For a while I was sure the answer was Michigan. I was born there, my sister and her kids live there, and my aunts, uncles and cousins are up there too. For years I told people in St. Petersburg that I was from Michigan, and I meant it. In late 2025 I worked through the question one day at a time. The short version is that Michigan was a real pull, but I did not move there. I moved into a rental house near Crescent Lake in St. Petersburg on January 8, 2026.
If you are weighing a move home, the honest answer is that the numbers pulled me north and my kids pulled me back. The rent gap was real. In Maybe Michigan Is Where I Belong I wrote that a nice one-bedroom up there could start around $1,100 to $1,200 a month, while a similar apartment near me ran $2,500 to $3,000. Then I pictured telling my son I was moving a thousand miles away, and I started crying in the middle of a Meijer. Every time my mind went back to the kids, I broke down.
The pull toward a new place started before Michigan. In Walking Into the Rest of My Life, from August 2025, I wrote "This is where I belong" outside a massage school in Sarasota. That certainty is worth remembering, because it came back with Michigan and did not hold up the same way when I tested it against my family and my routine.
The Michigan idea took shape in late November. My nephew told me over lunch that he thought I should move up there, and then my ex-wife told me by FaceTime that she could see the kids visiting in the summer and staying a month at a time. I could not decide, and that entry ends with a question I could not answer.
Then my niece changed the picture. In One Sentence Burns My Michigan Dream, from November 30, I wrote that my fourteen-year-old niece had told her mom I should stay closer to my kids, and that seeing them mostly in the summers would not work. My sister changed her view right away, and I respected that. I needed a fresh start, but I did not need to abandon my kids to get one. If you are working through custody, my posts on co-parenting and how the divorce ended cover that ground.
The search went south and downtown after that. I briefly applied for a house in South Tampa, then toured downtown apartments and found them too small and too expensive. Once I saw a house by Crescent Lake, the decision got simpler. It is described in The Old House by the Lake. It is 103 years old, the owners were kind, the rent was $2,700 a month, and the park was across the street. The kids could run around the playground, and my school drop-off and AA meetings were close.
Moving in is its own story, told in Move-In Day and a Hundred Thousand Thank Yous. I expected the whole move, including the rented truck and a former professional mover who helped me for three hours, to cost about $300. A few weeks later I wrote about the first overnight with both kids in The Night This House Became a Home, and the house had started to feel like a home.
What I took from the whole stretch is simple. Michigan is where my family is, and the rent math is real. But my kids are the anchor, and any home has to serve them first. I could not find a version of a Michigan move where I stayed close to my kids the way I wanted, so I stayed in St. Petersburg.
The posts below run newest first. The oldest, from February 2019, is an excerpt from my memoir Officer Banfield about my drinking years, not moving, and it is included so the page holds every entry on this subject. Start with the newest if you want to see where I ended up, or with Maybe Michigan Is Where I Belong if you want the question in the middle of the fight.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Every House Has Its Own Energy (March 6, 2026)
- The Night This House Became a Home (January 12, 2026)
- Move-In Day and a Hundred Thousand Thank Yous (January 8, 2026)
- The Old House by the Lake (December 6, 2025)
- Hunting Downtown for My Reset (December 5, 2025)
- Touring the Fresh Life I Crave (December 3, 2025)
- One Sentence Burns My Michigan Dream (November 30, 2025)
- Moving Back to Michigan: Why I Stayed in Florida Near My Kids (November 26, 2025)
- Walking Into the Rest of My Life (August 25, 2025)
- Driving 700 Miles for the Wrong Reasons (February 9, 2019)
Every House Has Its Own Energy
Originally published March 6, 2026.
This is my journal entry from March 6, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
I didn't sleep very well last night because the dude who was delivering my envelopes from my recovery group called me three times right when I was about to drop off to sleep at midnight. Like, what the fuck's this dude up to right now? I don't give a shit what's going on at midnight, man. I don't need to talk, but I will give him a call later today. I am interested to know what he called about, but it's weird for me to get a call at that time of night. I had just fallen asleep and the call started me awake and it took a long ass time to get back to sleep. Irregardless, I then woke up at 6:17 this morning and enjoyed a little meditation time. But when I get to my ex-wife's house to pick the kids up, they comment that I look tired. Like, well, that's accurate.
I dump a huge bin of compost out from the compost can in my ex-wife's compost. It's funny, even though we're divorced, we're still working together on the compost. It seems crazy to throw it out, and it works great in my ex-wife's garden. I produce so much of it. I get two hugs from my ex-wife, which is nice, and I have lots of playtime with my son in the back seat. He doesn't have a library book to read today, so it's just a whole lot of juicing and baby demon. And I introduced Dad Demon as well. After pickup, I head back home feeling good that I'm not going to that 8:30 class because I've got two hours of singles tennis scheduled later. I don't need to sweat it out first thing in the morning, and I'm ready to get to work today.
After yesterday's experience testing out the letters, I have 40 more that are ready, which I'm eager to deliver. It's beautiful, cloudy, and cool out this morning, so seems like the time to do it. I grab 40 letters and set a timer. It takes me less than 30 minutes, even though I walk straight from my house, and I end up picking up where I left off yesterday, and I inefficiently walk a couple extra blocks around. Still, I'm able to drop 40 letters in less than 30 minutes. I'm like, this shit has got to scale up. We're going to print thousands of these letters and drop them all over the place. I end up telling the guy from my recovery group who's delivering the letters, who I talk to later, that he inspired me to want to deliver a bunch of these myself. Paying him to do it, it's like, what the fuck am I doing? I might as well get out there and do them too.
And I enjoy today actually getting to step into people's space a little bit. Every home has a distinct energy and a feel to it. Some of the homes smell nasty, some of the homes give me the impression they play a lot of video games, others of the home feel like it's very bright energy, like there's a real loving person or family in them. Others feel very materialistic and sad, even though they're polished on the outside. Every house has a unique feeling, and this is oddly enough satisfying my desire for novel experiences and going and seeing new things. It's amazing how often we see the exact same streets and roads and almost everything. When I used to walk my dog in a neighborhood I lived in before, I mean, I'd walk the same houses, the same route all the time. I never stepped foot into the front yards or up to the doors of most of those houses. And it actually feels surprisingly good to go and walk into the energy of all these different houses. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more of this. And I'm excited to get my stamp in the mail. I'm hoping that I'll get a notification that I've got another date lined up, but no such luck today.
My friend who wants to record his book, who we've already done a lot of it, cancels and says he isn't feeling good. I'm tempted to send a bit of a critical message back, but I'm like, whatever. He's having a medical procedure soon, which in my belief I disagree with, but then I'm not a doctor. So I'm like, whatever. He doesn't seem interested in being talked out of it, or he's putting so much of his faith and his energy into having it, that it's going to somehow save him. And I don't want to disturb any of his belief. And I sure as hell hope it works. At the same time, from most of what I've seen, my belief is the odds are it's not going to work, at least for the long term, and the body's going to suffer. I had a lot of tooth surgeries. I mean, a lot. I had a good bit of dental work and braces and, you know, oral surgery to move teeth around. And I'm really grateful for that. That's paid off a lot. At the same time, you know, those weren't that invasive. The teeth were right there. Going into your body is a bit different. But what do I know? I tell him that, you know, I hope we can get back to his book when he's done.
And I reflect that, man, I have an abundance of time today and I'm going to use it. I go to a recovery meeting right in the middle of time as I'm getting to work on the letter again to see if we can make an even better version of it. I enjoy the meeting and it's another third step meeting. I talk about how I'm God again and I'm like, I got to tweak this message a little bit better because it seems like it's not being received that well. I then, after the meeting wrap up, head back home and I'm looking forward to tennis later. I had a big salad for breakfast today. And that is so filling. It sustains me from when I ate it at 9 a.m. most of the way through until starting tennis at 4 p.m.
I go to work revising the letter, spending hours going through and trying to get the absolute best version of letter I can. After all, if I'm going to hand out thousands of these, this should pack every emotional punch I've got. All the material I've come up with in the past should all be worked in here as best and as smooth as it can. By the time it's time to go play tennis, I'm like, holy shit, this letter kills it. It has a very clear flow from having the person imagine their book. And then I've got two people dying early in it, which is an incredible emotional hook. So it starts off with a couple paragraphs. You know, imagine holding a book with your name on the cover. And then, you know, if you think your life story isn't interesting, I promise there are people who it matters deeply. You know, then we'll talk about my dad dying and how I wished he'd written a book. I talk about how many people assume they'll write their story someday, but it usually doesn't happen. Talk about my friend from college who wouldn't have figured he needed to write his life story in his mid-30s. He's dead now, and his stories mostly went with him. I then introduce myself and talk about how I live here near St. Petersburg, Florida. I've got 32 books published, mentioned on Fn Myself, and my book. Then I dive beyond preserving your legacy into reflection and how writing my story helped me to stay sober. Then I talk about how easy it is for me to help someone write a book. And I transition smoothly into saying that I learned these skills during my career as a content creator, where I handle the objections people have about, well, shit, I'm already uploading all this stuff online, so why bother with a book? And the key line is that a book gathers the most meaningful parts of life into one place. And instead of thousands of disconnected posts or clips, it becomes a story someone can sit down and truly understand. If you have a life story, or a loved one's, that you have always meant to get into a book, you can book a one-on-one call with me and I will help you turn it into one.
My next paragraph hits nice saying after uploading over 10,000 videos online, I can tell you I learned the hard way that books endure while digital media often does not. The paragraph concludes saying nearly all the videos, blog posts, podcast episodes, status updates, and pictures I uploaded in the last 15 years are gone today. Then I transition into, you know, the kind of book you could have. Share my friend's book as an example. Then I wrap it up and this time I add the pricing in to help people not even waste their time going to my website and to say, look, 90 minute sessions, 3 for $310, or 10 sessions for $2500. If you know you want a complete life story, I have my phone number and a P.S. on there. I'm like, this letter fucking slaps. Like this letter is awesome. And I'm really proud of it.
I then, did I mention yesterday that the woman I'd been seeing actually sent me a message back? I think I forgot that. So I'm going to cover that here in case I didn't. So yesterday, she sent me a message saying she's been busy with doctor's appointments. She's hurt. She can't do massage. She won't need her website or any of that. And she said she'll reach out in the future if she wants to go down that path. I said, thank you for the update. I'm sorry to hear you're injured and not doing massage again. I hope your healing goes well and the website will be there for six more months if you change your mind. And then the last part I felt a little vulnerable but honest, like, if you ever have any availability, meet up for ice cream to catch up, let me know. Do you think I got a message back in 24 hours on that? Nope. And that's okay, because I feel good. Like, I'd love to meet up with her and catch up with her, and that's just being real with you.
I go to tennis today at the tennis club right after I feel like I've polished off this draft to be like the most incredible shit I've written before and ready to give out to tens of thousands of households in this area to crush it, to build my business up. I go to the tennis club. My guy's a little late, so I warm up with a tennis partner. And the one woman who's joining us today played last week, maybe I'll get to play with her today. And I'm so grateful to be able to do some mixed singles, which is awesome. They didn't have like any of that at the other club. And it's nice to play with the women as well as the men to not feel segregated. We then start playing the matches. I go warm up a few serves and my guy gets there. He's ready, since he's late, to just jump straight into it, and he beats me 5-0 without warming up. I mean, there was one or two games I was close to a win, but he puts so much spin on his shots. Like, everything's just donking off my racket. He's cranking out a fast serve, even double faults twice one game, and I still can't fucking get it done. My shots are at a record level of horrible. Like my whole arm just fell off. Speaking of which, the tendons in the arm are still pretty tight. I'm like, you think I can just keep playing on this without a problem and it'll just heal up? Because I sure hope so. That's pretty much the approach I'm taking right now.
After he beats me, then we just hit some, and even my hitting so shitty, but it's okay, I'm on the loser court, and the guy who lost the match in the middle court comes over to play me. We have a nice back and forth. He has a hard serve but I end up getting it back on some returns, and he is struggling just like I'm struggling. So he ends up beating me like 5-3, which it was at least nice to give him a little competition. I'm supposed to stay on the loser court and play the girl that's there, but for some reason they don't want to have the two guys rematch again, so they swap me and him. The guy I go to play is a tennis partner I haven't played before. Now, I've seen this guy play some pretty good tennis and he won his way up to the winner court last time. So I'm thinking this guy is going to wreck me today. And somehow he just shits the bed on almost every one of his shots. And I beat him 5-1. Like this doesn't even feel like winning. This is like I'm just watching him play worse than me, and it's actually triggering my empathy. I'm like, I feel you, bro. I know what that's like to play that bad. That's how I was just playing before. I start cranking some of my shots and some of my serves start going in really nicely with some power, and I win some points on him with my serve and with damn near everything else. He then picks up as we start hitting afterwards, and he wins a few more games after it's already over.
Then it's 6 o'clock suddenly, and it's time to head out. I brush the courts, and the only thing worse than my tennis game today was my court brushing. Turns out if you brush in circles, it doesn't work so well. Note to self, don't brush a clay tennis court in circles. It's so much harder. You just go up and down like it's a lawnmower. It's so much easier. I get everything loaded into the car and I head back home. I get home and I have some noodles for dinner, some bean noodles. And then shower. I'm going to talk to my sponsor on the way back. I'd been chewing on the idea of going to a strip club for some validation, and I looked up some reviews earlier, but the more I read the more it just felt gross and like a waste of money I don't have, and honestly part of me is still curious but mostly I just hope I can find some better things to do with my life. At least I talked to my sponsor about it, and I'm telling you about it.
After I shower, I go to work editing my old journaling. I roll through shit, like at least 30, maybe 40,000 words that I've been meaning to go through for a while, and it feels so good to catch up on it. I calculate that if I can catch up on seven days of these every day, that'll only take me a couple of weeks to get current, and then I'd probably have at least two, if not three more that I could publish in the next few weeks also, which would be awesome to get caught up on these before I start getting clients. As I'm halfway through editing, I start thinking I should go out for a walk along Crescent Lake. Maybe something interesting will happen. I should grab my books too in case any of them are gone from the little free library. So I picked a couple of books out. I walked a long way before going by the free library. I say hi to a few people. I sit down on a couple of the benches. And nothing interesting happens as far as I can see. Except I start to get rained on right at the very end of it. And then it downpours as soon as I walk into the house. Like, that was cool. Like, I literally had perfect timing on that.
I finished listening finally to Braiding Sweetgrass, which I swear I've been borrowing from the Libby app, which borrows audiobooks from the library, off and on for like six months, finally finished that book. And it leaves me feeling like my life is in the right place right now. It seems kind of hopeless to, you know, as bad as things are with the environment and society today, but at the same time, it's like, what can I do about it? Well, I think people telling our stories, preserving our wisdom, and focusing on in-person connection with people is one of the most important things we can do today. And me reaching out to people to write books, especially that have the money they can afford to do something like this, I think this is the best thing I can come up with to serve the planet today and to be useful to people. Thus, that's the best I can think to do for my part. If preserving your own story and wisdom matters to you the way it does to me, schedule a private call with me and we will map out how to get it written together.
After I have a little walk, I also print out 100 copies of the letter, upgrade my print subscription, and am thinking I'll go to bed before 11 tonight, get a little caught up on my sleep, and I'm glad I've actually got this recorded before bedtime. It is amazing to go back through my old journaling and to edit it and to read how I had something so clearly figured out three months ago, which then I wandered all over and tested. I had very clearly the idea that I should just put letters in people's door cracks or on their front porch and offer my services to help them write their book. I think the letter I have today for it is absolutely masterful. And I guess it's a logical progression that I tried mailing them, which didn't work for shit, and I tried a weak, basically salesy letter. This one fucking kills, and I'm really excited to use it, and it's so much faster to crank this out and deliver it, and so much cheaper as long as I'm not paying somebody to deliver it. I also loved being able to read back the days where I decided where to live, deciding, thinking for a few days I was going to live in Michigan, then thinking for a couple of days I was going to live in Tampa. Then the day I looked at downtown apartments and then the day I found the house I'm in right now and rented it is absolutely magical. Like, man, I'm so glad I documented all this stuff. I'm so glad I've got all this. And, you know, if there's one thing I'd tell my younger self, it's like, get into writing, write your whole life the whole time no matter what's happening, write it down honestly and get everybody else in your life to write too.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
The Night This House Became a Home
Originally published January 12, 2026.
This is my journal entry from January 12, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
Tonight's my first overnight with the kids during a school week, and I'm really excited about it. I start the day off by going to my yoga studio for the 8.30. There's lots of attractive girls as usual. I put my mat right up next to the mirror this time. It's actually nice looking at myself. I'm like, God damn, this is a narcissist row up in this bitch. I can just look at myself like, damn, look at this. I got some abs. And it's nice to discreetly check the girls out, too. I try and talk to the girl a little bit after class because she has three blocks next to her. And I guess one of them is the instructors. But she doesn't seem really into it. So I move on. Then I see a woman coming in for the 10 a.m. that I'm surprised I remember her and her name. So I say hi to her and talk to her a little bit, then head out.
I come straight home and get ready for the AA group that I go to at 11 a.m. My sponsor's there, and I get there just in time to see him. The girl I asked if she wanted to meet up a couple days ago and didn't respond is there as well. I actually get called on in this meeting, which is nice. They read the part of the big book where the guy's like 30 years old and quits drinking to focus on his business and then goes to pieces in his 50s after he retires. And I share. So the main theme from this message is if I wait to my 50s to drink, I can drink. You know, it's just being toxic and shit. Like, I'm going to take good care of myself. Thus, my share, I move on.
I head out of the meeting a little bit early and then I go get a massage with my massage therapist. She's dealing with her ex-husband and selling her house, which is tough for her. And it gives me an appreciation of everything my ex-wife and I are doing and how grateful I am for the smooth relationship that we have. I'm also super grateful for my massage therapist as a friend because she actually consistently responds to messages. And I feel like we have the same level of interest in each other as friends, which is really nice, which has been lacking on my messages with girls. But it just will take one girl really to turn everything around. If you are working to keep your own co-parenting this smooth while you rebuild the steady connections around you, you can schedule a private call with me and we can talk it through.
I go to pick the kids up from school. And my ex-wife texted me earlier that my daughter's staying after for a girlfriend's club. So I just picked my son up. My son and I ride home. And it's nice to have some time by himself, just the two of us. I enjoy chatting with him in the car and hearing how he's doing at school. And he's really excited to go to the park, but he says he wants to wait for my daughter, which is so nice. So I eat and rearrange stuff around the house and we wait for my daughter to get home.
Meanwhile, earlier in the day, I'd listened to this book called How Could She? The Shocking Story of a Mother's Betrayal and a Daughter's Survival, which is absolutely a horror story. And at the same time, it does give me an incredible contrast and perspective for how I show up and take care of my kids as a parent versus the worst that other kids endure at the hands of parents that just abuse them at shocking levels. And it leaves me feeling super grateful like that my son's just here with me having this nice day and being treated right and loved so much. And that my daughter's coming home to that, too.
My ex-wife drops my daughter off a little after four. And then when my daughter gets home, we have little snacks and we go to Crescent Lake Park. We hang out there for a little over an hour, flying the drone, driving the car around. And my son's chasing the car. I lay down in the grass. My daughter cries and is missing her mom because it was one thing when my ex-wife was going out at night and it was the first time over at my house for everybody on Saturday because, you know, that my ex-wife was going out and had something to do anyway. But this is different. You know, she's just got home from school and now that's all she's going to see of her mom is the ride home from school. And my daughter's pretty emotional about it. And I think my ex-wife was also pretty emotional about it. But my ex-wife doesn't often outwardly show her feelings that much. But this is a big night for my ex-wife, too, because after she drops my daughter off and leaves at 4.30, my ex-wife has the whole rest of the night to herself. There's no kids. She doesn't have a man at home that I know of, at least. She had the whole rest of the night to herself. This is a space she said she wanted before, and now she gets to have it.
I think the two of them, they both were feeling a lot of the emotions, and my son and I weren't feeling as much, which was nice. So my daughter had a good cry and gave me lots of snuggles. At one point my daughter was sitting on me and my son had his back sitting to my back in the park and we all just snuggled up and I'm like, this is what I've been missing. And I didn't, you know, I knew it was a struggle and I felt lonely over the last three months, but at the same time, like this, for some reason I didn't quite see how hard it was to not be having this kind of dad time with my kids. Like I was seeing them and I was taking them to and from school and doing stuff with them as I've described in depth over the last three months. But I didn't have this like quantity of time where I'm just doing dad stuff and it's like a normal routine and it's all on me, which is really nice.
We came home from the park about 5.30. And we take an hour to get ready and eat. We were going to play some games, but we didn't end up having any time. I have a salad for dinner. I cut up a bunch of fruit for my son. I cut up a pineapple and a watermelon that I bought and we get ready for the night. Then we head out a little after 630 to the grocery store because my daughter needs some shampoo. I need some dish soap and I need to pick up the package that I would have dropped at the grocery store again instead of at my house. Because I have a house. Now, if you're living in a van, it would make sense to have a package dropped at the grocery store because you don't have an address. But I'm not going to be taking up space there anymore.
We go to the grocery store and I'm figuring out stuff that they can eat for lunch as well as wondering if there's any single moms with their kids that I might run into and have a happily ever after with. No luck on that front, though. But we go around and have a great time shopping and picking out foods that they might enjoy in their lunch and end up spending $67. They scan everything for the self-checkout. Then we go get gas. I love just ordinary things are just so fun with the kids. They both get out and are helping fill up the Toyota Corolla with gas. My son and I put new black hubcaps on the Corolla earlier today that I received in the mail, which was fun. He even got one of them on completely by himself.
Then we get to my daughter's basketball at 7:30. There's tons of kids there. I was hoping my son and I would have time to shoot and have a basket to ourselves, but no, there's four teams playing at the same time. The courts are full. Nobody besides the people that are signed up for these teams seems to have space to play. My daughter's having fun with the seven other girls that are on her team. She has the same coach as last season. Meanwhile, my son is messing with me and hanging out for the first 15 minutes, but then he sees a girl from his class sitting down, her sister's playing basketball at this time, and the girl is just sitting there bouncing the ball off the wall. I'm like, come on, go play with her, and he's a little shy at first, but then he gets up and goes to play with her, and they end up playing the rest of the 45 minutes while my daughter plays, which was so cute because I felt that way a couple of days ago when I talked to the girl at the AA picnic. I'm like, come on, go talk to her. It was so cute to have that conversation with my son and see how much fun he had playing with her. They were rolling the ball across the gym on the sidelines and bouncing it off the wall. And they came up with all kinds of little games they played.
Meanwhile, I went through my phone and caught up on my text messages. And I'm thinking about having the events at my house. So I also wanted to let people know who I wasn't going to be around anymore. So I messaged a guy from AA that's working on a business servicing cars. And then I went back and messaged a woman I'd been talking to, to follow up with her after I didn't text her for like a month. And I also texted a woman I'd been interested in and I hadn't messaged her in a month. And it was nice because the woman I'd been talking to actually, I look at it, I'm like, you know, I first met her on October 25th. I messaged her on October 26th to do an invite. And then I did not message her again for two months until I saw her at a local spiritual community again. And then so I sent her a message last night saying that I dropped the ball on responding, that I just moved. And the best night I had at the local spiritual community was talking to the woman I'd been interested in. And I'm not doing that community anymore. You know, let me know if you'd like an invite to my events. And she sends a message back to me asking if I'm all moved in. I sent a message back to her asking what she does for fun. And she said she's into acroyoga and asked what I like to do for fun. It's like, man, here's a girl that is actually asking me questions and responding to my text messages. Isn't that nice? And while last time I saw her, she didn't seem interested in meeting up for doing anything one on one with me, this is a girl who actually I like and seems to like me and has some interest. How silly that I just didn't text her for two months and then for another month. So I didn't respond to the last message because the kids and I are about to go to bed.
I also messaged the woman I'd been interested in and she said she's going to go out of the country soon. I'm like, man, this is funny. Two of the girls I've been most interested in that I've met, I've texted them the least. And just kind of gave up quickly on even doing anything with them. If you notice this same pattern in your own dating life, pulling back from the people you actually like, schedule a one-on-one call with me and we will work through why it happens.
It's also got me thinking about my books. This morning I woke up and I was getting a bit paranoid about my books. I was wondering, like, man, after stuff I said about people and just all the shit I've talked in these books, all the, you know, the cursing, the clowning around having fun, all the events I've described and people and places, I'm like, you know, is there something I should do with this to protect myself a little better? I was like, what if someone like sues me for the shit I said in this book or somebody else, because I'm just talking about people now. I generally am only using people's first names. Although I tried to just use someone's first name, I slipped one time. So there it is, but still with the first name, there's no last name. It's difficult to even identify exactly who I'm talking about. And even if somebody that I did know being talked about read this, which seems unlikely but possible, thinking, what can I do to cover my ass a little bit better?
At first, I was just thinking, fuck it. I'm not going to publish these books anymore. I'm just going to print them out and try and sell them in person. And it's like, really? You know, how are your kids going to get access to that? What about the people online that might buy these books someday? What about the people across the world that might buy a book like this and just be interested in the story. So I asked ChatGPT what to do, and I was thinking before I talked to it, I'm like, what if I publish these books as fiction, that I'm not claiming anything in this is true, that this is just all my subjective reality in my head. I'm just, this is me processing life. I'm not trying to put this out as if this is reality or fact or anything like that. Like, because if I publish it nonfiction, then I'm standing behind this and saying this is true and this is my experience. But what if some of the stuff, you know, I don't want to have to prove anything in court and say that this is true. And I also like to take the edge off of any of the shit I say is like, you know, this is just my motherfucking opinion. Like I'm just in my office saying whatever I feel like.
I asked ChatGPT about it and it says that, you know, it is a genre of literature where people publish as autobiographical nonfiction or autobiographical fiction because that way, you know, it's honoring that this is a subjective reality. You know, the idea is I'm describing like, you know, how things felt in my life, not who people are, or actual events, or, you know, I'm not trying to make this something for a court case or to put anybody down. It's like, you know, I want to just document that this is my art. I'm creating this as art. And yes, this is my experience, but, you know, I'm not claiming this is nonfiction and everything is going to match what other people experience, and what other people say. To some degree, this is just a work of art.
So I asked ChatGPT what to do. It says this is fiction helps. If I label it as fiction, auto-fiction, or a novel inspired by real events, it does reduce legal exposure if I avoid clearly identifiable people being portrayed as doing harmful, illegal, or defamatory things. You don't use full names. You don't present statements as verifiable facts. And yeah, if I'm going to say this is fiction about this specific person who did these specific things, that's one thing. And thus, you know, I'm thinking the safest framing is to put it that this is my subjective internal experience, not objective truth. ChatGPT says, for the daily autobiography style books, the strongest legal and artistic positioning is that this is an auto-fiction subjective memoir. That I could do a disclaimer, and I may do this for the sixth book up front to say that this book is a work of autobiographical fiction. It reflects my subjective inner spirit, experience, perceptions, and emotional interpretations at any given moment of time. Names, details, and circumstances may be altered, condensed, or imagined. The narrative does not claim to represent objective reality or the experiences of others.
So it says I'm only at risk if I produce a real identifiable person with a false statement presented as fact that harms their reputation. And thus, it says, the memoir does give more credibility, higher emotional impact, and slightly higher legal risk. If I do autofiction, there's lower legal risk, still emotionally honest, gives me creative and philosophical freedom, which I would definitely like over time. Because I do have some fiction ideas that I'd like to dictate, and it'd be easiest to just put them in here. And it says, this also fits my creating-my-own-reality worldview. ChatGPT says, given how raw and interpretive my writing is, autofiction is more honest, not less, which is interesting. And going forward, I'll try and describe more of how I felt or how I experienced things instead of saying what people did. So I may, you know, starting today and going back, switch these to autobiographical fiction. You know, no book is zero risk. At the same time, though, I've seen people put lots crazier shit and put it as nonfiction, like putting that they're abducted by aliens and sold into sex slavery, taken off the planet, regressed through time. So I'll think about this some more, because I want to position these books for long-term viability, and I want to keep doing these.
I've also been wondering, should I catch up on these books? Right now, I've got a backlog of probably at least 50 days, which is an average of probably 20 minutes per day. So if we round and say maybe I probably have close to two months. So I probably have a backlog of close to 15 hours of audio dictated like this that I've not processed into writing. And it sucks because, well, I feel like I'm behind all the time. And I've done all this work that's not published. And to me, if I'm doing work like this, it should be published immediately. Once I'm done with it, I shouldn't be doing all this writing and have it sitting on my computer forever. Whereas if I took 20 or 30 hours, I could go through all these entries and get them published. But I've been hesitant, especially the sixth one gets into a whole new level of talking shit. And I've been a little hesitant to even publish that because I've been feeling like, is this just a ticking time bomb that somebody's going to discover one day and my life's just going to blow up because of how real and honest I've been? And yet, you know, I love publishing books. I want to continue publishing like this is my legacy.
This is my thing that 10 years from now, having published something like 20 minutes a day, let's say I get 100 hours a year of dictation, which I'm easily doing at this rate. Imagine in a decade that you'd have a thousand hours of these you could go through. That'd be a catalog that almost no human would have, that raw quantity. Assuming there's still humans reading in ten years. And my whole life would be recorded day by day. In the short term, they don't do anything. But I'm like, over the next decade, imagine someone finding one of these and they'd be able to buy a hundred of them. Like that's something I could never replace either. Like I can't go back and dictate 10 years ago in my life day by day. That'd be something priceless for my kids or grandkids or whatever. It'd be something amazing that you'd get to go through somebody's life in that much detail day by day. This is something that's worth doing. At the same time, I do need to figure out how I can publish it on an ongoing basis and minimize my legal risk. I don't want to have the whole damn series come tumbling down. But I guess there's just no going through life with no risk either. I mean, to me, the biggest risk in life is that you go through life so risk-averse that you don't really live, and I don't want to do that. So I'll research more about autobiographical fiction. If you have wanted to document your own life this way and turn it into books your family could hold one day, book a private call with me and I will help you start.
To wrap the day up, I put the kids to bed. We went to bed late at like 9.45. All three of us took showers and had dinner after basketball, and then we got in bed and snuggled up, and I went to bed so happy, feeling like, man, this is what I need. Like, this leaves my house feeling like a home. I've got the kids here. At the same time, I'm wondering about my ex-wife. She wanted all this space, and she's got it, and I'm looking forward to seeing how she did with it tomorrow.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Move-In Day and a Hundred Thousand Thank Yous
Originally published January 8, 2026.
This is my journal entry from January 8, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
Awesome move-in day today. I'm so excited to tell you about it. I woke up for the last time at the place in my ex-wife's neighborhood, picked the kids up and took the kids to school. And after dropping them off, I came back to my new place to get on the computer and rent my truck. I chose a U-Haul truck downtown. And it's only $20 to rent it plus like a dollar and something a mile. And you refill the gas up too. So it should be under $50. I set the rental for noon and have a little snack here. Then I go to the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that my sponsor is meeting me at today. We have a nice time there. And I talk about, again, how AA prepared me to have a divorce that was much easier than early sobriety. There's another girl that's just starting divorcing her wife, and I share after her about my experience with divorce, and a few other people do too. It's a really nice, warm meeting.
Then I head back to go get the truck. I stop at the new place real quick and get ready. Then I... Actually, no, I go back to the old place first to try and grab some shit real quick and then run it over to the new place before the U-Haul truck. So I've got everything ready. I get down and grab the truck. It's super easy. And then I get to work. A friend's not available until after three. So I take the moving truck straight to the old place. And I load everything I can in there, mainly a few nightstands. And then I go to my ex-wife's place, take apart the twin bed, load the twin mattresses and the beds for that into my truck along with my late father's headboards, get everything in there. Have a nice conversation with my ex-wife about moving on with our life. And at the same time, we're still connected. We still love each other. And this is just a new chapter of our family that doesn't include sex and finances tied together or being married, but does include love for each other and working together, which is really nice.
I drive the moving truck to the house, park it on the road, and walk everything in. I've got a good sweat doing that. Good workout. No need to do anything physical today. We're getting it in today. I make sure to have lots of little meals too instead of bigger meals because I don't want to slow down. I'm thinking that might be the way to eat, even though that guy in Metabolic Freedom encourages fewer meals. My body seems to like having smaller meals and not getting tied down with being overly full. After I unload the moving truck here, I start to just try and rearrange things, get set up and wait for my friend. And I have a little hummus to eat with celery and some of the crackers and a cucumber.
My friend tells me he's ready to go. So I drive up to meet him at his place and pick him up. We go to my ex-wife's place first to grab the dressers, which is all that's left there. She's already got her full bed set up, which is nice, so she'll be ready to sleep there. And it worked perfect for her that I took the twin beds out when she had time. We get the dressers loaded up quick. It's amazing. He's a former professional mover. It's just beautiful to watch how he thinks about moving things and how skillful he handles something like a hardwood antique dresser, loads it up by himself into a truck and doesn't even want me to help, so he can do it just right. He gets everything positioned in the truck. Then we go to the house in my ex-wife's neighborhood. We get the king bed in there, the table and chairs in there, the desk in there, and everything but the bed frame goes in there.
Which is actually perfect because I need to come drop him off in this neighborhood anyway. So he says to just toss the bed frame in there on the way back. We get everything loaded by 4.30 and are on the way to my place. So we're making great time. We pull up here and I try and pull up in the street, but he says, no, go around the alley. Go around the alley and it's a tight fit. I'm really glad I got a 10 foot truck, which is a small truck, but still, for driving, you know, down an alley, the 10 foot truck is perfect. It's nine feet high too. So you got to watch the clearance. I bumped some of the trees and bushes hanging out in the alley, which is pretty much unavoidable. He parks the truck so close to the telephone pole that it's gently leaning up against it, which leaves the alley clear for other people to drive by. We unload everything, which is the sweatiest thing I've done today.
He shows me how to get a hold of the dresser with one hand to balance and one hand for the main grip. We carry one dresser in, the other one he wheels in on a dolly, which was much easier for me, but the second one we carry in. He finds perfect places to put them in the house, and we get my king bed in the house as well. At just a little before 6, we've wrapped up and got everything loaded in the house, ready to sleep here tonight as soon as I set everything up. Meanwhile, I'm really enjoying my time with him today. It's great talking with him and hearing some of his stories. It's great for him to get out of the house. I've known him for years, and it's really nice to have this experience together. I could have asked people from AA to come over, but this is a perfect opportunity for time with him and to allow him to remember all his stories as a professional mover. I asked him what was the worst thing he moved before, and he said three dentist chairs, incredibly heavy expensive stuff on them, and he had to take them down three flights of stairs. Like god, that sounds miserable. Days like this remind me how much real time with people I care about means, and if you want that kind of connection, I'd love for you to set up a call with me and connect with me on the call.
I take him back to his place and drop him off and I love he has an open attitude about money. He's like, you know, whatever, whatever you feel is right, I'm sure it'll be more than whatever I'd ask. I have two hundred dollar bills in my wallet so I give him two hundred dollars for three hours of his time helping me move, which I feel is more than fair. Now, I could have hired little helpers for a couple hundred bucks for two people for two hours on U-Haul, and I think, did I give him too much? But then I'm listening to the book Happy Money as I drive away, and I load my bed frame up, and it's like the guy's... Ken Honda, the author, is talking about how he gives people more than they ask for. And it leaves a really good feeling and a really good karma. And I'm like, I feel great about giving him $200 for three hours of really valuable work. That means between him and the truck and the gas, the entire move is going to cost me $300. Plus, my ex-wife gave me all the beds I have in my house, which is enough to sleep the kids on and me.
At some point, I could have a girlfriend. We could all sleep in this house on the beds that my ex-wife gave me, which would probably be at least $1,000 to buy all those beds. So grateful. I've been thriving saying thank you so much. My God, thank you for this huge house. Thank you for the beds to sleep in. I go get the truck gassed up and dropped off at 645, so I avoid paying $20 extra for after-hours check-in. Then I drive up to a new discount grocery store near my house, and I want to check it out. I've been meaning to, and it's so close to my house. I'm like, tonight's the night to give it a try. I run into two people I know there.
The first one is an acquaintance from school who was really enthusiastic about Author in St. Petersburg. I talked to him for like 10 minutes outside. He asked me, is everything going all right? He tells me a little bit about what he's doing. I tell him that he said he doesn't have much time to read now. I'm like, well, if you have time to listen to audiobooks, my audiobooks are on Audible. And if your wife has a subscription, you can listen at no additional cost to the next three books in the series. So he's enthusiastic about that, and he's happy to see I'm doing well.
After that, I walk in, and I'm surprised how small the store is. It looked so much bigger. That's what she said. It looked so much bigger. And I get in there. I'm like, it's kind of small. Makes you really impressed with the fruit and vegetable section at a bigger grocery store. This place has like a really small section, but some of the things are dirt cheap. Like the German sauerkraut was like $1.50 or something. And I've been paying like four or five bucks for those at the regular grocery store. So I load up on German sauerkraut. I get plenty of fruit, strawberries, apples. I need to have all the stuff for the kids now since I'll be sending them to school. And they love when I pick them up and I have a nice... big bowl of fruit for them, especially since we're not getting fast food anything.
I see another guy I know from my yoga studio. I gave him my book I Was Famous on the Internet. He talks to me a little bit. I tell him that I'm going to a new yoga studio. I don't mention any kind of reason why. I'm just like, man, people have been saying it's cool, so I've been going there. He turns out he's been there a bunch of times as well. And then he lets me go. He says he needs to continue with his shopping. He probably talked to me for three or four minutes. But I end up feeling like, you know, he didn't like talking to me, feeling like he rejected me after he stopped in the store and had a conversation with me for a few minutes. And I realized I don't know what he's in the middle of. I don't know if he's got someone waiting at home, or he's trying to make his next video, or he's got an appointment to get to later, or, you know, he's about to start drinking for the night, or like, I have no idea what else he's enthusiastic about on Thursday night. It could be anything. It's 11, 11 p.m. as I'm recording this. How cool is that? But it's funny. I observe my thoughts and I'm like, okay. I throw on an audio book and move on.
I finish up Ken Honda's Happy Money book, which is fantastic. It's a great reminder that I do a lot of things right with money. And I'm saying thank you, thank you, thank you so much for the money I have. Thank you for the place to live. Thank you for the beds. Thank you for the landlords next door. Thank you for all of it. I get home from doing the grocery trip, and I have dinner right there, which ends up being... I've had four Larabars throughout the day. I've been hungry today. I've had four Larabars. I had a salad earlier, and I ate about a thing of hummus. I have some more hummus, and I get...
I eat three whole avocados and four bananas. I'm still hungry right now. I power through all that stuff with a little toasted sesame oil and salt on the avocados because fuck it, I forgot the soy sauce. Like one of the few things I still have to get in my house is the soy sauce, which I was going to put like an Asian avocado thing with sesame oil and soy sauce. I forgot half of that, but it turns out salt worked just as well. That's one of the big ingredients in soy sauce after all. So I put down that to give myself a nice full belly, but not too full. Then I get into the bedroom here to get to work on blacking the windows out because I want to get a good night of sleep in this bitch, especially my first night in here. And I need to do the blackout because it's so easy to get to the windows before I've got the bed set up.
So I butchered some of the blackout strips earlier, but I get it all right today. Everything looks awesomely blacked out as hell right now as I'm recording this in the bedroom. After getting all the windows blacked out, I set up the beds. And the kids' twin beds, two twin beds side by side, and my king bed fit perfectly in this room with my late father's nightstand he made for me in the middle of it. I mean, this is absolutely gorgeous setup. Gorgeous setup for a bedroom. I love it. It's got an air return in here too. Meanwhile, I'm listening to Ali Wong's special Single Lady, which is funny as hell. And I'm amazed how much overlap she has. She's talking about what a great relationship she has with her ex-husband and all her adventures dating. I'm like, this is some really nice validation right now. Like her experience and mine are overlapping quite a bit right here. How nice.
After I get all that set up, then I'm getting ready to shower. I throw down some more whole foods real quick. I eat some sauerkraut. I had to get into that $1.50 German sauerkraut. That shit was good. This one's a little saltier than some of the other ones. And then right as I'm finishing getting the bed set up, I'm getting a door light blocker. You slide this thing under the door so it blocks the light that way, getting my lamp and putting the finishing touches on my setup. I'm like, you know what? You know what I should do? I should listen to this Kenny G album. It's called Breathless. My late father used to listen to it. It came out in 1992. Starts off with A Joy of Life, then the next song's Forever in Love. I listened to A Joy of Life last night. So I started off with Forever in Love. Now, when I first, my late father used to listen to this.
And I remember a year or two ago when I first listened to this album, I could only get one song at a time without sobbing and remembering my late father in grief. It literally took me four different times of going through the joy of life, forever in love, in the rain, and then sentimental. It took four different listens, and I cried every single time. And I listened to the joy of life yesterday to kind of calm down a bit, and I'm like, I'm good. I don't think we're going to need to do that tonight. But I put on Forever in Love and I started sobbing right away. I just started feeling so grateful. I'm like, look at this. In some ways, my life just got utterly destroyed with my career and my divorce and moving out. But look at this beautiful house I'm in. I love the neighborhood. Look at how much work, how healthy I am that I moved all this stuff in the house except...
The one truckload of things a friend helped me with, which would be the two dressers, the king bed, the desk, the entertainment center that I got for free, and the dining room table. Everything else, the other twin beds. And I helped him. He appreciated my help, said I was a good helper. I helped him. Like, thank God I'm this strong and this active that I can do all this stuff today. And I had energy for all of it. I didn't have a moment where I was too tired the whole day. I got all the blackout strips set up right. I love how functional I am. It's such a gift. Thank you for that. And I just felt so much love. I'm like, you know that last house was a transition house and I'm super grateful for it. At the same time I was like, the whole time I was in there, this is a short-term house. If you're starting a fresh chapter and want a sounding board for it, I'd be glad to talk it through with you on a private one-on-one call with me.
And now I'm in this house. I'm like, I hope I'm here for a long time. Thank God for this house. Thank God for my ex-wife taking such good care of me, helping me out so much. And I've got like $20,000 in cash because I also took like a $12,000 cash advance from Discover. But it's on a balance transfer that I transferred to Citi, so I only paid 3% to borrow it for 18 months. Let's go. And I'm just thinking, like, thank you.
I have so much money right now. I have such a beautiful place to live. I'm desirable at least to some women. What a great life. I'm healthy. I have work I'm excited to do. What an incredible life. I shaved. I kept crying. Then I went to get in the shower and the fucking water flow out of that wand thing they have. I'm like this. Bitch is like fucking gently raining on me right now. Like I can barely feel the water. I can feel the time it takes from the water to hit my head and run down to my neck like this. I want to be fucking drenched by something. Tomorrow I'm getting my, what I've turned into a four gallon a minute instead of a two gallon shower head. I'm going to get that out of the last place along with the soy sauce. And we're going to get that set up properly.
I'm super grateful for my first shower here. Super grateful everything is set up for me to have a nice night of sleep. Man, what a gift. One of the things I remembered from Happy Money that he said today, that the guy he learned from had somebody who wanted to borrow money from him and start a business, and the guy said, I'll do it, but I want you to say thank you, arigato, 100,000 times first. I'm like, that's what I want to do. I want to say thank you 100,000 times. If I say thank you once a minute for an hour, that's 60. And even if I only manage to remember to do it 10 hours a day or maybe round up and we'll get 1,000 thank yous a day, that's 100 days. And I'll say thank you 100,000 times. And that's going to absolutely move everything in my life.
You know, that's the basic energy change, to say thank you instead of fuck you or I hate this or I don't like it. It's not right. Thank you. It's what you're grateful for you tend to get more of. Thank you. I'm going to wrap it up for tonight and see how my new night's sleep is. It's 1119. So happy for this day. Thank you. If anyone besides me actually listened to this, thank you.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
The Old House by the Lake
Originally published December 6, 2025.
This is my journal entry from December 6, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I woke up this morning around 7:00 a.m. after a rough night of sleep. It took me hours to fall asleep, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it was because I went to bed too early, or because I didn’t do any vigorous exercise yesterday—even though I did walk a lot. Still, despite the lack of sleep, I woke up with more clarity than I’d had in days. Almost immediately, I knew something important: these downtown apartments aren’t it.
I can already feel myself getting aggravated by all the things people complain about in the negative reviews—broken elevators, surprise fees, unresponsive maintenance, dog shit in the hallways, corporate property managers who don’t care because they’re just a middle layer between you and the actual owner. I don’t want to be at the mercy of some corporate entity that can leave me hanging whenever it’s convenient for them. Yes, I’ve had good apartment experiences in the past, but this situation is different now, especially with kids. What I actually love is having a landlord who lives nearby or is personally invested in the property. That’s the setup I have now, and it’s ideal for me.
I wake up with my son still here, and it feels really good. The loneliness that’s been creeping in—especially on Friday nights and Saturday mornings—is completely gone with him around. He’s ready to head back down the street to go to Snowfest, so we get up together. He eats an apple, I have a couple of Lara Bars, and I walk him back down to my ex-wife’s house. After that, I come home and immediately get to work, deep-diving into Zillow.
The clarity keeps building. Apartments just feel inconvenient for what I actually want. I don’t care about walkability in the way a lot of people do. Some people want to walk to bars and nightlife. I’m sober. I can drive any time of day. I don’t need to walk so I can get drunk and stumble back to my apartment. I want to be able to get in and out easily. I want space. The thought that keeps pissing me off is paying $2,900 a month for 432 square feet at Viv. That genuinely makes my stomach turn. I’m not doing that.
I spend about two straight hours searching—houses all over St. Petersburg, different neighborhoods, different price ranges—trying to feel into what actually makes sense. Then I head to my yoga studio for yoga. There’s a girl there who kind of looks like a woman I met, along with several other people I know. I take a 10:30 a.m. power flow with a yoga instructor, and it’s a solid workout. She has us holding standing positions, dropping into catcher’s stance, bouncing there forever, forearm planks, regular planks—just grinding it out. It’s intense in a good way.
On the way out, I briefly consider talking to a few women. One is probably around fifty, very friendly and beautiful, someone I’ve seen a few times before. Another woman in her fifties comes to mind—she’s talked to me before, she’s read my books, I walked in with her today, and I know she’s single. At least in my opinion, she could probably use some action. Then there’s the girl who looks like that woman I met. I think about talking to her too, but I’m not convinced it’s actually her, and I feel like I would’ve recognized her more clearly if it were. In the end, I don’t talk to anyone. My focus is elsewhere today. I want to get home, figure out my living situation, and go to Whole Foods.
Right after yoga, I drive by a house I’d already texted about earlier. I have a tour scheduled for 6:00 p.m. tonight. As the day unfolds, Crescent Lake starts to stand out more and more as the ideal spot for me. Especially with kids—it’s perfect. Playground, walking paths, open space, dog park. It feels like a real neighborhood instead of a box stacked on top of other boxes. There’s a house in an incredible location near the park. It’s listed as three bedrooms, though really it looks like two true bedrooms plus a bonus room, about 1,400 square feet.
The downside is the price. Rent is $2,700 a month, and the owner wants first month, last month, and a security deposit. That means I’d be dropping somewhere between $6,000 and $7,000 just to move in. That last month’s rent especially feels financially inefficient right now. Still, I start asking myself a more honest question: if I knew everything would work out financially, what would actually matter to me? The answer is clear. Location. And then the next layer: what do I actually care about in a location?
After going to my yoga studio today, I realized I might’ve had a bit of a stick up my ass about it and probably judged it too quickly. The truth is, there are plenty of attractive women who go there. There’s no reason I couldn’t meet someone to date—or even a future second wife—through that community. Hell, maybe I already know one there. Seeing a friend earlier this week, talking with my massage therapist, and hearing people’s stories keeps reminding me how valuable community really is when it comes to dating. So much of dating can be easy and natural when you share friends, routines, and environments instead of forcing yourself into cold approaches with strangers. That realization softened something in me. If you are single and tired of cold approaches, I have come to believe most good connection grows out of shared community and routine, and you can set up a call with me to look at how to build that into your own life.
Once I let that land, Crescent Lake started to make even more sense. If I lived there, my yoga studio would be less than a mile away. I could walk there or drive over in minutes. I could walk the kids to the park almost every day and let them run around the playground or go to the dog park. My ex-wife and I could even coordinate things easily—she could take the dogs to the park and meet me there to drop the kids off. I could walk the loop around Crescent Lake regularly. There are tons of people there all the time—runners, walkers, families, and yes, plenty of attractive women. It actually feels like the kind of environment that could support my life instead of complicating it.
Crescent Lake Park itself is really nice. I texted a friend about it, and she told me she used to live right there and loved the neighborhood, even though she eventually moved farther away. The more I looked at other houses in the area, the clearer it became how well this location lines up with everything that matters to me. It’s close to the kids’ school. It’s near multiple yoga studios. I could still go to the AA meeting I recently started. Crunch Fitness would still be easy to get to. There are tennis courts scattered all around the area. Downtown is close enough to pop into whenever I want, but far enough away that the neighborhood itself looks quiet and grounded.
One thing that really pushed me over the edge with the apartment complexes—both the ones I toured yesterday and the ones I looked into this morning—was the sheer volume of negative reviews about noise. That hit home. One of the things I absolutely love about the house I’m in now is how quiet it is. I can record audiobooks at any time of day without worrying about background noise. And when it comes to sleep, especially with kids, the idea of living somewhere loud is a nightmare. Imagine renting an apartment where the kids can’t even sleep over because it’s too noisy at night. That would be brutal. And while noise is technically a risk in any apartment, it seems almost guaranteed in the heart of downtown.
A lot of the reviews mentioned Janus Live and other venues making it impossible to sleep until early morning hours. Twenty years ago, that wouldn’t have bothered me at all—I’d probably still be awake. But now, I don’t want to live around people who are okay with that kind of lifestyle, or places where enough people are miserable that they’re leaving angry one-star reviews about it. That feels like a clear signal.
I kept looking around the rest of St. Pete and finally realized something simple: it makes sense to start with this house tour tonight before doing anything else. I don’t need to keep spinning myself out. I’ll make the finances work. And if I knew, truly knew, that everything would work out financially, I’d choose a place in a great location with unique benefits—somewhere I could literally walk across the street and be at Crescent Lake Park. A place where life could unfold naturally. Who knows what could happen there.
I had a great conversation with the two people from New York at the AA meeting yesterday, and they told me they really liked my take on manifesting. So here it is, clearly, the way I actually understand it. To me, manifesting is not lying in bed asking God, Shiva, or the Universe to drop something in my lap. It’s not staring at vision boards and imagining checks in the mail or convincing myself I’ve already won the lottery. That version always felt off. The Secret has some truth in it, but taken literally, it turns into bullshit pretty fast.
My version of manifesting is much simpler and much more grounded. I think the thoughts I want to think. Then I take real actions that put me in a position to receive what I want. After that, it’s no longer up to me how or when it happens. There’s clearly something impersonal at work—collective consciousness, God, reality, whatever you want to call it—that doesn’t respond to begging or fantasy. Just asking for something doesn’t mean it gets delivered. What does work is positioning yourself so that when opportunity passes by, you’re actually there to meet it. If that grounded take on manifesting resonates and you want help positioning your own life so what you want can actually find you, book a one-on-one call with me and we will map it out together.
I don’t see much value in visualizing lottery wins or pretending money is already yours if your life isn’t aligned to receive it. If you were already rich, would you even care about winning the lottery? Probably not. That tells me something important. The goal isn’t to fantasize outcomes—it’s to build a life where the outcomes you want naturally cross your path.
That’s where Crescent Lake keeps coming back into my mind. I had this same feeling about South Tampa, about Michigan, about downtown St. Pete. But Crescent Lake stands out. It feels like the kind of place where I could walk in the morning, talk on the phone, listen to an audiobook, and just be in my body. And maybe one morning I smile at a beautiful woman. She smiles back. We start talking. And who knows—next thing you know, we’re dying together. That’s the kind of manifesting I believe in. Not forcing, not chasing, not hustling—just being in the right environment.
So today, Crescent Lake feels like the best positioning move I can make. There are three houses for rent on the exact same block, which feels almost comically aligned. I’m going to check out all of them. If this first one doesn’t work, I’ll look at the other two. But it makes sense to start here.
Earlier today, I went to Whole Foods, and there were tons of attractive women there. But I noticed something important in myself. I don’t want to force anything. The pickup-artist approach doesn’t feel right to me anymore—just walking up to women everywhere and leading with “you’re hot.” That whole grind mindset is something I’ve lived before, in business and other areas of life, and it mostly produced suffering. Sure, you might get a yes once in a while, but you also rack up a lot of awkward or negative interactions, and you end up disturbing people who are just trying to live their lives.
That’s not what I want anymore. I don’t want to hustle relationships. I want to live in a place where connection can happen naturally, where shared space and repeated presence do the work for me. Where I don’t have to try so hard. Right now, Crescent Lake feels like the cleanest expression of that idea.
And if I’m actually on the right frequency with someone, we’ll run into each other and it’ll be organic. That keeps coming back to me. On the drive home from Whole Foods, I start running through the mental Rolodex. There’s a girl from yoga who’s hot—I could text her and see what she’s been up to. But then I remember I got her number a month ago and never texted her. There’s also the woman in her fifties I saw at yoga today. I could text her too. But neither of those moves feels right. I’m tired of feeling like I’m out there hustling and grinding and pursuing all the time, especially when it doesn’t seem like anyone actually wants to be pursued that way. I don’t want to force things just to have something happen.
With the woman in her fifties especially, I can see how easily that could go sideways. I don’t want to pursue her just to have a one-night stand. That feels like a terrible idea. I can already see how that could turn into attachment on her side and awkwardness on mine, followed by some version of me saying, “Wait a minute, you can’t have kids, this isn’t a long-term thing,” and suddenly I’ve burned a bridge for no good reason. I’d much rather stay friendly, give her books, and keep things clean. I don’t want to torch community connections for short-term gratification. I’m trying to walk that line where I’m available, paying attention, and positioned for organic things to happen—without forcing situations that create problems later.
I’ve definitely done the forcing thing before, especially with work. I messaged thousands of Facebook page owners back in the day, hustling hard just to get my first hundred or so clients. There were endless negative interactions, tons of wasted time, and none of those clients are still with me today. Not one. None of the things I got through pure hustle stood the test of time. That sticks with me. Pickup artist books teach the same thing when it comes to women: grind, push, collect numbers, make the move. And sure, you might get results, but how many of those connections actually last? Very few. They burn hot and fast and then disappear.
At the same time, I can’t lie to myself either. I was swiping like a maniac on Match back in the day—winking, messaging, doing all that shit—and that’s how I found my ex-wife. So clearly there’s some balance here. It’s not all passive. It’s not all hustle. There’s an ideal combination of positioning yourself well and then actually taking action when something real shows up. What feels right for me now is being present and living in the right neighborhood.
I keep thinking about it from a success perspective. What if I start making a bunch of money and then realize I’m stuck in some stupid house I don’t even like because I tried to play it safe? That would feel incredibly dumb. Imagine renting a cheap place in an awkward location, then things take off financially, and I’m sitting there thinking, why the hell did I lock myself into this lease in a place that doesn’t inspire me? That’s one of the worst outcomes I can imagine.
Being in the right place matters to me. It inspires me. If I’m paying $2,700 a month to live near Crescent Lake, I know myself well enough to say I’ll be out there, engaged with life, prepared for opportunities, and in position when things show up. Renting a place I actually want—one a woman would want to move into too—matters. Crescent Lake feels like that kind of neighborhood. It feels like a place where life could expand instead of contract. If you are trying to build a life and an environment that expands instead of contracts, that is one of my favorite things to talk through — schedule a private call with me and we can dig into it together.
I’m genuinely excited to go look at this house later today. At the same time, I notice a little resistance once I get home and eat a salad. That familiar resistance to doing my actual work. I hit a point where I realize, okay, I’ve done enough Zillow scrolling for today. I know the next place I’m going to look at. I don’t need backup options right now. I’m going to see this house, and if I like it, I don’t need to keep shopping. What I do need to do today is sit down and crank out my work and my books. That’s the part that actually moves my life forward. So I’m glad I’m finally doing that now.
It’s now five hours later. Five full hours. I went to look at the house, and it turns out it’s 103 years old. And somehow, that doesn’t bother me at all. What matters is the location, which is absolutely incredible. I love the neighborhood. The owners are genuinely awesome. The house has plenty of space—for me, for the kids, for a woman to move in someday, for pets. It just works. The contrast is almost funny when I think about how I felt touring Viv yesterday. That place is brand new, shiny, modern. This house is over a century old, and yet it feels infinitely more alive. Being close to Crescent Lake Park is unreal. That alone changes everything.
The house is currently occupied, so we briefly said hello to the tenants. Then the two owners walked us through the place, answered all my questions, and gave me a real tour. I got good vibes from both of them. I can genuinely see them being great neighbors and great landlords. I could picture the kids being happy there. I could picture myself settling into that neighborhood and staying for years, which is exactly what I want right now. Not another short-term scramble. Not another placeholder. A place I can actually land.
I felt ready to apply the moment I left the house. Completely ready. But then I remembered last night—how convinced I was that I should apply for the apartment at Viv, and how relieved I felt the next morning that I hadn’t. That memory slowed me down in a good way. So I’m going to sleep on this one too. As of right now, my plan is to apply first thing in the morning. The cost is basically the same as that 432-square-foot apartment I looked at yesterday, except this place has roughly three times the space, two parking spots right behind the house, and zero elevators. By the time I’d be waiting for an elevator downtown, I could already be halfway around Crescent Lake.
After the showing, I took a walk around Crescent Lake Park to let everything settle in my body. About halfway around, I ended up walking behind a woman, so I called out “hello” from a distance so I wouldn’t startle her by suddenly appearing right behind her in the dark. We ended up talking for about ten minutes. She was thinking about moving here and staying with family for the holidays, and she was literally on her phone using ChatGPT for real estate. That part made me laugh internally.
I was asking almost all the questions. She was answering, but she wasn’t really asking anything about me. About halfway through the conversation, I shook her hand and got her name. I kept wondering if I should just walk ahead instead of lingering, but it felt awkward to cut it short for no reason. She’s attractive, but she also seemed a little reserved and not fully present. Eventually she said she needed to head back to where she was staying, gave me a high five, and we parted ways. I walked the last couple of blocks back to my car thinking about whether I should have asked for her number.
I realized something important in that moment. Just because I could ask for a phone number doesn’t mean I should. I didn’t feel any real connection there. She didn’t seem particularly engaged with me either. Asking for her number would’ve just been me doing something out of habit, not out of alignment. It would’ve been a distraction, not a step forward. So I didn’t. Maybe I’ll see her again sometime. If we cross paths again and the energy is different, maybe something grows from that. If not, that’s fine too.
Walking back to my car, I felt calm. Grounded. Present. And more certain than I’ve felt in a while that I’m finally putting myself in the right place—not forcing anything, not chasing, just positioning myself where life can actually meet me.
I drive back home, and my mind just keeps looping about whether or not to go to the 8:00 p.m. AA meeting tonight—the speaker meeting where I might see people I know. I eat a little bowl of the potato and bean soup I made earlier. After walking around Whole Foods today, I had this very simple realization: why the hell wouldn’t I just make my own bean soup with potatoes? It’s basically free compared to buying prepared food. The potatoes were about $5, the beans were $1, and I threw in some celery and carrots. That’s it. Cheap, filling, and I’ve got a ton of it. I did go a little overboard on the seasoning, but whatever. It’s still solid food.
After eating, I finally land on the real lesson from two weeks ago: Jerry sitting at home on a Saturday night and skipping an AA meeting is a great way to wake up lonely and a little unhinged on Sunday. So I decide to get my ass out of the house. I drive about fifteen minutes to the meeting, and it hits me that if I lived in the Crescent Lake house, this group would be way closer—maybe half the distance, maybe even a third. That matters more than I usually acknowledge.
When I get there, I recognize several people right away. I sit next to two guys I know, and we’re joking around before the meeting starts. I’m relaxed. One of the speakers happened to share a first name with a character from Pulp Fiction, so I couldn’t resist riffing a line from that movie at him. It got a good laugh, and it felt nice to just be there, connected, not hiding out at home.
On the drive to the meeting, I’d been thinking a lot about a massage therapist, which surprised me because I hadn’t thought about her much recently. I caught myself thinking, she should text me. I even said it out loud in the car. If she’s thinking about me, she should text me. Then, sitting in the meeting, another thought creeps in: yeah, but men usually text first, so why don’t you just send her a message? I remember someone sharing recently about staying connected—sending simple messages to people you care about. I realize I don’t do that enough. Especially with people I already know. I need to keep people in mind more and let them know I’m thinking of them.
So I text a massage therapist. I keep it simple: Hey, I keep thinking of you tonight and hope you’re doing well. That’s it. Two hours later, there’s still no response. After I send it, I feel vulnerable, almost exposed, and part of me wishes I hadn’t sent it. At the same time, I think about how grateful I was when my sister called me two weeks ago when I was really struggling. Most of the time, we don’t reach out enough. Obviously, if there’s a restraining order or someone has explicitly asked you not to contact them, that’s different. But absent something like that, I think it’s generally a good thing to reach out to people you’re connected with. It helps me think about others instead of staying locked in my own head.
On the way home, I listen to Alan Watts. He talks about how the more interesting people tend to be the ones who think about others more. That lands for me. I want to be more interesting. I want to think about other people more. Tonight, I notice that I was thinking about a massage therapist, about a woman I met on a walk around Crescent Lake, about the landlords from the house, about people at the meeting. That feels like a good direction.
I stop by my mom’s house on the way home and show her the house near Crescent Lake. She lights up when she sees that it’s close to the lake because she could bring her dog and walk him around there. That reaction matters to me. This is the first place I’ve seriously looked at where my mom has shown genuine enthusiasm. I take that as a good sign. My ex-wife has also said the kids would love Crescent Lake, and that lines up with everything else I’m seeing. It really feels like all the arrows are pointing in the same direction. This neighborhood makes sense. This house looks like exactly what I’ve been looking for.
So my plan is to send in the application tomorrow, wrap this decision up, and let myself rest. It’s 10:42 p.m. now, and it feels like the right time to go to bed.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Hunting Downtown for My Reset
Originally published December 5, 2025.
This is my journal entry from December 5, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I had a call with Blockchain Pill first thing this morning at 8:00 a.m., and we ended up talking for three full hours. I felt genuinely honored that he wanted to hear every part of my story—everything from the divorce to my entire journey as a content creator, my thoughts on ICP, my books, and where I see myself going next. There’s easily enough material from that conversation for him to release at least four videos on his channel, which is meaningful because a lot of the people who used to follow me can now follow him. Talking with him gave me real clarity about content creation going forward, and that clarity feels like a breakthrough.
I’m completely happy to talk with another content creator on Zoom, especially someone with an existing audience. What I’m no longer interested in—or set up to do—is making videos on my own channels. That chapter is closed. I can still have my face and my story online through interviews and conversations like this, but I can’t be the one producing and uploading videos myself anymore. That boundary feels solid and healthy. With books, on the other hand, I can do this entirely on my own. Writing and dictating books like this is something I enjoy deeply, something that works long-term, and something I can sustain. What I don’t do well anymore is the constant grind of creating and distributing video content.
The idea that feels right is using interviews like this to talk about my books and let that drive sales naturally. If even a small number of people start buying my books and become repeat readers, that could turn into a meaningful stream of passive income over time. Especially since I’m dictating constantly, there would always be new books for them to buy. This format feels perfect for the people who used to watch me on YouTube—familiar, personal, but without me having to run my own channels. If you are dreaming up a way to earn from your own writing or story without running a channel, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we will figure out your version of it on our call.
After the call wrapped up, my friend an older friend—who’s supposed to come over to work on his book—let me know he couldn’t make it today, and we rescheduled. That ended up working out just fine, because I was fired up and ready to go look at apartments downtown. I talked with my ex-wife on the phone, and she agreed that a downtown apartment sounded like a great move for me. I’d be close to the kids’ school, close enough to her, but far enough away to have my own life. Plus, I’d have access to everything downtown offers. With that confirmation, I was ready to take immediate action.
I jumped in the car and toured several apartments back-to-back in the Edge District. I started with 930 Central, also known as Central Flats. It’s one of the more affordable options in the area, around $2,000 a month. I looked at it, and it was fine—nothing wrong with it—but I wasn’t feeling it. I knew I needed to see more. From there, I went across the street to Viv, a brand-new apartment complex that only started moving people in about a month ago. I toured a studio apartment on the fifteenth floor, and the view was absolutely incredible. The balcony alone was tempting.
But the moment I walked inside, the space felt tiny. My brain immediately started trying to solve impossible puzzles. How would I stay here overnight with the kids? How would I have a girl over and still make this work if the kids were around? Even something simple like the life coach coming over on Wednesday to work—would there be enough room for a bed, a desk, and a setup to record? I loved the view. I loved the balcony. But the reality of the space didn’t quite work. To upgrade to a one-bedroom, I’d be looking at over $3,000 a month.
A leasing agent told me my total cost to live at Viv would be around $2,900 a month. Hearing that number made me pause hard. If I’m paying $2,900 a month, I might as well rent a house somewhere. Paying that much for an apartment feels insane. It immediately made me think about Michigan, where I could have an apartment almost this nice for less than half the price. Of course, this isn’t Michigan. And that reality is part of the equation now, whether I like it or not.
I really enjoyed walking around downtown and taking everything in—the streets, the buildings, the people, the general energy. I noticed there’s a Publix just a couple of blocks away, and Sun State Yoga is only about five blocks from Viv. From a pure location standpoint, it’s excellent. It feels alive and walkable in a way that immediately appeals to me. After wandering around a bit, I walked down to Camden Apartments and took a tour there with a leasing agent. Coming straight from Viv, though, Camden felt underwhelming. Even though Viv was basically a ghost town—with hardly anyone moved in yet, despite a lot of units being reserved and something like 212 apartments still available, which looks like most of the building—it still felt more exciting. There was something kind of cool about the idea of leasing at Viv and essentially having the building to myself for a while.
Camden, on the other hand, looked mostly full. There were several hot girls hanging around outside, just like at Central Flats, but I still wasn’t feeling it. It’s only about seven years older than Viv, but it already feels dated by comparison, and the cost is almost the same. After Camden, I walked a couple more blocks and toured Windsor. The leasing agent showed me multiple units. I really wanted something on the top floor for the view, but they didn’t have anything available up there. She showed me both a studio and a one-bedroom. The moment I walked into the one-bedroom, my immediate thought was, yes—this is the kind of space I actually need. Not that closet masquerading as a studio at Viv.
Standing there, I kept thinking that if I could somehow mash together the best parts of all these places—the view from Viv, the space from Windsor, the location convenience—it might actually work. But again, the cost kept snapping me back to reality. Even here, where it was slightly cheaper, I was still in the range where I could rent a whole damn house for about the same price as apartment living. That’s hard to ignore.
I also found myself reflecting on the negative reviews I’d read before touring these places. Viv is brand new, so it doesn’t have much of a review history yet. But most of the other complexes are loaded with one-star reviews describing everything from dog shit in the elevators to elevators being broken constantly, maintenance requests going unaddressed for months, surprise fees slapped on residents when they move out, and all kinds of other nonsense. Sure, some of those reviews are probably written by toxic, pissed-off people who are exaggerating. But one of the negative reviews I read was written by a woman I actually know from Toastmasters. And if that’s her experience, then there’s definitely some truth in it.
That brought up a bigger concern: getting locked into a lease where you don’t even fully understand what the real cost will be, where fees magically appear later, where you’re restricted in which internet provider you can use. Viv actually handled that part well—you can choose either Spectrum or Frontier, which is great. Most of the other complexes force you into one option. I already have Frontier, and I want to keep it. It’s $30 a month. It irrationally pisses me off to think about paying $80 a month for some bundled TV and cable bullshit when I already have cheap internet, or canceling a Frontier promo and losing money just to comply with an apartment’s setup.
At that point, I started seriously asking myself how the hell I’d even afford these places long term. I know the numbers. I’ve talked to ChatGPT about it. I have enough money to comfortably cover the next several months, and I’ve got 0% interest credit cards. I realistically have at least six months of runway without needing to make a dollar. But that runway shrinks fast as rent goes up. And after touring everything, the only place I genuinely want to live is Viv—and the space there is just too damn small. The one-bedroom units don’t have the same view and start at over $3,000 a month base rent. By the time everything’s added up, I’d be looking at $3,400 or $3,500 a month.
Then there’s the parking garage and the elevators. Even if everything works perfectly, I’m a time Nazi. If it takes five minutes to get from my apartment door, down the elevator, and out to the parking garage, that’s five extra minutes each way. That’s ten minutes on every single round trip I make. Multiply that out over a day, a week, a month, and it starts to feel insane. As Scarface might say—or maybe someone else—this is fucking depressing. Either way, yeah. That’s not going to work.
At the same time, I honestly don’t know what else to do right now. What I do know is that I’m really excited about having an overnight with my son tonight. He has soccer, and I go to my 444 AA meeting. I thought the meeting was going to conflict with his soccer, but afterward my ex-wife calls me and lets me know it actually didn’t. At the meeting, there’s a couple who recently moved to the area. The wild part is that they got sober around the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before—a couple who found recovery together like that.
I ask them to tell me their dating story in detail, because I’m genuinely trying to figure out how to date properly in AA without turning into a pickup artist, burning bridges, or hooking up with every girl in the rooms. I want to know how to look for something real. They tell me their story, and it’s beautiful. It actually gives me hope. I ask to exchange numbers so I can recommend good meetings to them while they’re down here, and the woman offers her number right away. It all feels clean and appropriate, which I appreciate.
After the meeting, I go home and eat a big salad. My ex-wife calls and tells me my son’s soccer actually started later than we both thought, which sucks because it means I missed it. Still, I’m able to pick my son up and have the overnight with him at my house. When it’s time to leave my ex-wife’s place, he cries for about ten minutes. I know part of it is that he’s tired, and part of it is the transition. I also know that once we get going, he’ll be fine. I mostly stay quiet and let my ex-wife hug him and comfort him. Eventually, he’s ready. We walk down to my place together.
Once we’re home, everything settles. He loves my shower head—the one with double the water flow that most shower heads have—and that alone seems to improve his mood significantly. We get ready for bed and end up lying down a little after 9:00 p.m., which is slightly late for him and slightly early for me. As I’m lying there, drifting toward sleep, my mind keeps circling back to the same thought: I want that apartment at Viv. I want it. I want it. I want it. I seriously consider getting up and applying for it right then.
But I don’t. I know myself well enough to pause. Sometimes I get extremely excited about something and the excitement burns off quickly. Other times, the excitement sticks around and turns into a clear, grounded yes. I need to sleep on this and give my brain time to process everything. I did a lot today. Literally yesterday, I was planning to live in South Tampa. Today, I toured four downtown apartment complexes and mentally scrapped an entire relocation plan.
One thing my sponsor in AA consistently points out is how much I take action. That’s one of my strengths. At the same time, the downside is that I can take too much action too quickly and end up committing to something that isn’t quite right or that puts me in over my head. Tonight feels like a moment to slow down instead of push forward. I’m going to sleep, think about all of this tomorrow, and see what still feels true after I’ve had some rest. If you tend to move fast on big decisions the way I do and want a grounded second perspective before you commit, you can book a private call with me and we can slow it down together on our call.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Touring the Fresh Life I Crave
Originally published December 3, 2025.
This is my journal entry from December 3, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I woke up around 6:30 a.m. today with the immediate urge to take the kids to school. On the surface, that sounds like a good thing, even an asset, but it’s also exactly why living in Tampa would help me create better boundaries. I can’t be impulsive just because I want to see the kids more. My ex-wife and I had already planned that she would handle school drop-off and pickup today. I called her anyway, and she said it was fine if I took them this morning, so I went over, picked them up, and dropped them off at school.
From there, I drove straight to play tennis with a friend. He had plenty of stories to share, and I caught him up on everything that’s been going on in my life lately. Even though I hadn’t played in over a week, I really enjoyed the match. The weather was perfect. A friend won the first set 6–2 and the second set 6–4. He went up 2–0, then I won four games in a row, and then he won four straight to close it out. It was competitive and fun, and I left feeling energized. Afterward, I headed back to my place for a quick shower and then went to my massage appointment with my massage therapist.
During the massage, she was curious about my South Tampa plan, and we talked about that for a while. The conversation drifted to dating timelines, and it left me feeling oddly freeing. I don’t need to rush to find a partner. I don’t need pressure. I don’t need to force anything. I can actually relax and take my time, which feels like a huge relief. If you are giving yourself permission to date without rushing or forcing it and want to talk through what that looks like for you, book a one-on-one call with me and bring it to our call.
After the massage, I drove straight to the house in South Tampa and arrived twenty minutes early. I actually laughed to myself, thinking, who is this person that shows up twenty minutes early? The owner lives next door in another house she owns, and she walked over to greet me and show me around. The very first thing she said was that she had a cold and didn’t want to shake hands. I told her not to worry—I don’t believe in germ theory anyway.
Then we walked through the 1,600-square-foot house and out into the backyard, which is fully fenced—perfect for pets. The layout is genuinely interesting. The house was built in 1948, and you can tell immediately because the bedrooms are tiny. Apparently, people weren’t stuffing fat-ass king mattresses into their bedrooms back then. I’m not even sure I could squeeze a king bed into either of them. There are two bedrooms and one bathroom, yet somehow the house still feels big. It’s a strange but compelling use of space, and I can see why it might confuse people looking for something more conventional. She said people call every day acting like they want to rent it, then try to buy it instead, which annoys her. That makes sense, unfortunately.
Beyond the two bedrooms, there’s essentially a third room that isn’t technically a bedroom—a kind of bonus room in the middle of the house with three doorways and no actual doors. Another fascinating detail is that the house is poured concrete. Unlike cinder block, which is hollow, these walls are solid concrete. That’s absolutely ideal for blocking outside noise and recording audiobooks. Short of recording in the street or a homeless shelter or some shit, the worst possible environment for audiobook recording would be an apartment with thin walls and noisy neighbors. Trailers aren’t much better. This place, though—solid concrete walls—is basically a dream. I’d just need to soften the echo a bit, and it would be a near-perfect sound environment. I genuinely loved that part of it.
I walked the house carefully, asked a lot of questions, checked out the air return, and talked with her for about thirty minutes. At this point, part of my intention was clearly to sell myself as a good tenant. I asked her directly why the house had been empty for so long. It’s a great location, it’s been on Zillow for months, and that didn’t add up. She told me she’s very picky about who she rents to since she lives next door. That immediately made sense to me, and I told her so. I explained that I’m in the exact same situation now—the owner of the house I’m currently in lives right next door—and I actually love that arrangement. I told her I’m sober, I don’t throw parties, I don’t do anything wild. I have my kids over, I write and record books, and that’s basically my entire life.
I showed her pictures of the kids, told her about my life, and gave her a copy of I Was Famous on the Internet. About a month ago, I’d stuffed some loose pages into those books explaining that I was looking for a place to live close to my ex-wife, trying to figure out how to monetize my skills, and—on the back—some dating-related stuff. After I left, it hit me that I probably should’ve taken that piece of paper out. Giving her the book is one thing, but the random insert doesn’t exactly align cleanly with a landlord’s sense of stability and responsibility.
I told her that $2,300 a month—$4,600 total to move in with the security deposit—was affordable for me, which is true, assuming I continue doing what I’ve always done: printing money out of thin air by figuring shit out and making things work through books, coaching, and whatever else emerges. Still, there’s an obvious tension there. If you receive a note from someone saying they’re not entirely sure how they’re monetizing what they do, does that inspire confidence that they can reliably pay a couple thousand dollars a month on their own? Probably not. Fortunately, I do have real numbers to back myself up, which I’ll get into next.
After seeing the house, I decided to go by the Trader Joe’s nearby to get a feel for the neighborhood and the people. It’s only two blocks away, and somehow I snagged a parking spot immediately—probably because it was around 2:30 p.m. and not peak chaos yet. Inside, I noticed a mix of people, including some attractive younger women who didn’t have wedding rings on, which felt like a small but meaningful detail to my brain in that moment. It just felt… nice. Normal. Alive. I asked the cashier what he thought about the neighborhood, and he told me he’d moved there a couple of years ago and absolutely loved it. That landed as real validation, not salesy, not forced.
From there, I walked a couple of blocks farther down to a yoga studio. I went inside and got a quick tour. It made me miss my yoga studio a little, but this studio is genuinely within walking distance—about ten to fifteen minutes from the house—which is amazing. And if I didn’t feel like walking, it’s a two-minute drive. That kind of convenience matters more to me than I usually admit. After Trader Joe’s and the yoga studio, I drove back toward St. Petersburg, intentionally slowing down and really taking in the neighborhood and everything around me.
As I drove, I noticed something else coming up: fear. Fear that I wouldn’t get the house, mixed with excitement because I really want it. That familiar edge of desire plus uncertainty. So I started doing affirmations out loud in the car. Stuff like, “I’m really grateful that I have a house I’m going home to right this fucking second.” Seriously—here I am worrying about not having a house in the future when I literally have one right now. Gratitude. I have a place to live. I’ve always had a place to live. I have never been homeless a single night in forty-one years. I’m certain I will have a place to live, and I’m grateful for where I am right now. That makes the most probable outcome pretty obvious: I’ll be grateful for wherever I’m living next too. If you catch yourself anxious about the future while you actually have everything you need right now, this is the kind of reframe I love working through with people — schedule a private call with me.
I kept going. If this is the right house, it will be mine. If it isn’t fully aligned, then someone else will get it and it will be their house. Based on everything I’ve seen so far, it does feel like this place is coming to me. It feels right. And at the same time, I started saying thank you for the uncertainty. The uncertainty is what makes it interesting. If I knew for sure right now that I was getting the house, that would actually be kind of boring. One of the real upsides of this post-divorce life is that it’s more fun. It’s more of an adventure. There’s more uncertainty. I’ve craved that for years, and now I’m getting a big dose of it. I’m enjoying it while it’s here. Someday, when there’s more certainty—about where I’m living, how I’m making money, or who I’m fucking—I’ll be grateful for that too. And I’ll remember that I was also grateful during this phase, when things were unknown. Both states deserve appreciation.
Those affirmations grounded me on the drive home. I also listened to a lot more of Metabolic Freedom today and started taking notes in Microsoft Word so I wouldn’t forget the key points. I want to read through some of those notes now. I started with what he framed as critical: absolutely no ultra-processed foods. That stuff is junk—basically like pouring sand into your gas tank. Your body just tolerates it longer than a car would. I guess it depends how much sand you dump in that bitch, but the analogy still holds. Critical point: no processed foods.
Another big one was no cooked seed oils—only cold-pressed oils. Things like vegetable oil, grapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, and all those other seed oils that get cooked and end up in damn near everything, from potato chips to popcorn. You want to cook with olive oil, coconut oil, butter, avocado oil—oils that are cold-pressed. And not “et cetera” in a vague way, but very specifically oils that aren’t chemically abused in the extraction process. Apparently, when these seed oils are heated to extract them, they break down and turn into something your body wouldn’t naturally encounter in the wild. In other words, more junk your system has to deal with for no good reason.
In Metabolic Freedom, the author says doctors told him that cooked seed oils are actually worse for long-term health outcomes than smoking if you’re eating them every day. That got my attention. He talks about how these oils can have a half-life of nearly two years in the body, which means once they’re in there, they stick around for a long time. That alone is enough to make me commit to cutting them out as completely as I can. I’m clearly heading down the road of making sure those cooked seed oils aren’t part of my daily intake anymore.
Another thing I wrote down as critical is sleep disruption. He frames it as one of the worst things you can do to your health, and that tracks perfectly with my lived experience. There’s basically no way I spiral, get agitated, or go a little nuts unless my sleep is disrupted two nights in a row. I saw that clearly a week and a half ago. That’s also why I decided I’m not going to the a local spiritual community song ceremony on Friday. I don’t care how meaningful or interesting something sounds—if it’s going to mess with my sleep, I’m out. I’m done sacrificing sleep for experiences. I don’t give a shit what’s going on. If it disrupts my sleep, it’s not that important. I’m tired of being tired.
Another hard rule: no large meals at least three hours before bedtime. I’m also seriously looking at doing intermittent fasting again. Ideally, I’d like my eating window to be something like 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. I did intermittent fasting for at least a year back in 2016, and it was incredibly helpful for me. I stopped mostly because everyone around me was eating all the time, and little compromises add up until the whole thing disappears. What excites me now is that, post-divorce, I have total control. My ex-wife was supportive in a lot of ways, but not to the extent of changing her own habits. She wanted candy and processed junk food around, cooked seed oils in the house, and dinner right before bed. She supported me emotionally, but I couldn’t go as far as I wanted to go with her.
One memory that really sticks out is when we went to see Kevin Hart film his special at the Straz in Tampa about a year ago. Right before that, I threw out some ultra-processed food—chips, candy, that kind of stuff—and my ex-wife absolutely fucking lost it. She went off about it being her food, launched into a whole tirade, and completely blew up the day. Of course, she never apologized. She felt totally justified. And that was that. The entire day got shit on because I threw away some junk food, even though she knew I was actively trying to eat better at the time. I’m honestly relieved I don’t have to navigate that dynamic anymore.
I’ve already told the kids that there’s no more bullshit with food. No fast food at all. Ever. McDonald’s fries are the perfect example of garbage food—loaded with cooked seed oils, preservatives, and all kinds of chemical nonsense. You keep putting that stuff into your body and then act surprised when it doesn’t function properly. Imagine dumping water into your gas tank and expecting your car to run fine. And honestly, cars are way less impressive machines than human bodies. It’s kind of amazing our bodies work as well as they do considering how much garbage we feed them.
Some more notes I took: start the morning with vinegar. Have caffeine around 10:00 a.m.—late enough to get the benefit, early enough not to screw up sleep. Go to bed by 9:30 p.m., though realistically I might push that closer to 10:00. He says some of the most important sleep hours are between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., which feels accurate to me. Drink from glass containers and store food in glass to minimize microplastics. Eat green, low-starch vegetables. Eat avocados for healthy fat. Walk after meals. I actually bought avocados at Trader Joe’s today, which felt like a small but satisfying alignment between intention and action.
I took a nice walk over to the tennis club, canceled my membership, then came home and submitted the rental application. Sending that application in felt really good, especially when I saw my credit score pop up: 812. Let’s fucking go. A couple of years ago, that number was in the low 600s. Seeing 812—basically near-perfect—hit me hard in the best way. Zero evictions. Zero criminal history. I’m genuinely grateful for that. I listed my income based on what my ex-wife and I agreed reflects my earning capacity, and I don’t disagree with it. I’m confident I can hit that number. I’ve had months with strong crypto sales and months with solid sponsorship income. My ex-wife recently sent me some money, with more coming as we settle things. I can easily move into this house.
I even asked ChatGPT the best way to use my credit if I needed extra money. It laid it out clearly: start with a 0% interest credit card, then a personal loan if needed, then balance transfers. Simple. Clean. I’m good. I have so much. I really do. And the insane thing is how easy it is to have so much and still not see it—to walk around scared you’re not going to have enough. I’m grateful I’m not in that headspace today. I’m glad I’m reading this book too. Most of what’s in it isn’t brand new to me—I’ve heard versions of it in other books—but sometimes you need to hear the same truth over and over, especially when you’re finally in an environment where you can act on it without someone else quietly sabotaging you because they don’t want to change.
I get it. People are busy. You don’t want it. You don’t have time to take care of your body today. You’re stuck in survival mode. Who has time to learn and grow when you’re just trying to get through the day? What’s interesting is that a lot of people would assume I should be in survival mode right now. I don’t know where I’m going to live. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to make money. I don’t know who I’m going to date. Those are all big things. And yet I’m not in survival mode. I’m thriving. I’m enjoying my life. I had so much fun looking at that house today. If you are in a season of big unknowns and want help getting out of survival mode and actually enjoying it like I am, schedule a one-on-one call with me and we will talk it through.
Canceling the tennis club membership turned out to be a really good experience too. I had a great conversation with a member at my tennis club there. She talked about grieving and moving on after her husband died, and how she eventually met a guy at the tennis club who took a full year to pursue her before she finally said yes. He actually walked in while we were talking. Perfect timing. The membership requires thirty days’ notice to cancel, and I’m really glad I went in today. By January, I expect I’ll be gone, and that will drop about $260 a month from my expenses, plus hundreds more I’d otherwise spend on tennis lessons.
At this point, I’ve accepted that I’m probably a 3.5 tennis player unless I put a ton of effort into lessons. And honestly, 3.5 is fine. That’s good enough to have fun and get exercise. I don’t need to be a try-hard bitch chasing a 4.0 ranking. I’ve got a solid foundation. Now it’s about maintaining it. And I’m looking forward to playing some ultimate tennis in Tampa.
Tampa traffic is a little different. Even around 3:00 or 3:30 p.m., I turned left onto Westshore Boulevard—a two-lane road with a curve—and ended up waiting there for a solid two or three minutes. The traffic just kept coming. Thankfully, the person behind me was patient and didn’t start honking while I missed a couple of openings. When I finally saw a decent gap, I zoomed in and kept going. Sitting there waiting actually felt instructive. This would be a healthier kind of distance. A place where I’d need to plan overnights intentionally instead of casually popping over to my ex-wife’s house or my mom’s house whenever I felt like it.
After the tennis club, I went over to my ex-wife’s place to say goodnight to the kids. I told them about the house and we made a plan for my son to stay overnight with me on Friday. My daughter is going to be away with family, and it feels perfect to have just my son for the night, sleeping in the king bed with me. It feels good to plan things calmly and practically instead of scrambling or reacting.
After saying goodnight to my ex-wife and the kids, I went to the 7:00 p.m. AA meeting. We were outside, and I didn’t bring a jacket. Michigan definitely toughened me up a bit, but sitting there in sixty-two-degree weather, I was shivering by the end. Still, I was fine. I shared much of what I’ve been processing lately, listened to other people’s experiences, and felt grounded by the whole thing.
After the meeting, I headed over to my mom’s place. I gave her a call, then we watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica 1980 together—the third one, part three, where they’re back on Earth and time-traveling. It was simple and comforting. When I finally came back home, I felt deeply grateful for my life. I have a house I genuinely love. It’s exactly where I wanted to live. I almost effortlessly found it, moved in, and felt happy there. I know I want that kind of living situation again.
The other house I looked at earlier—managed by a property manager, near my ex-wife and my mom—never felt right. That setup didn’t sit well in my body. This house in South Tampa, though, feels right. I’m not rushing it. I’m glad I have a few days to think it through. I might take the kids down to South Tampa one day to show them around, though my daughter will be away with family, so we’ll see how that works out.
Mostly, I’m just grateful that I get to write books every day like I did today. That matters to me more than almost anything else right now. I’ll see you tomorrow.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
One Sentence Burns My Michigan Dream
Originally published November 30, 2025.
This is my journal entry from November 30, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I went to the 11:30 a.m. yoga flow this morning in downtown Plymouth, then headed to Starbucks in Northville to meet my aunt. It had snowed about three inches overnight, and everything was covered. The snow was absolutely beautiful—quiet, clean, everywhere. I loved it. When I met my aunt, we both had a lot of energy and were genuinely happy to see each other. The tone was completely different from the day before. It wasn’t confrontational at all. If anything, when I looked at her, it felt like the love between us was clearer and stronger than it had been previously, which was unexpectedly comforting.
We talked much more about her life today, which felt really good. She was gentler in how she shared her thoughts, though still very firm in her belief that I should not move to Michigan. That part hadn’t changed. After finishing my grande peppermint hot chocolate, I left and drove straight to meet my sister for the AA meeting near where she lives. Everyone had a chance to share, and the topic was rigorous honesty. I talked about how I needed living examples of that kind of honesty. Reading about it in books wasn’t enough for me. I had to see people actually do it—hear them say things out loud that, to me, felt shocking just to even admit, let alone share in a room full of people. Watching that gave me permission to be honest myself.
After the meeting, my sister told me something that completely shifted things. She said she had talked with her daughter the night before. Her daughter is fourteen, and in a fairly short conversation, she told my sister that she thought I should stay closer to the kids. She said it was important for them to have me around more consistently as their father, and that seeing me mostly during the summers wouldn’t really work—they needed me more often. Hearing that changed my sister’s perspective entirely. After a full week of her being excited about the idea of me moving up here, she listened to her daughter and adjusted her view without hesitation. As much as it derailed what I thought was my plan, I couldn’t help but respect that. I was grateful for the clarity, even as part of me thought, well, there goes the whole Michigan idea.
I drove back to my sister’s house turning it over in my head. What did this week actually teach me? The answer came into focus pretty quickly. I need space. I need newness. I don’t need to abandon my kids or disappear, but I do need to burn down the rest of my life as it currently exists. I need to stop going to the same AA meetings, stop going to the same yoga studio, and stop living in the same familiar patterns. I need a new neighborhood, a new environment. Thinking about Michigan made one thing very clear: I need to restart my life. I need a new life. If one honest sentence has ever set fire to a plan you were sure about and left you needing to rebuild, I know that disorienting moment well, and you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and talk through your own fresh start with me on our call.
When I first moved to Florida, I moved to Tampa. With that in mind, I started talking with ChatGPT again, laying out my updated thinking and asking for suggestions. Based on what I described, it suggested that South Tampa might actually be the best option for me. I spent hours on Zillow throughout the day, looking at different possibilities and imagining how each one might feel. I considered Gulfport, Clearwater, North Tampa around Wesley Chapel, and farther south toward Bradenton or Sarasota. I kept going back and forth, trying to balance distance, affordability, and how close I could reasonably stay to the kids—ideally within an hour.
By the end of the day, I found myself circling the same few options. South Tampa felt promising. Downtown St. Petersburg did too—there would be a lot of newness there, but I’d still be close to the kids’ school. Gulfport offered a similar balance. I didn’t land on a decision, but I could feel the direction shifting. Michigan may not be the move, but the message of this week is undeniable: something has to change, and whatever comes next needs to feel genuinely new.
Later that evening, I had dinner with my sister’s ex-husband. We went to a nice restaurant in downtown Plymouth. I forgot my wallet, which was a little embarrassing, but he waved it off immediately and said he was planning to pay anyway. I felt genuinely grateful. I also felt good knowing I’d bought groceries for my sister and lunch for my nephew earlier. It felt balanced. I’d given where I could, and I could receive this without guilt. I ordered a portobello mushroom dish with a Caesar side salad, and it was excellent. We ended up talking for nearly two hours.
The conversation felt unusually meaningful. It’s one we couldn’t have had before. When I was married and riding the high of what I thought was success, I had a hard time seeing divorced men as anything other than failures in most cases. Now I can relate in a way I never could before. We talked openly about our experiences as divorced dads, the compromises, the grief, and the quiet responsibilities that don’t get much recognition. At one point, I told him I was proud of him. Most of the work he does is to pay for the house where his kids live with my sister—a house he doesn’t even get to spend much time in anymore. I told him that’s honorable, that dedicating so much of his life to supporting his children, even without personal access to the home or daily presence, matters.
We also talked about dating. He’s hesitant to bring anyone new into his life because he doesn’t want to destabilize my sister. I encouraged him, honestly. I told him that if he wants to date, it might actually have a positive effect. It could normalize things, maybe even help my sister feel more open to moving forward herself. Yes, it could cause some disruption, but it could also be motivating. If it’s something he wants, I think he should allow himself that. He mentioned that he’d still be open to dating a woman who wants kids, even though he’s ten years older than me. That landed in a surprisingly comforting way. It helped me relax about my own timeline.
I started thinking about family history. My uncle is eighty-three now, and his youngest child was born in 1999. That makes my cousin about twenty-six, which means my uncle fathered his sixth child around age fifty-seven. As a man, you really do have more time than you’re often led to believe. That realization gave me space. I don’t need to rush or force anything. I can let a future family come into my life naturally.
After dinner, I went back to my sister’s house and spent a couple of hours hanging out with my nephew before bed. We talked, laughed, and just existed together in that easy, unforced way that feels increasingly rare. Before going to sleep, he opened up to me about his faith and his relationship with his girlfriend. We played Uno No Mercy and laughed a lot. I put on some Deadmau5 and told him about a couple of tracks—“FN Pig” and “Aural Synapse”—and mentioned that they have hidden subliminal lyrics. He was skeptical at first and said he couldn’t hear anything. I told him that once you catch the hidden phrase in “Aural Synapse,” it’s one of those things you can’t unhear. I’m convinced both tracks have explicit subliminal phrases buried in the sound design, and that “FN Pig” even carries a whole breakup-to-anger storyline underneath the music. He wasn’t fully convinced, but we had fun with it.
By the time I went to bed, I felt quietly content. Not wired. Not euphoric. Just grounded. The kind of fullness that comes from conversation, laughter, honesty, and being exactly where you are for the night.
I told him that I’ve made hundreds of songs, and in my experience, one of the ways to take dance music to another level is by embedding subliminal lyrics. You have to think about where this music is actually played—on dance floors, in clubs, in spaces where people are moving their bodies, feeling charged, hoping to connect or hook up. If there are explicit hidden phrases buried in the sound design, that energy is present whether people consciously notice it or not. The subconscious can pick up on things the conscious mind misses. I’ve always felt a little gifted—or cursed—in that my conscious mind can sometimes hear it too.
I told him that “FN Pig” is even more extreme. To me, it starts like a sad breakup song, and then when the beat drops, the energy flips into something much angrier, with even a reversed expletive buried in there. Not everyone hears these things, and I get that. But I didn’t hear them because someone suggested it to me or planted the idea. I heard them on my own, listening closely, watching Deadmau5 streams, replaying tracks over and over. One day it just snapped into focus—holy shit, that synth literally sounds like it’s saying an explicit phrase. And once you hear it, it explains why the track feels so euphoric.
I started explaining how words and thoughts carry vibrational patterns, and speech itself follows musical notes. Someone who really understands sound design and vibration could hit those same emotional and psychological notes without using literal words. Even if the lyrics aren’t clean or precise, matching the vibration of a specific thought pattern can still trigger the same response in someone’s body or mind. If I ever had time with Deadmau5, that’s exactly what I’d want to ask him about. I’ve even experimented with this myself in some of my own music. When I was going through synth presets, I’d listen closely to see if anything jumped out. There were moments where I’d play a synth and swear it sounded like it was saying something obscene—one preset literally sounded like an explicit phrase to me. That’s why I used it. I wasn’t just hearing noise. I was hearing something layered underneath it.
Then I had him listen to “Fack” by Eminem. The ridiculous, over-the-top hook came on, and he laughed and asked if that was really my favorite Eminem song. I told him yes, absolutely. It’s brilliant. I joked that it’s completely ruined pet stores for me—if I see gerbils now, I’m like, nope, I know exactly what’s going on here. We both cracked up. It was one of those conversations where you’re half joking, half dead serious, and fully enjoying how weird and specific your shared moment is.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Moving Back to Michigan: Why I Stayed in Florida Near My Kids
Originally published November 26, 2025.
For a while I was sure the answer was Michigan. I was born there, my sister and her kids live there, and my aunts, uncles and cousins are up there too. For years I told people in St. Petersburg that I was from Michigan, and I meant it. In late 2025 I worked through the question one day at a time. The short version is that Michigan was a real pull, but I did not move there. I moved into a rental house near Crescent Lake in St. Petersburg on January 8, 2026.
If you are weighing a move home, the honest answer is that the numbers pulled me north and my kids pulled me back. The rent gap was real. In Maybe Michigan Is Where I Belong I wrote that a nice one-bedroom up there could start around $1,100 to $1,200 a month, while a similar apartment near me ran $2,500 to $3,000. Then I pictured telling my son I was moving a thousand miles away, and I started crying in the middle of a Meijer. Every time my mind went back to the kids, I broke down.
The pull toward a new place started before Michigan. In Walking Into the Rest of My Life, from August 2025, I wrote "This is where I belong" outside a massage school in Sarasota. That certainty is worth remembering, because it came back with Michigan and did not hold up the same way when I tested it against my family and my routine.
The Michigan idea took shape in late November. My nephew told me over lunch that he thought I should move up there, and then my ex-wife told me by FaceTime that she could see the kids visiting in the summer and staying a month at a time. I could not decide, and that entry ends with a question I could not answer.
Then my niece changed the picture. In One Sentence Burns My Michigan Dream, from November 30, I wrote that my fourteen-year-old niece had told her mom I should stay closer to my kids, and that seeing them mostly in the summers would not work. My sister changed her view right away, and I respected that. I needed a fresh start, but I did not need to abandon my kids to get one. If you are working through custody, my posts on co-parenting and how the divorce ended cover that ground.
The search went south and downtown after that. I briefly applied for a house in South Tampa, then toured downtown apartments and found them too small and too expensive. Once I saw a house by Crescent Lake, the decision got simpler. It is described in The Old House by the Lake. It is 103 years old, the owners were kind, the rent was $2,700 a month, and the park was across the street. The kids could run around the playground, and my school drop-off and AA meetings were close.
Moving in is its own story, told in Move-In Day and a Hundred Thousand Thank Yous. I expected the whole move, including the rented truck and a former professional mover who helped me for three hours, to cost about $300. A few weeks later I wrote about the first overnight with both kids in The Night This House Became a Home, and the house had started to feel like a home.
What I took from the whole stretch is simple. Michigan is where my family is, and the rent math is real. But my kids are the anchor, and any home has to serve them first. I could not find a version of a Michigan move where I stayed close to my kids the way I wanted, so I stayed in St. Petersburg.
The posts below run newest first. The oldest, from February 2019, is an excerpt from my memoir Officer Banfield about my drinking years, not moving, and it is included so the page holds every entry on this subject. Start with the newest if you want to see where I ended up, or with Maybe Michigan Is Where I Belong if you want the question in the middle of the fight.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Every House Has Its Own Energy (March 6, 2026)
- The Night This House Became a Home (January 12, 2026)
- Move-In Day and a Hundred Thousand Thank Yous (January 8, 2026)
- The Old House by the Lake (December 6, 2025)
- Hunting Downtown for My Reset (December 5, 2025)
- Touring the Fresh Life I Crave (December 3, 2025)
- One Sentence Burns My Michigan Dream (November 30, 2025)
Every House Has Its Own Energy
Originally published March 6, 2026.
This is my journal entry from March 6, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
I didn't sleep very well last night because the dude who was delivering my envelopes from my recovery group called me three times right when I was about to drop off to sleep at midnight. Like, what the fuck's this dude up to right now? I don't give a shit what's going on at midnight, man. I don't need to talk, but I will give him a call later today. I am interested to know what he called about, but it's weird for me to get a call at that time of night. I had just fallen asleep and the call started me awake and it took a long ass time to get back to sleep. Irregardless, I then woke up at 6:17 this morning and enjoyed a little meditation time. But when I get to my ex-wife's house to pick the kids up, they comment that I look tired. Like, well, that's accurate.
I dump a huge bin of compost out from the compost can in my ex-wife's compost. It's funny, even though we're divorced, we're still working together on the compost. It seems crazy to throw it out, and it works great in my ex-wife's garden. I produce so much of it. I get two hugs from my ex-wife, which is nice, and I have lots of playtime with my son in the back seat. He doesn't have a library book to read today, so it's just a whole lot of juicing and baby demon. And I introduced Dad Demon as well. After pickup, I head back home feeling good that I'm not going to that 8:30 class because I've got two hours of singles tennis scheduled later. I don't need to sweat it out first thing in the morning, and I'm ready to get to work today.
After yesterday's experience testing out the letters, I have 40 more that are ready, which I'm eager to deliver. It's beautiful, cloudy, and cool out this morning, so seems like the time to do it. I grab 40 letters and set a timer. It takes me less than 30 minutes, even though I walk straight from my house, and I end up picking up where I left off yesterday, and I inefficiently walk a couple extra blocks around. Still, I'm able to drop 40 letters in less than 30 minutes. I'm like, this shit has got to scale up. We're going to print thousands of these letters and drop them all over the place. I end up telling the guy from my recovery group who's delivering the letters, who I talk to later, that he inspired me to want to deliver a bunch of these myself. Paying him to do it, it's like, what the fuck am I doing? I might as well get out there and do them too.
And I enjoy today actually getting to step into people's space a little bit. Every home has a distinct energy and a feel to it. Some of the homes smell nasty, some of the homes give me the impression they play a lot of video games, others of the home feel like it's very bright energy, like there's a real loving person or family in them. Others feel very materialistic and sad, even though they're polished on the outside. Every house has a unique feeling, and this is oddly enough satisfying my desire for novel experiences and going and seeing new things. It's amazing how often we see the exact same streets and roads and almost everything. When I used to walk my dog in a neighborhood I lived in before, I mean, I'd walk the same houses, the same route all the time. I never stepped foot into the front yards or up to the doors of most of those houses. And it actually feels surprisingly good to go and walk into the energy of all these different houses. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more of this. And I'm excited to get my stamp in the mail. I'm hoping that I'll get a notification that I've got another date lined up, but no such luck today.
My friend who wants to record his book, who we've already done a lot of it, cancels and says he isn't feeling good. I'm tempted to send a bit of a critical message back, but I'm like, whatever. He's having a medical procedure soon, which in my belief I disagree with, but then I'm not a doctor. So I'm like, whatever. He doesn't seem interested in being talked out of it, or he's putting so much of his faith and his energy into having it, that it's going to somehow save him. And I don't want to disturb any of his belief. And I sure as hell hope it works. At the same time, from most of what I've seen, my belief is the odds are it's not going to work, at least for the long term, and the body's going to suffer. I had a lot of tooth surgeries. I mean, a lot. I had a good bit of dental work and braces and, you know, oral surgery to move teeth around. And I'm really grateful for that. That's paid off a lot. At the same time, you know, those weren't that invasive. The teeth were right there. Going into your body is a bit different. But what do I know? I tell him that, you know, I hope we can get back to his book when he's done.
And I reflect that, man, I have an abundance of time today and I'm going to use it. I go to a recovery meeting right in the middle of time as I'm getting to work on the letter again to see if we can make an even better version of it. I enjoy the meeting and it's another third step meeting. I talk about how I'm God again and I'm like, I got to tweak this message a little bit better because it seems like it's not being received that well. I then, after the meeting wrap up, head back home and I'm looking forward to tennis later. I had a big salad for breakfast today. And that is so filling. It sustains me from when I ate it at 9 a.m. most of the way through until starting tennis at 4 p.m.
I go to work revising the letter, spending hours going through and trying to get the absolute best version of letter I can. After all, if I'm going to hand out thousands of these, this should pack every emotional punch I've got. All the material I've come up with in the past should all be worked in here as best and as smooth as it can. By the time it's time to go play tennis, I'm like, holy shit, this letter kills it. It has a very clear flow from having the person imagine their book. And then I've got two people dying early in it, which is an incredible emotional hook. So it starts off with a couple paragraphs. You know, imagine holding a book with your name on the cover. And then, you know, if you think your life story isn't interesting, I promise there are people who it matters deeply. You know, then we'll talk about my dad dying and how I wished he'd written a book. I talk about how many people assume they'll write their story someday, but it usually doesn't happen. Talk about my friend from college who wouldn't have figured he needed to write his life story in his mid-30s. He's dead now, and his stories mostly went with him. I then introduce myself and talk about how I live here near St. Petersburg, Florida. I've got 32 books published, mentioned on Fn Myself, and my book. Then I dive beyond preserving your legacy into reflection and how writing my story helped me to stay sober. Then I talk about how easy it is for me to help someone write a book. And I transition smoothly into saying that I learned these skills during my career as a content creator, where I handle the objections people have about, well, shit, I'm already uploading all this stuff online, so why bother with a book? And the key line is that a book gathers the most meaningful parts of life into one place. And instead of thousands of disconnected posts or clips, it becomes a story someone can sit down and truly understand. If you have a life story, or a loved one's, that you have always meant to get into a book, you can book a one-on-one call with me and I will help you turn it into one.
My next paragraph hits nice saying after uploading over 10,000 videos online, I can tell you I learned the hard way that books endure while digital media often does not. The paragraph concludes saying nearly all the videos, blog posts, podcast episodes, status updates, and pictures I uploaded in the last 15 years are gone today. Then I transition into, you know, the kind of book you could have. Share my friend's book as an example. Then I wrap it up and this time I add the pricing in to help people not even waste their time going to my website and to say, look, 90 minute sessions, 3 for $310, or 10 sessions for $2500. If you know you want a complete life story, I have my phone number and a P.S. on there. I'm like, this letter fucking slaps. Like this letter is awesome. And I'm really proud of it.
I then, did I mention yesterday that the woman I'd been seeing actually sent me a message back? I think I forgot that. So I'm going to cover that here in case I didn't. So yesterday, she sent me a message saying she's been busy with doctor's appointments. She's hurt. She can't do massage. She won't need her website or any of that. And she said she'll reach out in the future if she wants to go down that path. I said, thank you for the update. I'm sorry to hear you're injured and not doing massage again. I hope your healing goes well and the website will be there for six more months if you change your mind. And then the last part I felt a little vulnerable but honest, like, if you ever have any availability, meet up for ice cream to catch up, let me know. Do you think I got a message back in 24 hours on that? Nope. And that's okay, because I feel good. Like, I'd love to meet up with her and catch up with her, and that's just being real with you.
I go to tennis today at the tennis club right after I feel like I've polished off this draft to be like the most incredible shit I've written before and ready to give out to tens of thousands of households in this area to crush it, to build my business up. I go to the tennis club. My guy's a little late, so I warm up with a tennis partner. And the one woman who's joining us today played last week, maybe I'll get to play with her today. And I'm so grateful to be able to do some mixed singles, which is awesome. They didn't have like any of that at the other club. And it's nice to play with the women as well as the men to not feel segregated. We then start playing the matches. I go warm up a few serves and my guy gets there. He's ready, since he's late, to just jump straight into it, and he beats me 5-0 without warming up. I mean, there was one or two games I was close to a win, but he puts so much spin on his shots. Like, everything's just donking off my racket. He's cranking out a fast serve, even double faults twice one game, and I still can't fucking get it done. My shots are at a record level of horrible. Like my whole arm just fell off. Speaking of which, the tendons in the arm are still pretty tight. I'm like, you think I can just keep playing on this without a problem and it'll just heal up? Because I sure hope so. That's pretty much the approach I'm taking right now.
After he beats me, then we just hit some, and even my hitting so shitty, but it's okay, I'm on the loser court, and the guy who lost the match in the middle court comes over to play me. We have a nice back and forth. He has a hard serve but I end up getting it back on some returns, and he is struggling just like I'm struggling. So he ends up beating me like 5-3, which it was at least nice to give him a little competition. I'm supposed to stay on the loser court and play the girl that's there, but for some reason they don't want to have the two guys rematch again, so they swap me and him. The guy I go to play is a tennis partner I haven't played before. Now, I've seen this guy play some pretty good tennis and he won his way up to the winner court last time. So I'm thinking this guy is going to wreck me today. And somehow he just shits the bed on almost every one of his shots. And I beat him 5-1. Like this doesn't even feel like winning. This is like I'm just watching him play worse than me, and it's actually triggering my empathy. I'm like, I feel you, bro. I know what that's like to play that bad. That's how I was just playing before. I start cranking some of my shots and some of my serves start going in really nicely with some power, and I win some points on him with my serve and with damn near everything else. He then picks up as we start hitting afterwards, and he wins a few more games after it's already over.
Then it's 6 o'clock suddenly, and it's time to head out. I brush the courts, and the only thing worse than my tennis game today was my court brushing. Turns out if you brush in circles, it doesn't work so well. Note to self, don't brush a clay tennis court in circles. It's so much harder. You just go up and down like it's a lawnmower. It's so much easier. I get everything loaded into the car and I head back home. I get home and I have some noodles for dinner, some bean noodles. And then shower. I'm going to talk to my sponsor on the way back. I'd been chewing on the idea of going to a strip club for some validation, and I looked up some reviews earlier, but the more I read the more it just felt gross and like a waste of money I don't have, and honestly part of me is still curious but mostly I just hope I can find some better things to do with my life. At least I talked to my sponsor about it, and I'm telling you about it.
After I shower, I go to work editing my old journaling. I roll through shit, like at least 30, maybe 40,000 words that I've been meaning to go through for a while, and it feels so good to catch up on it. I calculate that if I can catch up on seven days of these every day, that'll only take me a couple of weeks to get current, and then I'd probably have at least two, if not three more that I could publish in the next few weeks also, which would be awesome to get caught up on these before I start getting clients. As I'm halfway through editing, I start thinking I should go out for a walk along Crescent Lake. Maybe something interesting will happen. I should grab my books too in case any of them are gone from the little free library. So I picked a couple of books out. I walked a long way before going by the free library. I say hi to a few people. I sit down on a couple of the benches. And nothing interesting happens as far as I can see. Except I start to get rained on right at the very end of it. And then it downpours as soon as I walk into the house. Like, that was cool. Like, I literally had perfect timing on that.
I finished listening finally to Braiding Sweetgrass, which I swear I've been borrowing from the Libby app, which borrows audiobooks from the library, off and on for like six months, finally finished that book. And it leaves me feeling like my life is in the right place right now. It seems kind of hopeless to, you know, as bad as things are with the environment and society today, but at the same time, it's like, what can I do about it? Well, I think people telling our stories, preserving our wisdom, and focusing on in-person connection with people is one of the most important things we can do today. And me reaching out to people to write books, especially that have the money they can afford to do something like this, I think this is the best thing I can come up with to serve the planet today and to be useful to people. Thus, that's the best I can think to do for my part. If preserving your own story and wisdom matters to you the way it does to me, schedule a private call with me and we will map out how to get it written together.
After I have a little walk, I also print out 100 copies of the letter, upgrade my print subscription, and am thinking I'll go to bed before 11 tonight, get a little caught up on my sleep, and I'm glad I've actually got this recorded before bedtime. It is amazing to go back through my old journaling and to edit it and to read how I had something so clearly figured out three months ago, which then I wandered all over and tested. I had very clearly the idea that I should just put letters in people's door cracks or on their front porch and offer my services to help them write their book. I think the letter I have today for it is absolutely masterful. And I guess it's a logical progression that I tried mailing them, which didn't work for shit, and I tried a weak, basically salesy letter. This one fucking kills, and I'm really excited to use it, and it's so much faster to crank this out and deliver it, and so much cheaper as long as I'm not paying somebody to deliver it. I also loved being able to read back the days where I decided where to live, deciding, thinking for a few days I was going to live in Michigan, then thinking for a couple of days I was going to live in Tampa. Then the day I looked at downtown apartments and then the day I found the house I'm in right now and rented it is absolutely magical. Like, man, I'm so glad I documented all this stuff. I'm so glad I've got all this. And, you know, if there's one thing I'd tell my younger self, it's like, get into writing, write your whole life the whole time no matter what's happening, write it down honestly and get everybody else in your life to write too.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
The Night This House Became a Home
Originally published January 12, 2026.
This is my journal entry from January 12, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
Tonight's my first overnight with the kids during a school week, and I'm really excited about it. I start the day off by going to my yoga studio for the 8.30. There's lots of attractive girls as usual. I put my mat right up next to the mirror this time. It's actually nice looking at myself. I'm like, God damn, this is a narcissist row up in this bitch. I can just look at myself like, damn, look at this. I got some abs. And it's nice to discreetly check the girls out, too. I try and talk to the girl a little bit after class because she has three blocks next to her. And I guess one of them is the instructors. But she doesn't seem really into it. So I move on. Then I see a woman coming in for the 10 a.m. that I'm surprised I remember her and her name. So I say hi to her and talk to her a little bit, then head out.
I come straight home and get ready for the AA group that I go to at 11 a.m. My sponsor's there, and I get there just in time to see him. The girl I asked if she wanted to meet up a couple days ago and didn't respond is there as well. I actually get called on in this meeting, which is nice. They read the part of the big book where the guy's like 30 years old and quits drinking to focus on his business and then goes to pieces in his 50s after he retires. And I share. So the main theme from this message is if I wait to my 50s to drink, I can drink. You know, it's just being toxic and shit. Like, I'm going to take good care of myself. Thus, my share, I move on.
I head out of the meeting a little bit early and then I go get a massage with my massage therapist. She's dealing with her ex-husband and selling her house, which is tough for her. And it gives me an appreciation of everything my ex-wife and I are doing and how grateful I am for the smooth relationship that we have. I'm also super grateful for my massage therapist as a friend because she actually consistently responds to messages. And I feel like we have the same level of interest in each other as friends, which is really nice, which has been lacking on my messages with girls. But it just will take one girl really to turn everything around. If you are working to keep your own co-parenting this smooth while you rebuild the steady connections around you, you can schedule a private call with me and we can talk it through.
I go to pick the kids up from school. And my ex-wife texted me earlier that my daughter's staying after for a girlfriend's club. So I just picked my son up. My son and I ride home. And it's nice to have some time by himself, just the two of us. I enjoy chatting with him in the car and hearing how he's doing at school. And he's really excited to go to the park, but he says he wants to wait for my daughter, which is so nice. So I eat and rearrange stuff around the house and we wait for my daughter to get home.
Meanwhile, earlier in the day, I'd listened to this book called How Could She? The Shocking Story of a Mother's Betrayal and a Daughter's Survival, which is absolutely a horror story. And at the same time, it does give me an incredible contrast and perspective for how I show up and take care of my kids as a parent versus the worst that other kids endure at the hands of parents that just abuse them at shocking levels. And it leaves me feeling super grateful like that my son's just here with me having this nice day and being treated right and loved so much. And that my daughter's coming home to that, too.
My ex-wife drops my daughter off a little after four. And then when my daughter gets home, we have little snacks and we go to Crescent Lake Park. We hang out there for a little over an hour, flying the drone, driving the car around. And my son's chasing the car. I lay down in the grass. My daughter cries and is missing her mom because it was one thing when my ex-wife was going out at night and it was the first time over at my house for everybody on Saturday because, you know, that my ex-wife was going out and had something to do anyway. But this is different. You know, she's just got home from school and now that's all she's going to see of her mom is the ride home from school. And my daughter's pretty emotional about it. And I think my ex-wife was also pretty emotional about it. But my ex-wife doesn't often outwardly show her feelings that much. But this is a big night for my ex-wife, too, because after she drops my daughter off and leaves at 4.30, my ex-wife has the whole rest of the night to herself. There's no kids. She doesn't have a man at home that I know of, at least. She had the whole rest of the night to herself. This is a space she said she wanted before, and now she gets to have it.
I think the two of them, they both were feeling a lot of the emotions, and my son and I weren't feeling as much, which was nice. So my daughter had a good cry and gave me lots of snuggles. At one point my daughter was sitting on me and my son had his back sitting to my back in the park and we all just snuggled up and I'm like, this is what I've been missing. And I didn't, you know, I knew it was a struggle and I felt lonely over the last three months, but at the same time, like this, for some reason I didn't quite see how hard it was to not be having this kind of dad time with my kids. Like I was seeing them and I was taking them to and from school and doing stuff with them as I've described in depth over the last three months. But I didn't have this like quantity of time where I'm just doing dad stuff and it's like a normal routine and it's all on me, which is really nice.
We came home from the park about 5.30. And we take an hour to get ready and eat. We were going to play some games, but we didn't end up having any time. I have a salad for dinner. I cut up a bunch of fruit for my son. I cut up a pineapple and a watermelon that I bought and we get ready for the night. Then we head out a little after 630 to the grocery store because my daughter needs some shampoo. I need some dish soap and I need to pick up the package that I would have dropped at the grocery store again instead of at my house. Because I have a house. Now, if you're living in a van, it would make sense to have a package dropped at the grocery store because you don't have an address. But I'm not going to be taking up space there anymore.
We go to the grocery store and I'm figuring out stuff that they can eat for lunch as well as wondering if there's any single moms with their kids that I might run into and have a happily ever after with. No luck on that front, though. But we go around and have a great time shopping and picking out foods that they might enjoy in their lunch and end up spending $67. They scan everything for the self-checkout. Then we go get gas. I love just ordinary things are just so fun with the kids. They both get out and are helping fill up the Toyota Corolla with gas. My son and I put new black hubcaps on the Corolla earlier today that I received in the mail, which was fun. He even got one of them on completely by himself.
Then we get to my daughter's basketball at 7:30. There's tons of kids there. I was hoping my son and I would have time to shoot and have a basket to ourselves, but no, there's four teams playing at the same time. The courts are full. Nobody besides the people that are signed up for these teams seems to have space to play. My daughter's having fun with the seven other girls that are on her team. She has the same coach as last season. Meanwhile, my son is messing with me and hanging out for the first 15 minutes, but then he sees a girl from his class sitting down, her sister's playing basketball at this time, and the girl is just sitting there bouncing the ball off the wall. I'm like, come on, go play with her, and he's a little shy at first, but then he gets up and goes to play with her, and they end up playing the rest of the 45 minutes while my daughter plays, which was so cute because I felt that way a couple of days ago when I talked to the girl at the AA picnic. I'm like, come on, go talk to her. It was so cute to have that conversation with my son and see how much fun he had playing with her. They were rolling the ball across the gym on the sidelines and bouncing it off the wall. And they came up with all kinds of little games they played.
Meanwhile, I went through my phone and caught up on my text messages. And I'm thinking about having the events at my house. So I also wanted to let people know who I wasn't going to be around anymore. So I messaged a guy from AA that's working on a business servicing cars. And then I went back and messaged a woman I'd been talking to, to follow up with her after I didn't text her for like a month. And I also texted a woman I'd been interested in and I hadn't messaged her in a month. And it was nice because the woman I'd been talking to actually, I look at it, I'm like, you know, I first met her on October 25th. I messaged her on October 26th to do an invite. And then I did not message her again for two months until I saw her at a local spiritual community again. And then so I sent her a message last night saying that I dropped the ball on responding, that I just moved. And the best night I had at the local spiritual community was talking to the woman I'd been interested in. And I'm not doing that community anymore. You know, let me know if you'd like an invite to my events. And she sends a message back to me asking if I'm all moved in. I sent a message back to her asking what she does for fun. And she said she's into acroyoga and asked what I like to do for fun. It's like, man, here's a girl that is actually asking me questions and responding to my text messages. Isn't that nice? And while last time I saw her, she didn't seem interested in meeting up for doing anything one on one with me, this is a girl who actually I like and seems to like me and has some interest. How silly that I just didn't text her for two months and then for another month. So I didn't respond to the last message because the kids and I are about to go to bed.
I also messaged the woman I'd been interested in and she said she's going to go out of the country soon. I'm like, man, this is funny. Two of the girls I've been most interested in that I've met, I've texted them the least. And just kind of gave up quickly on even doing anything with them. If you notice this same pattern in your own dating life, pulling back from the people you actually like, schedule a one-on-one call with me and we will work through why it happens.
It's also got me thinking about my books. This morning I woke up and I was getting a bit paranoid about my books. I was wondering, like, man, after stuff I said about people and just all the shit I've talked in these books, all the, you know, the cursing, the clowning around having fun, all the events I've described and people and places, I'm like, you know, is there something I should do with this to protect myself a little better? I was like, what if someone like sues me for the shit I said in this book or somebody else, because I'm just talking about people now. I generally am only using people's first names. Although I tried to just use someone's first name, I slipped one time. So there it is, but still with the first name, there's no last name. It's difficult to even identify exactly who I'm talking about. And even if somebody that I did know being talked about read this, which seems unlikely but possible, thinking, what can I do to cover my ass a little bit better?
At first, I was just thinking, fuck it. I'm not going to publish these books anymore. I'm just going to print them out and try and sell them in person. And it's like, really? You know, how are your kids going to get access to that? What about the people online that might buy these books someday? What about the people across the world that might buy a book like this and just be interested in the story. So I asked ChatGPT what to do, and I was thinking before I talked to it, I'm like, what if I publish these books as fiction, that I'm not claiming anything in this is true, that this is just all my subjective reality in my head. I'm just, this is me processing life. I'm not trying to put this out as if this is reality or fact or anything like that. Like, because if I publish it nonfiction, then I'm standing behind this and saying this is true and this is my experience. But what if some of the stuff, you know, I don't want to have to prove anything in court and say that this is true. And I also like to take the edge off of any of the shit I say is like, you know, this is just my motherfucking opinion. Like I'm just in my office saying whatever I feel like.
I asked ChatGPT about it and it says that, you know, it is a genre of literature where people publish as autobiographical nonfiction or autobiographical fiction because that way, you know, it's honoring that this is a subjective reality. You know, the idea is I'm describing like, you know, how things felt in my life, not who people are, or actual events, or, you know, I'm not trying to make this something for a court case or to put anybody down. It's like, you know, I want to just document that this is my art. I'm creating this as art. And yes, this is my experience, but, you know, I'm not claiming this is nonfiction and everything is going to match what other people experience, and what other people say. To some degree, this is just a work of art.
So I asked ChatGPT what to do. It says this is fiction helps. If I label it as fiction, auto-fiction, or a novel inspired by real events, it does reduce legal exposure if I avoid clearly identifiable people being portrayed as doing harmful, illegal, or defamatory things. You don't use full names. You don't present statements as verifiable facts. And yeah, if I'm going to say this is fiction about this specific person who did these specific things, that's one thing. And thus, you know, I'm thinking the safest framing is to put it that this is my subjective internal experience, not objective truth. ChatGPT says, for the daily autobiography style books, the strongest legal and artistic positioning is that this is an auto-fiction subjective memoir. That I could do a disclaimer, and I may do this for the sixth book up front to say that this book is a work of autobiographical fiction. It reflects my subjective inner spirit, experience, perceptions, and emotional interpretations at any given moment of time. Names, details, and circumstances may be altered, condensed, or imagined. The narrative does not claim to represent objective reality or the experiences of others.
So it says I'm only at risk if I produce a real identifiable person with a false statement presented as fact that harms their reputation. And thus, it says, the memoir does give more credibility, higher emotional impact, and slightly higher legal risk. If I do autofiction, there's lower legal risk, still emotionally honest, gives me creative and philosophical freedom, which I would definitely like over time. Because I do have some fiction ideas that I'd like to dictate, and it'd be easiest to just put them in here. And it says, this also fits my creating-my-own-reality worldview. ChatGPT says, given how raw and interpretive my writing is, autofiction is more honest, not less, which is interesting. And going forward, I'll try and describe more of how I felt or how I experienced things instead of saying what people did. So I may, you know, starting today and going back, switch these to autobiographical fiction. You know, no book is zero risk. At the same time, though, I've seen people put lots crazier shit and put it as nonfiction, like putting that they're abducted by aliens and sold into sex slavery, taken off the planet, regressed through time. So I'll think about this some more, because I want to position these books for long-term viability, and I want to keep doing these.
I've also been wondering, should I catch up on these books? Right now, I've got a backlog of probably at least 50 days, which is an average of probably 20 minutes per day. So if we round and say maybe I probably have close to two months. So I probably have a backlog of close to 15 hours of audio dictated like this that I've not processed into writing. And it sucks because, well, I feel like I'm behind all the time. And I've done all this work that's not published. And to me, if I'm doing work like this, it should be published immediately. Once I'm done with it, I shouldn't be doing all this writing and have it sitting on my computer forever. Whereas if I took 20 or 30 hours, I could go through all these entries and get them published. But I've been hesitant, especially the sixth one gets into a whole new level of talking shit. And I've been a little hesitant to even publish that because I've been feeling like, is this just a ticking time bomb that somebody's going to discover one day and my life's just going to blow up because of how real and honest I've been? And yet, you know, I love publishing books. I want to continue publishing like this is my legacy.
This is my thing that 10 years from now, having published something like 20 minutes a day, let's say I get 100 hours a year of dictation, which I'm easily doing at this rate. Imagine in a decade that you'd have a thousand hours of these you could go through. That'd be a catalog that almost no human would have, that raw quantity. Assuming there's still humans reading in ten years. And my whole life would be recorded day by day. In the short term, they don't do anything. But I'm like, over the next decade, imagine someone finding one of these and they'd be able to buy a hundred of them. Like that's something I could never replace either. Like I can't go back and dictate 10 years ago in my life day by day. That'd be something priceless for my kids or grandkids or whatever. It'd be something amazing that you'd get to go through somebody's life in that much detail day by day. This is something that's worth doing. At the same time, I do need to figure out how I can publish it on an ongoing basis and minimize my legal risk. I don't want to have the whole damn series come tumbling down. But I guess there's just no going through life with no risk either. I mean, to me, the biggest risk in life is that you go through life so risk-averse that you don't really live, and I don't want to do that. So I'll research more about autobiographical fiction. If you have wanted to document your own life this way and turn it into books your family could hold one day, book a private call with me and I will help you start.
To wrap the day up, I put the kids to bed. We went to bed late at like 9.45. All three of us took showers and had dinner after basketball, and then we got in bed and snuggled up, and I went to bed so happy, feeling like, man, this is what I need. Like, this leaves my house feeling like a home. I've got the kids here. At the same time, I'm wondering about my ex-wife. She wanted all this space, and she's got it, and I'm looking forward to seeing how she did with it tomorrow.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Move-In Day and a Hundred Thousand Thank Yous
Originally published January 8, 2026.
This is my journal entry from January 8, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
Awesome move-in day today. I'm so excited to tell you about it. I woke up for the last time at the place in my ex-wife's neighborhood, picked the kids up and took the kids to school. And after dropping them off, I came back to my new place to get on the computer and rent my truck. I chose a U-Haul truck downtown. And it's only $20 to rent it plus like a dollar and something a mile. And you refill the gas up too. So it should be under $50. I set the rental for noon and have a little snack here. Then I go to the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that my sponsor is meeting me at today. We have a nice time there. And I talk about, again, how AA prepared me to have a divorce that was much easier than early sobriety. There's another girl that's just starting divorcing her wife, and I share after her about my experience with divorce, and a few other people do too. It's a really nice, warm meeting.
Then I head back to go get the truck. I stop at the new place real quick and get ready. Then I... Actually, no, I go back to the old place first to try and grab some shit real quick and then run it over to the new place before the U-Haul truck. So I've got everything ready. I get down and grab the truck. It's super easy. And then I get to work. A friend's not available until after three. So I take the moving truck straight to the old place. And I load everything I can in there, mainly a few nightstands. And then I go to my ex-wife's place, take apart the twin bed, load the twin mattresses and the beds for that into my truck along with my late father's headboards, get everything in there. Have a nice conversation with my ex-wife about moving on with our life. And at the same time, we're still connected. We still love each other. And this is just a new chapter of our family that doesn't include sex and finances tied together or being married, but does include love for each other and working together, which is really nice.
I drive the moving truck to the house, park it on the road, and walk everything in. I've got a good sweat doing that. Good workout. No need to do anything physical today. We're getting it in today. I make sure to have lots of little meals too instead of bigger meals because I don't want to slow down. I'm thinking that might be the way to eat, even though that guy in Metabolic Freedom encourages fewer meals. My body seems to like having smaller meals and not getting tied down with being overly full. After I unload the moving truck here, I start to just try and rearrange things, get set up and wait for my friend. And I have a little hummus to eat with celery and some of the crackers and a cucumber.
My friend tells me he's ready to go. So I drive up to meet him at his place and pick him up. We go to my ex-wife's place first to grab the dressers, which is all that's left there. She's already got her full bed set up, which is nice, so she'll be ready to sleep there. And it worked perfect for her that I took the twin beds out when she had time. We get the dressers loaded up quick. It's amazing. He's a former professional mover. It's just beautiful to watch how he thinks about moving things and how skillful he handles something like a hardwood antique dresser, loads it up by himself into a truck and doesn't even want me to help, so he can do it just right. He gets everything positioned in the truck. Then we go to the house in my ex-wife's neighborhood. We get the king bed in there, the table and chairs in there, the desk in there, and everything but the bed frame goes in there.
Which is actually perfect because I need to come drop him off in this neighborhood anyway. So he says to just toss the bed frame in there on the way back. We get everything loaded by 4.30 and are on the way to my place. So we're making great time. We pull up here and I try and pull up in the street, but he says, no, go around the alley. Go around the alley and it's a tight fit. I'm really glad I got a 10 foot truck, which is a small truck, but still, for driving, you know, down an alley, the 10 foot truck is perfect. It's nine feet high too. So you got to watch the clearance. I bumped some of the trees and bushes hanging out in the alley, which is pretty much unavoidable. He parks the truck so close to the telephone pole that it's gently leaning up against it, which leaves the alley clear for other people to drive by. We unload everything, which is the sweatiest thing I've done today.
He shows me how to get a hold of the dresser with one hand to balance and one hand for the main grip. We carry one dresser in, the other one he wheels in on a dolly, which was much easier for me, but the second one we carry in. He finds perfect places to put them in the house, and we get my king bed in the house as well. At just a little before 6, we've wrapped up and got everything loaded in the house, ready to sleep here tonight as soon as I set everything up. Meanwhile, I'm really enjoying my time with him today. It's great talking with him and hearing some of his stories. It's great for him to get out of the house. I've known him for years, and it's really nice to have this experience together. I could have asked people from AA to come over, but this is a perfect opportunity for time with him and to allow him to remember all his stories as a professional mover. I asked him what was the worst thing he moved before, and he said three dentist chairs, incredibly heavy expensive stuff on them, and he had to take them down three flights of stairs. Like god, that sounds miserable. Days like this remind me how much real time with people I care about means, and if you want that kind of connection, I'd love for you to set up a call with me and connect with me on the call.
I take him back to his place and drop him off and I love he has an open attitude about money. He's like, you know, whatever, whatever you feel is right, I'm sure it'll be more than whatever I'd ask. I have two hundred dollar bills in my wallet so I give him two hundred dollars for three hours of his time helping me move, which I feel is more than fair. Now, I could have hired little helpers for a couple hundred bucks for two people for two hours on U-Haul, and I think, did I give him too much? But then I'm listening to the book Happy Money as I drive away, and I load my bed frame up, and it's like the guy's... Ken Honda, the author, is talking about how he gives people more than they ask for. And it leaves a really good feeling and a really good karma. And I'm like, I feel great about giving him $200 for three hours of really valuable work. That means between him and the truck and the gas, the entire move is going to cost me $300. Plus, my ex-wife gave me all the beds I have in my house, which is enough to sleep the kids on and me.
At some point, I could have a girlfriend. We could all sleep in this house on the beds that my ex-wife gave me, which would probably be at least $1,000 to buy all those beds. So grateful. I've been thriving saying thank you so much. My God, thank you for this huge house. Thank you for the beds to sleep in. I go get the truck gassed up and dropped off at 645, so I avoid paying $20 extra for after-hours check-in. Then I drive up to a new discount grocery store near my house, and I want to check it out. I've been meaning to, and it's so close to my house. I'm like, tonight's the night to give it a try. I run into two people I know there.
The first one is an acquaintance from school who was really enthusiastic about Author in St. Petersburg. I talked to him for like 10 minutes outside. He asked me, is everything going all right? He tells me a little bit about what he's doing. I tell him that he said he doesn't have much time to read now. I'm like, well, if you have time to listen to audiobooks, my audiobooks are on Audible. And if your wife has a subscription, you can listen at no additional cost to the next three books in the series. So he's enthusiastic about that, and he's happy to see I'm doing well.
After that, I walk in, and I'm surprised how small the store is. It looked so much bigger. That's what she said. It looked so much bigger. And I get in there. I'm like, it's kind of small. Makes you really impressed with the fruit and vegetable section at a bigger grocery store. This place has like a really small section, but some of the things are dirt cheap. Like the German sauerkraut was like $1.50 or something. And I've been paying like four or five bucks for those at the regular grocery store. So I load up on German sauerkraut. I get plenty of fruit, strawberries, apples. I need to have all the stuff for the kids now since I'll be sending them to school. And they love when I pick them up and I have a nice... big bowl of fruit for them, especially since we're not getting fast food anything.
I see another guy I know from my yoga studio. I gave him my book I Was Famous on the Internet. He talks to me a little bit. I tell him that I'm going to a new yoga studio. I don't mention any kind of reason why. I'm just like, man, people have been saying it's cool, so I've been going there. He turns out he's been there a bunch of times as well. And then he lets me go. He says he needs to continue with his shopping. He probably talked to me for three or four minutes. But I end up feeling like, you know, he didn't like talking to me, feeling like he rejected me after he stopped in the store and had a conversation with me for a few minutes. And I realized I don't know what he's in the middle of. I don't know if he's got someone waiting at home, or he's trying to make his next video, or he's got an appointment to get to later, or, you know, he's about to start drinking for the night, or like, I have no idea what else he's enthusiastic about on Thursday night. It could be anything. It's 11, 11 p.m. as I'm recording this. How cool is that? But it's funny. I observe my thoughts and I'm like, okay. I throw on an audio book and move on.
I finish up Ken Honda's Happy Money book, which is fantastic. It's a great reminder that I do a lot of things right with money. And I'm saying thank you, thank you, thank you so much for the money I have. Thank you for the place to live. Thank you for the beds. Thank you for the landlords next door. Thank you for all of it. I get home from doing the grocery trip, and I have dinner right there, which ends up being... I've had four Larabars throughout the day. I've been hungry today. I've had four Larabars. I had a salad earlier, and I ate about a thing of hummus. I have some more hummus, and I get...
I eat three whole avocados and four bananas. I'm still hungry right now. I power through all that stuff with a little toasted sesame oil and salt on the avocados because fuck it, I forgot the soy sauce. Like one of the few things I still have to get in my house is the soy sauce, which I was going to put like an Asian avocado thing with sesame oil and soy sauce. I forgot half of that, but it turns out salt worked just as well. That's one of the big ingredients in soy sauce after all. So I put down that to give myself a nice full belly, but not too full. Then I get into the bedroom here to get to work on blacking the windows out because I want to get a good night of sleep in this bitch, especially my first night in here. And I need to do the blackout because it's so easy to get to the windows before I've got the bed set up.
So I butchered some of the blackout strips earlier, but I get it all right today. Everything looks awesomely blacked out as hell right now as I'm recording this in the bedroom. After getting all the windows blacked out, I set up the beds. And the kids' twin beds, two twin beds side by side, and my king bed fit perfectly in this room with my late father's nightstand he made for me in the middle of it. I mean, this is absolutely gorgeous setup. Gorgeous setup for a bedroom. I love it. It's got an air return in here too. Meanwhile, I'm listening to Ali Wong's special Single Lady, which is funny as hell. And I'm amazed how much overlap she has. She's talking about what a great relationship she has with her ex-husband and all her adventures dating. I'm like, this is some really nice validation right now. Like her experience and mine are overlapping quite a bit right here. How nice.
After I get all that set up, then I'm getting ready to shower. I throw down some more whole foods real quick. I eat some sauerkraut. I had to get into that $1.50 German sauerkraut. That shit was good. This one's a little saltier than some of the other ones. And then right as I'm finishing getting the bed set up, I'm getting a door light blocker. You slide this thing under the door so it blocks the light that way, getting my lamp and putting the finishing touches on my setup. I'm like, you know what? You know what I should do? I should listen to this Kenny G album. It's called Breathless. My late father used to listen to it. It came out in 1992. Starts off with A Joy of Life, then the next song's Forever in Love. I listened to A Joy of Life last night. So I started off with Forever in Love. Now, when I first, my late father used to listen to this.
And I remember a year or two ago when I first listened to this album, I could only get one song at a time without sobbing and remembering my late father in grief. It literally took me four different times of going through the joy of life, forever in love, in the rain, and then sentimental. It took four different listens, and I cried every single time. And I listened to the joy of life yesterday to kind of calm down a bit, and I'm like, I'm good. I don't think we're going to need to do that tonight. But I put on Forever in Love and I started sobbing right away. I just started feeling so grateful. I'm like, look at this. In some ways, my life just got utterly destroyed with my career and my divorce and moving out. But look at this beautiful house I'm in. I love the neighborhood. Look at how much work, how healthy I am that I moved all this stuff in the house except...
The one truckload of things a friend helped me with, which would be the two dressers, the king bed, the desk, the entertainment center that I got for free, and the dining room table. Everything else, the other twin beds. And I helped him. He appreciated my help, said I was a good helper. I helped him. Like, thank God I'm this strong and this active that I can do all this stuff today. And I had energy for all of it. I didn't have a moment where I was too tired the whole day. I got all the blackout strips set up right. I love how functional I am. It's such a gift. Thank you for that. And I just felt so much love. I'm like, you know that last house was a transition house and I'm super grateful for it. At the same time I was like, the whole time I was in there, this is a short-term house. If you're starting a fresh chapter and want a sounding board for it, I'd be glad to talk it through with you on a private one-on-one call with me.
And now I'm in this house. I'm like, I hope I'm here for a long time. Thank God for this house. Thank God for my ex-wife taking such good care of me, helping me out so much. And I've got like $20,000 in cash because I also took like a $12,000 cash advance from Discover. But it's on a balance transfer that I transferred to Citi, so I only paid 3% to borrow it for 18 months. Let's go. And I'm just thinking, like, thank you.
I have so much money right now. I have such a beautiful place to live. I'm desirable at least to some women. What a great life. I'm healthy. I have work I'm excited to do. What an incredible life. I shaved. I kept crying. Then I went to get in the shower and the fucking water flow out of that wand thing they have. I'm like this. Bitch is like fucking gently raining on me right now. Like I can barely feel the water. I can feel the time it takes from the water to hit my head and run down to my neck like this. I want to be fucking drenched by something. Tomorrow I'm getting my, what I've turned into a four gallon a minute instead of a two gallon shower head. I'm going to get that out of the last place along with the soy sauce. And we're going to get that set up properly.
I'm super grateful for my first shower here. Super grateful everything is set up for me to have a nice night of sleep. Man, what a gift. One of the things I remembered from Happy Money that he said today, that the guy he learned from had somebody who wanted to borrow money from him and start a business, and the guy said, I'll do it, but I want you to say thank you, arigato, 100,000 times first. I'm like, that's what I want to do. I want to say thank you 100,000 times. If I say thank you once a minute for an hour, that's 60. And even if I only manage to remember to do it 10 hours a day or maybe round up and we'll get 1,000 thank yous a day, that's 100 days. And I'll say thank you 100,000 times. And that's going to absolutely move everything in my life.
You know, that's the basic energy change, to say thank you instead of fuck you or I hate this or I don't like it. It's not right. Thank you. It's what you're grateful for you tend to get more of. Thank you. I'm going to wrap it up for tonight and see how my new night's sleep is. It's 1119. So happy for this day. Thank you. If anyone besides me actually listened to this, thank you.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
The Old House by the Lake
Originally published December 6, 2025.
This is my journal entry from December 6, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I woke up this morning around 7:00 a.m. after a rough night of sleep. It took me hours to fall asleep, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it was because I went to bed too early, or because I didn’t do any vigorous exercise yesterday—even though I did walk a lot. Still, despite the lack of sleep, I woke up with more clarity than I’d had in days. Almost immediately, I knew something important: these downtown apartments aren’t it.
I can already feel myself getting aggravated by all the things people complain about in the negative reviews—broken elevators, surprise fees, unresponsive maintenance, dog shit in the hallways, corporate property managers who don’t care because they’re just a middle layer between you and the actual owner. I don’t want to be at the mercy of some corporate entity that can leave me hanging whenever it’s convenient for them. Yes, I’ve had good apartment experiences in the past, but this situation is different now, especially with kids. What I actually love is having a landlord who lives nearby or is personally invested in the property. That’s the setup I have now, and it’s ideal for me.
I wake up with my son still here, and it feels really good. The loneliness that’s been creeping in—especially on Friday nights and Saturday mornings—is completely gone with him around. He’s ready to head back down the street to go to Snowfest, so we get up together. He eats an apple, I have a couple of Lara Bars, and I walk him back down to my ex-wife’s house. After that, I come home and immediately get to work, deep-diving into Zillow.
The clarity keeps building. Apartments just feel inconvenient for what I actually want. I don’t care about walkability in the way a lot of people do. Some people want to walk to bars and nightlife. I’m sober. I can drive any time of day. I don’t need to walk so I can get drunk and stumble back to my apartment. I want to be able to get in and out easily. I want space. The thought that keeps pissing me off is paying $2,900 a month for 432 square feet at Viv. That genuinely makes my stomach turn. I’m not doing that.
I spend about two straight hours searching—houses all over St. Petersburg, different neighborhoods, different price ranges—trying to feel into what actually makes sense. Then I head to my yoga studio for yoga. There’s a girl there who kind of looks like a woman I met, along with several other people I know. I take a 10:30 a.m. power flow with a yoga instructor, and it’s a solid workout. She has us holding standing positions, dropping into catcher’s stance, bouncing there forever, forearm planks, regular planks—just grinding it out. It’s intense in a good way.
On the way out, I briefly consider talking to a few women. One is probably around fifty, very friendly and beautiful, someone I’ve seen a few times before. Another woman in her fifties comes to mind—she’s talked to me before, she’s read my books, I walked in with her today, and I know she’s single. At least in my opinion, she could probably use some action. Then there’s the girl who looks like that woman I met. I think about talking to her too, but I’m not convinced it’s actually her, and I feel like I would’ve recognized her more clearly if it were. In the end, I don’t talk to anyone. My focus is elsewhere today. I want to get home, figure out my living situation, and go to Whole Foods.
Right after yoga, I drive by a house I’d already texted about earlier. I have a tour scheduled for 6:00 p.m. tonight. As the day unfolds, Crescent Lake starts to stand out more and more as the ideal spot for me. Especially with kids—it’s perfect. Playground, walking paths, open space, dog park. It feels like a real neighborhood instead of a box stacked on top of other boxes. There’s a house in an incredible location near the park. It’s listed as three bedrooms, though really it looks like two true bedrooms plus a bonus room, about 1,400 square feet.
The downside is the price. Rent is $2,700 a month, and the owner wants first month, last month, and a security deposit. That means I’d be dropping somewhere between $6,000 and $7,000 just to move in. That last month’s rent especially feels financially inefficient right now. Still, I start asking myself a more honest question: if I knew everything would work out financially, what would actually matter to me? The answer is clear. Location. And then the next layer: what do I actually care about in a location?
After going to my yoga studio today, I realized I might’ve had a bit of a stick up my ass about it and probably judged it too quickly. The truth is, there are plenty of attractive women who go there. There’s no reason I couldn’t meet someone to date—or even a future second wife—through that community. Hell, maybe I already know one there. Seeing a friend earlier this week, talking with my massage therapist, and hearing people’s stories keeps reminding me how valuable community really is when it comes to dating. So much of dating can be easy and natural when you share friends, routines, and environments instead of forcing yourself into cold approaches with strangers. That realization softened something in me. If you are single and tired of cold approaches, I have come to believe most good connection grows out of shared community and routine, and you can set up a call with me to look at how to build that into your own life.
Once I let that land, Crescent Lake started to make even more sense. If I lived there, my yoga studio would be less than a mile away. I could walk there or drive over in minutes. I could walk the kids to the park almost every day and let them run around the playground or go to the dog park. My ex-wife and I could even coordinate things easily—she could take the dogs to the park and meet me there to drop the kids off. I could walk the loop around Crescent Lake regularly. There are tons of people there all the time—runners, walkers, families, and yes, plenty of attractive women. It actually feels like the kind of environment that could support my life instead of complicating it.
Crescent Lake Park itself is really nice. I texted a friend about it, and she told me she used to live right there and loved the neighborhood, even though she eventually moved farther away. The more I looked at other houses in the area, the clearer it became how well this location lines up with everything that matters to me. It’s close to the kids’ school. It’s near multiple yoga studios. I could still go to the AA meeting I recently started. Crunch Fitness would still be easy to get to. There are tennis courts scattered all around the area. Downtown is close enough to pop into whenever I want, but far enough away that the neighborhood itself looks quiet and grounded.
One thing that really pushed me over the edge with the apartment complexes—both the ones I toured yesterday and the ones I looked into this morning—was the sheer volume of negative reviews about noise. That hit home. One of the things I absolutely love about the house I’m in now is how quiet it is. I can record audiobooks at any time of day without worrying about background noise. And when it comes to sleep, especially with kids, the idea of living somewhere loud is a nightmare. Imagine renting an apartment where the kids can’t even sleep over because it’s too noisy at night. That would be brutal. And while noise is technically a risk in any apartment, it seems almost guaranteed in the heart of downtown.
A lot of the reviews mentioned Janus Live and other venues making it impossible to sleep until early morning hours. Twenty years ago, that wouldn’t have bothered me at all—I’d probably still be awake. But now, I don’t want to live around people who are okay with that kind of lifestyle, or places where enough people are miserable that they’re leaving angry one-star reviews about it. That feels like a clear signal.
I kept looking around the rest of St. Pete and finally realized something simple: it makes sense to start with this house tour tonight before doing anything else. I don’t need to keep spinning myself out. I’ll make the finances work. And if I knew, truly knew, that everything would work out financially, I’d choose a place in a great location with unique benefits—somewhere I could literally walk across the street and be at Crescent Lake Park. A place where life could unfold naturally. Who knows what could happen there.
I had a great conversation with the two people from New York at the AA meeting yesterday, and they told me they really liked my take on manifesting. So here it is, clearly, the way I actually understand it. To me, manifesting is not lying in bed asking God, Shiva, or the Universe to drop something in my lap. It’s not staring at vision boards and imagining checks in the mail or convincing myself I’ve already won the lottery. That version always felt off. The Secret has some truth in it, but taken literally, it turns into bullshit pretty fast.
My version of manifesting is much simpler and much more grounded. I think the thoughts I want to think. Then I take real actions that put me in a position to receive what I want. After that, it’s no longer up to me how or when it happens. There’s clearly something impersonal at work—collective consciousness, God, reality, whatever you want to call it—that doesn’t respond to begging or fantasy. Just asking for something doesn’t mean it gets delivered. What does work is positioning yourself so that when opportunity passes by, you’re actually there to meet it. If that grounded take on manifesting resonates and you want help positioning your own life so what you want can actually find you, book a one-on-one call with me and we will map it out together.
I don’t see much value in visualizing lottery wins or pretending money is already yours if your life isn’t aligned to receive it. If you were already rich, would you even care about winning the lottery? Probably not. That tells me something important. The goal isn’t to fantasize outcomes—it’s to build a life where the outcomes you want naturally cross your path.
That’s where Crescent Lake keeps coming back into my mind. I had this same feeling about South Tampa, about Michigan, about downtown St. Pete. But Crescent Lake stands out. It feels like the kind of place where I could walk in the morning, talk on the phone, listen to an audiobook, and just be in my body. And maybe one morning I smile at a beautiful woman. She smiles back. We start talking. And who knows—next thing you know, we’re dying together. That’s the kind of manifesting I believe in. Not forcing, not chasing, not hustling—just being in the right environment.
So today, Crescent Lake feels like the best positioning move I can make. There are three houses for rent on the exact same block, which feels almost comically aligned. I’m going to check out all of them. If this first one doesn’t work, I’ll look at the other two. But it makes sense to start here.
Earlier today, I went to Whole Foods, and there were tons of attractive women there. But I noticed something important in myself. I don’t want to force anything. The pickup-artist approach doesn’t feel right to me anymore—just walking up to women everywhere and leading with “you’re hot.” That whole grind mindset is something I’ve lived before, in business and other areas of life, and it mostly produced suffering. Sure, you might get a yes once in a while, but you also rack up a lot of awkward or negative interactions, and you end up disturbing people who are just trying to live their lives.
That’s not what I want anymore. I don’t want to hustle relationships. I want to live in a place where connection can happen naturally, where shared space and repeated presence do the work for me. Where I don’t have to try so hard. Right now, Crescent Lake feels like the cleanest expression of that idea.
And if I’m actually on the right frequency with someone, we’ll run into each other and it’ll be organic. That keeps coming back to me. On the drive home from Whole Foods, I start running through the mental Rolodex. There’s a girl from yoga who’s hot—I could text her and see what she’s been up to. But then I remember I got her number a month ago and never texted her. There’s also the woman in her fifties I saw at yoga today. I could text her too. But neither of those moves feels right. I’m tired of feeling like I’m out there hustling and grinding and pursuing all the time, especially when it doesn’t seem like anyone actually wants to be pursued that way. I don’t want to force things just to have something happen.
With the woman in her fifties especially, I can see how easily that could go sideways. I don’t want to pursue her just to have a one-night stand. That feels like a terrible idea. I can already see how that could turn into attachment on her side and awkwardness on mine, followed by some version of me saying, “Wait a minute, you can’t have kids, this isn’t a long-term thing,” and suddenly I’ve burned a bridge for no good reason. I’d much rather stay friendly, give her books, and keep things clean. I don’t want to torch community connections for short-term gratification. I’m trying to walk that line where I’m available, paying attention, and positioned for organic things to happen—without forcing situations that create problems later.
I’ve definitely done the forcing thing before, especially with work. I messaged thousands of Facebook page owners back in the day, hustling hard just to get my first hundred or so clients. There were endless negative interactions, tons of wasted time, and none of those clients are still with me today. Not one. None of the things I got through pure hustle stood the test of time. That sticks with me. Pickup artist books teach the same thing when it comes to women: grind, push, collect numbers, make the move. And sure, you might get results, but how many of those connections actually last? Very few. They burn hot and fast and then disappear.
At the same time, I can’t lie to myself either. I was swiping like a maniac on Match back in the day—winking, messaging, doing all that shit—and that’s how I found my ex-wife. So clearly there’s some balance here. It’s not all passive. It’s not all hustle. There’s an ideal combination of positioning yourself well and then actually taking action when something real shows up. What feels right for me now is being present and living in the right neighborhood.
I keep thinking about it from a success perspective. What if I start making a bunch of money and then realize I’m stuck in some stupid house I don’t even like because I tried to play it safe? That would feel incredibly dumb. Imagine renting a cheap place in an awkward location, then things take off financially, and I’m sitting there thinking, why the hell did I lock myself into this lease in a place that doesn’t inspire me? That’s one of the worst outcomes I can imagine.
Being in the right place matters to me. It inspires me. If I’m paying $2,700 a month to live near Crescent Lake, I know myself well enough to say I’ll be out there, engaged with life, prepared for opportunities, and in position when things show up. Renting a place I actually want—one a woman would want to move into too—matters. Crescent Lake feels like that kind of neighborhood. It feels like a place where life could expand instead of contract. If you are trying to build a life and an environment that expands instead of contracts, that is one of my favorite things to talk through — schedule a private call with me and we can dig into it together.
I’m genuinely excited to go look at this house later today. At the same time, I notice a little resistance once I get home and eat a salad. That familiar resistance to doing my actual work. I hit a point where I realize, okay, I’ve done enough Zillow scrolling for today. I know the next place I’m going to look at. I don’t need backup options right now. I’m going to see this house, and if I like it, I don’t need to keep shopping. What I do need to do today is sit down and crank out my work and my books. That’s the part that actually moves my life forward. So I’m glad I’m finally doing that now.
It’s now five hours later. Five full hours. I went to look at the house, and it turns out it’s 103 years old. And somehow, that doesn’t bother me at all. What matters is the location, which is absolutely incredible. I love the neighborhood. The owners are genuinely awesome. The house has plenty of space—for me, for the kids, for a woman to move in someday, for pets. It just works. The contrast is almost funny when I think about how I felt touring Viv yesterday. That place is brand new, shiny, modern. This house is over a century old, and yet it feels infinitely more alive. Being close to Crescent Lake Park is unreal. That alone changes everything.
The house is currently occupied, so we briefly said hello to the tenants. Then the two owners walked us through the place, answered all my questions, and gave me a real tour. I got good vibes from both of them. I can genuinely see them being great neighbors and great landlords. I could picture the kids being happy there. I could picture myself settling into that neighborhood and staying for years, which is exactly what I want right now. Not another short-term scramble. Not another placeholder. A place I can actually land.
I felt ready to apply the moment I left the house. Completely ready. But then I remembered last night—how convinced I was that I should apply for the apartment at Viv, and how relieved I felt the next morning that I hadn’t. That memory slowed me down in a good way. So I’m going to sleep on this one too. As of right now, my plan is to apply first thing in the morning. The cost is basically the same as that 432-square-foot apartment I looked at yesterday, except this place has roughly three times the space, two parking spots right behind the house, and zero elevators. By the time I’d be waiting for an elevator downtown, I could already be halfway around Crescent Lake.
After the showing, I took a walk around Crescent Lake Park to let everything settle in my body. About halfway around, I ended up walking behind a woman, so I called out “hello” from a distance so I wouldn’t startle her by suddenly appearing right behind her in the dark. We ended up talking for about ten minutes. She was thinking about moving here and staying with family for the holidays, and she was literally on her phone using ChatGPT for real estate. That part made me laugh internally.
I was asking almost all the questions. She was answering, but she wasn’t really asking anything about me. About halfway through the conversation, I shook her hand and got her name. I kept wondering if I should just walk ahead instead of lingering, but it felt awkward to cut it short for no reason. She’s attractive, but she also seemed a little reserved and not fully present. Eventually she said she needed to head back to where she was staying, gave me a high five, and we parted ways. I walked the last couple of blocks back to my car thinking about whether I should have asked for her number.
I realized something important in that moment. Just because I could ask for a phone number doesn’t mean I should. I didn’t feel any real connection there. She didn’t seem particularly engaged with me either. Asking for her number would’ve just been me doing something out of habit, not out of alignment. It would’ve been a distraction, not a step forward. So I didn’t. Maybe I’ll see her again sometime. If we cross paths again and the energy is different, maybe something grows from that. If not, that’s fine too.
Walking back to my car, I felt calm. Grounded. Present. And more certain than I’ve felt in a while that I’m finally putting myself in the right place—not forcing anything, not chasing, just positioning myself where life can actually meet me.
I drive back home, and my mind just keeps looping about whether or not to go to the 8:00 p.m. AA meeting tonight—the speaker meeting where I might see people I know. I eat a little bowl of the potato and bean soup I made earlier. After walking around Whole Foods today, I had this very simple realization: why the hell wouldn’t I just make my own bean soup with potatoes? It’s basically free compared to buying prepared food. The potatoes were about $5, the beans were $1, and I threw in some celery and carrots. That’s it. Cheap, filling, and I’ve got a ton of it. I did go a little overboard on the seasoning, but whatever. It’s still solid food.
After eating, I finally land on the real lesson from two weeks ago: Jerry sitting at home on a Saturday night and skipping an AA meeting is a great way to wake up lonely and a little unhinged on Sunday. So I decide to get my ass out of the house. I drive about fifteen minutes to the meeting, and it hits me that if I lived in the Crescent Lake house, this group would be way closer—maybe half the distance, maybe even a third. That matters more than I usually acknowledge.
When I get there, I recognize several people right away. I sit next to two guys I know, and we’re joking around before the meeting starts. I’m relaxed. One of the speakers happened to share a first name with a character from Pulp Fiction, so I couldn’t resist riffing a line from that movie at him. It got a good laugh, and it felt nice to just be there, connected, not hiding out at home.
On the drive to the meeting, I’d been thinking a lot about a massage therapist, which surprised me because I hadn’t thought about her much recently. I caught myself thinking, she should text me. I even said it out loud in the car. If she’s thinking about me, she should text me. Then, sitting in the meeting, another thought creeps in: yeah, but men usually text first, so why don’t you just send her a message? I remember someone sharing recently about staying connected—sending simple messages to people you care about. I realize I don’t do that enough. Especially with people I already know. I need to keep people in mind more and let them know I’m thinking of them.
So I text a massage therapist. I keep it simple: Hey, I keep thinking of you tonight and hope you’re doing well. That’s it. Two hours later, there’s still no response. After I send it, I feel vulnerable, almost exposed, and part of me wishes I hadn’t sent it. At the same time, I think about how grateful I was when my sister called me two weeks ago when I was really struggling. Most of the time, we don’t reach out enough. Obviously, if there’s a restraining order or someone has explicitly asked you not to contact them, that’s different. But absent something like that, I think it’s generally a good thing to reach out to people you’re connected with. It helps me think about others instead of staying locked in my own head.
On the way home, I listen to Alan Watts. He talks about how the more interesting people tend to be the ones who think about others more. That lands for me. I want to be more interesting. I want to think about other people more. Tonight, I notice that I was thinking about a massage therapist, about a woman I met on a walk around Crescent Lake, about the landlords from the house, about people at the meeting. That feels like a good direction.
I stop by my mom’s house on the way home and show her the house near Crescent Lake. She lights up when she sees that it’s close to the lake because she could bring her dog and walk him around there. That reaction matters to me. This is the first place I’ve seriously looked at where my mom has shown genuine enthusiasm. I take that as a good sign. My ex-wife has also said the kids would love Crescent Lake, and that lines up with everything else I’m seeing. It really feels like all the arrows are pointing in the same direction. This neighborhood makes sense. This house looks like exactly what I’ve been looking for.
So my plan is to send in the application tomorrow, wrap this decision up, and let myself rest. It’s 10:42 p.m. now, and it feels like the right time to go to bed.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Hunting Downtown for My Reset
Originally published December 5, 2025.
This is my journal entry from December 5, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I had a call with Blockchain Pill first thing this morning at 8:00 a.m., and we ended up talking for three full hours. I felt genuinely honored that he wanted to hear every part of my story—everything from the divorce to my entire journey as a content creator, my thoughts on ICP, my books, and where I see myself going next. There’s easily enough material from that conversation for him to release at least four videos on his channel, which is meaningful because a lot of the people who used to follow me can now follow him. Talking with him gave me real clarity about content creation going forward, and that clarity feels like a breakthrough.
I’m completely happy to talk with another content creator on Zoom, especially someone with an existing audience. What I’m no longer interested in—or set up to do—is making videos on my own channels. That chapter is closed. I can still have my face and my story online through interviews and conversations like this, but I can’t be the one producing and uploading videos myself anymore. That boundary feels solid and healthy. With books, on the other hand, I can do this entirely on my own. Writing and dictating books like this is something I enjoy deeply, something that works long-term, and something I can sustain. What I don’t do well anymore is the constant grind of creating and distributing video content.
The idea that feels right is using interviews like this to talk about my books and let that drive sales naturally. If even a small number of people start buying my books and become repeat readers, that could turn into a meaningful stream of passive income over time. Especially since I’m dictating constantly, there would always be new books for them to buy. This format feels perfect for the people who used to watch me on YouTube—familiar, personal, but without me having to run my own channels. If you are dreaming up a way to earn from your own writing or story without running a channel, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we will figure out your version of it on our call.
After the call wrapped up, my friend an older friend—who’s supposed to come over to work on his book—let me know he couldn’t make it today, and we rescheduled. That ended up working out just fine, because I was fired up and ready to go look at apartments downtown. I talked with my ex-wife on the phone, and she agreed that a downtown apartment sounded like a great move for me. I’d be close to the kids’ school, close enough to her, but far enough away to have my own life. Plus, I’d have access to everything downtown offers. With that confirmation, I was ready to take immediate action.
I jumped in the car and toured several apartments back-to-back in the Edge District. I started with 930 Central, also known as Central Flats. It’s one of the more affordable options in the area, around $2,000 a month. I looked at it, and it was fine—nothing wrong with it—but I wasn’t feeling it. I knew I needed to see more. From there, I went across the street to Viv, a brand-new apartment complex that only started moving people in about a month ago. I toured a studio apartment on the fifteenth floor, and the view was absolutely incredible. The balcony alone was tempting.
But the moment I walked inside, the space felt tiny. My brain immediately started trying to solve impossible puzzles. How would I stay here overnight with the kids? How would I have a girl over and still make this work if the kids were around? Even something simple like the life coach coming over on Wednesday to work—would there be enough room for a bed, a desk, and a setup to record? I loved the view. I loved the balcony. But the reality of the space didn’t quite work. To upgrade to a one-bedroom, I’d be looking at over $3,000 a month.
A leasing agent told me my total cost to live at Viv would be around $2,900 a month. Hearing that number made me pause hard. If I’m paying $2,900 a month, I might as well rent a house somewhere. Paying that much for an apartment feels insane. It immediately made me think about Michigan, where I could have an apartment almost this nice for less than half the price. Of course, this isn’t Michigan. And that reality is part of the equation now, whether I like it or not.
I really enjoyed walking around downtown and taking everything in—the streets, the buildings, the people, the general energy. I noticed there’s a Publix just a couple of blocks away, and Sun State Yoga is only about five blocks from Viv. From a pure location standpoint, it’s excellent. It feels alive and walkable in a way that immediately appeals to me. After wandering around a bit, I walked down to Camden Apartments and took a tour there with a leasing agent. Coming straight from Viv, though, Camden felt underwhelming. Even though Viv was basically a ghost town—with hardly anyone moved in yet, despite a lot of units being reserved and something like 212 apartments still available, which looks like most of the building—it still felt more exciting. There was something kind of cool about the idea of leasing at Viv and essentially having the building to myself for a while.
Camden, on the other hand, looked mostly full. There were several hot girls hanging around outside, just like at Central Flats, but I still wasn’t feeling it. It’s only about seven years older than Viv, but it already feels dated by comparison, and the cost is almost the same. After Camden, I walked a couple more blocks and toured Windsor. The leasing agent showed me multiple units. I really wanted something on the top floor for the view, but they didn’t have anything available up there. She showed me both a studio and a one-bedroom. The moment I walked into the one-bedroom, my immediate thought was, yes—this is the kind of space I actually need. Not that closet masquerading as a studio at Viv.
Standing there, I kept thinking that if I could somehow mash together the best parts of all these places—the view from Viv, the space from Windsor, the location convenience—it might actually work. But again, the cost kept snapping me back to reality. Even here, where it was slightly cheaper, I was still in the range where I could rent a whole damn house for about the same price as apartment living. That’s hard to ignore.
I also found myself reflecting on the negative reviews I’d read before touring these places. Viv is brand new, so it doesn’t have much of a review history yet. But most of the other complexes are loaded with one-star reviews describing everything from dog shit in the elevators to elevators being broken constantly, maintenance requests going unaddressed for months, surprise fees slapped on residents when they move out, and all kinds of other nonsense. Sure, some of those reviews are probably written by toxic, pissed-off people who are exaggerating. But one of the negative reviews I read was written by a woman I actually know from Toastmasters. And if that’s her experience, then there’s definitely some truth in it.
That brought up a bigger concern: getting locked into a lease where you don’t even fully understand what the real cost will be, where fees magically appear later, where you’re restricted in which internet provider you can use. Viv actually handled that part well—you can choose either Spectrum or Frontier, which is great. Most of the other complexes force you into one option. I already have Frontier, and I want to keep it. It’s $30 a month. It irrationally pisses me off to think about paying $80 a month for some bundled TV and cable bullshit when I already have cheap internet, or canceling a Frontier promo and losing money just to comply with an apartment’s setup.
At that point, I started seriously asking myself how the hell I’d even afford these places long term. I know the numbers. I’ve talked to ChatGPT about it. I have enough money to comfortably cover the next several months, and I’ve got 0% interest credit cards. I realistically have at least six months of runway without needing to make a dollar. But that runway shrinks fast as rent goes up. And after touring everything, the only place I genuinely want to live is Viv—and the space there is just too damn small. The one-bedroom units don’t have the same view and start at over $3,000 a month base rent. By the time everything’s added up, I’d be looking at $3,400 or $3,500 a month.
Then there’s the parking garage and the elevators. Even if everything works perfectly, I’m a time Nazi. If it takes five minutes to get from my apartment door, down the elevator, and out to the parking garage, that’s five extra minutes each way. That’s ten minutes on every single round trip I make. Multiply that out over a day, a week, a month, and it starts to feel insane. As Scarface might say—or maybe someone else—this is fucking depressing. Either way, yeah. That’s not going to work.
At the same time, I honestly don’t know what else to do right now. What I do know is that I’m really excited about having an overnight with my son tonight. He has soccer, and I go to my 444 AA meeting. I thought the meeting was going to conflict with his soccer, but afterward my ex-wife calls me and lets me know it actually didn’t. At the meeting, there’s a couple who recently moved to the area. The wild part is that they got sober around the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before—a couple who found recovery together like that.
I ask them to tell me their dating story in detail, because I’m genuinely trying to figure out how to date properly in AA without turning into a pickup artist, burning bridges, or hooking up with every girl in the rooms. I want to know how to look for something real. They tell me their story, and it’s beautiful. It actually gives me hope. I ask to exchange numbers so I can recommend good meetings to them while they’re down here, and the woman offers her number right away. It all feels clean and appropriate, which I appreciate.
After the meeting, I go home and eat a big salad. My ex-wife calls and tells me my son’s soccer actually started later than we both thought, which sucks because it means I missed it. Still, I’m able to pick my son up and have the overnight with him at my house. When it’s time to leave my ex-wife’s place, he cries for about ten minutes. I know part of it is that he’s tired, and part of it is the transition. I also know that once we get going, he’ll be fine. I mostly stay quiet and let my ex-wife hug him and comfort him. Eventually, he’s ready. We walk down to my place together.
Once we’re home, everything settles. He loves my shower head—the one with double the water flow that most shower heads have—and that alone seems to improve his mood significantly. We get ready for bed and end up lying down a little after 9:00 p.m., which is slightly late for him and slightly early for me. As I’m lying there, drifting toward sleep, my mind keeps circling back to the same thought: I want that apartment at Viv. I want it. I want it. I want it. I seriously consider getting up and applying for it right then.
But I don’t. I know myself well enough to pause. Sometimes I get extremely excited about something and the excitement burns off quickly. Other times, the excitement sticks around and turns into a clear, grounded yes. I need to sleep on this and give my brain time to process everything. I did a lot today. Literally yesterday, I was planning to live in South Tampa. Today, I toured four downtown apartment complexes and mentally scrapped an entire relocation plan.
One thing my sponsor in AA consistently points out is how much I take action. That’s one of my strengths. At the same time, the downside is that I can take too much action too quickly and end up committing to something that isn’t quite right or that puts me in over my head. Tonight feels like a moment to slow down instead of push forward. I’m going to sleep, think about all of this tomorrow, and see what still feels true after I’ve had some rest. If you tend to move fast on big decisions the way I do and want a grounded second perspective before you commit, you can book a private call with me and we can slow it down together on our call.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Touring the Fresh Life I Crave
Originally published December 3, 2025.
This is my journal entry from December 3, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I woke up around 6:30 a.m. today with the immediate urge to take the kids to school. On the surface, that sounds like a good thing, even an asset, but it’s also exactly why living in Tampa would help me create better boundaries. I can’t be impulsive just because I want to see the kids more. My ex-wife and I had already planned that she would handle school drop-off and pickup today. I called her anyway, and she said it was fine if I took them this morning, so I went over, picked them up, and dropped them off at school.
From there, I drove straight to play tennis with a friend. He had plenty of stories to share, and I caught him up on everything that’s been going on in my life lately. Even though I hadn’t played in over a week, I really enjoyed the match. The weather was perfect. A friend won the first set 6–2 and the second set 6–4. He went up 2–0, then I won four games in a row, and then he won four straight to close it out. It was competitive and fun, and I left feeling energized. Afterward, I headed back to my place for a quick shower and then went to my massage appointment with my massage therapist.
During the massage, she was curious about my South Tampa plan, and we talked about that for a while. The conversation drifted to dating timelines, and it left me feeling oddly freeing. I don’t need to rush to find a partner. I don’t need pressure. I don’t need to force anything. I can actually relax and take my time, which feels like a huge relief. If you are giving yourself permission to date without rushing or forcing it and want to talk through what that looks like for you, book a one-on-one call with me and bring it to our call.
After the massage, I drove straight to the house in South Tampa and arrived twenty minutes early. I actually laughed to myself, thinking, who is this person that shows up twenty minutes early? The owner lives next door in another house she owns, and she walked over to greet me and show me around. The very first thing she said was that she had a cold and didn’t want to shake hands. I told her not to worry—I don’t believe in germ theory anyway.
Then we walked through the 1,600-square-foot house and out into the backyard, which is fully fenced—perfect for pets. The layout is genuinely interesting. The house was built in 1948, and you can tell immediately because the bedrooms are tiny. Apparently, people weren’t stuffing fat-ass king mattresses into their bedrooms back then. I’m not even sure I could squeeze a king bed into either of them. There are two bedrooms and one bathroom, yet somehow the house still feels big. It’s a strange but compelling use of space, and I can see why it might confuse people looking for something more conventional. She said people call every day acting like they want to rent it, then try to buy it instead, which annoys her. That makes sense, unfortunately.
Beyond the two bedrooms, there’s essentially a third room that isn’t technically a bedroom—a kind of bonus room in the middle of the house with three doorways and no actual doors. Another fascinating detail is that the house is poured concrete. Unlike cinder block, which is hollow, these walls are solid concrete. That’s absolutely ideal for blocking outside noise and recording audiobooks. Short of recording in the street or a homeless shelter or some shit, the worst possible environment for audiobook recording would be an apartment with thin walls and noisy neighbors. Trailers aren’t much better. This place, though—solid concrete walls—is basically a dream. I’d just need to soften the echo a bit, and it would be a near-perfect sound environment. I genuinely loved that part of it.
I walked the house carefully, asked a lot of questions, checked out the air return, and talked with her for about thirty minutes. At this point, part of my intention was clearly to sell myself as a good tenant. I asked her directly why the house had been empty for so long. It’s a great location, it’s been on Zillow for months, and that didn’t add up. She told me she’s very picky about who she rents to since she lives next door. That immediately made sense to me, and I told her so. I explained that I’m in the exact same situation now—the owner of the house I’m currently in lives right next door—and I actually love that arrangement. I told her I’m sober, I don’t throw parties, I don’t do anything wild. I have my kids over, I write and record books, and that’s basically my entire life.
I showed her pictures of the kids, told her about my life, and gave her a copy of I Was Famous on the Internet. About a month ago, I’d stuffed some loose pages into those books explaining that I was looking for a place to live close to my ex-wife, trying to figure out how to monetize my skills, and—on the back—some dating-related stuff. After I left, it hit me that I probably should’ve taken that piece of paper out. Giving her the book is one thing, but the random insert doesn’t exactly align cleanly with a landlord’s sense of stability and responsibility.
I told her that $2,300 a month—$4,600 total to move in with the security deposit—was affordable for me, which is true, assuming I continue doing what I’ve always done: printing money out of thin air by figuring shit out and making things work through books, coaching, and whatever else emerges. Still, there’s an obvious tension there. If you receive a note from someone saying they’re not entirely sure how they’re monetizing what they do, does that inspire confidence that they can reliably pay a couple thousand dollars a month on their own? Probably not. Fortunately, I do have real numbers to back myself up, which I’ll get into next.
After seeing the house, I decided to go by the Trader Joe’s nearby to get a feel for the neighborhood and the people. It’s only two blocks away, and somehow I snagged a parking spot immediately—probably because it was around 2:30 p.m. and not peak chaos yet. Inside, I noticed a mix of people, including some attractive younger women who didn’t have wedding rings on, which felt like a small but meaningful detail to my brain in that moment. It just felt… nice. Normal. Alive. I asked the cashier what he thought about the neighborhood, and he told me he’d moved there a couple of years ago and absolutely loved it. That landed as real validation, not salesy, not forced.
From there, I walked a couple of blocks farther down to a yoga studio. I went inside and got a quick tour. It made me miss my yoga studio a little, but this studio is genuinely within walking distance—about ten to fifteen minutes from the house—which is amazing. And if I didn’t feel like walking, it’s a two-minute drive. That kind of convenience matters more to me than I usually admit. After Trader Joe’s and the yoga studio, I drove back toward St. Petersburg, intentionally slowing down and really taking in the neighborhood and everything around me.
As I drove, I noticed something else coming up: fear. Fear that I wouldn’t get the house, mixed with excitement because I really want it. That familiar edge of desire plus uncertainty. So I started doing affirmations out loud in the car. Stuff like, “I’m really grateful that I have a house I’m going home to right this fucking second.” Seriously—here I am worrying about not having a house in the future when I literally have one right now. Gratitude. I have a place to live. I’ve always had a place to live. I have never been homeless a single night in forty-one years. I’m certain I will have a place to live, and I’m grateful for where I am right now. That makes the most probable outcome pretty obvious: I’ll be grateful for wherever I’m living next too. If you catch yourself anxious about the future while you actually have everything you need right now, this is the kind of reframe I love working through with people — schedule a private call with me.
I kept going. If this is the right house, it will be mine. If it isn’t fully aligned, then someone else will get it and it will be their house. Based on everything I’ve seen so far, it does feel like this place is coming to me. It feels right. And at the same time, I started saying thank you for the uncertainty. The uncertainty is what makes it interesting. If I knew for sure right now that I was getting the house, that would actually be kind of boring. One of the real upsides of this post-divorce life is that it’s more fun. It’s more of an adventure. There’s more uncertainty. I’ve craved that for years, and now I’m getting a big dose of it. I’m enjoying it while it’s here. Someday, when there’s more certainty—about where I’m living, how I’m making money, or who I’m fucking—I’ll be grateful for that too. And I’ll remember that I was also grateful during this phase, when things were unknown. Both states deserve appreciation.
Those affirmations grounded me on the drive home. I also listened to a lot more of Metabolic Freedom today and started taking notes in Microsoft Word so I wouldn’t forget the key points. I want to read through some of those notes now. I started with what he framed as critical: absolutely no ultra-processed foods. That stuff is junk—basically like pouring sand into your gas tank. Your body just tolerates it longer than a car would. I guess it depends how much sand you dump in that bitch, but the analogy still holds. Critical point: no processed foods.
Another big one was no cooked seed oils—only cold-pressed oils. Things like vegetable oil, grapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, and all those other seed oils that get cooked and end up in damn near everything, from potato chips to popcorn. You want to cook with olive oil, coconut oil, butter, avocado oil—oils that are cold-pressed. And not “et cetera” in a vague way, but very specifically oils that aren’t chemically abused in the extraction process. Apparently, when these seed oils are heated to extract them, they break down and turn into something your body wouldn’t naturally encounter in the wild. In other words, more junk your system has to deal with for no good reason.
In Metabolic Freedom, the author says doctors told him that cooked seed oils are actually worse for long-term health outcomes than smoking if you’re eating them every day. That got my attention. He talks about how these oils can have a half-life of nearly two years in the body, which means once they’re in there, they stick around for a long time. That alone is enough to make me commit to cutting them out as completely as I can. I’m clearly heading down the road of making sure those cooked seed oils aren’t part of my daily intake anymore.
Another thing I wrote down as critical is sleep disruption. He frames it as one of the worst things you can do to your health, and that tracks perfectly with my lived experience. There’s basically no way I spiral, get agitated, or go a little nuts unless my sleep is disrupted two nights in a row. I saw that clearly a week and a half ago. That’s also why I decided I’m not going to the a local spiritual community song ceremony on Friday. I don’t care how meaningful or interesting something sounds—if it’s going to mess with my sleep, I’m out. I’m done sacrificing sleep for experiences. I don’t give a shit what’s going on. If it disrupts my sleep, it’s not that important. I’m tired of being tired.
Another hard rule: no large meals at least three hours before bedtime. I’m also seriously looking at doing intermittent fasting again. Ideally, I’d like my eating window to be something like 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. I did intermittent fasting for at least a year back in 2016, and it was incredibly helpful for me. I stopped mostly because everyone around me was eating all the time, and little compromises add up until the whole thing disappears. What excites me now is that, post-divorce, I have total control. My ex-wife was supportive in a lot of ways, but not to the extent of changing her own habits. She wanted candy and processed junk food around, cooked seed oils in the house, and dinner right before bed. She supported me emotionally, but I couldn’t go as far as I wanted to go with her.
One memory that really sticks out is when we went to see Kevin Hart film his special at the Straz in Tampa about a year ago. Right before that, I threw out some ultra-processed food—chips, candy, that kind of stuff—and my ex-wife absolutely fucking lost it. She went off about it being her food, launched into a whole tirade, and completely blew up the day. Of course, she never apologized. She felt totally justified. And that was that. The entire day got shit on because I threw away some junk food, even though she knew I was actively trying to eat better at the time. I’m honestly relieved I don’t have to navigate that dynamic anymore.
I’ve already told the kids that there’s no more bullshit with food. No fast food at all. Ever. McDonald’s fries are the perfect example of garbage food—loaded with cooked seed oils, preservatives, and all kinds of chemical nonsense. You keep putting that stuff into your body and then act surprised when it doesn’t function properly. Imagine dumping water into your gas tank and expecting your car to run fine. And honestly, cars are way less impressive machines than human bodies. It’s kind of amazing our bodies work as well as they do considering how much garbage we feed them.
Some more notes I took: start the morning with vinegar. Have caffeine around 10:00 a.m.—late enough to get the benefit, early enough not to screw up sleep. Go to bed by 9:30 p.m., though realistically I might push that closer to 10:00. He says some of the most important sleep hours are between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., which feels accurate to me. Drink from glass containers and store food in glass to minimize microplastics. Eat green, low-starch vegetables. Eat avocados for healthy fat. Walk after meals. I actually bought avocados at Trader Joe’s today, which felt like a small but satisfying alignment between intention and action.
I took a nice walk over to the tennis club, canceled my membership, then came home and submitted the rental application. Sending that application in felt really good, especially when I saw my credit score pop up: 812. Let’s fucking go. A couple of years ago, that number was in the low 600s. Seeing 812—basically near-perfect—hit me hard in the best way. Zero evictions. Zero criminal history. I’m genuinely grateful for that. I listed my income based on what my ex-wife and I agreed reflects my earning capacity, and I don’t disagree with it. I’m confident I can hit that number. I’ve had months with strong crypto sales and months with solid sponsorship income. My ex-wife recently sent me some money, with more coming as we settle things. I can easily move into this house.
I even asked ChatGPT the best way to use my credit if I needed extra money. It laid it out clearly: start with a 0% interest credit card, then a personal loan if needed, then balance transfers. Simple. Clean. I’m good. I have so much. I really do. And the insane thing is how easy it is to have so much and still not see it—to walk around scared you’re not going to have enough. I’m grateful I’m not in that headspace today. I’m glad I’m reading this book too. Most of what’s in it isn’t brand new to me—I’ve heard versions of it in other books—but sometimes you need to hear the same truth over and over, especially when you’re finally in an environment where you can act on it without someone else quietly sabotaging you because they don’t want to change.
I get it. People are busy. You don’t want it. You don’t have time to take care of your body today. You’re stuck in survival mode. Who has time to learn and grow when you’re just trying to get through the day? What’s interesting is that a lot of people would assume I should be in survival mode right now. I don’t know where I’m going to live. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to make money. I don’t know who I’m going to date. Those are all big things. And yet I’m not in survival mode. I’m thriving. I’m enjoying my life. I had so much fun looking at that house today. If you are in a season of big unknowns and want help getting out of survival mode and actually enjoying it like I am, schedule a one-on-one call with me and we will talk it through.
Canceling the tennis club membership turned out to be a really good experience too. I had a great conversation with a member at my tennis club there. She talked about grieving and moving on after her husband died, and how she eventually met a guy at the tennis club who took a full year to pursue her before she finally said yes. He actually walked in while we were talking. Perfect timing. The membership requires thirty days’ notice to cancel, and I’m really glad I went in today. By January, I expect I’ll be gone, and that will drop about $260 a month from my expenses, plus hundreds more I’d otherwise spend on tennis lessons.
At this point, I’ve accepted that I’m probably a 3.5 tennis player unless I put a ton of effort into lessons. And honestly, 3.5 is fine. That’s good enough to have fun and get exercise. I don’t need to be a try-hard bitch chasing a 4.0 ranking. I’ve got a solid foundation. Now it’s about maintaining it. And I’m looking forward to playing some ultimate tennis in Tampa.
Tampa traffic is a little different. Even around 3:00 or 3:30 p.m., I turned left onto Westshore Boulevard—a two-lane road with a curve—and ended up waiting there for a solid two or three minutes. The traffic just kept coming. Thankfully, the person behind me was patient and didn’t start honking while I missed a couple of openings. When I finally saw a decent gap, I zoomed in and kept going. Sitting there waiting actually felt instructive. This would be a healthier kind of distance. A place where I’d need to plan overnights intentionally instead of casually popping over to my ex-wife’s house or my mom’s house whenever I felt like it.
After the tennis club, I went over to my ex-wife’s place to say goodnight to the kids. I told them about the house and we made a plan for my son to stay overnight with me on Friday. My daughter is going to be away with family, and it feels perfect to have just my son for the night, sleeping in the king bed with me. It feels good to plan things calmly and practically instead of scrambling or reacting.
After saying goodnight to my ex-wife and the kids, I went to the 7:00 p.m. AA meeting. We were outside, and I didn’t bring a jacket. Michigan definitely toughened me up a bit, but sitting there in sixty-two-degree weather, I was shivering by the end. Still, I was fine. I shared much of what I’ve been processing lately, listened to other people’s experiences, and felt grounded by the whole thing.
After the meeting, I headed over to my mom’s place. I gave her a call, then we watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica 1980 together—the third one, part three, where they’re back on Earth and time-traveling. It was simple and comforting. When I finally came back home, I felt deeply grateful for my life. I have a house I genuinely love. It’s exactly where I wanted to live. I almost effortlessly found it, moved in, and felt happy there. I know I want that kind of living situation again.
The other house I looked at earlier—managed by a property manager, near my ex-wife and my mom—never felt right. That setup didn’t sit well in my body. This house in South Tampa, though, feels right. I’m not rushing it. I’m glad I have a few days to think it through. I might take the kids down to South Tampa one day to show them around, though my daughter will be away with family, so we’ll see how that works out.
Mostly, I’m just grateful that I get to write books every day like I did today. That matters to me more than almost anything else right now. I’ll see you tomorrow.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
One Sentence Burns My Michigan Dream
Originally published November 30, 2025.
This is my journal entry from November 30, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I went to the 11:30 a.m. yoga flow this morning in downtown Plymouth, then headed to Starbucks in Northville to meet my aunt. It had snowed about three inches overnight, and everything was covered. The snow was absolutely beautiful—quiet, clean, everywhere. I loved it. When I met my aunt, we both had a lot of energy and were genuinely happy to see each other. The tone was completely different from the day before. It wasn’t confrontational at all. If anything, when I looked at her, it felt like the love between us was clearer and stronger than it had been previously, which was unexpectedly comforting.
We talked much more about her life today, which felt really good. She was gentler in how she shared her thoughts, though still very firm in her belief that I should not move to Michigan. That part hadn’t changed. After finishing my grande peppermint hot chocolate, I left and drove straight to meet my sister for the AA meeting near where she lives. Everyone had a chance to share, and the topic was rigorous honesty. I talked about how I needed living examples of that kind of honesty. Reading about it in books wasn’t enough for me. I had to see people actually do it—hear them say things out loud that, to me, felt shocking just to even admit, let alone share in a room full of people. Watching that gave me permission to be honest myself.
After the meeting, my sister told me something that completely shifted things. She said she had talked with her daughter the night before. Her daughter is fourteen, and in a fairly short conversation, she told my sister that she thought I should stay closer to the kids. She said it was important for them to have me around more consistently as their father, and that seeing me mostly during the summers wouldn’t really work—they needed me more often. Hearing that changed my sister’s perspective entirely. After a full week of her being excited about the idea of me moving up here, she listened to her daughter and adjusted her view without hesitation. As much as it derailed what I thought was my plan, I couldn’t help but respect that. I was grateful for the clarity, even as part of me thought, well, there goes the whole Michigan idea.
I drove back to my sister’s house turning it over in my head. What did this week actually teach me? The answer came into focus pretty quickly. I need space. I need newness. I don’t need to abandon my kids or disappear, but I do need to burn down the rest of my life as it currently exists. I need to stop going to the same AA meetings, stop going to the same yoga studio, and stop living in the same familiar patterns. I need a new neighborhood, a new environment. Thinking about Michigan made one thing very clear: I need to restart my life. I need a new life. If one honest sentence has ever set fire to a plan you were sure about and left you needing to rebuild, I know that disorienting moment well, and you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and talk through your own fresh start with me on our call.
When I first moved to Florida, I moved to Tampa. With that in mind, I started talking with ChatGPT again, laying out my updated thinking and asking for suggestions. Based on what I described, it suggested that South Tampa might actually be the best option for me. I spent hours on Zillow throughout the day, looking at different possibilities and imagining how each one might feel. I considered Gulfport, Clearwater, North Tampa around Wesley Chapel, and farther south toward Bradenton or Sarasota. I kept going back and forth, trying to balance distance, affordability, and how close I could reasonably stay to the kids—ideally within an hour.
By the end of the day, I found myself circling the same few options. South Tampa felt promising. Downtown St. Petersburg did too—there would be a lot of newness there, but I’d still be close to the kids’ school. Gulfport offered a similar balance. I didn’t land on a decision, but I could feel the direction shifting. Michigan may not be the move, but the message of this week is undeniable: something has to change, and whatever comes next needs to feel genuinely new.
Later that evening, I had dinner with my sister’s ex-husband. We went to a nice restaurant in downtown Plymouth. I forgot my wallet, which was a little embarrassing, but he waved it off immediately and said he was planning to pay anyway. I felt genuinely grateful. I also felt good knowing I’d bought groceries for my sister and lunch for my nephew earlier. It felt balanced. I’d given where I could, and I could receive this without guilt. I ordered a portobello mushroom dish with a Caesar side salad, and it was excellent. We ended up talking for nearly two hours.
The conversation felt unusually meaningful. It’s one we couldn’t have had before. When I was married and riding the high of what I thought was success, I had a hard time seeing divorced men as anything other than failures in most cases. Now I can relate in a way I never could before. We talked openly about our experiences as divorced dads, the compromises, the grief, and the quiet responsibilities that don’t get much recognition. At one point, I told him I was proud of him. Most of the work he does is to pay for the house where his kids live with my sister—a house he doesn’t even get to spend much time in anymore. I told him that’s honorable, that dedicating so much of his life to supporting his children, even without personal access to the home or daily presence, matters.
We also talked about dating. He’s hesitant to bring anyone new into his life because he doesn’t want to destabilize my sister. I encouraged him, honestly. I told him that if he wants to date, it might actually have a positive effect. It could normalize things, maybe even help my sister feel more open to moving forward herself. Yes, it could cause some disruption, but it could also be motivating. If it’s something he wants, I think he should allow himself that. He mentioned that he’d still be open to dating a woman who wants kids, even though he’s ten years older than me. That landed in a surprisingly comforting way. It helped me relax about my own timeline.
I started thinking about family history. My uncle is eighty-three now, and his youngest child was born in 1999. That makes my cousin about twenty-six, which means my uncle fathered his sixth child around age fifty-seven. As a man, you really do have more time than you’re often led to believe. That realization gave me space. I don’t need to rush or force anything. I can let a future family come into my life naturally.
After dinner, I went back to my sister’s house and spent a couple of hours hanging out with my nephew before bed. We talked, laughed, and just existed together in that easy, unforced way that feels increasingly rare. Before going to sleep, he opened up to me about his faith and his relationship with his girlfriend. We played Uno No Mercy and laughed a lot. I put on some Deadmau5 and told him about a couple of tracks—“FN Pig” and “Aural Synapse”—and mentioned that they have hidden subliminal lyrics. He was skeptical at first and said he couldn’t hear anything. I told him that once you catch the hidden phrase in “Aural Synapse,” it’s one of those things you can’t unhear. I’m convinced both tracks have explicit subliminal phrases buried in the sound design, and that “FN Pig” even carries a whole breakup-to-anger storyline underneath the music. He wasn’t fully convinced, but we had fun with it.
By the time I went to bed, I felt quietly content. Not wired. Not euphoric. Just grounded. The kind of fullness that comes from conversation, laughter, honesty, and being exactly where you are for the night.
I told him that I’ve made hundreds of songs, and in my experience, one of the ways to take dance music to another level is by embedding subliminal lyrics. You have to think about where this music is actually played—on dance floors, in clubs, in spaces where people are moving their bodies, feeling charged, hoping to connect or hook up. If there are explicit hidden phrases buried in the sound design, that energy is present whether people consciously notice it or not. The subconscious can pick up on things the conscious mind misses. I’ve always felt a little gifted—or cursed—in that my conscious mind can sometimes hear it too.
I told him that “FN Pig” is even more extreme. To me, it starts like a sad breakup song, and then when the beat drops, the energy flips into something much angrier, with even a reversed expletive buried in there. Not everyone hears these things, and I get that. But I didn’t hear them because someone suggested it to me or planted the idea. I heard them on my own, listening closely, watching Deadmau5 streams, replaying tracks over and over. One day it just snapped into focus—holy shit, that synth literally sounds like it’s saying an explicit phrase. And once you hear it, it explains why the track feels so euphoric.
I started explaining how words and thoughts carry vibrational patterns, and speech itself follows musical notes. Someone who really understands sound design and vibration could hit those same emotional and psychological notes without using literal words. Even if the lyrics aren’t clean or precise, matching the vibration of a specific thought pattern can still trigger the same response in someone’s body or mind. If I ever had time with Deadmau5, that’s exactly what I’d want to ask him about. I’ve even experimented with this myself in some of my own music. When I was going through synth presets, I’d listen closely to see if anything jumped out. There were moments where I’d play a synth and swear it sounded like it was saying something obscene—one preset literally sounded like an explicit phrase to me. That’s why I used it. I wasn’t just hearing noise. I was hearing something layered underneath it.
Then I had him listen to “Fack” by Eminem. The ridiculous, over-the-top hook came on, and he laughed and asked if that was really my favorite Eminem song. I told him yes, absolutely. It’s brilliant. I joked that it’s completely ruined pet stores for me—if I see gerbils now, I’m like, nope, I know exactly what’s going on here. We both cracked up. It was one of those conversations where you’re half joking, half dead serious, and fully enjoying how weird and specific your shared moment is.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Walking Into the Rest of My Life
Originally published August 25, 2025.
This is my journal entry from August 25, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Author in St. Petersburg — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I am sitting in a 2025 Toyota Camry Hybrid, parked outside the Sarasota massage school, minutes away from enrolling. This feels like one of those key moments in life where a decision shapes the future in ways I can’t fully see yet. I’ve been searching for reasons not to do it, trying to talk myself out of massage school to make sure I’m all in. Do I really want to spend my life touching people’s bodies? Am I ready to deal with smelly skin, with the constant intimacy of physical contact? Will anyone actually want a massage from me after reading my books?
My ex-wife and I talked about it, and she’s fully behind me. She loves the idea of having time to herself while I’m at school, and she’s especially enthusiastic about the prospect of me exchanging massages with other therapists instead of paying for them. Honestly, the sheer number of massages I’ll receive during school might make the entire program worth it, even if I chose never to practice professionally for money beyond exchanging. Yet I suspect I will enjoy the work itself. I’ve been craving more physical touch in my life. My closest friends in recent years have often been massage therapists, which feels like more than coincidence. Even one of the yoga instructors I’ve grown closest to over the past five years revealed he used to be a full-time massage therapist before letting his license lapse. It’s as if every sign points me toward this path.
If ever there were a time to pause and reconsider whether something else might suit me better, this would be it. Yet when I strip away the doubts, nothing else shines as brightly as massage therapy. I like the thought of being challenged, stretched out of my comfort zone, forced to grow through discomfort. That is life itself.
This morning I dropped our Toyota RAV4 off at the Toyota dealership because of a loud noise in the front right wheel well. They gave me this Camry, and I have to admit, if my cars were ever destroyed by flood or wreck, this is the one I’d buy. It’s quick, responsive, and smooth—exactly the kind of car I love. I’m grateful I don’t have to stress about repairs or money right now. I can just hand the keys over, pay someone to fix it, and move on with my day.
Last night, though, sadness sat heavy on me. So many of my relationships feel strained, unfulfilling, or outright broken: my brother, my ex-wife’s family, even one of my longtime massage therapist friends. None of them seem willing or able to connect with me on the terms I value. My terms are simple: no draining late-night calls, no lopsided friendships where I’m expected to show up while the other person stays disconnected, no trips with people who have no interest in who I am or what I care about.
My mom told me not to expect anything from others. It’s easier to live that way when I also stop expecting myself to do things for them. If I don’t feel pressured to attend my brother’s wedding, then it doesn’t sting that he doesn’t call me. Expectations, after all, are a two-way trap. My ex-wife added her perspective: giving people a break doesn’t mean tolerating unhealthy dynamics—it means letting them be who they are, then deciding from there whether to engage. That was a revelation.
For years I’ve mistaken “giving people a break” with bending myself into their world, even when it hurt me. Like scheduling massage after massage with a friend who kept canceling on me. Or staying on the phone with a family member through draining, difficult conversations. Or showing up at my ex-wife’s family gatherings where I feel invisible. I thought that was generosity, but it was really just self-betrayal. My ex-wife’s definition feels more freeing: let them be, then choose whether that reality is worth my time.
After those conversations, I realized I don’t want to spend my life forcing relationships that don’t nourish me. The more time I spend with someone, the more deeply I want to connect. If that connection isn’t possible—whether because of alcoholism, apathy, or indifference—then it’s healthier to step away. My energy belongs with people like a massage therapist friend, who radiates enthusiasm and lifts me up. I love how alive I feel when I’m with her. If you’re sorting out which relationships nourish you and which ones drain you, that’s exactly the kind of thing we can work through together when you book a private call with me.
Sadness, I see now, is not wasted. It clears space for letting go. It reminds me that I don’t need to call my brother on his birthday; he’ll survive without it. Birthdays mean nothing to me anyway. Every day is just another slice of infinity—no more or less special than the last.
Driving down to Sarasota today, I kept the audiobooks off and sat with my thoughts. I wanted silence to confirm whether massage school really is the next step. Even in the quiet, no other ideas came. This is it. This is where I belong.
Yesterday I worked for hours on I Was Famous on the Internet. I even considered rewriting the beginning in present tense so the whole book shares the same raw immediacy, from childhood through college and beyond. That work, combined with this step into massage, feels like the foundation of my long-term plan. Writing books gives me intellectual stimulation and a place to express the flood of ideas that once only had room in my videos. Massage adds a physical practice that keeps me grounded in my body. Together they feel like the fullest expression of how I can live.
The only requirement standing between me and that vision is a massage license. Once I have it, the rest can unfold. My body is in excellent shape, and I intend to keep it that way. I want to be capable of bodywork not just now but decades from now, sustaining strength and presence through practice.
It’s ten minutes before my appointment. I’m walking into that school to sign up. This feels like the beginning of something that will shape the rest of my life.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Driving 700 Miles for the Wrong Reasons
Originally published February 9, 2019.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
The way he told it, is that she left the cash for him because she felt bad.
Now, I don't know whether she intended to leave the money for him or maybe she even got the money back out and put it on the couch or something.
I don't know.
The way he told it, he got all his money back and a free hookup.
I said, "Man, I need to take some notes, bro. Good lord. I dropped
$1,000 the first time and got nothing, then the next time I dropped another thousand, and then messed it up when the stripper came over to my apartment. I need to take some notes bro."
This was right before they asked me to quit at USCPD too. I loved hearing that story from him.
I said, "Man, that's how you do it right there. Just have the stripper spill a drink on you and feel bad, and you get the hookup and your money back."
I don't even know if he covered that shit up either, but I guess that's up to him really. I know how I did it.
Are there any more stories?
There were so many stories at USCPD.
Oh, here's another good one.
Alright, so I was working an overtime event at the football stadium. Man, I always had some shit going on. This was right when the dispatcher was
getting going.
So, I was talking to the dispatcher, I was trying to get a date with her, but she was still hung up on the other USCPD officer at this point.
I was talking to her and there was this girl that was putting out this real
"slut vibe," but that's not how I would put it today.
I would put it out today that she was putting out an invitation to connect. How about that?
She was really flirtatious, really just wide open. She just wanted to talk to me like, you know, "Here's my phone number. Call me up tonight. We'll hook up tonight."
I was working and I was in uniform at an overtime event. This was one of the girls who was working there serving the event, which was some kind of dinner I think or something.
She was like a waitress at this dinner and I was going around talking to all these people.
She gave me her phone number.
I was imagining, "Boy, this can be a good night."
Meanwhile, my friends said, "Yeah, man. We're going to all come over to your place and we are having a party."
So, I was so pumped.
This was a night shift overtime event. I woke up something like five o'clock. No, earlier, maybe like three.
I worked this overtime event for like four hours, and I came home at like
10 o'clock.
This was making me thirsty just retelling it and I'm grateful to be sober too. Staying grateful for sobriety got so much easier once I had people around me who get it, and if you want that kind of support you can schedule a private call with me.
I went home. I got the liquor out. I was so excited.
I said, "Oh, my God. I have so many opportunities lined up. This waitress wants to hook up with me, my friends are coming over tonight, the dispatcher might be available."
I was like so pumped.
I got my strawberry Smirnoff, a 70-proof vodka out, mixed it up with some diet Dr. Thunder.
I said, "All right. Let's do this."
I was playing some "Call of Duty World at War."
I said, "All right. I'll just play some video games until everyone comes over."
And the clock kept fucking ticking. Eleven o'clock.
Twelve o'clock.
One o'clock.
Two o'clock.
I said, "What the fuck? No one's coming over."
I called the girl up, she was not answering.
My friends are not answering either. The dispatcher was not answering.
I said, "What the fuck? This was supposed to be such a fun night and I'm sitting here drinking by myself. This is total bullshit."
So I continued to drink. Three o'clock.
Four o'clock.
I said, "Motherfucker."
My friends ended up folding.
They said, "We got tired and went home."
I said, "Motherfucker. I hate all of you assholes."
The girl, I must have called her three or four times. She never answered although she did try to hook up with me a little while later. I think she got drunk and was trying to have sex with me in a bathroom while I was working in another overtime event and the dispatcher was there.
This shit was just crazy. All right. One thing at a time.
So the dispatcher all of a sudden said, "Hey, I'm going out to the bar. Do you want to meet me out there?"
It was some shit bar that was right next to campus, apparently where the one lieutenant ended up having to quit over the stuff that went down there. There was this shit bar and she said, "Yeah. Meet me at it."
"Okay, I'm heading over there now."
I guess her phone died or some bullshit. I went over to the parking lot. I was drunk. I had been drinking six or seven hours by this point, at least two shots an hour.
I was drunk, but it was really close.
I said, "Okay. It's like a mile away. No big deal."
I drove over there and the bar was closed.
I said, "What the fuck? Bitch the bar is closed."
And, of course, the dispatcher was not answering the phone at all.
I don't know if it was the next day or something, I think we had just been out on our first date a little while before this.
Then, I was in this parking lot, no one was fucking answering. I was feeling like such a loser. It was 5:30 in the morning, the bar I just went to was closed and I went to bed feeling like a total sack of shit. If you know that exact feeling and want to talk it through with people who have been there, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me any time.
I woke up the next day and I talked to the dispatcher on the phone, and she said, "Oh, yeah. Well, that bar was closed and my phone died. So we went over to this other bar."
It was some shittier bar in Cayce and she said, "Yeah, and I guess I was dancing. I got this guy's number and he's trying to talk to me."
I thought, "Oh, my God. I just want to get with you already."
I hadn't hooked up with her yet, but this was right before the hookup. I felt like, "Oh, my God. This is so stupid right now."
I really wanted to hang out with her, but she had all these guys trying to
hang out with her.
So, that was another just lame night out trying to go to the bar by myself and not being even able to meet up with her, but shortly after that, she did end up coming over.
A little while after I hooked up with her, I saw the girl again from the overtime event, the waitress, except this time she was absolutely hammered.
She recognized me just walking around. It was a Dane Cook show, or something like that. The dispatcher had wanted to go with me, but I declined, I said, "No. I got overtime. I can't go with you."
So instead, she went with one of her guy friends and I was realizing,
"Wow, I easily could have got out of that and went with her."
She was with one of her guy friends.
So this drunk girl was trying to have sex with me there and the dispatcher was here with one of her guy friends, they came by and said Hi, and it was all awkward.
This girl was all over me, she stopped by several times and was trying to have sex with me.
She said, "Look, just come in the bathroom really quick.
Come on."
I said, "I'm in uniform. I'm working right now."
The bathrooms were packed. It was not the Coliseum, it was the new basketball arena, though.
It is like 10 or 12 years old now, but it was new at the time.
I said, "These bathrooms have got to be packed. There's got to be 20 or 30 women and girls in there at the same time. How am I going to walk into the women's bathroom in full uniform and do that discreetly?"
She just could not understand that.
I said, "Look, let's just hook up after the show."
I called her up after the show, and it was like she forgot about that shit. I said, "Hey?"
She said, "Oh, what's up?"
I don't know if she was in a blackout or what happened, but it was like she totally forgot about that shit.
I bet she was in a blackout because she was sloppy at the time I saw her. I don't even think she hardly remembered me when I called her up after the show was over.
Thank God I didn't do that, because that would have been a whole other level of stupid, trying to have me have sex with her in a bathroom. This was a girl I had only seen once before this at another overtime event.
I remember I had a friend in college who said he had a guy who would just hook up with girls anywhere, like at a football game he would get into a porta potty and have sex with a girl.
Here I was in the middle.
I said, "This is how this stuff happens. People just hook up in bathrooms.
This shit is disgusting. Not that I'm one to not know about disgusting, but you know what I'm saying. Like people just hook up in bathrooms. This shit is crazy. I can't do that in uniform."
Right after that the dispatcher and I had our final little trip together. All right.
Have I got to all the stories?
I want to make sure you get all the good stories out because we got a bunch of crazy stories from going all out at USCPD, just lots of crazy trips to the bar and the strip club.
I think I've told you most of the good ones by now. Are there any more of these stories?
I'm forgetting.
"Jerry, you should just edit this shit. This is terrible. I'm tired of the realness of this book. God! Edit the fucking book, man."
I think it's more fun to have the truth, to hear it in a natural way someone would talk.
Editing gets boring sometimes.
Can you imagine if I edited this book?
I would have just edited this whole section.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.