Episode 35 | Mistakes, Missteps, And The Apology That Never Came

The Words I Wanted To Hear. And Feel.

If you grew up hearing I love you from the same people who hurt you, you already know what this episode is about. It means that a lot of us have moved through life feeling fucked-up.  You know what it does to your self-concept when love and pain arrive in the same sentence. You know what it does to your identity when the people who were supposed to show you what love feels like showed you something else entirely and called it the same thing. You know the relationship patterns it creates — the ones you keep repeating, the ones that make no sense from the outside, the ones that make perfect sense once you understand where they started. What then, is this thing called, “love?” Was I too fucked-up to ever know what it is? Could be? Let’s chat…. Sunday night. Ninety degrees in St. Louis. I'm in bed next to my wife and something on television hits me so fast and so hard I don't move for I don't know how long. When did my mother say I love you without it being attached to an ass beating? I couldn't find a single time. What I found instead was her standing in the hallway, arms crossed over her housecoat, telling my father to hit me again because I hadn't learned yet. Not. One. This episode is about what that does to a child's inner voice. About the self-worth you can't build when the foundation is that. About the 17-year-old who wrote a love song called Where Were You, took it to a recording studio with his father, failed at something he was never equipped to do, and ended up at the end of the driveway with two paper bags of clothes feeling relief at the thought that it might all just be over. About what snapped on the walk up Whited Avenue, walking alone with those bags in my hands.  It became all about survival mode. About four marriages and alcohol and decades of not letting anyone close enough to hurt you again. And about what's on the other side of all of it — if you're willing to stop running long enough to find out. This one is for anyone who has ever wondered why love feels wrong when it arrives clean. Why I love you lands sideways. Why you keep choosing what hurts because at least you know how to survive it. You may not yet be ready to believe it, but we aren’t fucking broken.  Never were.  No matter how much we believed it. But damn if the journey doesn’t suck. Truly. Sit with me….

The Shit That "Self-Help" Won't Even Touch. Ever.

Another episode that I wasn't planning on posting. But like the others, here it is. I recorded this for myself. Voice memo. Private thoughts. The kind of conversation you have with yourself at 2am when something won't stop pulling at you and you finally just hit record because that's the only way to hear what you actually think. I posted it anyway. Because this is exactly the shit that self-help won't touch — and somebody needs to. Here's what nobody building a course or a following or a brand is going to tell you about self-concept work and inner transformation: it gets worse first. Not as a metaphor. Literally worse. I had a 1969 GTO with gunk all over the engine. Cleaned it up. Car ran like shit. Turns out the gunk was load-bearing — it was plugging the holes where the gaskets had failed. The car had built a compensation system out of its own damage. Clean it up and you expose everything the debris was holding together. That's what happens when you start paying honest attention to your inner voice, your relationship patterns, your self-worth, the stories you've been telling yourself since childhood. The self-help industry doesn't tell you this because it doesn't sell. I'm telling you because it's true and I lived it. I also talk about four people I know personally — a nurse, a doctor, a cop, a social worker — all in professions built around helping others, all of them miserable, all of them told me so directly. About what excessive drinking actually signals when someone is trying to squeeze themselves into an identity that doesn't fit. About the math we do — around alcohol, around wrong relationships, around careers we chose for everyone else — to defer the consequence just long enough to keep functioning. And about the one question that cuts through all of it. How many of the people you're going to for guidance on your life, your relationships, your sense of self — how many of them are actually happy? Not their follower count. Not their income. Not their curated highlight reel. Actually happy. Inside their own skin. When nobody's watching. Because if the answer is no — and more often than not, it is — what the fuck are you taking their advice for?

Speed Bumps, Late Fees, and the Art of Chilling the F*ck Out

I missed a bill. I had the money. It was in the calendar — every device, every platform, no excuse. And I still missed it and had to pay the late fee and I lost my shit about it while my wife quietly got dressed and went for her walk. This one is about what happened between the moment she left and the moment she came back. I've spent decades living on the financial edge with Sharon. Paycheck to paycheck, the kind of edge where an unexpected bill doesn't just cost you money — it activates something old and ugly that has nothing to do with the actual dollar amount. I know this about myself. And knowing it didn't stop it from happening Saturday morning. But here's the thing. It used to take me all day to come back from something like that. Days sometimes. And this time I laid in the bed, listened to what was actually running underneath the reaction, and by the time she walked back through that door I was ready for chocolate wafers and a streaming service. That's not nothing. This episode is about speed bumps. About the difference between catching yourself and beating yourself. About what it actually means to sit with the uncomfortable thing instead of talking your way around it with a bunch of cute words that don't do a damn thing. Oh, and Sharon makes an appearance. She was tiptoeing. It didn't work.

Open Your Eyes and Heart — If You Can

I joined the Mormon church for a woman's ass. Sure, I told myself that it was all about finding and getting “right” with Jesus, but actually and I knew it in my heart, I wanted that ass and I was willing to hang out with Jesus to get it. I'll say that again so it lands the way it's supposed to. I sat through the missionary discussions, got baptized, moved out of my then-girlfriend's place so I could live righteously, stood behind the podium on Sacrament Sundays and testified to a faith I wasn't sure I had — and the whole time, underneath every prayer and every scripture I memorized, I was trying to convince myself that if I just said the right things long enough, I'd eventually mean them. I didn't. “It” didn’t. The “get right with Jesus” part. Didn’t happen. At least not in the way one would think. That's not the even the deepest part of this episode. I'm going to tell you about Malachi. Born May 20th, 1999. Gone, as in dead, July 31st, 1999. And what I decided about myself the day I found his body — a decision I carried around like a verdict for longer than I have words for. A combat medic who had never heard of SIDS. A man who was already drinking too much, already drowning in a marriage that started wrong, already running from something he couldn't name. And then a morning that stopped everything. And I'm going to tell you about last night, 2026, and life having been lived into the moment that seems, like so many, just another mundane conversation in my head. Standing in the grocery store. The voice in my head making its case for a third or fourth Guinness for the night.  That fucking voice was patient, reasonable, persuasive as hell. Telling me I'd earned it. Telling me I could handle it. Telling me this time would be different. It's the same voice and it’s one that I’ve heard many times about many things. It’s the same voice that was with me when I stood at the one at the church podium all those many years ago.  The one let me know, deeply and effectively, after Malachi’s death, that I was indeed, without question, a living piece of shit.  The voice at the grocery store last night. The same goddamn voice.  And this episode is about learning to hear it without letting it drive. Open your ears and your heart if you can. That’s not some social-media shit—that’s how I move through life and found the kind of peace I didn’t even know fucking existed for people like me.

Sunday Stroll 06 | What The Fuck Am I Actually Doing?

I'm 60 years old, sitting behind a microphone at 11 PM on a Sunday in St. Louis, humid as hell, not making a dime, and somewhere between a George Michael documentary and flipping someone the bird at a red light, something cracked wide open tonight. And I fucking love it. I've been homeless. A couple of times in fact. And the last stint was with my beloved wife. It’s that kind of shit that makes you wonder if you’re doing any of this “right”.  I’ve buried an infant child.  I've been married four times. Divorced four times. Four DUIs (and I wonder if that number matches the number of divorces in a deeper way… just sayin’) I tried to leave this world on November 2nd, 1994 and I'm still here three decades later sharing what I have actually figured out in real time, and yet knowing that we still have those, “what the fuck that's supposed to mean” moment that seem to come whenever they please.  And tonight — not in a therapy office, not in a journal, not on a mountaintop — it got a little clearer. This episode isn't about George Michael. Not really.  It's not really about road rage either. I mean, it might be, but I don’t think so. It's about what happens when you stop using that question as a weapon against yourself and start actually listening for and to the answer.  Because "what the fuck am I actually doing" can destroy you or it can save you. It can burden you in ways that seem to beat the life and breath out of you, or you can sit with it and just let you and “it,” be. And in so many ways, it really seems that the only difference is whether you're willing to sit still long enough to hear what comes back. And yes, that can truly suck. Or not. Other than that, it’s just a Sunday….