This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
About a month later, I’m drinking late into the night again—three or four in the morning—completely annihilated. And I see them. Three blue faces on the wall. My father. His father. And his father. My dad, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. Every one of them had alcoholism threaded through their life. Every one of them, in one way or another, was a shitty husband.
My great-grandfather died on the way home from a poker game in the 1930s, crashed his car into a tree at twenty-five years old. They took him to the hospital, and the doctors, doing what they thought was right at the time, put concrete blocks on his shoulders while they were X-raying him. They didn’t realize his back was broken. He was doing fine until they snapped his spinal cord with those blocks and killed him while trying to diagnose him. My grandfather lost his father at two years old and grew up with an abusive stepfather who beat him and nearly killed him at fifteen, leaving him for dead in a barn before kicking him out of the house. My dad grew up with that man—harsh, violent, relentless—and then got sent to Vietnam. None of them knew how to be decent husbands. None of them knew how to be present.
And I just lose it. I scream at those three blue faces for an hour straight. I unload everything. I scream at my great-grandfather for abandoning his wife and child. I scream at my grandfather for beating his son and living a miserable, bitter life. I scream at my dad for ignoring his health, for never making amends, for letting everything rot. I call them worthless, useless, pathetic. I rage at the entire lineage, at the inheritance I forgot I asked for, at the pattern I can’t escape. After an hour of screaming into the dark, I go to bed.
My ex-wife wakes up the next morning completely terrified. She thinks I’m on drugs. She had lost someone close to drugs, so that fear is very real for her. She’s looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. I tell her I’m not on drugs. I say it dismissively, almost offended. I tell her I just drank a lot. I make a joke out of it—I saw dead people, like Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis. I laugh it off. I say it like it’s nothing. But internally, I’m scared shitless. I’m thinking, What the fuck is happening to me?
After this, I try to get sober again. I make it maybe two days. Then I’m out in the backyard edging the grass, and I hit a black racer snake. It’s curled up next to the HVAC unit in the corner of the yard. I don’t see it. I’m edging, and I accidentally smack it right in the face with the edger. It freaks out, starts slithering away, trying to escape. I’m startled out of my mind. And instead of backing away or letting it go, I get angry. Offended. Like the snake did something to me by scaring me.
So I go inside, grab a shovel, come back out, and kill it. I chop it up with the shovel. Looking back, it’s absurd. The snake wasn’t doing anything. I could’ve just left it alone. But it didn’t slither away fast enough, and it looked at me. That was enough. I killed it. Then I stand there thinking, Jesus Christ, mowing the lawn was such a hard day. I need a drink. And I get fucked up again.
Another time, I’m trying to quit drinking, and I’m working on the pool. I’m putting chlorine tablets into the little container by the pool pump. I drop one of the tablets, and it splashes some water back into my face. The pump is off, so the water has a high chlorine concentration. It’s not pure chlorine, but it’s not nothing either. I’m sober at this point—maybe one or two days—and I’m mentally completely unstable. I’m not even telling anyone I’m trying to quit because I’m barely holding it together.
The splash hits my face. Maybe a little gets in one eye. I lose my fucking mind. I panic instantly. I rush inside and start washing my eyes out in the sink. I do this for thirty minutes. If you’ve never done that before, don’t use there is a very good reason. Running water into your eyes for thirty straight minutes will irritate the hell out of them. My eyes get inflamed. My vision starts to blur badly. Normally my vision is around 20/40 or 20/60, but now I can’t see shit. Everything is fuzzy. I’m convinced I’ve burned my eyes with chlorine and I’m going blind.
I move into the shower because my neck is killing me from leaning over the sink with water running into my face. I’m standing there, water pouring into my eyes, completely panicking. My ex-wife is at work. I’m alone in the house during the day again, losing my mind. I call poison control. I remember this vividly even now. The woman on the other end says, We don’t even know if you’re going to be okay at this point.
I lose it. I’m like, What the fuck do you mean you don’t know if I’m going to be okay? You’re supposed to calm me down. You’re poison control. Don’t say that shit to someone who’s already spiraling.
I call my ex-wife at work and tell her she needs to come home immediately. It’s around 2:00 p.m., and I’m completely unraveling. I’m pacing, panicking, convinced I’ve permanently damaged my eyes. I start praying out loud—screaming prayers, bargaining with God. I tell Him I’ll do anything if I don’t go blind. Somewhere in the middle of that, it finally occurs to me that maybe I should stop running water directly into my eyes. I shut the shower off, dry myself, crawl into bed, and cry. My eyes are burning. Everything is blurry. I feel wrecked and terrified.
Once I stop flushing my eyes nonstop, my vision slowly starts to clear. My ex-wife comes home from work and finds me in pieces. She consoles me. She stays with me. By the next day, my eyes still hurt, but I can see clearly again. Looking back, it’s obvious what happened: I had a panic attack while sober. Dropping a chlorine tablet into some stagnant pool water set off a full-blown psychological meltdown. If that same thing happened today, I’d rinse my eye out for thirty seconds and move on with my day. Back then, I nearly lost my mind.
I hadn’t told anyone I was trying to quit drinking. I was doing it silently, shamefully, barely holding myself together. The next day, my thinking flips the way it always does. Yesterday was really stressful. I need to take the edge off with a few drinks. By “a few drinks,” I mean ten to fifteen shots spread across eight hours. That’s what taking the edge off looked like for me. And this is where the collapse really accelerates—the end of this caterpillar phase before whatever comes next.
Things are fully out of control now. I start obsessing over the idea that one night my ex-wife is going to be angry, exhausted, or just done with my bullshit and won’t want to have sex with me anymore. Not far from our house there are massage parlors with a certain reputation. I start fixating on them. I imagine this scenario where I’m drunk, horny, resentful, and self-destructive. In my head, my ex-wife is the unreasonable one for not wanting to be close to me, completely ignoring the fact that I’ve been drinking for six or seven hours and she’s coming home from work to absolute chaos.
She walks in the door and I’m blasting “Fack” by Eminem at full volume and somehow I’m confused about why she wouldn’t want to come anywhere near me. I’d always believed I shouldn’t date someone who drank like I did, because you don’t want to be with someone who actually enjoys that version of you. My ex-wife didn’t. And she was getting fed up.
In my head, the spiral gets darker. I start believing that one night I’m going to destroy my marriage and my whole life in a single night of shame, and I don’t see this as a fear so much as an inevitability. It feels like a movie I’m watching play out in slow motion, and I can’t change the ending. I’m terrified of myself. Terrified of what I might do. Terrified that I don’t have control. So I keep trying to quit drinking in secret. I don’t tell my ex-wife. I don’t tell friends. I just white-knuckle it alone—and then relapse almost immediately. Over and over. Quietly. Desperately. Convinced I’m broken, convinced I’m doomed, and completely unable to see a way out.
By the end of this collapse—March 2014—there’s one more moment that really seals it. A friend has a bachelor party in Las Vegas. I fly out with $1,000 in cash, exactly like I did the last time I went. On that previous trip, the money lasted almost the entire time. I’d even left my debit card at home so I couldn’t completely drain my bank account, and only took a small cash advance at the very end. This time, that $1,000 includes one of the hundred-dollar bills my dad had in his wallet when he died—the one my mom gave me afterward. I’d been keeping it as a kind of talisman, a reminder. I told myself I wouldn’t gamble it. I blew the entire $1,000 the first night.
Normally, I do okay at the craps table. That night, I got absolutely destroyed. I drank all day on the plane, drank all night in the casino, and lost nearly every bet. All my friends have plenty of money and are in the middle of their gambling addiction. Meanwhile, I’m down to my last $100. I thought about my dad, about how he’d done the same kind of shit in his life, only worse. I took that last hundred—the one from his wallet—and put it on the pass line at the craps table. The shooter rolled a two immediately. Just like that, it was gone. I stood there on the casino floor crying, drunk, broke, and hollowed out.
By the time I made it back to the hotel room, it was six or seven in the morning. I was sick, shaking, wrecked, and as hopeless as I had ever been. I told everyone I was done. Done gambling. Done drinking. I’d blown my entire budget in one night, and I felt completely destroyed.
I missed most of the next day with my friends. They went down to old Vegas while I lay in the hotel room, sick as hell, pounding Advil, trying to stop the nausea. Later, they came back, took me out to dinner, and then went to a club. I could barely manage to walk from place to place and sit down. That’s all I had in me. I called my mom and told her I was never drinking or gambling again. I told my ex-wife the same thing. I told anyone who would listen.
We were sharing a couple of connected rooms—five of us total. On the third and final day of the trip, we went to the Bellagio breakfast buffet. I hadn’t eaten much the day before because I felt so bad, and I went completely overboard. Seven plates of food. At this point, I weighed around 240 pounds, and I just kept eating. Afterward, something shifted. I felt better. Physically, at least. And that’s when the lie crept back in. Fuck it, I thought. I don’t want to waste the last day of this trip.
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