Six Months to the Rest of My Life

I stood on the cliff overlooking the ocean. The same ocean I had looked at just a few years earlier, thinking to myself, I'm going to live here. And live here I did, with the love of my life Amy, whom I also met a few years earlier one day at the beach.

The wind pummeled me from the sea, cold and damp. I was drunk. Again. I smoked a cigarette. The burning smoke enhanced my dark euphoria. I cried and smoked another cigarette. 

This recurring pattern continued for a few months. I had been laid off from my startup tech job and was unemployed. Amy and I did take an amazing trip across Europe shortly after I was laid off, but when the travels were over, the perpetual hangover kicked in. I struggled with my blue genes, my addictions, my destructive past patterns of soul-crushing anxiety laced with depression. I didn't know what to do; this was post the dot-com bubble bursting into a tough job market. I felt like a failure unworthy of love or grace, even with my new found love.

At that time, I hid how much I drank from Amy. She worked nights then and it was too easy to drink more than usual. By the time she got home, I was already asleep. Passed out more likely. But then one day she found out what I was hiding, and the reckoning was upon me.

I come from addiction genes; my birth father was an abusive alcoholic and my mother struggled with chronic pain and painkillers later in life. I didn't start drinking until the very end of high school, but the fact is that I did start. Same with smoking cigarettes. In fact, I smoked cigarettes for 14 years after high school. A pack a day on average for most of those years. 

After the above heavy drinking, I didn't quit drinking, but I didn't drink as much and I didn't hide it anymore. Amy and I both drank in moderation, until the pandemic, where we both upped our intake (like many others at the time). I remember our kids asking us why we drank nearly every night. I'll come back to that one.

In 2002, I quit smoking. Amy and I were to be married in 2003, but she didn't want to marry a smoker. I didn't blame her. But it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. 

Nicotine has been proven to be as addictive as cocaine and heroin and may even be more addictive. 70 percent of smokers report wanting to quit, but many wait until they develop a significant tobacco-related disease such as heart disease, cancer or stroke.

The first two years were rough, but thankfully I did it. My official quit date was September 22, 2002, the same date when our oldest Beatrice was born years later. 

Which brings me back to drinking. Post-pandemic, Amy decided there would be no more drinking for her; she wanted to be healthier; it was no longer "fun". It'll be four years for her in October. She didn't have a problem with me still drinking and I kept it low to moderate (except for work trips unfortunately). Our kids asked why I still drank. While I reminded them it was usually only 2-3 times per week, Bryce would say to me, "You have a beer every night, Dad."

Then came the death of my dear friend Robby. Paralyzed since his swimming accident in high school, he suffered from chronic pain and a body that degenerated over the decades. And like my mother, he struggled with painkillers.

After that, I really began to reflect on my relationship with drinking. Alcohol is detrimental and there's plenty of data now showing how toxic it is to the body, no matter the amount ingested. Without planning exactly when, I stopped on March 22 this year, six months to the anniversary date of my quitting smoking back in 2002.

When you're genetically dispositioned to addiction, ultimately the only choice you have is to not do the thing you might become highly addicted to. That was something I learned from attending Nicotine Anonymous (same program as AA) before I quit for good. Because if you choose to do it, you're right back in the heart of the destructive dark abyss. Overdramatic? Not really. Those who know, know. And mercy me, quitting smoking was a lot harder than quitting drinking, that's for sure. 

I'm glad I quit drinking. I'm glad my wife did four years before me. We also know our own kids may drink someday and that's their choice (but as far as we know they haven't yet). However, I know firsthand that addiction and purposeful sedation prevented me from overcoming fear, anxiety, and scarcity, instead of embracing love and the potential abundance of a brighter life. And better health. You can truly never be happy if you don’t let go of the things that make you sad. And in the end, alcohol always made me sad. 

So today, my life-affirming sentence is six months to the rest of my life. Blessings.

These Dry Kids Today

What could go wrong with having 14 teenagers over unsupervised for a few hours?

Actually, nothing. Everything went quite right. 

While my wife Amy and I were out celebrating my birthday and our anniversary with dear friends, our oldest Beatrice had thrown herself a belated Halloween birthday party with her good friends (some of whom were the kids of our friends). Bea planned it all, from the decor to the food to the activities. It was quite the production. Amy helped her out with the food before we went out, and I helped a little as well, including decorating for Halloween outside prior to the party because Beatrice loves Halloween. Our youngest Bryce loves their sister but wanted nothing to do with all the teens in our house, so instead spent the night at her best friend's house.

What's great is that Beatrice is taking a culinary class this semester in high school and is learning a lot about food, cooking, and presentation. From a cemetery spinach dip to mummy dogs to ghost pizza and strawberries to spider Oreos, she really had quite the spread for her friends. 

What was missing thankfully were the alcohol and drugs. That's not a joke either. Zero interest from our kids and their friends as far as we know. No vaping either. Nothing. However, when Amy and I were 16 and 17, we had many friends who drank, smoked, and did various drugs. We did as well, although I didn't try alcohol until I was 18 during my senior year. And shortly after high school I started smoking cigarettes. I smoked a pack a day for much of that time until I quit on September 22, 2002. 

But the drinking was common during our teenage years and early adulthood. My sister and I threw many parties at house when our parents were away (which they always knew). We were literally like all the 1980's teen coming of age movies personified. Amy had similar party times as a teenager, too. I was also in a fraternity in college and there was always lots of drinking going on.

Decades later during the pandemic, many parents we knew who drank moderately prior to covid upped their ante on drinking. We were no exceptions. But then Amy stopped drinking just over three years ago, and I drink less frequently overall, even periodically debating about stopping drinking all together myself.

According to a new survey released by Gallup in the summer, only 54 percent of Americans now say they drink alcohol. That’s the lowest share since Gallup began tracking the question way back in 1939, six years after Prohibition was repealed.

Wow. That's down quite a bit, but humans have been drinking alcoholic drinks in some capacity for thousands of years, brewing beer, fermenting wine, and creating other distilled concoctions. The more recent conventional wisdom that moderate drinking is okay and can be good for you, like red wine, just isn't correct. It turns out that the World Health Organization reported "no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health". Then there are the devastating effects of addiction and alcoholism on the addict directly and their family and friends. 

The good news is that, besides the dip in overall alcohol consumption, it's even more dramatic for teens, with some recent data suggesting that alcohol, tobacco, and other drug usage has been declining significantly since the late 1990s.

That's why it's funny when our kids joke with us and say things like "I'm going to host two parties while you're gone", which Beatrice really said but no other teen ever said (unless it was a Tupperware party). Or, "We're going to find our stoner friends and tell them we'd like to buy one drug, please", which was funny coming from sardonic Bryce when I asked what they were going to do with their best friend when they spent the night. But no, no stoner friends, and no drugs or alcohol. And we check in regularly with them, too. 

Beatrice's Halloween "adulting" birthday bash was a big hit without the bad stuff. Maybe in the future they'll try something, but today they don't. These dry kids today with their culinary skills and safer and stronger social bonds. Mercy me, maybe we should be modeling them instead. 

My Algorithmic Stranglehold

Social media was fun at first. For me, way back in 2007 and 2008, I jumped into Facebook and Twitter, reconnecting with old friends on Facebook and making new friends on Twitter. Prior to that, I had joined LinkedIn in 2005. I wasn't a super early adopter, but it was early on.

Later would come Instagram where I loved to share photos I took. And it was fun. Mostly. Communication, connection, sharing, and of course sharing my parenting and personal leadership writing on the sites as well as my pictures. I've had an interesting run of writing online, too, almost quitting it all back in 2021. 

However, since the 2016 election, social media took a dark turn, and it's never turned around. And along the way too many folks got addicted to the clicks. The likes. The attention. And the algorithms' stranglehold continued to strengthen, shaping what we see and hear (and what we want to see and hear). That in turn amplifies the nastiness of human bias and the trolls that say and do horrible denigrating things online. 

More clicks. More likes. More attention. More rage. More hate. More misinformation. More bullying. More trolling. More of a crappy self-defeating mix.

And you may have heard about that Wall Street Journal investigation a few years ago referring to internal Facebook research about how Instagram causes increased levels of anxiety and depression and suicidal thoughts in teenage girls. 

Thankfully that hasn't impacted our kids (can't say 100%, but they've been okay), and we've never denied our daughters using social media. We've always monitored and asked about what they're watching and searching for and seeing and posting (YouTube is their preferred social). Now that they're teens, we also entrust them to use their own discretion and to stay away from inappropriate and dangerous content. In fact, we recently had the social media conversation when the Tik Tok ban was enforced and it was no longer available to download. Our kids didn't really use Tik Tok and were more depressed because another app, a video editing app called CapCut, was no longer available, also from the same parent company ByteDance. 

The good news is that we haven't see increased levels of anxiety or depression from our teen's social media use. The bad news is that I've seen my anxiety spike. Primarily due to the current state of the world and America, plus my addiction of clicks, likes, and attention. That social AI smack ain't playing, that's for sure. I've always struggled with wanting to be liked and social media hasn't helped.

Our kids are always telling us we spend too much time on our phones, that I spend too much time on my phone. I don't think I do, but I've definitely got my wife Amy beat there. Teens average 5+ hours a day online, and my average is 1.5 hours, so there, and even less soon. Our kids are lower than the teen average, too. 

During dinner recently, a time reserved for sharing our days and what we're all grateful for, they both scolded me for having my phone out. I wasn't looking at it, but it was out on the table because I had been looking at the news right before we started to eat (another algorithmic addiction). I literally had to turn it over and then remove it from the table. Both kids do a good job of keeping their phones away at dinner, so they've become the better role models for me. I should probably have a phone pocket at home to put mine in like the kids have at school. 

I'm taking a social break to weaken my algorithmic stranglehold. Kind of. There's still "work" social sharing I will do on LinkedIn, and there's the new BlueSky social network I've joined for those who need a mainstream social break and political refuge. Plus, there's my news and music algorithms to manage and balance (including my drumming channel). 

Ugh. I guess it's not a complete break; social addiction is real and so are the negative impacts. But, the break that I am taking and the positive time I'm getting back is time to reinvest in my family, my friends, my writing, my drumming, and more. Those are the "likes" to be liked every day. 

Driving Straight

In the next year, our oldest child might be getting her driver's license. Mercy me. I have to believe every parent is excited about this prospect because the days and nights of being the family Uber driver will become fewer and farther in between. Every parent is also full of trepidation about their children driving around with all the craziness on the roads, higher insurance rates, and the fear of accidents and injuries. And God forbid they ever drive under the influence of anything and risk everything. 

Driving aside, which will definitely be the subject future articles once Beatrice does start driving, this is also about her getting an official California ID. Both our daughters already have passports, which we got for family travel, but soon she'll have driver's license, and at some point, Bryce will as well. And even if they don't drive, they'll have a California issued ID. 

Legitimate IDs are important for sure, and when we're adults we'll need them for getting jobs, to applying for loans, to voting, to buying alcohol and other legal drugs, to nearly everything. For buying alcohol and other legal drugs, you have to be of the legal age to do so. Unless you have a fake ID.

Back in my day, and my wife's day, fake IDs weren't easy to come by and weren't very good either, like all the cheesy 1980's teen movies we loved back then. I had friends in college who had fake IDs, but never in high school (that I was aware of). My dad could've spoken to this much better than I being a forgery and fraud detective in the 1980's. 

But today it's supposedly very easy to get a fake ID online. For $50-$150 you can get two to three fake IDs on sites such as this one. I don't really want to advertise these sites, but it's real and teens have access to them. 

In California, you still have to be 21 years old to purchase alcohol and marijuana products, but if fake IDs are that good, then it doesn't matter how young you look using one. For those who are 18-20 years old, marijuana is still illegal in California unless you have a current qualifying physician’s recommendation or a valid county-issued medical marijuana identification card. I've also read those are easier to get than you think. 

So, combine that with fake IDs and cannabis dispensary access within walking distance from high schools, and that's a potentially major health risk for our kids. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has shared evidence of the mental health impacts of marijuana usage among teens that include harmful impacts on brain and cognitive development, addiction, higher risk for marijuana-induced psychosis, and suicidal ideation. Not to mention the detrimental effects of alcohol on teen brains. Plus, we need store owners and employees that are vigilant to identifying and reporting flake IDs.

As adults, our grown children may choose to drink alcohol and/or use marijuana, and that's fine, as long as it's legal and they do it safely and not drive under the influence. Or, they'll choose not to, which is probably even better. And yes, there are parents of teens who do consume both as adults, but hopefully aren't making it okay for their kids. 

Teen consumption is more complex and dangerous than ever, and as parents, we need to be aware of how easy it is to get fake IDs and what they can do with them. Access shouldn't as easy as walking to the corner store or dispensary with a fake ID. The legal ramifications and the physical and mental health damage for teens that occur when using and abusing alcohol and cannabis should inspire us to be better parents and talk to our kids about all of this. 

We want our children to drive someday. Of course, we do. With legal IDs. That will be super helpful to us, especially when they're driving straight, and not under the influence (of peer pressure, alcohol, marijuana, the list goes on and on). 

That Bastard of a Monkey

"It's not a habit, it's cool, I feel alive
If you don't have it you're on the other side
I'm not an addict, maybe that's a lie..."

–K's Choice, Not an Addict

She knew when I cheated. The first two years were the hardest, and covering up the few cheats were exercises in futility; the stench never leaves the clothes after even just one cigarette, and the residue left in the mouth and throat is unmistakable, no matter the mouth wash or breath mints. I convinced myself that it was okay, that each one was the last cheat. It was such a difficult monkey on my back.

However, after the first two years of quitting in 2002, it became literally a breath of fresh air. I didn't miss it after that. It had been nearly 20 years since I first smoked those nasty clove cigarettes that eventually led to my pack a day cigarette habit. Even with smoking decreasing everywhere, I'm surprised / not surprised when I still see smokers on the streets, in parks, on the beaches, etc. And now vaping is more prevalent that ever, which is nothing more than another way of getting the nicotine smack monkey on your back. And this is something we've talked to our girls about since vaping is has been marketed to younger school-age kids.

My quit date is still a very important date to me, even with the cheats. It's also our oldest daughter's birthday. And my wife Amy wouldn't marry me unless I quit. She had smoked a little herself when we first met, but had long since quit.

If you've been a smoker, then you know how tough it is to quit. You also know how easy it is to start again. I had quit multiple times prior to the official quit, failing each and every time. Nicotine is such a highly addictive drug, and even though it doesn't give you the same "high" as other addictive drugs, the vicious reward cycle is one of the strongest.

According to recent research:

Nicotine stimulates the release of dopamine in neurons that connect the nucleus accumbens with the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, and other brain regions; this dopamine signal “teaches” the brain to repeat the behavior of taking the drug. 

The amount of dopamine released with any given puff of a cigarette is not that great compared to other drugs, but the fact that the activity is repeated so often, and in conjunction with so many other activities, ties nicotine’s rewards strongly to many behaviors that we perform on a daily basis, enhancing the pleasure and the motivation that we get from them. 

Smokers’ brains have learned to smoke, and just like unlearning to ride a bike, it is incredibly hard to unlearn that simple, mildly rewarding behavior of lighting up a cigarette.

Columbia University researchers Denise B. Kandel and Eric R. Kandel have identified a molecular mechanism underlying nicotine’s gateway effect: Nicotine encourages expression in the reward circuit of FOSB, a gene that underlies the learning processes described earlier. Thus, nicotine makes it easier for other drugs to teach users’ brains to repeat their use.

Smoking seems to both enhance and prolong the pleasure of other activities. The reinforcement-enhancing effect applies also when obtaining nicotine from e-cigarettes.

Not to mention that cigarettes cause more than 480,000 premature deaths in the United States each year, which is about 1,300 deaths every single day. There's enough research out there today accessible to all of us that underscores the dangers of smoking.

I empathize with addicts of all kinds. I do. Unfortunately it's in my genes. I also know the health benefits of quelling an addiction, especially one like smoking cigarettes. Because you don't choose to smoke once you've started, the only choice you have is not to smoke. Addiction is selfish that way. (Learned that from Nicotine Anonymous.)

Recently I was on my way to one of my Natural Bridges State Park beach workouts, and a woman had just finished smoking a cigarette. I didn't see her smoke it, but as she walked in front of me to cross the street, I could smell it. The visceral memories of that smell reminded me all the times I smelled that way. That bastard of a monkey on my back dug its rusted nails into my skin and I literally flinched. Not because I missed it; I'm way past that now. Because I worry it could still kill me someday, just like it continues to kill 1,300 people per day.

God bless you, Brothers and Sisters. The only choice is not to.

Did you hear? The only choice you have is not to smoke. Addiction is selfish that way.

Mama A and I are big fans of Madmen, the dramatic series about an ad agency in New York in the early 1960's. The new season starts in August and we can't wait. There's currently fun promotion on the AMC Madmen website that allows you to Madmen Yourself. You can see my evil-eye-patch-marketing-twin avatar in this post, complete with a cigarette and a martini.

One of the main characters, Don Draper, isn't the poster-father-husband of goodness and light. Far from it. He's a complicated and dark character that makes for good dramatic fiction, and so his character isn't supposed to be a role for fathers - then or now.

But man, I miss the smoking. Yep, didn't I tell you? I was a smoker for almost 20 years. Loved it, especially when drinking. The alcohol accentuated the burning flow of smoke-filled nicotine to head, heart and lungs - setting every cell afire.

In fact, the first thing I did every morning was light up. Two cigarettes from the get go before anything else. I looked forward to the smack many times throughout the day.

There's a very cool song by K's Choice called "I'm not an addict" and part of the repetitive chorus goes:

It's not a habit, it's cool
I feel alive
If you don't have it you're on the other side
I'm not an addict (maybe that's a lie).

Yes, it is a lie. I don't miss smoking. I miss the way nicotine lit me up like a neon sign while calming me at the same time. It's the drug I miss.

You don't choose to smoke once you've started. One cigarette and then a pack and you're on the hook for more. You're hooked on the smack, simple as that.

You don't choose to smoke once you've started. The only choice you have is not to smoke. Addiction is selfish that way. (Learned that from Nicotine Anonymous.)

When we were in Illinois a couple of weeks ago, it seemed as though we passed a cigarette "emporium" every few blocks. Exaggerating, yes, but still there were many. In fact we passed the "Cigarette Emporium" whose sign said:

We like smokers!

Of course you do, silly.

My official quit date was September 22, 2002, and although I've fallen down a few times since, I'm sticking to that date. (And thank goodness I had Mama A for "forceful" moral support.)

According to the American Heart Association, cigarette smoking is the most important preventable cause of premature death in the United States. It accounts for more than 440,000 of the more than 2.4 million annual deaths.

Some may consider that a great way to thin out the herd, but I'd prefer car accidents to addictive carcinogens. Colour me crazy (the British way).

Check out the website thetruth.com. You've probably seen the controversial commercials and the site doesn't disappoint.



A fun factoid from thetruth.com: In 1978, one tobacco executive said that "unhappiness causes cancer."

Wow. It's pretty clear where they're coming from.

According to the New York Times, in 1998, one tobacco executive said, "Nobody knows what you’d turn to if you didn’t smoke. Maybe you’d beat your wife."

Please. Cigarettes got nothing on domestic violence.

This year was the third year I ran the local race Wharf to Wharf. It's a 10K and every mile before and after that race, or any other race I may run, is a mile run for my life, my wife and my child.

Like I said, addiction is selfish and non-discriminatory. Fellow daddies (and mommies) out there who still smoke or battle with addiction of any kind, get help and let yourself be helped.

The only choice you have is not to do it. You've got your families and futures counting on you.