about that.

A kid from Odessa who started DJing in 1994 eventually built a career where he could take care of his family, build a life and become pretty damn good at what he did.

For a long time, that career was part of my identity.

And then one day it wasn't there anymore.

Ten years at one company.

Gone.

Whatever happened before that moment and whatever came afterward isn't what this story is about.

This is about what happens after the door closes.

Because everybody talks about losing a job like it's an economic event.

Your paycheck stops.

Your insurance stops.

Your 401(k) contributions stop.

Those things matter.

But nobody tells you what happens when something you've done for decades suddenly disappears from your daily life.

You wake up Monday morning...

and nobody needs you anywhere.

There is no customer waiting.

No sales meeting.

No route.

No reason to put on your shoes.

At first, there's almost relief.

Then weeks become months.

Months become a year.

And somewhere along the way, you start wondering whether the world moved on without you.

My Daughter Told Me to Go Back

I had been out of work for roughly a year and a half.

I had savings.

Thank God I had savings.

But savings don't feel like security when you watch the number go down every month.

They feel like a clock.

Every mortgage payment.

Every electric bill.

Every grocery trip.

Every unexpected expense.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Money you spent years accumulating slowly disappearing because life doesn't give a damn whether you're currently earning anything.

There was a point where I seriously considered going to work somewhere completely outside the career I knew.

Maybe that was it.

Maybe my foodservice career had run its course.

Maybe I'd find something simple.

Punch in.

Do my job.

Punch out.

Go home.

My daughter didn't see it that way.

She told me I needed to get back into foodservice.

That's what I knew.

That's what I was good at.

And when your daughter looks at you and still sees the man you used to see when you looked in the mirror...

you listen.

So I went back.

NOVEMBER 30, 2025

I remember that day.

I don't think I'll ever forget it.

It was a Sunday.

Cold.

Dark.

West Texas behind me.

Central Texas somewhere ahead of me.

Around three in the afternoon, I left Odessa and pointed my vehicle east.

Nearly six hours.

I was headed to Temple, Texas.

A city I didn't know.

A company I had never worked for.

People I had never met.

The next morning I was supposed to walk into a building and start over.

At 52 years old.

Read that again.

Start over.

Not transfer.

Not promotion.

Not welcome back.

Start over.

I had decades of experience behind me, but that Sunday afternoon none of it could tell me what Monday morning was going to feel like.

I remember driving.

I remember watching West Texas disappear behind me.

I remember the temperature dropping.

I remember darkness settling over the highway.

And I remember being scared.

I don't use that word lightly.

I was scared.

What if I couldn't do this anymore?

What if I'd been out too long?

What if everything had changed?

What if they didn't like me?

What if I didn't fit?

What if the career I remembered didn't exist anymore?

But underneath all of that fear was something else.

Hope.

For the first time in a long time, I had somewhere to be Monday morning.

People don't understand what that means until they've lost it.

I had a job.

I had a title.

I had a paycheck coming.

I had another chance.

Driving through that cold darkness toward Temple, I really believed I might be driving toward the beginning of the rest of my career.

I wanted it to work.

God, I wanted it to work.

AND THAT'S WHAT HURTS

Sometimes something doesn't have to be horrible to break your heart.

Sometimes it just has to not become what you hoped it would become.

That's harder to explain.

Because I didn't walk into this wanting it to fail.

I wasn't secretly planning my escape.

I wasn't comparing everything to the past.

I wanted a home.

I wanted to rebuild.

I wanted to prove that the guy who had spent all those years succeeding was still inside me somewhere.

So I worked.

I drove.

And drove.

And drove some more.

I built a territory where there wasn't one waiting for me.

I found customers.

I fought for business.

I watched gasoline disappear.

I watched miles pile onto my vehicle.

I dealt with credit problems.

Pricing.

Collections.

Prospecting.

Customers who said yes.

Customers who disappeared.

Deals I thought were going to change everything.

Deals that blew up in my face.

And somewhere during all of it, something changed.

Not overnight.

That's the dangerous part.

It happened slowly.

Hope became frustration.

Frustration became exhaustion.

Exhaustion became indifference.

And one day I realized:

I'm not trying to build a future here anymore.

I'm trying to survive the present.

That realization hurt.

Because I remembered that guy driving to Temple in November.

I remembered how badly he wanted this.

Sometimes I wish I could reach backward through time, sit in the passenger seat next to him, and tell him:

“You're going to be okay.”

Not because everything is going to work out the way he thinks.

It won't.

But because he is going to make it through anyway.

THE WORST PART IS THAT I'M TIRED

Not sleepy.

Tired.

There is a difference.

Sleepy can be fixed with eight hours.

This kind of tired lives somewhere deeper.

I'm tired of proving myself.

I'm tired of starting over.

I'm tired of wondering whether the next opportunity is actually an opportunity or just another problem wearing nicer clothes.

I'm tired of corporate language.

I'm tired of people talking about being “hungry” as though a grown man with decades of accomplishments needs somebody to teach him ambition.

I'm tired of wondering whether making good money means accepting everything that comes attached to it.

I'm tired of calculating gasoline.

I'm tired of calculating miles.

I'm tired of calculating whether something is worth the damage it does to me.

And maybe more than anything...

I'm tired of uncertainty.

I want somebody to hand me the next ten years and say:

Here.

This is where you belong.

This is where you finish.

You can stop looking now.

But life doesn't work that way.

At least mine hasn't.

SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT WALKING AWAY FROM ALL OF IT

Foodservice.

Sales.

The whole damn thing.

Just walk.

Twenty-plus years of knowledge.

Walk.

Customers.

Walk.

Commission.

Walk.

The entire world I've known professionally.

Walk.

There are days when that thought feels frightening.

There are other days when it feels like freedom.

And then something happens.

I walk into a prospect.

We start talking.

I recognize an opportunity.

My brain starts working.

Pricing.

Products.

Volume.

Competition.

How do I get this?

And suddenly that old feeling comes back.

I want the business.

There he is.

That motherfucker is still in there.

😂

So maybe I don't hate foodservice.

Maybe I don't hate sales.

Maybe I'm just exhausted from carrying all the shit that gets piled around the part I actually love.

I don't know yet.

That's one of the questions I'm still trying to answer.

AND THEN I COME HOME

This is the part nobody at work sees.

I come home.

The door closes.

No customers.

No manager.

No résumé.

No interview.

No numbers.

Just Greg.

And sometimes that's when everything I've been holding up all day falls on top of me.

I'm 53 now.

That's weird to write.

Fifty-three.

When did that happen?

There are moments when I still feel like the kid standing behind two Technics turntables in 1994.

Music loud.

Whole life ahead of me.

No idea where any of it was going.

Then I look around, and three decades have passed.

My daughter is grown.

She became a nurse.

I look at her sometimes and wonder how the hell that little girl became this grown woman sitting across from me giving me advice.

And sometimes she looks at me when I'm talking about work, and I can see it on her face.

She knows I'm tired.

Kids know.

Even when they're not kids anymore.

You spend your whole life trying to protect them from your worries.

Then one day they're adults, and they're looking at you like

Dad, are you okay?

That's a hard moment.

Because fathers are supposed to have answers.

And sometimes I don't.

BUT THEN THERE'S THE MUSIC

Always the music.

That's the one thing that has followed me through almost every version of myself.

1994.

Turntables.

Records.

Headphones.

Radio.

Hip hop.

Freestyle.

House music.

Mixing.

That feeling when two records lock together perfectly and for a few seconds the entire world makes sense.

Thirty-two years later...

it's still here.

Boss Global Radio exists because somewhere inside me there was still a kid who wanted to build a radio station.

So I built one.

Not because some corporation hired me.

Not because somebody gave me permission.

Because I fucking wanted to.

And sometimes late at night I sit here listening to it.

The station ID fires.

The processing opens up.

The next record drops.

Boss Global Radio. Hip Hop in Hi-Fi.

And I smile.

Because that sound came out of my head.

The station didn't exist.

Then I made it exist.

There is something powerful about remembering that when the rest of your life feels uncertain.

Nobody can tell me I can't build something.

I already did.

MAYBE THAT'S WHY BOSS MEANS MORE TO ME THAN PEOPLE KNOW

To somebody listening, it's a radio station.

Music.

A stream.

An app.

A DJ mix.

Something playing while they're driving home.

To me?

Sometimes it's evidence that I didn't disappear.

That year and a half when I wasn't working?

I wasn't dead.

I was building.

When one identity disappeared, another part of me started breathing again.

The DJ.

The programmer.

The obsessive bastard who will spend hours adjusting something almost nobody else can hear because I can hear it.

Boss gave me somewhere to put that energy.

It gave me something that belonged to me when so much of my life felt like it belonged to circumstances I couldn't control.

And lately...

I think Boss has been giving something back to me.

A reminder.

You are more than your job.

I need that reminder.

Maybe that's why I'm writing this here.

I'M SCARED OF MAKING THE WRONG MOVE

There.

Another truth.

I'm scared.

There's a strange thing that happens when you've already been knocked down once.

Every new opportunity looks different.

You don't just see possibility anymore.

You see risk.

What if I leave and regret it?

What if I stay and waste another year?

What if the next company is worse?

What if nobody hires me?

What if somebody does and I hate it?

What if I walk away from foodservice and discover I miss it?

What if I don't?

What if I'm running out of time?

That last one gets me.

What if I'm running out of time?

At 23, a bad career decision costs you a year.

Who cares?

At 53, you start counting differently.

Ten years doesn't sound like forever anymore.

It sounds like 63.

And suddenly every decision feels heavier because you don't want to spend whatever good working years you have left miserable.

I don't want to wake up at 60 and realize I spent seven years enduring something because I was afraid to change it.

But I also don't want to blow up my financial security because I had a shitty week and got emotional.

So here I am.

Between those two fears.

Trying to make intelligent decisions while carrying very human emotions.

I DON'T NEED TO WIN THIS WEEK

Maybe that's what finally clicked for me.

I don't have to solve my entire life this week.

I don't need one phone call to save me.

I don't need one company to choose me so I can feel valuable again.

I don't need to quit tomorrow to prove that I'm serious about leaving.

I don't need to know today where I'm going to be six months from now.

I can handle Monday.

Then Tuesday.

Then Wednesday.

Hour by hour.

Day by day.

That's not giving up control.

Maybe that's finally understanding what control actually is.

I cannot control whether somebody offers me a job.

I cannot control what somebody thinks of me.

I cannot control corporate decisions.

I cannot control the past.

But I can control what I do next.

One decision.

Then another.

Then another.

THERE IS A MAN I KEEP THINKING ABOUT

He's driving east on a cold Sunday afternoon in November.

Odessa is disappearing in his rearview mirror.

Temple is hours away.

He's nervous.

He's scared.

But he's hopeful.

He thinks he's driving toward an answer.

I wish I could tell him something.

Not to turn around.

I wouldn't tell him that.

Because he needed to make that drive.

He needed the paycheck.

He needed somewhere to be Monday morning.

He needed to get moving again.

He needed to remember that he could still walk into a room full of strangers and start over.

So I'd let him keep driving.

I'd just tell him:

“This isn't going to be the answer you think it is.”

And he'd probably look at me like, What the hell does that mean?

I'd tell him:

“It doesn't matter. Keep going.”

Because maybe the purpose of that road wasn't to take me somewhere permanent.

Maybe it was simply to get me moving again.

And it did.

SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

I don't know.

Maybe I stay in foodservice.

Maybe I don't.

Maybe another company calls.

Maybe the phone stays silent.

Maybe Boss Global Radio grows into something I can't even see yet.

Maybe I discover an entirely different path.

Maybe the next year surprises the hell out of me.

I've spent too many nights trying to force an answer out of a future that hasn't happened yet.

Tonight I'm going to try something different.

I'm going to let the future come to me one day at a time.

Because I have survived every version of my life so far.

The young DJ.

The husband.

The father.

The salesman.

The successful years.

The failures.

The divorce.

The career changes.

The unemployment.

The comeback.

The nights when I didn't know how the hell I was going to fix something.

Every one of those versions eventually became another chapter.

This one will too.

I'M STILL FUCKING HERE

That's the part I keep coming back to.

Maybe I've lost some things.

Maybe I've gained some scars.

Maybe I'm more tired than I used to be.

Maybe I'm more cautious.

Maybe I don't believe every shiny opportunity is going to save me anymore.

Good.

That's called living.

But I'm still here.

My daughter can still call me Dad.

I can still put my hands on those turntables.

I can still walk into a business and sell.

I can still build something from nothing.

I can still hear a record I've heard a thousand times and turn it up because that one fucking part still hits me exactly the way it did twenty years ago.

I can still dream.

Even if the dreams look different now.

And tomorrow morning, whether I know what I'm doing with the next ten years or not...

I'm going to wake up.

I'm going to put my feet on the floor.

I'm going to deal with whatever is waiting for me.

And I'm going to keep moving.

Because maybe courage at 53 doesn't look like it did at 23.

Maybe courage isn't believing you're invincible anymore.

Maybe it's knowing damn well that you're not...

and getting back in the car anyway.

I don't know what happens next.

For once, I'm going to stop pretending that I do.

But wherever this road goes...

I'm not finished driving it.

Not yet.

Not even fucking close.

Greg Lopez

Founder / Director of Programming

Boss Global Radio

The Boss. Hip Hop in Hi-Fi.