This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
After about three months, my ex-wife and I took a trip to New York. While we were there, my dad had a heart attack. I was sober at the time, but sobriety hadn’t fixed anything underneath. My emotions were completely unregulated, bouncing all over the place, and because I wasn’t drinking, I felt morally bulletproof. In my mind, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. If you tried to argue otherwise, I would tear into you without hesitation. My ex-wife, unfortunately for both of us, was fully capable of matching that energy point for point.
The trip itself already carried tension. I had flown up a day earlier for a school conference, and my ex-wife met me later after working a full day and then catching a late flight. She was exhausted. We got to the hotel room, where my friend was sleeping in one bed and my ex-wife and I were in the other. She hadn’t had anything to drink at all. She was just completely wiped, and I was still selfishly pushing for her attention anyway. She passed out—literally fell asleep on me. I remember staring at her in disbelief, thinking, Are you serious? It hit my ego harder than I wanted to admit, which says more about my selfishness that night than anything about her.
After the New York trip—and after my dad’s heart attack—we came back emotionally wrecked. When we returned to her parents’ place, we discovered her car had been towed. We’d driven separately because of the staggered travel, and now she felt stupid and embarrassed for getting it towed on top of everything else. I was distraught over my dad. She was exhausted, stressed, and humiliated. We were both on edge, and I handled it terribly. Instead of cutting her any slack, I went straight into attack mode. I criticized her relentlessly—telling her she should have read the signs, that it was stupid, that it was going to cost $150, that she should have known better. I showed zero compassion.
At the tow yard—some dusty, miserable parking lot across town—we exploded at each other. Full screaming match. We had the dog with us, and my ex-wife was yanking the dog away, insisting she was taking her home in her car, acting completely unhinged. I remember thinking we looked like two absolute lunatics. The worst part was that we were both completely sober. No alcohol. No excuse. Just raw, unfiltered rage. The tow yard guy came out with her car, awkwardly hovering while we screamed at each other, unsure whether to intervene. Eventually I said fuck this and walked away, heading back to the apartment.
It didn’t end there. Back at the apartment, the fight kept going. Neither of us would back down. It reminded me of the night with the dispatcher I described in Officer Banfield—one of those brutal, ego-driven standoffs where nobody is listening, only trying to win. The difference was that the argument with the dispatcher had happened while I was drunk. This one didn’t. This was the first truly ugly argument my ex-wife and I ever had, and it took days to recover from it and get back on the same page.
That scene of verbal abuse in both directions planted a dangerous idea in my head. One of my biggest motivations for getting sober—aside from losing control of my life and clearly being an alcoholic—was the belief that drinking caused my problems with my ex-wife. That 3:00 a.m. blowup had convinced me alcohol was the cause. But now we’d had a fight just as bad while sober. Over the next couple of months, I started rewriting the story. I told myself the real issue wasn’t alcohol—it was drinking around my ex-wife. If we could quarrel like that sober, then alcohol wasn’t the root cause. And while it’s true that having arguments that severe should probably prompt personality changes or even a breakup, the solution was very clearly not to start drinking again. Of course, that’s exactly what I ended up doing.
A quick flashback to December 2011 where I managed to string together about two months sober, and for the first time in a while, I felt like I had my shit together. We’d been dating less than a year, but I loved my ex-wife deeply, and in that burst of clarity and urgency, I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I felt this pressure to get my life moving in the right direction before it was too late and I figured getting married was a step in the right direction.
By May 2012, I finished my master’s degree. I was finally done with school, and instead of feeling relieved, I felt energized in a completely different direction. I didn’t want a traditional career. What I wanted was to build my business online. That’s where the excitement was. That’s where I felt alive, useful, plugged in. This was the first thing in a long time that actually felt fun instead of obligatory. Somewhere in that mix of confidence and denial, I landed on a new rule: as long as I didn’t drink around my ex-wife, everything would be fine.
The solution I came up with was, in hindsight, impressively stupid. I decided I would drive from Sarasota, Florida to Columbia, South Carolina to drink with my friends. If you’ve never made that drive, it’s about eight or nine hours with no traffic, and easily over ten if you hit congestion. I started doing it once or twice a month—long solo drives north, a weekend of drinking and video games, then back home as if nothing had happened.
I remember calling my dad during this phase. I had five months sober at that point, the longest stretch I’d had since I started drinking. I explained my plan to him. My dad had his own history with alcohol and had long since stopped drinking, so he immediately knew exactly how bad this idea was. He didn’t sugarcoat it. He told me not to do this to my life. He asked me why I would risk everything like that. I told him he didn’t understand. I told him I needed it. And what I really meant was that I needed relief. The longer I stayed sober, the worse I felt—tight, irritable, on edge—because I didn’t have any tools to handle life. I hadn’t dealt with anything underneath. I hadn’t rewired my body or my instincts. I’d just stopped pouring alcohol on top of the problem.
So I went. I got drunk with my friend. Nothing bad happened. I stayed with the same guy I’d played zombies with for years. We played video games, went out to bars, laughed, and it all seemed harmless. Because nothing blew up, I took that as proof that the plan worked. For the rest of 2012, I kept doing it—driving to Columbia once or twice a month, drinking with my friends, and returning home without visible consequences.
Before one of those trips, my ex-wife said something that should have stopped me cold. She told me that if that was what I wanted to do, fine, she hoped it worked out for me—but not to come crying to her like a little bitch if it didn’t. I heard exactly what I wanted to hear and ignored the rest. I took it as permission instead of a warning.
In August 2012, my ex-wife and I bought a house together. Just a year after moving in together, we owned a home and were planning a wedding for the end of the year. On the surface, everything looked stable. Most of my drinking happened out of town. The system appeared to be working.
Then, toward the end of 2012, a crack formed. One morning, my friend—the same one from Columbia—called me around 10:00 a.m. He had unexpectedly gotten the day off and wanted to play zombies all day. That almost never happened. He worked constantly. My ex-wife was at work. I wasn’t planning on drinking, but there was no way I was going to waste that opportunity. I went straight to the liquor store.
When my ex-wife got home later, I hadn’t technically been drinking all day, but I was already committed to the idea. I explained my logic with complete confidence. Driving to South Carolina was dangerous. I could get into a car accident. I could get another speeding ticket. I’d been pulled over at least ten times in my life at that point—mostly when I was a police officer—and I’d never gotten a ticket. The first time a cop really scared me, I was a teenager. He came up behind me at night without his lights on, tailgating me out of nowhere. I sped up just to get out of the way, and when he pulled me over, I told him exactly that. He gave me a warning. Every time after that, while I was a cop, I’d been pulled over doing up to twenty-four miles an hour over the speed limit and let go once I showed my badge and explained I had multiple firearms in the car.
But the first time I got pulled over after I stopped being a police officer, I got a ticket—some speed-trap shithole in central Florida. That became my justification. I told my ex-wife it was reckless to keep driving long distances just to drink. I told her it made more sense to drink at home again. It would be fine this time. That’s how the rule quietly broke.
All right. It’ll be fine. We’ve got a nice big house now. I can drink on one side of it—never mind that the TV is in the living room, the center of everything. I start drinking at home again, and at first it actually seems manageable. I’m controlling it. It’s not blowing up right away. My ex-wife and I are still having a lot of fun, genuinely. During the time I was sober, we’d bought season passes to Disney, and that period stands out clearly in my memory.
I remember going to Disney with the girl I dated before my ex-wife back in 2010 and walking into the Disney Store, a place designed to manufacture happiness, and feeling this hollow certainty that something was wrong. I remember thinking, This is not how I should feel. This isn’t the right person to be doing this with. I broke up with her not long after that trip. When my ex-wife and I went to the same Disney Store later, the feeling was completely different. Everything clicked. I remember thinking, This is the right girl. This is what it’s supposed to feel like.
2012 with my ex-wife was mostly packed with fun. We had Disney passes and went almost every other weekend, sometimes staying until 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. before driving a couple of hours home to Sarasota. I’d drive while my ex-wife slept, talking to my parents on the phone. We had passes to Busch Gardens, Adventure Island, and SeaWorld before that. When we first started dating, we were constantly doing something—movies, the beach, short trips to Miami. Even during most of the year I stayed sober, we kept that momentum going. We did a ton of fun shit together, and it worked. It really worked. Things only started slipping once I began drinking more and slowly fucking it up.
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