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To My Daughter on Her 16th Birthday

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At a certain age, gifts are either thoughtful or pointless.  There’s really no in-between for me (that’s how men’s brains work,) and you, kiddo, already have a car and we already have a plan for gas and insurance and you have a closet full of clothes and shoes and a nice phone and a computer and you could not ask for a better place to live.

Well, I guess you would love a little more freedom from the two toddlers running around this house, but there are some things you just have to get over.  I doubt we give them away.

The point is, you have everything, and you may or may not realize that yet.  At 16, I was just like you.  I had everything I could ever imagine, but as a teenager, I didn’t know that either.

What’s sad about that, and what inspired me to write this rather than try to find some meaningless gift, is that it took me a quarter of a century after that ever-important sixteenth birthday to even BEGIN to understand gratefulness.  I didn’t know how or why to be truly thankful for what I had (and that’s not my parents’ fault – they tried.)

And part of that gratefulness – perhaps the hardest part – is learning how to be thankful in the present, not just the past.  It’s a VERY uncommon trait for adults and almost unheard of for teenagers, but if you somehow become that one in a million kid that understands and feels and oozes gratefulness at an early age, you can alter your entire course for the better.  Not only that, you can have a gigantic impact on the people around you.

These are just my thoughts on it.  I hope if you’re ever in need, these words will lift you up.

What Does Gratefulness Look Like?

I started with this question because it doesn’t have an answer.  Well, it does, but it’s going to be different for you than other people.  It’s unique for everybody.

You know how we’ve talked about before that what we see on social media is just the good stuff?  You see only a person’s “good side” in pics, you see pics that have been doctored so much you wouldn’t recognize them without advanced pixelization, you see only the stories of success, you spend five hours a day mired in either jealousy or desire.

It’s not real.  It’s absolutely NOT a glimpse of reality.  You don’t see the warts, the chafing, the hemorrhoids, the zits, the mental illness, the depression, the suicidal thoughts, the issues with body image, the sadness, the rage, the envy.  You will NOT meet a person in your entire time on this Earth who doesn’t have a bunch of crap hidden behind the scenes.  Heck, I’m your father and I raised you by myself for six years and we’ve been almost inseparable for a year because of this pandemic, and you’ll never know all my crap.

Why?  Because I don’t want you to.  Neither does anybody else.  Remember that.  

And also remember this.  The crap almost never lasts as long as the blessings.  Figuring out how you acknowledge that in your own life is what the foundation of gratefulness looks like.  And when you have a foundation, you begin to build the walls of gratefulness that will never be completed.  That’s the point, by the way.  You’ll never stop building upon gratefulness.

Don’t Get Bogged Down on Those You Perceive to be Less Fortunate

In a nutshell, it’s not your job to determine if they are or are not less fortunate than you.  This, of course, requires a definition of the ubiquitous “they,” but you already know what I mean.

“They” are the people you will encounter every day of your life.  The man who probably lost his legs in a war, the kid in the wheelchair, the commercial on television that shows all the starving kids, the homeless man holding the sign.  That’s not the only list, though.  Some are in your life far more directly.  The friend you assume has issues at home, the guy at school who gets picked on for being obese, the girl in your homeroom that always sits by herself and never talks.

Unless you get to know these people – and I mean REALLY get to know them – you have no idea if they are truly less fortunate.  A man who lives in a trailer with three walls but spends five days a week working at a homeless shelter might be a hell of a lot happier than a millionaire who spends every single night with a gun in one hand and liquor in the other.  The starving kid on television might be the most popular kid on the stickball playground and go to bed every night with very real dreams of becoming a baseball player once his aunt and uncle become citizens and take him to a better country.

It’s hard sometimes to be grateful for what you have when you see others who can’t possibly have any reason to be grateful, but if you let that hinder your own gratefulness, you’re being horribly unfair to yourself.

You cannot and will not save everybody, you cannot give people what you cannot afford to give, and you will never be able to save those you can if you’ve never figured out how to live in the present and be grateful for the blessings by which your support of them is most meaningful.

Because honestly, often the best way to lend a helping hand to those you perceive to be less fortunate is just to offer a smile.  You will learn to decipher between the ones you truly believe need your help, the ones who don’t want it, the ones who don’t need it, and the ones who will abuse what you have to offer.

None of them should darken your own gratefulness, though.  Your life, your blessings, and yes, even your crap, are unique ONLY to you.  It’s quite literally nobody else’s job to help or hinder your gratefulness.  It’s your job to learn that there are only two options under the heading of gratefulness anyway.  You can choose to be grateful or you can choose to be ungrateful.

I will not try to equate gratefulness with happiness because I know all too well how hard it is to defeat depression, but let’s eliminate the gray areas for a moment.  If you want to be happy – if you want to defeat any depression that might ever seep in – do you think gratefulness or its opposite would be the better avenue towards achieving it?

The Dichotomy Between Dreams and Gratefulness

A person has to be confident to have dreams, but somehow they must be as tough as a rhino when those dreams don’t come true.  It’s impossible to know just how many dreams you have running around in your head right now, but I know there are at least a few.

And at least a couple of those will NOT come true.  I hope not anyway.  If they all come true, you aren’t dreaming big enough.  

The ones that don’t come true might be the big ones or the minor ones, but even when you go to order a shirt you’ve been wanting and they don’t have your size, it can be deflating and disappointing.  In its own minor way, your desire for that shirt was a dream, and that dream didn’t come true.

You know I can’t stand to sound like other people, and I hate trite, pedestrian advice, but sometimes such advice is warranted.  In this frivolous example, be grateful you have clothes, be grateful you have the internet access to go online and search for that shirt, be grateful you have two arms to stick through the arm holes in the shirts you have.

Blah.  That was a painful paragraph to write.  I felt like I was writing a sermon stolen from the weekly theme of Sesame Street.  But it was necessary.  Those are VERY real reasons to be grateful.  But they aren’t deep enough for a mind like yours.  I know you well enough to know that.  I also know that since we are so similar, I don’t want you looking back on your life at 43 years old wondering why you’re just now figuring out how to be grateful.

So let’s go beyond it.  Let’s think of dreams both big and small and do gratefulness differently.  Because since you’re so much like me, if somebody tells you to be thankful for internet access, you might want to punch them in the throat.

So let’s be thankful for anger.  

I know you have a gigantic dream to go to UNC in two years.  It’s probably your biggest dream and the one you truly work your butt off to obtain.  What happens if you don’t get in?

I will tell you right now that if that happens, you have my permission to be angry.  I see how hard you work, I see how you dive into extracurricular activities to pad your resume, I see how competitive you are, I see how a 92 in a class pisses you off because you know I’m going to say something like, “In my day, that was a B.”  

(I’m not sorry for saying that, by the way.  A fact is a fact.) 🙂

But the reality is, you might not get into Carolina.  It could happen.  And if you don’t, I want you to get mad because anger is one of the best known prescriptions for improving yourself, even when you can’t imagine working harder than you’ve already worked.

It’s taken me a LONG time to understand why I have failed so much in my life, and it’s going to sound REALLY strange that I hope you fail some, too, but I can honestly say that I hope you don’t succeed at all of your dreams.  One day – even if that day is not today – you’ll agree with me.  And you’ll be grateful that you failed.

Happy Birthday, Kiddo

I know this is a weird gift, but it’s the most meaningful gift I can give you.  And if you’re wondering if this might be the start of other such gifts for important dates, you probably already know the answer to that.  It’s either this or a gift card.

So I wish for you the blessing of eternal gratefulness, or at the very least, a recognizable path towards achieving it.

I wish for you a life where you can isolate those things that make you ungrateful.  Only then will you understand how to be grateful.  Only then will you be able to possess the world’s only definition for gratefulness in your own life.

I wish for you a life where you have suffered for the perceived misfortunes of others, especially when they did not know it.  I wish for you a life where many of those same people prove you wrong.  Only then will you understand that it’s not your job to feel ungratefulness for others.  Only then will you understand that you are the only person on Earth who can define your own gratefulness.

I wish for you a life where you fail often.  Only then will you show your true strength.  Only then will you be able to live for today with a fervor you will never be able to grant to tomorrow.

I don’t wish for you a life better than mine.  I’ve been blessed every step of the way.  Certainly I hope you make a few better choices than I’ve made, but I know you’ll make bad choices, too.  And you’ll most likely recover from them.  I do, however, wish for you a life where you defeat all odds and live with a gratefulness that took me far too long to recognize.

And FYI, I still fail at it every single day.  I still fail at being grateful.  But I’m closer than I was yesterday.  And yes, I cried writing this because I’m just going to do that and I don’t really try to even hide it anymore.

I’m grateful for my tears.  I’m grateful that they come from a place of unfailing love.  I’m even more grateful that you’re my daughter.  I love you, kiddo.

Thoughts on Running for Office Again

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When you think about something four to eight hours a day EVERY day, it probably means you REALLY want whatever it is you’re thinking about, right?

That’s more rhetorical than actually answerable, because I could fashion a scenario where it could mean the exact opposite.

But it’s the first scenario for me.  I think about it ALL THE TIME.  I learned a lot last year running for the General Assembly, and now the pervasive banner ad in my head is flashing at me to do it again.  The only problem is, I know I will not run another symbolic race as an unaffiliated candidate, no matter how uncompromising I am that I was built for that platform.

I regret NOTHING about my race last year.  I did it the right way.  I was true to who I am and I still believe independent voters are a glaringly unrepresented segment of the population.

A centrist is not somebody who is going to win a race on any steadfast and unbending policy beliefs.  A centrist is a person who doesn’t expect unity, but they sure as hell expect people from both sides to be able to have adult conversations and compromise.

A centrist has beliefs, but mostly those beliefs are a marriage of what is normally considered “right” and “left.”  I had several people instruct me last year to “pick a side.”  One even told me to “pick a side FFS,” and I won’t spell out those words if you can’t decipher them.  But I’m sorry, there isn’t a single political issue that is as simple as “picking a side.”  NOT ONE.  They are ALL complex, and to be creative and open-minded in how we solve those issues, I’m not committing to either side’s platform even if I’m forced to pick a letter to put beside my name.

For instance, I wholeheartedly believe that capitalism is FAR superior to socialism, but I also believe it takes some social programs and moderate regulation to ensure equity across the socioeconomic spectrum.  I also will never admit to knowing what that regulation looks like.  I just know it requires adults willing to find common ground and leave their freaking greed and hunger for power at the door because the good of the country requires it.

That’s just one example.  There are literally hundreds, and there are literally hundreds where I can find and marry the best ideas of both sides.

I think my favorite aspect of being a centrist is that I can see all the crappy political stunts both sides pull to make the other side look bad, and when I see it, I just cringe and get angry because it just seems so childish to me.  

For instance, Democrats call Republicans racist and sexist and say they don’t care about the less fortunate, but what I see is that there are a bunch of really good people whose biggest issue – aside from those whose biggest issue (and often ONLY issue) is either guns or abortion – is the fact that they are sick and tired of the handouts.  

And I get that.  I really do.  We give and give and give to poor people and immigrants and foreign countries, many of whom are arguably undeserving of our tax dollars, and everyday Republicans are so sick of it that they’ll pledge their allegiance to a man that every single one of them will admit is a horrible human being, but they trust him to make the unwarranted handouts go away.

And on the other side, Republicans call Democrats baby-killers because they refuse ANY legislation other than total and complete abolishment of abortion, but Democrats just want government to stay the hell out of it.  And if you break down both of those examples – and there are PLENTY of other examples – they’re all chock full of hypocrisy.  

And why is that?  Because this god-awful two-party system pits us against each other, and it uses fear to create hatred across that political divide, and it is absolutely the most childish form of disagreement known to mankind.  Power has become the most important possession in America, and it has brought with it a hypocrisy and fearmongering that is clearly impossible to see from either side of the aisle.

But it is dazzlingly obvious from a centrist’s point of view.

But what do you do if you want to run for office as a centrist and feel your way of thinking truly needs to be represented in the chambers of Raleigh or Washington?  Running unaffiliated again is pointless.  I’m proud of my campaign last year, but I won’t do that again.  When you spend literally thousands of hours on your campaign but one of the party candidates barely sticks a sign in the ground and spends about four and a half minutes campaigning and they beat you by over fourteen thousand votes, you know the deck has only two stacks.

And Centrist / Unaffiliated / Independent is NOT one of those stacks.

But nationwide, almost 40% of Americans are registered independent or unaffiliated (it’s the same thing,) and they have a near zero percent representation rate.  How in the hell can those people EVER be represented, especially in a political climate as toxic and extreme as we’re in now?

How?

So Here are My Thoughts

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first because it will determine everything about what race I might be able to run for and what kind of chance I actually have in 2022.  I already have ideas on that, by the way.  Just not ready to announce what they are.

In Johnston County, North Carolina where I live, Republican voters outnumber Democratic voters by over 15,000 as of February 13, 2021.  Seems like a no-brainer that if I were going to affiliate myself with a party, that would be the one to partner with, right?

For some people, sure, but not me.  I probably hold more traditional conservative beliefs than liberal ones, but that party would not want me.  I simply do not have what it takes to be a Republican.  Even though…

  • I’m a big fan of capitalism.
  • I want as little government in my life as humanly possible.
  • I want to see the number of abortions in this country decreased exponentially.
  • I get pains in my stomach thinking about the debt we’re in as a country and our inability (or refusal?) to balance a budget for two full decades.
  • I “back the blue” and understand every profession has a few shitty employees.
  • I’m a fan of the Second Amendment and think responsible gun owners should welcome a simple process that PROVES they are responsible gun owners.  I mean, we prove we’re responsible vehicle owners pretty much every year, right?  What’s the difference?
  • I am in favor on every level of ensuring our handouts are justified.
  • I will fight for the Constitution and rule of law with all my power.
  • I believe you have the right in this country to do whatever you want, believe whatever you want, and be whatever you want, as long as those things don’t infringe on somebody else’s rights to do the same.

I have seen too much over the past few months and years to know how I would be welcomed into the Republican party, and if you know the names Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Ben Sasse, or even Richard Burr, or you’re familiar with what a RINO is, you know how ostracized I would be for disagreeing with a party whose own leaders call it the “Party of Trump.”  In fact, I don’t believe every poll I see, but I saw one recently that said 80% of Republican voters would require the person they voted for in upcoming elections to be a Trump supporter.

And I am NOT a supporter of his and never will be.  But as a person on the outside of the party, it’s pretty obvious that you can’t be a “real” Republican unless you pledge your undying allegiance to him.  I’m sorry, but that will not be me.  Ever.  I can support some conservative policies without making one man the omniscient ruler of my beliefs.  And I’ll never support any politician who treats people the way he does and incessantly lies without regard for anybody or anything, even human life.

So that leaves only one other option, and in a country with only two options, I will probably have to choose that one.  And no matter how much sense I make, no matter my beliefs, no matter how I run my campaign, and no matter how committed I am to representing 100% of my potential constituents – not just those in my own party – that choice will not meet with a successful campaign in Johnston County.  I would be blacklisted as an enemy of the Republican party even with having arguably MORE constitutional / conservative beliefs than the “Party of Trump.”  Fascinating, right?

But chances are, I’ll be welcomed as a centrist by most people in the other party.  Chances are just as good, however, that I’ll meet quite a bit of resistance with my main platform.  Should I run next year, you aren’t going to hear me robotically spouting off a party’s platform.  I’m going to be talking about all the things most of us want that politicians aren’t giving us.  Stuff like:

  • We need a viable centrist party, and it’s going to take elected officials to get it off the ground.  I’m sick of only having two choices for every race because they are often crappy choices.
  • When centrists are skeptical about a public option in health care reform, you know we have a fear that it’s going to function like the damn DMV and skyrocket our national debt.  It’s clearly not been sold well.  But we have to find some answers to this.  Start with finding a way to make sure a medical catastrophe can’t financially ruin a family and go from there.
  • In education, get rid of standardized testing, put LOTS of trade schools in our high schools, and require every middle AND high school kid to take a personal finance class.  Tell me ONE person who would disagree with that.
  • Stop with the voter suppression until you can prove widespread voter fraud.  Just stop.  Put your focus on trying to find a creative, unique way to make sure every voter has an ID instead of just bitching that they don’t.
  • Campaign finance reform.  A job that earns a hundred grand a year should not cost five million to obtain.  That’s a breeding ground for corruption.
  • Legalize marijuana and get non-violent offenders out of jails and into rehab.

Other than that, my campaign will be based on common sense, common decency, and the very common idea that we are a melting vat (much bigger than a pot at this point,) and we have to make laws that somehow work for every ingredient in that vat.  If we stuck every piece of legislation in that vat and sincerely tried to find what worked for the majority, we’d be amazed at what we could accomplish and what kind of country we could be.

And for the love of god, give us term limits FFS.

 

Finding Joy in the Fight

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My brain does not turn off.  Ever.  I’m quite certain I’m not the only one, but I am completely certain that the reasons why are always unique to each of us.  

Another thing I am quite certain about is that the topics that saddle a restless brain and the reasons they won’t leave aren’t nearly as important as how they affect your life.

In the past week, I have thought a lot about this, because it has affected me.  Why does it feel right and normal to have a brain that won’t shut off; a brain that can hover just outside of temporary contentment but never actually take its shoes off and stay awhile?  Why is my brain so hyper-focused that I often can’t concentrate on the many pulls of life because I MUST get this one thing perfect, and other times my brain is a blender set to puree and not a single one of a thousand challenges is awarded that focus? 

More importantly, whether it’s been given that level of focus or given barely a second thought, why does the constant fight for the answers to all those things that weigh me down seldom include joy?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an unhappy person.  Quite the opposite, really.  In a blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I even said I was nearing a place in my life that had always felt like a distant, unreachable dream. 

I never thought I’d actually be able to look in the mirror and say I was content.  Most days now, though, I’m generally content.

But I’m not finished.  I’m not done seeking success.  I’m not done trying to figure out why the hell I’m actually here.  I’m not done trying to figure out exactly what my mission in life was supposed to be.  I’m not done trying to give my family a better life.  I’m not done trying to uncover the place in this world where I’ll make a real, far-reaching impact.  I don’t even know why I want that, but I do.  I always have.

But because I’m not done, I fight.  And since I got sober nearly four years ago, I fight like hell.  I didn’t even know how to fight when I was a drunk.  I didn’t know what I was even fighting for even if I developed some kind of motivation to do so.

For a week now, I’ve been in my restless head trying to figure out why I’ve chosen to live a life full of personal fights when I don’t really find joy IN the fight.  And I think that’s something I have to acknowledge because if contentment was my main goal in sobriety, it’ll only be about 80% discovered without finding joy in the daily grind.  It’s something I clearly need to work on.

It’s also something in which I question the possibility.

This past weekend, I took a break from the fight.  I took a break from the ambition.  I took a break from giving everything I have to what has become an often isolated, lonely, unceasing fight.  I needed that break, but all it really did was make me wonder how to find authentic joy in the battles I choose to fight. I  knew writing about it would help.  It always does.

Between October of 2019 and March 1st of 2020, I fought as hard as I’ve ever fought in my life.  I was charged with getting over 3,000 signatures just to get on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate for the NC House of Representatives.  It was a completely pointless fight because I knew I was going to lose.  And I did.  I’ve grown to be rather proud of myself, but it’s hard to say it was anything other than pointless.  

What exactly did I change in my thirteen month fight to convince 12% of the district that my message was worth voting for?  I mean, you really can’t answer that with anything other than “nothing.”  But somehow it was still a worthy fight.

I was a trailblazer in this country.  I have never attempted to find out how many unaffiliated candidates there were in the entire country, but there was exactly one in North Carolina:  me.

And why does that make me a trailblazer?  We’re seeing people flock out of each party for different reasons daily in search of political independence, we’re in a twenty year trend that has thus far seen unaffiliated voters go from 10% of the population to nearly 40%.  And that has been a bipartisan flock.  Somebody had to start a trend of being a voice for that flock, and it is that reason alone that I will forever smile at that pointless campaign.  It was worth the fight, with joy or without.  And the joy did come, but mostly it came after the fight was over.

But it was lonely.  And it was the toughest fight of my life.  So tough, in fact, that I had every intention of building on the momentum and continuing the fight as soon as November 4th arrived.  I’m not done with the fight, but I needed a break from it.  And though I KNOW people will follow me in that fight, I don’t know of anybody else that will champion it with the same fervor that I will, and so it will once again be a lonely fight.

That’s hard.  It’s even harder to find joy in it, even when it’s something in which I believe so strongly.  Solitary fights are hard.

But when I really sat back to think about it, solitary fights have been the only fight I’ve actually fought since I was 14 years old.

In ninth grade, I didn’t make the JV basketball or baseball team after being in the starting lineup for both in middle school.  I was devastated.  But I knew I was going to play some kind of sport in high school, so I took golf lessons that summer.  For the next six years, my entire LIFE was golf, and a more solitary sport you will not find.  

That fight led me to all-conference by senior year, it led me to become a scholarship athlete on the Division II level in college.  But all along, it was a solitary fight, and one I did not enjoy the way I should have.  I was too angry at not being perfect to enjoy it.

By nineteen I was drinking too much.  By twenty I lived alone and quite often drank alone.  I was married at 26, a father at 27, and widowed at 30.  I was never the husband or father I should have been because a drunk can be in a clown car with seventeen other clowns and be alone.

I started a business at 28 and ran it into the ground all by myself, mainly because at that point, I either had no idea how to fight anymore or I just didn’t care to fight.

I was 35 before I did anything that resembled escaping solitary confinement, and I married her less than a year and a half later.  And even though it was the best decision of my life, I was still alone.  That’s what addiction does to you.  It is the most solitary fight known to man, and it is not the kind of fight in which joy can have any part.

Not to kill that mini life story right there, as I completely understand why there is no joy in the fight to preserve an addiction, but I’m sober now.  There should be joy in life’s battles now.  

So why did I struggle to find joy in running for office when it was something I’d always wanted to do?  Why was there little joy when I knew (and still know) it was a MUCH-needed position and platform on which to run?  Why did the joy come after the fight instead of during it?

Why does the fight to discover my purpose on this Earth include no intrinsic joy?  Why does the fight to start a business I know is needed in this country produce pessimism and self-doubt when it should produce joy?

I mean, seriously.  How many people have the effing guts to do what I’ve done over the past year and a half?  I know the answer to that.  There are very, very few.  But guts and ambition and desire and perseverance do NOT translate to joy.  I do not know why.  I hope I live long enough to know so I can tell young people the secret to life.

I have serious doubts about ever actually finding those answers.  I don’t know that personal battles – by their very nature – are supposed to include joy.  I think some fights and personal battles are simply necessary because the person you want to be is on the other side.

In the case of starting a side business, a battle to relevance is not fun, but the capability to see success at the end – even if it’s a long ways away – lets you know that joy exists somewhere in the battle.  It ignites the fight to go after it.  Or in the case of running for office, the state and the country you want to see are on the other side of the fight, but the battle is just too daunting to include joy.

But all of those battles are necessary, I think.  The personal battles are simply a necessity of humanity.  The worldly ones are the ones you take on because your kids deserve better than what the world is giving them without your input.  Joy is – at best – only a tertiary side effect of the positive repercussions of those battles.

But I do know one thing.  You can actually add a year to one of the questions I asked earlier.  How many people have the guts to do what I’ve done over the past TWO and a half years?  Again, not many.

My very first big decision in sobriety was to write about it and hopefully help people who might also be struggling with addiction and sobriety.  Out of all the decisions I have made in the past four years, that was my best.  And why is that?

Because it doesn’t feel like a fight.  Writing – and hopefully making a real impact on real people suffering real personal conflict – simply brings me joy.

What Sobriety Gave Me

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A few friends and I started a side business this week.  I would have never done that four years ago.

Before I turned my every waking minute into building a website, I was the only unaffiliated candidate in the state of North Carolina to run for the General Assembly.  I never would have done that four years ago.

Before I ran for office, I made the decision to tell my sobriety story to the world because that was healing for me.  I never would have had the guts – or the ability – to do that four years ago.

I’m not writing this as an anniversary tale or an attempt at a pat on the back.  My four year sobriety anniversary isn’t until May.  And I’m sure somebody will give me a virtual pat on the back for writing this.  That’s expected but not required.  And somebody will probably tell me they’re proud of me.  But that’s not why I’m writing it.  

For me, after a week where I traveled the full spectrum of emotions because of accomplishing something that caused me great doubt, it’s all about reminding myself of where I was and where I am now, and if that helps others who may be wondering what life can be after addiction, it’s just not something I’m willing to keep to myself.

I truly believe that if I hadn’t gotten sober, I’d be dead right now.  I was as close to suicidal as I had been in twenty years of addiction.  That kind of mindset comes at the end, I think.  It comes when you have reached a point that you steal $20 out of your own daughter’s wallet just to drink and dip because the secret account your wife doesn’t know about has dried up.

And this is AFTER you’ve also stolen bags of change from your own parents.

If I wasn’t dead right now, I really don’t know where I’d be.  I can’t even imagine the depths I would have reached to maintain the addictions.  I would have no family.  That much is guaranteed.  My wife was ready to leave and she would have taken the kids and made damn sure I’d never have the opportunity to drive drunk with them in the car.

I think there’s a chance that if I wasn’t dead, I’d be homeless, with no job, no car, nothing.  That was a VERY real future for me at the end.

There’s no point in rehashing the road to rock bottom because it wasn’t as climactic as the end.  If somebody is reading this who is struggling with addiction, they already know what the road is like because they’re traveling it.  

But what they can’t see is that no matter how dark it is around them, there is ALWAYS a place to turn off of that road.  There’s actually two turns at all times.  You can go right OR left to get off that road.  Both will end the addiction.  It’s just that one of them ends your life.

But if you’re on that road, I hope this finds you and I hope you are able to see even a glimpse of what might happen if you choose the other turn.  My life isn’t close to perfect and I’m absolutely assured that it never will be, but I’m reaching a place I never thought I would.

That place is kinda boring, and I hope it’s a place in which I never stop raising the bar, but it’s all I ever wanted:  contentment.

I’ve been a little surprised by who I’ve become, but not the least bit unhappy or regretful about it.  For whatever reason, when I got to about the one year sober mark, I just saw a life where I was going to leave everything out on the field.  I wasn’t going to take anything I wanted to do with me to the grave.  

I wanted to write.  I’m doing it.

I wanted to run for office.  I did it.

I saw something I thought the world needed.  I found some help and we’re doing it.

I don’t know what comes next other than trying to build that business into something I know the world needs while simultaneously being the best teacher, husband, and father I can be, but if I discover something I want to do, I’m going to do everything in my power to do it.

But that stuff I just talked about is the stuff that the outside world sees.  That’s the stuff I’m doing, but it’s not a full picture of who I’m becoming.  Sobriety has given me riches I cannot count.

It’s given me a family that loves and respects me.  It’s given me in-laws that probably hated me but now know their daughter and grandchildren are in damn good hands.  It’s given me pride in my career.  It’s given me this magical view of life where I love seeing other people’s happiness because it makes ME happy.  It’s given me dreams and hope and joy and self-respect and the unbelievable feeling that contentment is achievable.  

I’m going to leave it all on the field.  I stole from this world for twenty years, and I’m going to give anything and everything I have back to it.

And yes, it gave me one thing I did not want.  Sobriety gave me about twenty-five extra pounds.  And fighting it is a daily struggle.

But sobriety gave me something I had struggled with even more than that for the majority of my life.  Until 1,350 days ago, I had felt like a failure for most of my life.  No matter what I did, I never felt like a success.

Well I kicked addiction’s sorry ass.  And that means I can do damn near anything.

COVID For The Holidays

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It’s a weird debate to me, but we’re in a world where truth has no definition and facts don’t need evidence, so I guess it’s understandable.  I mean, even those people who call the virus a hoax admit that people can die a pretty shitty death if they get it, but I still feel pretty bad about the possibility of taking a year off from the holidays.

Let’s do a quick “tale of the tape,” shall we.  Every medical expert (yes, expert, and I respect them as such) tells us that if we have pre-existing conditions, the virus will probably affect us worse than a marathon runner with godlike vitals.  They say that you should especially be worried if you have one of eleven different ailments, and I have two and a half of them.

First, I have had asthma since I was a child.  For 35+ years, I’ve had a Ventolin inhaler or a nebulizer near me at all times, just in case.  Second, I finally got our family’s most ill-desired heirloom – hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – about 6 years ago.  And lastly, I could stand to lose 25 pounds (thank you, replacement addictions,) so I am on the “overweight enough to have COVID negatively affect you” scale.

So I got heart problems, lung problems, and sugar problems, and yet somehow I still manage to be a cheery son of a bitch.  But even without the COVID, that cheery son of a bitch could still pass out walking up a flight of stairs, wake up needing a shot of Ventolin, and shake it off with a glass of sweet tea and some cookie dough.  And yes, I’m well aware that I have some control over the weight thing.  The other two, not so much.

It feels like, however, that society expects people like me to feel guilty for those things we cannot control, and it makes us bitter towards the ones so callous about a damn mask that they’d rather preserve their supposedly fleeting freedom in rebellion than to take a chance that maybe they actually could save a life by wearing it and respecting a virus that clearly did not leave on Election Day, 2020.

So if you’re in that boat – and especially if you are one of the afflicted like me – this blog post is for you.  And it’s also for me, to make me feel better about my limited participation in this year’s holiday festivities.

When You See What Others Cannot

Do you notice when you’re in the grocery store and you’re “drafting” behind the person in front of you as you both walk down an aisle?  Do you realize that the air they breathe is following them like the contrails of a jet, thus meaning that you are walking in the exact air they breathe and therefore causing you to stay back or suddenly stop and pretend to need gefilte fish?  

I do.

Do you look at pictures on social media of family and friends and start piecing together the possibility that they might have been with or near people who you might soon be with or near?  Do you see the pics of group shots with no masks and know that if one of them has the virus, they all have a really good shot of contracting it because if they got that close for a picture, chances are they hung around with people that close for several hours, too?

I do.

Do you watch your child go off to school or preschool and hope like hell they keep their mask on and wash their hands and don’t get too close to somebody coughing or sneezing?  Do you attempt to contact trace the parents of your child’s friends on that rare occasion that your four-year-old gets to have a playdate?

I do.

It’s almost impossible not to notice these things when you respect the virus because of pre-existing conditions.  And sure, I’ve gotten virus fatigue and noticed myself slacking, but these past couple of weeks as the numbers have skyrocketed, I’ve noticed how much my mind works overtime thinking through all the scenarios to make sure I keep myself safe.

And for the most part, I don’t judge other people for living the life they want to live.  I honestly have no interest in telling people they are being careless or inconsiderate when they go to a dinner party at a friend’s house.  More than likely, if they get infected, they’ll cough twice and head right back out into the world.  I doubt I would be that lucky.  

And yeah, I’ve sat back and watched the hypocrisy and carelessness of the rallies and the protests (with emphasis on the bipartisan hypocrisy) and I’ve wondered why our small businesses are being legislated to die when the big box stores are yielding record profits.  I notice a country where every single person has already made up their mind about how they will live in this pandemic world, and I am not going to change their mind.  So I don’t even try.  I find wasting my time rather pointless these days.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t notice EVERYTHING about how this country and her people are reacting to the first major pandemic in our lifetimes.  It’s been pretty ugly.  And in the face of that, I’ve learned a lot about what I see.  And I see a lot of things that other people simply cannot see. Or refuse to see.

The “Don’t Stop Living” Argument

In their reaction to the constraints being placed upon them these past eight months, many people have thrown out the argument that you’re as good as dead if you let this virus control you.  If you stop living, they say, you might as well just stop actually living.

Well, you do you, my quote-wielding friend.

The thing about this “quote” is that it’s a microcosm of our country today.  It’s overly generalized to the point that it becomes almost laughable in its application.  It assumes so many things that it falls really, really flat with me.

It assumes that everyone must “live” the way the speaker of the quote defines life.

It assumes that those people to whom they are addressing lived somewhat of a glamorous life before the virus interrupted it.

It assumes that those of us who “stopped living” couldn’t benefit from a life that slowed down a little.

It assumes that people were truly happy before the virus, when if you actually understand the human condition and the many struggles therein, true happiness is actually pretty rare for most people.  You can’t really “live” if you aren’t really enjoying the life, can you?

This mantra also assumes that respecting the virus is something we are doing against our will.  Do I WANT to live in a world where a pandemic is ravaging everything in our lives?  Of course not.  But am I being realistic about its existence and respecting it because it’s the most prudent thing for me to do?  Absolutely.  I’m not reacting that way against my will.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a positive, uplifting mantra.  I hope it inspires happiness and contentment in people who decide to not let a virus make them “stop living.”  I hope they find new ways to “live” within the safe guidelines we’ve been given by our medical experts, but if not, it clearly won’t be me who stops them.

But I think it’s important to understand that to some of us, our choice to live to see the other side of this pandemic gives us a happiness and contentment that you might not understand.  And you aren’t necessarily SUPPOSED to understand me, by the way.  You’re supposed to work to understand yourself.  And yes, it is MUCH easier said than done. So you do you and I’ll do me.  

And in a few months, those of us lucky enough to survive this virus will ALL start living again. And we still won’t need anybody’s approval to do so in our own unique way.

So About Those Holidays

I think it’s become an easy decision for me.  I have no interest in telling anybody else how to live.  If they want to hang out with people on the weekends and live as if I’m being stupid and go around the grocery store with no mask on breathing on cereal boxes because they have no ability to see how their carelessness actually could cost somebody else their life, I’m to a point where I just say, “You be you, my dude.”

I also have contact traced so many people that cross my path that I’m done with that, too.  I am not going to sit down and have the following conversation with my wife ever again:

Wife, when, for example, planning a potential play date:  “His dad works in a sawmill and wears a mask from 9:00 until 11:30, then he goes to lunch in a break room with poor ventilation, and he wears a mask only over his mouth during the afternoon hours before carpooling with two guys who have second jobs as waiters, but they have to wear masks at the restaurant, except in the kitchen.”

Me:  “And you said the mom scrapbooks with a nurse and goes skeet shooting with three ladies who do a yoga class at a gym that stays 78 degrees year round? Do these women have socially active children? Tell me ALL about them.”

Yes, that was overly-dramatized for effect, but when we’re done with the parents, we inevitably go down the contact tracing path to talk about everybody they come in contact with.  And it’s EXHAUSTING.  I’m so sick of it.  We’re ALL four degrees of separation from somebody who’s dead from this virus.  It’s really gotten pretty stupid trying to figure out who’s safe and who isn’t because NOBODY is 100% safe.  A perfectly healthy person could test negative one day and become a super spreader the next and they’d never show a single symptom.  

In other words, it is absolutely stupid to tell me that any single person I come in contact with is completely healthy.  You don’t know that, I don’t know that, the often incorrect tests don’t know that, and the perfectly healthy super spreader who hasn’t shown a single symptom doesn’t know that.  So go ahead and tell me that everybody at a holiday get-together is perfectly healthy.  I already know you can’t prove that, so I’ll just smile and do whatever makes me feel the safest.

So for the holidays this year, I’m going to do two things.  I’m going to look out for myself, and I’m going to LIMIT my exposure to others to the best of my ability.  If I know I am going to a holiday gathering where ten people have self-quarantined for two weeks and two people hung out with another side of the family a couple of days ago and there were fifteen people in the den opening presents with no masks on, I don’t really care if the ten people who self-quarantined get pissed off at me or not.  

The two people who were exposed to fifteen people with no masks on will keep me home.  And I’m okay with that. No hard feelings on my end whatsoever.

I am going to LIMIT my exposure to people.  I’m never 100% safe because that’s impossible, but if I can be 80% safe as opposed to 60% safe for one winter, it will probably mean that this is not the winter where I “stop living.”

So you do you.  And I’m going to do me.  I’ll probably just see you next year.  And if you’re not okay with that, I am.

And that’s okay with me.

And PS, if somebody in your family doesn’t feel comfortable doing holiday get-togethers this year, tell them you love them, you respect their decision, and don’t say a single negative word behind their back about them not being there.  Because it’s not your job to live their life.

Win or Lose

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Win or Lose….

….and I know the odds are not in my favor, these past 13 months since I announced I was running for the NC House have been a case study in how to do something completely irrational with unbending rationality.  And that probably makes no sense unless you’d been in my shoes throughout. 

But rational doesn’t mean everybody understands it, and that’s why it’s been irrational.  It was an impossible game to play, and I played it as if it was the most normal challenge in the world.  It takes a little bit of crazy to do something nobody else is doing.  So to me, it’s been a completely rational, completely necessary goal.  To others, it’s been a stupid, irrational waste of time.  I don’t agree with them.

Win or Lose….

….I’m proud of myself.  I set a few goals for myself several months before I announced my candidacy, and I have met those goals, even in a pandemic.  I had a goal to work harder than I’d ever worked in my life.  I succeeded.  I had a goal to be the complete opposite of everything you see in politics today; I was going to be decent and respectful and open-minded and tolerant and at all times proving the possibility of compromise and coexistence.  I succeeded.  I never once strayed from that goal.  And it’s exactly why I gained (and earned) a lot of support.

Win or Lose….

….the last goal was often the hardest but also the one that confused the hell out of some people (and made a few of them angry for some reason.)  I had a goal that I was going to be me, and that meant I was going to be professional while mixing in some fun.  As I told somebody recently, if I had to be serious the entire time, I think my head would have exploded. 

But let me tell you, some people do NOT want you to be unique and goofy.  I had one guy comment the following on one of my goofy videos:

“Like most everything else, just a show.” 

Delete!!  He couldn’t belittle me on the 80% of videos that covered serious topics (and covered them really well, if I do say so myself,) but he sure did come out of his hole when I had a little fun with my campaign.  Whatever.  That brings me to the next one.

Win or Lose….

….I learned a lot about people this year.  I think the biggest thing I learned was that people who were critical of my candidacy have no real interest or ability in actually making the world a better place.  They just want to bitch about it. They don’t have the guts to try and understand people different from themselves.  They don’t have the ability to think critically and creatively and admit that there are other opinions out there that are just as correct as theirs.  And then sometimes I can’t explain why they would rather tear people down than build people up.  Sometimes they’re just assholes.

Win or Lose….

….my wife is a little terrified of me actually winning.  She has a point.  I told her the story of talking to Donna White, the incumbent, one day at the polls and how Donna told me the story of the hours she put in in the days after the CARES Act stimulus bill was passed because the state only had about a week to figure out how they would allocate billions of dollars. 

She told me about the hundreds of emails she would get each day and the hundreds of texts and how she did her best to reply to every one.  (See?  I told everybody from day one I had nothing bad to say about Donna White.  I wasn’t lying.)  You can probably imagine why a mother of three with two toddlers might be a little terrified of the hours her husband might have to work.  Lucky for her I’m still a pretty big longshot.

Win or Lose….

….honesty and integrity will FOREVER prevail.  I get pissed off when I hear the blatant lies coming from our leaders.  It is not their f*&$#ng job to lie.  It is, in fact, their destiny to get fired from that job.  And it is OUR job as American citizens to not only fire them but to light a fire under our own asses and put people in public office who don’t give a damn about lobbyists or kickbacks and who view politics as exactly what it was designed to be in this great country.  It’s a public service done because you have a passion to help make this state, country, and world a better place for everybody, not a f&%$#ng political party or corporate CEO.  EVERYBODY. 

And win or lose, I sometimes cuss.  I don’t apologize.  Sometimes things just need the oomph that a good cuss word provides.

Win or Lose….

….I don’t think anybody in the world has a mama quite like my mama.  She busted her ass helping me get signatures to get on the ballot and she busted her ass at the polls during early voting.  Every person she could talk to she would say, “Let me tell you about my son,” and then she would tell them so much that most of them could have written a short biography when she was done.  And she did it over and over and over again, every single day of early voting. 

My mama’s not better than your mama because I think all mamas are pretty awesome and it’s really not a competition, but I had the most popular mama at the early voting polls in JoCo in 2020.  Hands down.

Win or Lose….

….I regret nothing.  It would have been great to figure out the secret recipe for campaigning on a budget in a pandemic, but since the world is a little different than it was during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, I obviously had nobody to mimic.  I had to figure out the best I could by myself, and I can’t look back and say I would do anything differently.  Not one thing.  Did I make mistakes?  Sure.  But I learned from them, and I will never again regret something that taught me how to do it better next time.

Win or Lose….

….I won.  I did something at which fifty people in North Carolina attempted and only one in the entire state succeeded.  Me.  I actually got on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate. I won because I gave the 2021 General Assembly all the reason in the world why the people want to see more unaffiliated candidates on the ballot and why they better make the process easier for them in the future. When a third of your state is registered that way because they want nothing to do with the parties, they better make it easier for us to get on the ballot in the future. There is absolutely no sense in making it as hard as they’ve made it. 

I won because I proved to myself that bravery existed within me again.  I won because I showed a lot of people that something other than Democrat or Republican existed, and that it exists with an open-mindedness, tolerance, compromise, and creativity that neither of them possess any longer.

Win or Lose….

….there might be another win or lose left in me. Or there might not be. Or there might be a lot. Sorry, dear. 🙂