​You meet them out there, in the quiet, desperate wasteland of modern dating. They’re a new and particularly resilient strain of the human animal. The ones with the clean cars and the clear eyes and a whole goddamn, beautifully curated…

​You’re sitting here, fifty-six years into the goddamn bar fight, and you’re looking at the two menus they give you at the end of the world. ​On one side, you’ve got the special of the house: The Life of Discipline.…

It’s one hundred and ten goddamn degrees out here in Tucson. High noon. The sun isn’t just shining; it’s a hammer. A big, stupid, and completely honest fist, beating down on the asphalt until the whole world shimmers and sweats.…

I love dogs. Let’s just get that out of the way. I love them in the abstract, in the pure, honest way a man can love a simple, beautiful, and completely uncomplicated animal. In other countries, they get it. You…

  “Trying is often the most subtle form of avoiding.” Read that again. Let it crawl around in your skull for a minute. Let it find all the soft, comfortable, and completely rotten places where you’ve been hiding your whole…

  It sounds like a goddamn surrender, doesn’t it? A white flag waved over the battlefield of your own convictions. They sell you this idea from the day you’re born that the whole point of the game is to be…

  The sun is already a pale, indifferent bastard, climbing over the mountains and shining a light on all the dirt and the quiet desperation of another day. My ankle aches from a run yesterday, a dull, stupid throb. My…

They sell you this idea of “comfort” like it’s the goddamn prize at the end of the race. A warm bed, a full belly, a quiet room. A soft, gentle, and completely passionless slide into the grave. They’ve built a…

I was young once. I know it’s hard to believe, looking at this broken-down piece of machinery now, but I was. And when you’re young, you think you’ve got the whole goddamn world figured out. You think you’re a king,…

That’s the oldest, prettiest, and most dangerous lie they ever sold you. It’s the sweet, cheap poison they pour in your ear from the day you’re born, the thing that keeps you quiet, keeps you in line, keeps you from…

That dream they planted in your heart, you think that was an accident? That little itch you can’t scratch, that quiet, persistent whisper in the dark when you’re all alone with a bottle and your own goddamn failures? That’s not…

You can’t take everyone with you. Let’s just start there. Let’s carve that into the cheap wood of the bar right now. You can’t drag every goddamn corpse from your past into the future. It’s not a cruise ship, this…

Let’s just start there. Let’s carve that into the cheap wood of the bar right now. You. Are. Losing. Out. You’re sitting there, in your quiet, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing little cage, and you’re moping. You’re telling yourself stories. Sad,…

Now, I don’t want you to move your lips. I don’t want you to make a sound. But in your head, in that quiet, dirty little theater behind your eyes, I want you to say a word. The word is…

It’s a goddamn comedy, our age. You dive into those dating apps, and there they are: women chirping about “slow love,” wanting some knight in shining armor to rescue them from their forty-hour-a-week grind and playing mommy on the weekends.…

You start out, just another blue-collar slug, maybe some white-trash credentials, trying to crawl out of the bucket. Then you hear that old saw: “You’re only as good as the company you keep.” Sounds like something your sainted aunt would…

So, courtship. Remember that? Some dusty old word from a black and white movie. It’s over. Dead and buried. Now it’s all online profiles, swiping on faces like you’re picking out cheap cuts of meat. They talk about “vows,” about…

I tell my kids this, and I’ll tell it to any other bastard out there with the ears to hear it: I hate my kids. Carve it on my goddamn tombstone. And right below that, you can carve this: I…

You’re looking at a case study in demolition. My whole goddamn life has been a project built in reverse. I’m a self-made man, alright. I’ve built a new version of myself every ten years or so—the perfect Mormon, the bar-brawling…

You weren’t just running from a bad family, kid. You were trying to outrun a prophecy. You looked at your brothers, the dead-end jobs, the trouble with the law, and you looked at yourself, the “Golden Boy” who was still…

You find yourself there sometimes. Three in the morning, in the bathroom. The only light is that single, merciless bulb over the mirror, the one that shows you every crack and every goddamn failure on your face. You’re pulling at…

One day, you’ll pour a whiskey, and you won’t realize it’s your last. There will be no warning. No spotlight from God. Just another Tuesday night, another dirty glass, another habit. You’ll sit down, like you always do. But because…

You spend your whole life trying to build something, and then one day, your own kid comes along and tries to burn it all down with a few, simple, stupid words. “You know, Dad,” one of them says to me,…

The American ideal, the one they sell you in the brochures, is that any man can make it with hard work. The success of the immigrants, the ones who show up with nothing and build empires, proves that the old…

You want to understand the philosophy, the reasoning behind it all? You don’t need a self-help book or a goddamn guru. You just need a dark room, a bottle of something strong, and these five films. They’re not just movies.…

You scroll through the dating apps, and it’s a goddamn comedy. Every other profile, a woman staring into the camera, trying to look both sexy and profound, and the caption always says the same damn thing: “Not here for a…

You see those old photographs sometimes. Seal Beach, 1960. A bunch of people laid out on the sand, and every last one of them looks like they just finished a CrossFit class. You see pictures of New York from the…

Here’s what a man really needs when he’s standing at that crossroads, with the ruins of his life behind him and a whole lot of nothing up ahead. First, you need a getaway plan. Not some goddamn daydream you talk…

So this is the issue, isn’t it? The junction. You spend half your life fighting your way out of the cage, and you finally get free, only to find yourself standing in the middle of an empty goddamn field, wondering…

There’s that scene in the movie, The Matrix. The traitor, the rat, he’s sitting in a fancy restaurant, cutting into a thick, juicy prime rib. And he says it, the whole goddamn philosophy of the modern world in one perfect,…

You want to understand the difference between companionship and a relationship? First, you have to understand my grandfather, Johnny. The man looked like Desi Arnaz and had the philosophy of a back-alley bookie. He was a man who understood the…

They tell you, when you’re young, that you’re a block of marble. A clean, perfect, untouched slab of potential. You can be anything, they say. Anything you want. You don’t know what it is yet, and if you think you…

The demise of humanity seems to be closer than ever before. You don’t need to read the newspapers; you can just go get a goddamn burrito. I’m in my truck yesterday, and this thing, this zombie, shuffles up to my…

It was Christmas Eve in Covina, California. You know the scene. A perfect suburban night, the air smelling of pine needles and roasting meat. The houses all lit up, inflatable snowmen on the lawns, the whole goddamn American stage play…

They have a name for it now, a nice, clean, scientific-sounding name they cooked up in some university basement: “The Universal Fear of the Unknown.” It’s the kind of thing a man in a sweater-vest tells you about while you’re…

There’s a point in life where you come to a cold, hard realization: you won’t see certain people again. It’s not a dramatic thought; it’s just a quiet, sober fact. Like when you’re hugging your grandmother in some piss-stinking hospice,…

Monogamy used to mean something. It used to be a word with teeth. It meant one person for life. That was the deal you made at the altar, in front of God and all those bored witnesses. You stood there,…

I’m parked on my usual barstool at the local watering hole, third Hazy IPA in, watching two guys a few stools down chirp back and forth like neutered parrots. One of them’s got a polo shirt tucked into skinny jeans,…

Blood in My Stool This Isn’t Therapy—It’s the Shit I Lived Through Most podcasts want to fix you. Not this one. Blood in My Stool isn’t some motivational echo chamber wrapped in a neat little recovery arc. It’s raw, unfiltered,…

Marriage was supposed to be the thing that anchored me. The white picket fence, the Sunday dinners, the carefully curated photos on social media that screamed, Look, I made it. I had the house, the wife, the job, the kids.…

You’re 56, huh? You’re old enough to know that family’s a damn joke, but young enough to still get pissed off about it. And I get it, I really do. It’s a brutal kind of truth when you realize that…

The greatest gift your parents ever gave you isn’t the things they bought, the places they took you, or the lessons they tried to teach you. It’s their dysfunction. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but stick with me. You…

Another damn drink, another thought, and it hits me like a wrecking ball to the gut. Men are being told to soften up, feel more, get in touch with our “feminine side”—whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. And women?…

The “low-hanging fruit” woman. Ever since my first breakup, the one after my divorce, these Low-hanging fruit women has been my go-to. The kind of woman who’s always there, easy to grab when the loneliness starts gnawing at you. She’s…

I remember hearing once that in your 50s, you learn what’s going to kill you. It’s like life finally hands you a death certificate in progress and tells you to start taking notes. Maybe it’s the lungs, maybe the heart,…

I’m getting old. It’s not a question anymore, it’s a goddamn fact. I see it in the mirror—the roadmap of whiskey and bad nights etched around my eyes. I feel it in my joints when I get out of bed,…

I’m 56, single, and thought I had exorcized all my mommy issues. But here I am, swiping through the wreckage of the dating pool, and all I see is her. Not literally, but close enough—dark, tired eyes, the weight of…

Monogamy. What a goddamn joke. Used to be, it meant one person for life. Till death do us part. The penguins do it. The swans. But humans? Nah, we ran that word through the wringer, chewed it up, spit it…

If you can sit down, take a deep breath, and make a list of every fucked-up thing that’s ever happened to you—every disaster, every betrayal, every gut punch life has thrown your way—and somehow, somehow, you’re still standing, still moving,…