Re:Building Together EP 325 — Wayback Wednesday

Host: CEELOS (@CEELOSFIGG) with cohost ValerieKates (@valeriekates_) · Wed, Sep 16 2026 · 1:20:33 · 5 voices heard (plus Pharaoh, present but never on mic)

TL;DR

• CEELOS opened burnt out after roasting ~1,200 pounds of coffee and warned this would be the roughest episode he'd do — then delivered an hour-long, mostly unbroken account of his teens that nobody wanted to interrupt.
• ValerieKates was mid-verification duty for a ladies-only Ape Church poker tournament, fielding a steady stream of guys trying to talk their way in [7:44].
• The first half turned into a shared childhood inventory: Skittles as poker chips, Loteria played for pinto beans, Toys R Us as a place you look but don't ask, and both hosts catching themselves before calling their kids spoiled.
• CEELOS told the full Guadalajara story — nine months he didn't consent to, withdrawals he mistook for a bad cold, three friends lost in four months, and the Thanksgiving-morning phone call.
• He landed it on addiction transfer: the personality doesn't go away, you just aim it somewhere cheaper — coffee, NFTs, Spaces — and he's nearly a year off smoking.
• Baked turned out to have been in the room the whole time as a silent ghost [1:06:35], the last fifteen minutes dissolved into meal-prep slander and drive-thru jokes, and Val's pre-game poker space got pinned.

Highlights

The ladies' tournament has a verification problem [7:44] — Val was trying to confirm players before the 7pm game and kept hitting men signing up on the forum. One asked to skip the verification call because his girlfriend was asleep, which raised the question of whose profile he intended to play on. Her private theory about that girlfriend's existence went unspoken at the time and fully spoken here.

Wigs on PFPs, and the identity question [9:10] — Asked what happens if someone identifies as a woman, Val said it hasn't come up at Ape Church but was discussed in Green Visor Gang, and the answer was basically: if that's their life, fine. What has come up is guys photoshopping wigs onto their PFPs for ladies' night — a bit CEELOS claims he had a hand in starting, and which Val escalated by telling her whole community to show up wigged.

Skittles as chips [11:29] — Val learned poker on the Mexican side of her family using Skittles for chips, with one structural flaw in her game: she ate her own stack, lowest denominations first. Yellows low, reds high. She credits Yahtzee, of all things, for making Texas hold'em click later.

Beans, not prizes [15:06] — The board-game comparison turned into a quiet class inventory. Val had Parcheesi, Chinese checkers, spoons, spades; CEELOS had a deck of cards if you were lucky enough to have the whole deck, and Loteria when someone in the neighborhood broke it out. Played with pinto beans, no prizes. "Yeah, I won. All right, next game."

Toys R Us, once [16:24] — CEELOS can still narrate the route to the one Toys R Us trip of his childhood, taken with a friend of his mom's, and admits he didn't know how to act when someone offered to buy him something. Val's version: she was trained never to ask, so she spent those trips riding display cars and swinging on an anchored swing set while her mom pretended not to know her for an hour [19:07].

"You have no idea of the childhood I had" — and holding the tongue anyway [20:19] — Both hosts landed on the same parenting knot: their kids' baseline is everything the parents provide, so calling them spoiled is unfair even when it's tempting. Val's light-bulb moment was on a plane, watching her son turn down free drinks because they'd trained him on airport snacks, and realizing he has no idea the flight itself is the luxury [24:49].

Nine months in Guadalajara [28:42 → 34:41] — The long middle: his stepdad's employer of a decade died and left the staff a life-changing sum, which funded a family move his older brother had proposed from jail as the only way to keep CEELOS alive. He was told two weeks. It was nine months. The first month he was drenched in sweat and unable to sleep, filing it under climate and homesickness; only in hindsight did he understand it was withdrawals, and he'd been too proud to hear the older homies who'd already told him he wasn't doing well.

The picture frame [39:27] — He flew home unannounced, terrified his two-year-old wouldn't know him. He got a hug from his son's mom that he could feel was performance, then found his son asleep on the couch holding something: a framed photo of the two of them, which the family said he carried around the house. The kid woke up and said "Papa." CEELOS narrated the shirt, the jeans, the bottle — all of it still in frame, thirty years on.

Walking out of the living room [45:25] — Back home and dabbling again, he was sitting in a house with a sweating, grinning friend who kept checking the window for cops that weren't there, and had the argument with himself in real time. He stood up, left, and told the guy holding the bag that if he ever offered him that again the conversation would be physical. That was the cutoff, and it held — years later he quietly excused himself from a friend's party the second he saw what was on the table [56:58].

Three funerals in four months, then three jobs [49:06 → 55:51] — October, a car crash nobody thought was fatal until the next morning. Thanksgiving morning, a phone call at 7:30 about a friend shot outside his building. February, a stolen bottle of vodka and blue lips in the back of a car, and CEELOS being the one who had to find the mother and tell her — she lit up when she saw him, because she'd been looking for her son. He responded by going from one job to three so he wouldn't have time to think, which is how he ended up at the coffee shop he eventually started roasting for.

Where the addiction went instead [59:53] — His read on himself: the addictive personality doesn't leave, you relocate it. Coffee, NFTs, running one Space and rolling into the next. He also marked nearly a year since he decided to find out what being an adult sober felt like, which he notes is a strange sentence to have to say out loud.

The ghost in the room [1:06:35] — Val noticed Baked had been up the whole time, listening from another screen and declining to interrupt — "I'm a ghost" [1:06:57]. CEELOS's reaction to being politely un-interrupted for an hour was to insist everyone is allowed to cut him off, immediately followed by "that's as deep as I'll go. I don't go any deeper" and Val's inevitable four-word reply. From there: Baked's uncelebrated birthday, one Seltzer and lights out, a Cheesecake Factory plan with his mom, and a full Reacher / Blue Mountain State digression [1:09:08].

Meal prep is a crime, the drive-thru bit, and the man with the monkey [1:12:36 → 1:14:30] — Solo dolo's plan for the evening (run, meal prep) drew immediate opposition from both Baked and CEELOS on the grounds that you can't know on Sunday what you'll want on Tuesday. When toomazingTM voiced his displeasure with the space's start time, CEELOS took his order — double jumbo jack, no tomato, extra mayo, don't forget the ranch — and got promised a denial of future surgical care in return. CEELOS's fallback health plan is the old man in El Salvador who fixed the foot he'd destroyed with an empty Coke bottle, in a house with a caged monkey and a pig behaving like a dog.

Topic timeline

Notable quotes

• "And then I was like, his girlfriend probably isn't even real, but I didn't want to tell him that." — ValerieKates [8:08]
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  0:38
• "My Thea would give us Skittles, we'd use them as chips. And my biggest problem was that I would eat my chips." — ValerieKates [11:29]
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  0:38
• "One of the benefits of growing up in the poor neighborhood with other poor families is that you don't realize outside of your bubble just how little you have, because everybody else has just as well." — CEELOS [20:19]
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  0:38
• "He woke up and let go of what he was holding, and he was holding a picture frame of a picture of me and him." — CEELOS [40:49]
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  0:38
• "When you have an addictive personality, the addiction doesn't stop. You just find, if you're lucky enough, at least for me, you just find where to put that addictive personality. Buying NFTs." — CEELOS [59:53]
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  0:38
• "That's what she said." — ValerieKates [1:07:44]
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  0:38

Who said what

• CEELOS (@CEELOSFIGG) — host; opened exhausted, apologized in advance, then carried the episode with an unusually unguarded telling of his teens: poverty, Guadalajara, withdrawals, three lost friends, and how all of it routes into the coffee, the Spaces and the buying habit. Closed with shoutouts, Dodgers praise and Clippers resignation.
• ValerieKates (@valeriekates_) — cohost; brought the poker tournament logistics and the gatekeeping comedy, matched CEELOS memory-for-memory on El Paso childhood economics, and did the thing a good cohost does — stayed quiet through the hard part, then asked the one question that mattered ("to have no power... at such a young age, that must have been really tough" [36:51]).
• Baked (@Bakedmetax) — listened in silence for an hour before being outed as present; belated birthday, an attic job in Orlando, a move on Friday, and firm anti-meal-prep views.
• Solo dolo (@solodolo) — showed up from a meeting pleasantly surprised the space existed; run and meal prep on the agenda, chicken and rice defended on principle.
• toomazingTM (@TooMazing265) — surgical-side voice calling in around work, lodged a formal complaint about the 4 o'clock start and threatened to deny everyone care at the moment of need.
• Pharaoh (@spade_pirates) — up but never heard; credited with sending a One Piece card link and gently accused of withholding alpha [1:14:30].

Worth a full listen

• [28:42]–[34:41] — The Guadalajara stretch: the inheritance that funded the move, the brother's plan from jail, the walk toward the border that ended when it got dark, and the slow realization about what that month of "being sick" actually was. Summary can't hold the pacing.
• [39:27]–[47:27] — The homecoming and the picture frame, straight into the living room he walked out of. Two scenes he's clearly replayed a thousand times, told in full detail.
• [1:06:35]–[1:15:54] — The tonal hard cut. An hour of heavy story, then Baked reveals he's been a ghost the whole time, and the room rebuilds itself out of drive-thru orders, surgical threats, meal-prep contempt and a monkey in a cage.