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.
I actually remember picking my parents. I know how that sounds, and I can already hear you saying, hold on, what the fuck are you talking about? I’m serious. I remember it. This wasn’t something I carried consciously my whole life—it came back to me later—but I’m starting the book here because it puts everything else in context. Before having this human body, I remember existing as some kind of energy body, looking down and watching my parents in a cheap hotel room. I remember thinking, yeah, these two are going to do just fine. They were opening a gateway into this reality, and it felt like the right moment for me to enter. There were plenty of other options—different parents all over the world, different life scenarios I could have chosen—but this one stood out.
These were two parents in Michigan, with my father being an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict, and a compulsive gambler. He was a Vietnam veteran who worked at a racetrack, a man with an ex-wife and two children he couldn’t show up for. He kept getting kicked out of his parents’ house, spent some days homeless, and was banned from a VA psych ward. I remember looking at him and thinking, I can help this guy. I was trying to save motherfuckers before I was even born. I remember thinking, this is a fixer-upper right here. I really believed I could help him get his life on track. The woman who would become my mother felt like the perfect partner in that mission. I thought she and I would make a great team, because she was also trying to fix him.
At the time, she was still technically married, coming out of a bad first marriage, though they had been separated for a while. She was a veterinarian, seven years younger than my father, and full of passion. From my perspective, it felt obvious: these two had intensity, chaos, and potential, and all they needed was me. Once I got in there, I was sure we were going to have a great life together. I imagined us turning this whole thing around and making something beautiful out of it.
The beginning was rough, though. While my mother was pregnant with me, she went to live with my father’s parents. Not long after, he got kicked out of the house again. So there she was, pregnant, living with his parents and his brothers and sisters, while he couldn’t even be there because he was such a drunk and drug addict. That was the environment I entered into.
Right before choosing them, I remember another presence—call it an angel, God, a friend, or whatever makes sense to you. We were talking shit, honestly. I was like, look at these two. Look at these crazy motherfuckers. I think they’ll work as my parents. And this presence was like, are you sure? That could be a rough ride. Have you really examined the probabilities here? There was a high chance I could become an alcoholic myself. Plenty of ways this life could go completely sideways with these two as parents.
I remember acknowledging all of that and saying, yeah, I know. I knew there were high-risk scenarios baked into this choice. I knew it could go very wrong. But I also saw the upside. It could go really well. I could help turn their lives around. We could have an incredible time together and transform this mess into something meaningful. And honestly, I was tired of shopping around. It felt like picking a character at the beginning of a video game—after a while, you just want to stop tweaking sliders and get started. I remember thinking, fuck it, these two will work. Let’s spawn already.
I arrived on June 15, 1984 at 11:55 p.m., and from the moment I got here, I was loved. My mother loved the hell out of me. She wanted a child deeply, and I was her first. That love was unmistakable. My father’s mother—my grandmother—radiated care and devotion in her home. She held a beautiful, steady space. Now, she could also be harsh sometimes, talking shit about what a whiny baby I was, which in hindsight probably had a lot to do with the food they were feeding me and what my mom was eating and all that. Still, underneath the commentary, there was a lot of love. My grandfather provided the house, made sure everyone had a place to live, and took care of the practical side of things. It was a loving home.
That doesn’t mean it was peaceful all the time. There was drama, screaming, and yelling here and there, and it was a hard environment for my mother to stay in long-term. She knew she needed a way out. She was thinking, I have to get out of here, and the best option she could see was the military. It guaranteed a paycheck and a way to provide for me. Being an army brat comes with its own baggage, no question, but it also came with stability. My mom stayed in the military the entire time until I left home. She joined when I was just about to turn one, and it was a massive leap of faith.
After my father had been kicked out of his parents’ house and moved all the way to Texas to live with his aunt and uncle, my mom got assigned to Texas to begin her military career. While she was there, she picked my dad back up. He was still drinking, using drugs, and gambling, but she laid down a hard boundary around his sexual acting out. She told him she’d cut his balls off if he didn’t stop. As far as any of us know, he kept it in his pants from that point forward. That was one of the first addictions he actually did something about. So I grew up in a household with an alcoholic, drug-addicted father and a mother who was clearly attracted to that kind of man—both in her first husband and her second. At the same time, the military provided a stable and relatively safe container for our lives.
My mom worked a lot, and my dad stepped up and stayed home with me. He filled what most people would think of as the traditional mom role. He was what we called a house man. My mom told me that when she first went to work and left me alone with him, I cried nonstop for forty-five minutes. Then something clicked. My dad took care of me, and life settled down. From that point on, he was always there. Once my mom got home from work, he’d sometimes head out drinking, but during the day, he was a constant presence. There was no one more consistent in my childhood than my father. He was always there.
A big reason for that consistency was that he did make changes. After his last night doing cocaine, he prayed to God that he would never do it again, and he stopped. When I was six years old, after many failed attempts, he finally got sober. By then, we had moved to White Sands, New Mexico, and later to Yokota, Japan. Those were my earliest childhood years, all the way up through kindergarten. Most of the time, I remember thinking that life was good. I had a parent taking care of me at all times. My basic needs and material possessions were provided for. From my perspective as a kid, things felt solid. For all the chaos underneath it, I had a nice childhood.
Now, I had little things happen. An adult crossed a sexual boundary with me when I was little. I told my parents immediately, and they dealt with it. That experience marked me in ways I wouldn't understand until much later. At the same time, though, my dad was worse in terms of abuse. My dad would spank my ass until it was bruised and red sometimes. He'd get the belt out and spank my bare ass when I wasn't doing what he was telling me to do. I'd get smacked upside the head sometimes, put in my room, grounded, and live in fear of it more often. He was always telling me and threatening me with something. But then again, I was being a little pain in the ass too and constantly rebelling.
He’d tell me to stop doing something, and I’d deliberately do more of it. I’d run around causing chaos, daring him to chase me down and catch me. I was a kid who hated being told what to do, and I challenged my father constantly. Over time, I learned to read his emotions with precision. There were moments when you could fuck with him and moments when you absolutely could not. When he was right on the edge of blowing up, I tried harder to behave. When he was in a better mood, I let myself push things a little further.
Even with those quiet foundations of struggle and a measure of abuse, it wasn’t as bad as I once believed it was. I’ve talked to countless people since then and read story after story of childhoods that were far worse. For a long time, I treated my own childhood like something I should resent, something I should punish myself for. Looking back now, I can see that I actually had it pretty good. I was taken care of. I was loved, consistently. I never went a single day without someone loving me.
The worst of it, honestly, was being sent to my room sometimes. When I was eight years old and my dad had just gotten sober, he was constantly on edge. You could spill a glass of milk and he’d snap—God damn it. What the fuck, Gerald? Jesus Christ—just fucking losing it over small things. He refused to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that tension showed. At the same time, he was a Vietnam veteran doing the best he could, and he was home every single day.
He was also a woodworker, and he took care of everything. He built furniture in the shop, handled the house, and kept our lives running. He made dinner, took care of the cars, did the laundry, mowed the lawn, and handled everything for my brother and me. Literally all my mom had to do was go to work and come home, and everything else was taken care of. If my dad wanted time in the workshop, my mom actually enjoyed having that extra time with us kids.
Then there was another incident around me exploring my body as a kid, and it went very badly. My dad got really pissed off and grounded me and put me in my room for hiding and lying to him. I’m not even sure how long I was grounded—at least a week, maybe a month. That stretch was one of the worst, loneliest periods of my entire life. I remember going to school and feeling like it was the only positive thing I had. School felt safe. It felt like relief. Thankfully, it was a good school, and I actually enjoyed being there. I made a lot of friends, which mattered more than I realized at the time.
I also remember that my father struggled with his weight for as long as I can remember. He’d go on these extreme, crazy-ass diets. Sometimes he’d eat something like five hundred calories of rice a day and ride the shit out of an exercise bike. He’d starve himself, lose the weight, hit whatever target number he had in his head, and then immediately go out for a steak dinner. Half the weight would come back almost instantly, and he’d fall into hopelessness again. Throughout my early childhood, my dad struggled consistently with both his drinking and his weight. I had things happen to me that never should have happened. I got smacked and hit. I lived with fear. And yet, somehow, when I look at the whole picture, it was still a pretty good deal.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.