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This episode sits at the foundation of Confessions of a Gen-X Mind. It’s not about diagnosis. It’s about the environment that shaped one. If you’ve come here for the ADHD, ASD, or chosen-family episodes, this is the backstory that makes them make sense.

I was nine years old.
Suddenly surrounded by wealth.
And something felt off.

In this episode of Confessions of a Gen-X Mind, I tell the true story behind My Uncle’s Mercedes and the Church of Creative Accounting. It begins with a Detroit kid raised on BMX bikes, MTV, and pop-culture rebels, and then drops him into the middle of 1980s Texas wealth during the height of the Savings and Loan era.

Overnight, I went from watching Silver Spoons and Dallas on TV to standing in driveways with real Mercedes, jet skis, private planes, and adults who talked loud about Jesus while quietly bending the rules. My uncle lived big. He talked smooth. Money seemed to appear out of thin air. Even as a kid, I could tell something didn’t add up.

As an adult, I came to understand what I was witnessing. Land flips. Inflated appraisals. Shell companies. Trusts and proxies. A textbook case of white-collar crime wrapped in piety and respectability. When the system finally collapsed, the legal consequences came late and incompletely. The damage to the family came fast and lasted for decades.

This isn’t a story about nostalgia or crime trivia. It’s about growing up rich-adjacent inside moral contradiction. About how greed, charm, and intelligence without ethics leave collateral damage behind. About what it does to kids when adults treat the rules like a game.

It’s also how those early contradictions shaped my voice, my skepticism, my dark humor, and my instinct to notice the cracks beneath polished surfaces.

This is a Gen-X story about money, faith, family mythology, and learning early that not everyone who looks blessed is playing fair.

This podcast reflects personal experience, opinion, and information drawn from publicly available court records and historical reporting. It is not intended to assert new allegations or to characterize any individual beyond matters established in public proceedings