Rev Left Radio - All Too Human: Christian's Struggle with Meth, Alcohol, & Incarceration

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Shoeless in South Dakota: In this fourth edition of our All Too Human interview series, Breht and Dave welcome their old friend from high school, Christian, into the Shoeless Shed to have an honest conversation about his struggles with alcoholism, methamphetamine, and incarceration. This is the first time Breht and Christian have seen eachother in 15 years! With these All Too Human interviews, we aim to highlight and destigmatize the mental health and addiction struggles of regular working class people in hopes that we can provide insight into this type of human suffering, help others who struggle with similar things feel less alone, and deepen our understanding of the modern human condition. Outro music: "Learning to Change" by Tidda (Christian) Check out more of Christian's music HERE ---------------------- Contact us, support us, follow us, or learn more about the show here: https://www.shoelessinsouthdakota.com  

so i know there's a lot of like discussions about m gk and you know him as an artist and after the m&m beef but he to me he's he's he's one of my favorite whether he wears pink or not i think he's one of the illish rap like from 2012 on i listened to this dude i'm talking about black flag mixtapes and such and uh this dude literally has just been tearing it up and when he switched genres he i thought i was going to hate it too and i heard he made a rock album i was like what you know i was in jail at the time But I was like, what do you mean? But I listened to it, fell in love with it. And I was on my, I'm getting ready to go see this dude.

Me and my girlfriend bought tickets for it. And they were like $212 bucks. They're expensive. So I knew he was starting to make it. And it was in Omaha. I lived in Laurel at the time. I'm in a very deep hiding it, but still it's so obvious relapse. And I drink about a pint of vodka before I drive to Omaha.

I did like two shots of meth. And I drive down there. And I, for some reason, I was. good enough you know what i mean i i i wasn't ready to go in there so well it's m gk right i i mean i figured i had to be something and uh but seriously leave my love and uh but i uh i get ready to go in and my buddy chris sitting there and and uh we're gonna have to exit out that's and uh but uh my buddy's sitting out there and he's like bro uh you want to do some heroin and i'm like all right cool and so anyways i didn't realize that these days of heroin has so much

fentanyl in it that it's not even heroin anymore and i did probably the smallest blast you could do and you say blast into my into my arm and and that's that's a lot of my use and uh i wake up in a in an ambulance i don't know what's going on i'm grabbing my chest um it it's it's it's like you can't breathe and your chest is caving in all at the same time and i'm gasping for air i have no idea what's happening i do remember at one point I woke up out of the going into the overdose and I looked over at Chris and he's sitting there smacking me

and I remember my last thing I did before I went into the real bad part of the overdose was I laughed and it was the weirdest thing because I remember that in the middle of the overdose. I remember a split second of coming out of it and I thought everything was fine and I laughed with him and then I went back into OD and yeah dude

I woke up in the ambulance they rushed me there i remember i was fighting with them i was like dude it's m gk i got to go see this dude like i don't even care about my well-being like i got to get in there and and and and when you when i look back at it man like all i wanted to do was go to the show and have a good time and like but i wasn't even thinking that something like this could ever happen but it's but i remember as soon as after it happened the first thing i did was go get a bottle to to like that's the thing about addiction is it doesn't it never like seems like it's bad bad enough like like it wasn't just bad enough i walked out of the hospital it couldn't have been

the drugs the alcohol that was the issue obviously i got to go get more to deal with this now but i you can never just put like dude it's the drugs you know and and and and to me that yeah like it's just that's just one of the many moments i remember that just something crazy happens and i just go right back to what i'm doing you know what i mean not even a split second stop so you were drunken already on meth and then you and then i did a blaster like when you got to the hospital what was that whole how long were you in and everything so i was in the there for three hours. They had to hit me with Narcane twice. The first time, they, like, they had to hit me with the Narcane, but I was still at a point to where I had so much in my

system I could OD again. So then they had to actually give me more. Yeah. So you missed the concert? Yeah, I missed the concert and I made up some story and I, and I, yeah, it was nuts. You didn't miss much. Don't, don't. Sorry, sorry. All right. Well, that's a wonderful and also tragic, cold open and I think speaks to where we're going to go in the rest of this conversation. For people listening, this is our old friend, Christian. This is not just somebody that we've recently come across. We go way, way back. Way back.

The story you might have heard recently about the firework, Fourth of July fight that set the whole soccer field on fire. We were with Christian. That age 15, 16, 17, for me, 19-20-ish, and then you guys, you, meaning you, Christian, and Dave, continue to have a friendship and relationship. but I haven't seen Christian in 15 years 15 fucking years it's great to be back and it's one of those crazy things that we were we were so close at such a pivotal time in our life even though it was fairly brief that even 15 years later the moment I see you the moment we start talking it's just like holy shit man

it's like no time has passed at all absolutely absolutely couldn't agree more just walking in the steps I look in the door I see Dave sitting there like this I see Brett and I instantly just laugh you know what I mean it's just you guys are my boys. So crazy. The memory's flood back. It's the formative years.

Oh, yeah. Exactly. Like it's those like really crucial years or like you're like creating yourself. Absolutely. I think like you could spend your 30s and 40s with somebody and that would be a huge relationship. But that those fit that 15 to 21 range, it's so salient. It's you're becoming who you are.

Your deepest memories, your craziest experiences often happen. So the people that you were with at that time, they'll leave that mark on you. And literally like all of our personalities, I think. think it's fair to say have been shaped by one another well and not only that like even at 35 if i think of some of my fondest memories it goes back to those days like i like there's so many yeah we were free and we were free and we were learning who we were and about each other and like we had each other's back dude and that was what was so cool about our circle is that like you used to say all the time bread of how important loyalty is i truly felt how important loyalty was with you guys you

guys weren't you guys i didn't need my family i had my brothers oh yeah well i think it's because life is so scary everything's so new like you get a license you're driving just even driving is kind of scary you're crashing immediately on mushrooms no but like you're eating dirt yeah you're thinking about like going to um i'm going to start a career or like a family maybe or like people are having kids like all these like very huge things are happening but you're just a rookie you're on the precipice of just like starting life and it's so scary and it's so nice to be with with people like, hey, it's nice to be scared too. Like, it's kind of one of those things where it's, even though it's a bad thing,

it's like when you didn't study for a test and you go, dude, you're like right before the test happens, you go, I didn't study at all. And one person goes, me neither. And that catharsis, that feeling of like, oh, that's so good. Yeah, that's what life is. We do not study for life. Yeah. But why did all we do is get fucked up together?

Well, that's the other, I was just about to say that's the other part of it. Like some people go to homecoming and like, I mean, we did that shit, but our goal, like, usually was just to get fucked up. Well, the thing is, is that, like, you, if you think about it, like, there's getting messed up, because I don't cuss. There's getting fucked up and there's, like, you know, changing your mood. There's dealing with your own problems and everything like that. But there's also this line of, because you could do that with anybody. You could drink, you could get high, you could get drunk with anybody, but you decipher the real friendships, like who you actually spend your real time. Like, no, this is quality time.

And I knew that with you guys. Yeah. Because it's all those memories that you forget, like, everybody's happy when they're drunk or they're all like, you know, like you see fans at a concert or at a game or something like that. They can all like be together drunk and happy. But if you think about like in those formative years, you think about the quality times, I know, even though. we were still under the influence that they were important and like a real thing between us like discovering life got you absolutely so let's go ahead and start from the beginning this this story is gonna it's multifaceted it goes deep we talk about jail time we talk about hospitalizations multiple substances

i believe um music and art as well which which we might get into pretty quickly but it's probably best to start with how me and you met because we met before you and dave really because it was kind of through me that I brought you into the wider circle of my friends. Yep. Although we did have a mutual friend, Mike, who you had known as a child. Right. And I think I even remember maybe little flashes of us as kids' kids around Mike playing basketball once or twice.

And every time I seen you, I thought that I was like, I thought I knew you prior in it, but it had to have been just in passing with basketball. But yes, you're right. But it was through my sister in high school that we really came to be friends. Yes. You want to talk about how me and you became friends and what ages we were? Yeah, absolutely. So this would have been my junior year, I believe, of high school.

And you guys were always a year younger than me. And I met Katie through, I had a group of friends in high school. We like to listen to the same music. We were, quote, unquote, emo. Oh, yeah. You fucking cut my wrist. Got fire. Yeah.

So, but I met her, and I started dating her, and you just happened to be her brother. And I remember every time I would hang out with her, like, you would be around or you would be there. And there was something about the way you presented yourself to me that made me, like, one of, like, gravitated towards you and i wanted to know more and even after me and katie stopped and she moved to montana our friendship continued you know what i mean my chemical romance yeah well yeah in a way dude like and uh so yeah dude that that's exactly how we met and it and and and it's funny because me and brett's friendship of starting wasn't your normal one i think maybe by the third week i was living in his jeep and we were kids so like he so so so but it showed his heart man like

this dude would bring me out meatballs in his jeep because i didn't have anywhere to sleep that night you know what i'm saying he would hide me in his garage from his stepdad because he didn't want me to sleep on the street so like it wasn't that we like became great friends over time like instantly he he cared about me enough to take care of me and then and that's just kind of tells you what kind of guy is so no man well thank you and i felt the same way when i first came across you we just immediately hit it off um just the sort of personality gravitational force you can't even quite um articulate when my sister left we didn't yeah we didn't step back at all we continued doing our thing i know that we were kind of young

So our friendship was even a little earlier than you and Dave's. And so it was a little more pure, wholesome in the sense that we weren't really getting fucked up yet. I wasn't even using them. Yeah. So our friend, like, I ruined everything. You are the worst. It's the fucking problem. And another thing, bro, is like I had other friends like Nate and some of my friends and we would all hang out together.

I still have pictures from Grammy's house and me, you and Nate in the hallway together. Yeah, I forgot about me. And you had this long hair. And the coolest thing about our friendship was the music part. Because we had, we, we had, I mean, this was back in the day. Like nowadays you can record on your phone, you can send it anywhere, you can do this and that. We had this computer in a MySpace and we're 20 years ago. 20 years ago and we're trying to make music and it wasn't bad, you know, and another thing was atmosphere.

Oh yeah. You got me into atmosphere, dude. I've loved them ever since. So your music taste, I always love that as well. I remember so many times me and you rolling around just like blasting, um, love life or no. God loves ugly. Lucky Lucy and God loves ugly. I just had deep memories of that.

And why did you, why were you ended up homeless at that age? So I got kicked out because I thought that my 10 o'clock curfee was I wanted to hang out Katie and I didn't want it. It was more of a choice to be homeless. I just didn't go home. I had that red Jeep. Remember when I put the stupid fucking red lights underneath it? You were talking about it. But it was an old Jeep Cherokee that I had for a while. And yeah, I remember you used to sleep in it in the driveway and I'd like smuggle you out food and shit. But not a mountain dude. My stepdad didn't fuck around now. No, he didn't. So, yeah, great times and, yeah, making music together, listening to music together. I have memories of me and you, going to, I think it was the YMCA or whatever, up 84th Street and playing basketball.

The wreck, yep. And also, like, stealing from the local gas station. And the cop came in. They lined us up and took pictures of all of us, and it was clearly us, but they still never caught us. And it was a Pepsi. Yeah, just a fucking Pepsi. But I remember that. There's always that little edge to our friendship.

we were kind of growing into that direction of like, you know, we could do shit like that. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, it was crazy. And then I remember bringing you around my other friends, the one time that always stands out to me, it was just so funny because it was so indicative of both your personalities. But when you met, shit, maybe I'll bleep that out, but you met another friend of ours, and it was like the first time you were meeting, and he was dressed in a really preppy way with, like, this multicolored fucking polo shirt on.

and you, like, literally had fingerless gloves and shit. Dude. All black, you know, middle of summer. My chemical romance is the max. And then you met, and then I think when you walked up to him, because you were a funny dude and you would always be witty and talk shit. And to break the ice, you were like, oh, I didn't know it was Easter because he was wearing this fucking goofy as polo.

And then he immediately shot back. I didn't know it was Halloween. Yep. We all broke out laughing. Instant. Yeah. But, you know, that was kind of how you came into the whole broader group. Yeah.

So yeah, great times. I wish we had the music that we made back then. But I remember just spending endless summer days in your grandpa's house hunched around that little computer. Just doing what, yeah, writing music, man. So then the next question is, how did you and Dave come to meet? Because obviously it's through me in some way. Yeah, I don't remember that clearly.

So how I remember meeting Dave was it was over at your house and he had just happened to come over. Now, Kyle, Kevin, and Dave always hung out. together and somehow from our friendship it transitioned into me hanging out with them and i don't know exactly when that transition happened it's not like we didn't hang out anymore but as far as like who i kicked it with in that it's like there were sub circles of of that group you know what i mean yeah and i somehow found myself in that in that lane with them and maybe that was more of the drug use maybe or whatever the case may be but that's how i started hanging out with them yeah i'm so sorry yeah

well you guys just drank bro and i was like looking for fucking acid honestly like you You have these, like, groups of people that travel together, and there, you have, like, a common goal, which is drugs at the time. And this is what, in our drug using years. But it's nice to have, like, a foxhole buddy. They're like, okay, we have to do this shitty life of, like, being addicted drugs, trying to find money, scrape up stuff. But at least this guy's cracking jokes during it. At least it's, like, fun being around a cool guy doing it. Like, you could, honestly, there's times that, like, there's the joke.

of like hanging out at the dealer's place like the pot dealer who was like listen to my music man and it's terrible and awful and stuff but it's like I remember even though the scenario like circumstances were bad because it was doing drugs it was good

to like this is a genuine cool dude like I'm glad like I'm glad I found a person here I mean I wish we could meet under like a better circumstances but it's good that you're here and I'm here.

No, and I feel the same. And the thing about me and Dave's friendship is we're the type of friendship that we can drive home together, drunk, committee, like obviously shouldn't be doing what we're doing, but we're listening to music and having a heart-to-heart moment

during that, during that. And during the chaos of addiction, that's exactly what Dave was, is he was that person that I could, like, be myself around while not trying to mask myself with these drugs. And I remember it was Home by Michael Boubley. And he's like,

Christian, dude, we got to fucking listen to this. And I'm thinking it's going to be like, like a rap or like something but he plays this beautiful song and he's driving me home and i'm just bawling you know what i mean like and those are moments that i'll never forget dude because you took me home then i and i remember going to bed i'm like fucking just take me home you know what i mean like it's just is the first time you guys made love yeah it's second well the difference is honestly is that like there's plenty of times you have like weird drunken ventures with a person

but i still remember those like i travel about with many dudes and like playing like i i In case you don't know, I travel and I, like, I hitchhike and play home by Michael Day apparently, but drunk guys. But I remember. Wait, you did that with somebody else? What the fuck? But I remember with you. You're the one that was important.

But like, that's the whole point is like, you tried to decipher like in this like harsh world of addiction. Like it's surviving and it's, you know, it turns people against each other. Like it's it's so nice to have

a friend, but also awful to have a friend, because you watch each other, like, slowly commit suicide in this way. Well, can I retell my heart-to-heart, Dave, story, please? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I want a different one. You listen to home with somebody else?

No, I'm joking. Okay. He would never. Okay, thank God. I was actually hurt there for a moment. So then, here's the next question, or one little memory, and then we'll go into another question. I also remember we played basketball a lot,

and just one crant of funny memory is the time my own was, fought Donnie because he stuck up for you when we collided at the room and then I was like I'm gonna call the police I remember that? Yeah yeah

Just a random little flash of a lightning bolt of memory Called the police for a basketball game We got to take this shit seriously I remember fighting Kevin playing football Every time I fucking was on the other thing Donnie We collided at the rain

We ran into it So you're gonna write of a report Like yeah No what happened was that we were doing that And then Donnie took Christian side Because Donnie was on Christian's team And I thought loyalty went deeper than whose team you happened to be on at that time.

And then Donnie took Christian's side, and so I got super pissed, but I couldn't beat Donnie. Because Donnie was just a fucking, he was a big-ass dude, and he would fuck anybody up. So you can't get into it. Like, I would get into it with Kevin me, and you would get into it. You know, I'll beat Dave's ass right now.

But with Donnie, you just couldn't really get physical. Even though you wanted to, he pissed you off so fucking much. So you called the police. So, like... My mom had to come out of the house and shit. I'm like, Mom, call the cops. Fuck, Donnie. Get him.

I want him to the fuck out of you. The Christian's just over there kind of like being serious. but a little smirking. That's how I was, man. Is breaking your friendship a misdemeanor or a felony? Yeah, I don't know. That would have been sorted out if the cops come, but my mom's like, honey, we don't need to call the cop.

Absolutely, do not call the cops. But, okay, my question for you guys is, as you guys started going in your direction and started really becoming a little group yourselves, I was going probably in the direction of being more with Levi and Kyle. Yep, and kind of moving in that direction. So we still would, of course, be at parties together.

We were still friends. We would still hang out. but over time it kind of separated and I know at 19 I got my girlfriend at the time pregnant and I was moving in the direction of becoming a dad and then I started getting into school

and all this other shit and then I kind of lost track of what you guys were doing but my question for you guys is where did the drugs start what drugs were you guys initially doing together you have the story Dave of

doing opiates early on and feeling that addictive switch flip in your head was that in the same era that was at 15 so basically like it started at 15 16 with the the opiates and Christian kind of came along during that time and we were kind of met each other like 17 18 fully like addicted and then two opiates yeah and then

what happened was that there was like a big crisis like in my life at the like I first went to rehab at like 19 and That's when, like, high school's over, and, like, the world is, like, here you go. Like, this is the world now. You can go to school or can you go to school or can you work a job, like, all that type of stuff? The freedom's over. Yeah, yeah. And it was me and Christian. And so, like, I was under the spell of, like, I'm not doing drugs anymore.

That's good. But I'm drinking, like, an alcoholic. And that's when me and Christian were, like, kind of doing the same thing. And it's just this weird relationship where it's like a, like the emperor's new clothes where you don't say the thing in the room that we know we're like alcoholics. And we're like what we're doing is destructive, but we both we have to do it. And it's if we're going to do it, I would want to do it with you. So it really started with hardcore drinking. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, mine did and I'll get to that. But what I want to say about me and Dave's use is, like, with all four of us, when we used together, we would listen to music and hang out and do stupid shit. But like when, if it was via text to me and Dave wanting to use together, it was always we should do this and then talk. If that makes sense. Like it wasn't let's get together and go to a party or whatever. It was let's get together and talk because me and him could sit there on the opiates and just have these heart-wrenching conversations about what's going on in our lives. how do we feel about this certain situation.

So in a sense, it was that therapeutic value that we had with our friendship, as well as the fact that we were both on that same level of we didn't want to be doing this. You know, even if it was subconscious, we didn't. So we would talk about shit like that. And that's why it was so unique with him because, like I said, if he's going to hit me up to use, I know we're going to go talk about shit. And we're going to hang out and try to find an answer to something rather than just get fucked up. Yeah, we were basically like made sure we wouldn't drown alone.

you know like this is not to make it not to make it homoerotic but like holding hands as we're drowning under the sea exactly yeah I get that and I get I mean you know

sort of the different relationships we had both of you with me had the music relationship where we would make our music our little raps and stuff and we really were like our early friendships were really centered around that

and then there was a vulnerability that of course came along with writing you know introspective raps and stuff that we would do in addition to our more fuck around raps or our talk shit raps but i can see how that vulnerability translated into you to just having those that ability to be completely open and vulnerable with each other which as adolescent young men you don't always get that with all your friends no you don't because you got you got to keep that persona and you got to make sure you know what i mean you can't talk about it but with him i could but yeah and and and and i don't think

throughout my use i had someone that i could talk to like him you know what i mean like i i think that that was just that rare thing that like we had and it was earth early on and not saying I wish I would have had it later because I got it clean with therapists and stuff like that but I but I never I never had that with anyone else like that's just the kind of thing I have with them so a twofold question is regarding your guys's ongoing relationship oh I think I forgot the first part of it but one I'm interested how the drinking turned into other substances and then if oh the other part was that do you guys have any particularly funny crazy or weird stories with your time together memories so

It was actually, it didn't turn into other substances. It was, like, opiates, like oxycodone and morphine and all that stuff. And then it turned into drinking. I see. And I remember, like, so clearly, you were in this, like, you were with, um, we're going to bleak the name out, but I'll say, just say first names. L, Laura. And, uh, we were in that apartment complex. And basically, we were just, like, trying to, like, struggle to get by.

and just have like be drunk have a buzz and just hang out like just kind of like in these dog days of drinking just exist together i think it goes without saying we're all incredibly broke at this time oh yeah literally ranging for coins and stuff to do all i live with laura for two years and she paid for everything including my alcohol yeah and i remember so this is one i don't know if you remember this but there was a guy gas station right next to the apartment and i do remember that gas station very well yep and we bought alcohol there a lot and there was one time where we were so broke dude it was not quarters it was dimes and nickels and we like we both walked down the funny thing is is that only one only one

person needs to buy this but we did it together for whatever reason and we both walked down and I remember the cashier like honestly like cashiers watch people be alcoholic all the time they don't never say anything this was the only time someone said something I remember the slave said

can I just do this you just drink and I don't I don't it's like she was offended by the Nichols or like what it was like I made her count there was nobody behind us like is it's never a good sign when you're paying with booze with nickels and dimes

at about seven in the morning but it was i i remember that so vividly like it's it like we were in such bad shape that even the public was against us right and you know how like with addicts like the script they're scraping up anything they're selling their stuff for meth and blah but we were scraping we were we were we were on the floor looking for coin yeah because it was 399 for a pint a half pint wasn't going to do it so we had to get 427 and we knew exactly i remember to this day the exact numbers with tax so yeah dude we we scraped up change bro and walked in there together

and we're like pint of vodka please yeah so then as that continues to evolve into when do you guys start I guess gravitating away from each other well basically like

I had my relationship with a significant other and I was like I have to stop this I'm going to go back to school I need to like have a life and that's where it was like you know

when I went to treatment when I was 19 for drugs it was like okay maybe this was just a bad time in my life no you're a you're a full bone alcoholic you have to like get help and it was just this process this like hard like hardship of trying to stay sober during like these times of like you know the dog days of drinking um sometimes just giving up for like a year imagine just giving up for a year like um going through these relationships just trying to hold together jobs that are just meaningless and I

essentially like I know you understand this it's nothing like to the offense of the other person but there's things you just have to do yourself and you have to slap yourself in the face and go hey you need to get up and start your life

and create your life from the bottom up no one's going to help you you need to do this now and i think that's what we were kind of doing like me like that's what i was doing like i collected some stuff because i still had credits from um like school and i could get just like screw the writing thing just get a degree and uh that would be my big carrot thing and then i would work a job and just be in this relationship but just be a normal person That was, like, the goal was just to be a normal person. How do you remember it? I, I, uh, I made it easy for a lot of the people.

I moved. Um, what age? Um, I'd have been 22, I think, 23. We had completely lost connection with that one. Yeah. So, so it, it wasn't as prevalent. And I know that, but, but when I moved it, it was, I was done with everybody. Because they moved me there for that purpose. Where did you move to?

I moved to Norfolk. Okay. Nebraska. I went to treat. They moved me into the link, which is a halfway house, and that's jumping ahead a little bit, however. But I lasted 16 days there relapsed, was doing the same shit. So it's not like the move helped me, but as far as my connections in Omaha specifically, when I moved, it cut off everything with everybody. So he would have been 22, and so you would have been 21-ish?

Yeah, I think it's only just like one year between us. But the real, like, thing is that, like, in those early 20s to mid-20s is when we were, like, just really grinding and out, like, basically trying to get through life, just drinking. And then, you know, trying to figure it out from that point on, like, from the mid-20s up is, you want to tell you that part of the story? Yeah, like really quick before you go into that, just the Kevin and Kyle dynamic. Okay. I'm just curious because you guys were kind of a group. I know you guys had your special connection.

But from my perspective, around that time where I kind of stepped back away from you, it wasn't a conscious stepping back. It was just my life was naturally going in a different direction. I was kind of in a different group. I even moved to Montana for a while, and that really kind of cut a lot of ties at the time. But I was very close with Kyle, Kevin, and all of you for several years in my mid-to-late teens. But then I did get this sort of like third-person perspective, like they're getting into other stuff. You know, Kyle and Kevin.

were kind of being associated now with more opiate use and selling drugs and selling drugs especially there was like stories of kyle getting robbed and guns and stuff and it was just like i was already gravitating away from that circle and then it just seemed like oh they're kind of on a totally different path and then i just completely lost track of everybody after that yeah i mean it when you have four guys that are together that their sole purpose is to use like there's going to be things that happen and i can't i can't even pinpoint like there wasn't like there wasn't like a day where we were just like all right guys this is it you know what i mean like we'd go a couple months without seeing each other or we'd go a little bit of time but then we'd always pull back in or

if you needed a relapse you could call one of us you know what i'm saying and because we were all at different me mainly me and him but we were all trying to get clean in some point you know what i mean and um so yeah but with with with kevin and kyle like it it it it just it it it was four people literally just using all the time and that's just what it was and using alcohol alcohol Robitussing, whatever Get our hands on it and me and you know A lot about Robo days. Dude, I used to trip with, dude, this dude had me

tripping, bro. He put on Asoff rock in his basement dog with a red light and dude, I like, I knew what I knew. The answers, bro. Robo tripping with Asobred. The answer, I'm saying, but no, dude, it just, it's not like we just one day all broke off, it's that everyone's

like by themselves got so sick that together it didn't work. Because we were each at a different level we like when it started we all got together let's what are we going to do how are we going to do it everyone progressed in a different manner and that that that way it couldn't stay together the way it was i see because kevin he was an addict but it wasn't like he like he always could like do his own thing kyle was just he was lost he was nuts dude and and and so was i'm not this isn't like me trying to say anyone's worse i'm just saying we all had our own level of worse totally and once we all got to a certain level it just went

work anymore yeah and you have different like trajectories of like one person is like trying at least yeah and one person is not trying and there was like times where i would say like i poor producer dave i want she has to cut out but like Kyle for a long time was not trying anything ever yeah it was actually he was not only that he was embracing it yeah it was his identity at some point it was and and imagine the selling of drugs yeah exactly and imagine the people you count on because like it even Even though we were using, that's all we had was each other. And if anyone wanted to get clean, there's no way we could talk to anyone in our circle about it because that person had drugs in their pocket.

Right, right. So how do you tell someone you want to stop using? And they're going to be like, oh, well, shit, here's it. You know what I mean? So it just, like I said, it was just a really bad mix. So when it broke up, there wasn't a day. It just kind of just happens slowly over time until it was nonexistent. Now, we just said Kyle's name.

We don't have to bleep that out because it's just a first name. There's no last name that was mentioned. And, you know, he's obviously, he's grown up now. he's our age so who knows what he's not growing up it would be awesome to get him back on the he's doing good yeah is he okay he's doing good i'm glad to hear that i have nothing he just he just smokes that's it which is totally california soup i've only got little hints of them um since then you know little social media pages that i've checked out and just like oh it's interesting to see where everybody everybody goes but he got into selling drugs and was that selling um was it selling pills

no it was it okay and it was yes and same with myself and uh you sold to yes i did and and that's actually a so i'll just i'll talk about that for a second so another thing that happened in the midst of all this was i somehow ended up and this is there's another guy he asked me not to say his name but there's another guy that kind of came into the mix and i started selling cocaine at this time so that really boosted up and that was also a part of a separating because i was using a different drug than that that that we weren't doing so yeah there was a like the selling the selling did come into play that actually that that was actually a really crazy time in my life man because it was

I mean just imagine it being free as much as you want get rid of it if you want do it if you want I don't care it was a setup bro because the person I was getting it from was somehow a family friend

so basically the dude was dating my sister and he would get and I don't even think he realized how much money we owed him by the end of it I think it came up to like $3,400 I know that's not crazy but it's a lot for us when we're young and but dude he would just continue to give it to us dude

we'd come back and be like here's 40 bucks in a McDouble you know what I mean and and and we think it'd be cool and he'd be like alright here's a baseball you know what I mean and like it was just naive too he didn't care I don't know like I don't know he he went later on he said he just wanted to help me out interesting okay

I don't know there's some coke you know that's coming to cocaine that's kind of like the different thing where you talk about like you have these like individuals that are looking at their lives and which way are we going to go and there's like when you get into like we talked about Kyle like the embracing it's like okay normal life is off the table oh yeah we're not we're not going to do any of that we're just going to like like see no evil hear no evil like like not going to look at the five year plan

nothing no more attempt like and you could also live a life where you're pretending that you have a five year plan but you're not like actually crafting it dude yes that's why i drank yeah so i was stuck in that i was in the the version of like i have plans for my future but i wasn't doing anything for it like there was nothing for the future so it was like almost on this like it's not at the same par as like Kyle, like, embracing and, like, going on these ventures of, like, you know, committing crimes and actually, like, selling drugs and saying, like, F at all. But at a certain point, it was like, I thought to myself as like, he's almost the more pure one because he's at least like saying, hey, I'm not pretending anymore. I made a choice. I made a choice to just say, F it, you, you're stuck in this thing where, like, you're making plans?

No, you're not. You're not doing anything with your life. I love that point you just brought up That is such a good perspective on that Because we as a group We all in our mind Like we wanted to still be good people

Or at least thought we were Oh yeah We never took on the role of a drug addict Not that wasn't until later When you realize all that But dude we always were like We're better than it Like we may use

But we're not fucking them You know Or just be functional Yeah We always thought that we were always Going to get out of it And I know that Like there wasn't a day

Where we got together And we're like This is just it Like, we always thought that there was an end game to this. We just didn't want to talk about it. Right. That was the thing. It's like we had this ideal that, like, we're not going to end up in the gutter,

but it's like everything you do, every day is heading towards the gutter. Yeah, yeah. Like, literally what is not towards the gutter? Your practical activity is leading into the gutter, even though you have an idea about what you would like to be. And again, it's like this future is shrouded in this, like, mystical, like, it's going to be different because it's far. way. It's like, it doesn't matter. Everything you do today is just times that by whatever in your future. Like, you're not like, it's like this crazy thing where you try to, it's a form of denial where you try to push out because it's so painful to look at your life and the changes

that you have to make. It's so painful to look at that. So you just go, no, it's just, it's just going to be different. It's going to be different. And you don't have any reasoning for it. You no like logic to it you just think it's going to be different and you just hope for it and then you have on the other hand kyle who goes i don't care about future stuff i'm selling drugs i'm pumping little wayne i'm just like yeah driving around yeah Kyle took on the persona for sure risen well that was that's the thing i wanted to say is like Kyle he embraced that as his identity i'm a drug dealer um you know i'm a menace's are getting cold on me uh fuck it i'm doing shit hard but you both of you always had visions for your future like you i remember always just had

this musical vision for your future and no matter what highs or lows you maintain that and you still do make musical course which is beautiful you've always had that strain in you since i met you yep and so that that there's clearly a passion and something outside of the world of degenerate drug use and everything that you kept your eyes on through thick and thin which you know props to you for doing that thank you yeah and you had that too i mean you know even afterwards like you had the as a stand-up comedian always been pursuing poetry you still have that to this day well honestly like the the core thing was like writing like sand up was just something i did because i was sober and i had an appetite for life

and it's writing you're writing jokes yeah it's related but like honestly you think about it like just a bunch of guys and you you're not concerned with like you don't think about does he want a family does he want a career like you just when you hang out with each other You just want to be in the presence of each other in your hope that they're doing well. But if they're not doing well, it's hard to like ring the bell. You just kind of hope that they'll fix it. And during those times, especially with addiction, it's so easy to just like put it away. To just like look away and just go, they're going to, they're going to handle it.

and I remember Christian, like, thinking of you, when I heard you went to prison, I was like, oh, no, is his life going to be, he's just going to be, like, a career criminal guy? That's not a life for him. He's so much more than that. And everyone's so much more than that, so to speak, but, like, no. I remember seeing that years later the mugshot of a friend of a friend sent to, like, have you guys seen this? I don't know how they came across it, but, you know, it's all public information. And I was just like, damn. And it just made me this thought of, like, where did his path lead, you know?

And so, and we'll definitely get to that. No, for sure. Real quick, dude. I actually just learned something just now. You're absolutely right. We just thought it was going to be okay. Yeah. And I didn't even put that into, you know, into a thought at all until just now at this moment.

Like, I got with you guys and I never thought ahead. Like, I just thought, thinking ahead was it's just going to be okay someday, not what do I need to do to me? make it okay. I thought that by doing all this someday it would just counterbalance or mysteriously stop, but you're right, dude, that's why it progressed so long is because in those pivotal moments with you guys, I never had a plan of how to stop this. It was always it's just going to be okay. Hold on to that, hold on to that notion and keep doing what I'm doing with reckless abandon. I just learned that. Thank you. It's the naivete and the hubris, the arrogance of youth. You don't have the life experience that has gristled you and brought you

low and showed you how fucking things end up but when you're young you just do think that things are going to pan out things are going to be okay I get you know when I'm an adult quote unquote you know I'll have a job with all the other adults and shit but and you just have this sort of naivete as as a youthful person but now we're in our mid 30s and we can see life will kick the shit out of feet and there is the the real exactly yeah the realization that there's no safety in yes like they're like you kind of feel like if I fall like a trust fall someone will catch me like

I'm not going to like fall all the way out it's like you will you actually will like to homelessness like to even death like we have so many friends

that have died from like overdoses and just this disease and it's just a spin of the wheel but if you think about it it's it's

you just you're in that perspective of but not me though never me exactly exactly was Matt that's the first one for us that was one that's one that's what's one that's what I was thinking about because I remember when it happened like I knew it like we all knew I think it was the first one that we all collected okay as as us three together in

this room knew okay so like when that happened dude like it was a shock speaking for myself it was a shock but it didn't like I still didn't think that could be me I still always thought of him as like a little bit worse off I guess I don't know how to explain yeah I see what I mean like he was crazy and that's scary He's like me, but I'm not that bad. Yeah, and it put me in perspective. I was like, you know, I'm not, but I was. Dude, I was, if not worse.

And that's what's sad. Yeah, and he, I mean, he kind of was crazy. He was, but he's also, yeah, he had that. He was just like us, though, brother. He was. But he, he was actually that version of Kyle where he embraced the just, you know what? I don't care. Like, I'm not looking towards 10 years down the road.

I'm just going to live my life now. Yeah. And the problem is, is that if you do that, especially with drugs, it's like okay you want to play that chance like sometimes when you like do the Russian roulette the bullets in the chamber yeah yeah absolutely absolutely that sucks you know rest in peace to him yeah for sure because he did like all these people that he had that wholesome side to him that big heart you know that interesting unique personality and it just is so sad to see it all get wiped away and then just like oh he died from a drug overdose throw him in the category of people who

die from drug overdose yeah he's a person we knew him yeah he saw him grow up and some you know exactly exactly um so to move the narrative a little bit forward around 22 or so you get sent over to norfolk the the sort of bonds that tied you to the Omaha circle disintegrated you shifted into your relationship and trying to see what you could make out of your life at that time so where does the story go for christian after we lose contact with you okay um and a quick side note is i i i'm having trouble remembering exactly when i moved to norfolk i it was 2012 so i don't know how old i was if i do the math. I'm sure I could, but 2012 was when I left. So anyways,

I moved to Norfolk, and it's the same stuff. I lasted 16 days in the halfway house. And by this time, I already been to treatment like six times. Is this alcohol? Alcohol? Primarily right now? This is just alcohol. And I'll get to, that's another weird part. So I'm just,

I'm a heavy drinker. That's what I do. I'm this guy that wants to build up a bunch of stuff, and then drink it all the way down. And that's just how I live my life up until 16 months ago, really. so I was just the guy that like I was in it everything could be going right I could have a good job a really good girlfriend you know everything's just starting to move in the right direction and my mind goes to this place where it says okay but if you add alcohol to it how much better is it

going to be and my mind always says well it can't hurt that much look at everything you have and it never works out that way because the second that alcohol touches my just me personally when I drink there's no off button and in my mind I'm telling myself I'm like you know I could probably I could probably just drink two today or I could probably just drink four today

but those two or four are while you're at work Christian like you're fucking working you know what I mean like just because you made them less you did them at work you know so I mean like yeah so my I moved to Norfolk and I bounced around a lot I was homeless up there for a while

and then I ended up I ended up and I'll try to summarize a lot of it i ended up in o'neill nebraska valley hope yeah so valley hope is a completely different treatment center it's weird get your phone when i was there you could leave and i'd been to treatment centers where they lock you down so i'm i'm leaving people are drinking like it's just a really weird situation and i end up getting into a very sticky sticky situation with the girl that was there and and and by the way i was another patient yes i was the dude that went to treatment and And there was only one time I ever left treatment

that I didn't have a girlfriend when I was leaving. I'm a very codependent person. My addiction and codependency intertwined very, very strongly. I find myself through my relationships. I find myself through that other person. It's insightful. Yeah. And so I met this girl at the treatment center.

We ended up hooking up. And then this fucking gangster dude who had like, he did like 30 years in prison, tells on me. And he's like, recovery dog. You know what I'm saying? We got to tell us. He had his hat crooked and like fast. His face was tatted. And I like, and I'm not trying to like knock him, but bro, like of all people, you tell on me. And so he told him that I had this chick in my room. Oh, okay, okay. And, and I had this chick in my room. And so the next day, they, they separated us, right? And they talked to her first. And she's like, yeah, I was in there. They come to me and this is Christian. Always, I'm like, no. What are you mean? You know what I mean? I'm

Hold the line. I was in a meeting, you know. I was at the AA meeting, actually. Hold the line. But, no, so they were like, well, she's staying because she told us the truth, and you're out of here. So they kicked me out, and I met this girl. Another one. Another one.

Right after. She was young. Not our Kelly young or nothing, but she was young. Do we have to clarify that? I think we should, yeah, in these days and times. He would do that. What do you mean young? No, but, no, we met and she moved me in, and this wasn't the first time this happened, by the way.

She moved me into her house on our second date with her mom. But what? Let's go. Swear to God. So I'm, I move in with her. I'm in O'Neill. Things are going, I work at Casey's. By the way, the listeners, O'Neill is like 3,000 people.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, outside of Omaha and Lincoln and maybe Grand Island and Fremont, there's not really a town. It's a fart of a town. Yeah. It's an Irish town. A fart of a down. Because I met her at a meeting.

Her mom actually was like, you should come to the meeting. We started talking through messages. I lied to her and said they kicked me out for no reason. And then she moved me in, just so people understand what I'm saying by this story. So I move in with her. And I'm living with her. And I'm working at Casey's. And she gets pregnant.

Well, it doesn't just happen, Christian. Yeah. You say that like you got a cold. Explain how she got pregnant. Okay. So she gets pregnant. We are still doing it Dave let him talk dog

Go ahead Christian You busted in her Okay go ahead She was young But no we We made love And when two people love each other The way they show their love

Is uh you know They make love And anyways they So we have a We're getting ready to have a kid She has a miscarriage I'm really sorry about that honestly Thank you

And during the miscarriage I relapsed Because I lost it Because that was the reason I was gonna stay clean this time You know I always had these thousands of reasons If this happened I could stay sober

If this happened It would be okay And this was my new one I had a new one You know what I was so passionate About my new one Because it felt new and different And real

It's a kid Because it's a kid who I'm not gonna be like my dad You know what I mean And so she gets pregnant She has a miscarriage I relapse we end up having a rainbow baby

which is she gets pregnant right after she heals up from the miscarriage and that's how my son's born I'm at the link What is the link? The link is a halfway house So Explain the listeners for

Yeah absolutely The link is It's an all men's halfway house In Norfolk It's one of the best houses I've ever been a part of The recovery there is so tight And Norfolk alone

As far as the meetings go um this is one if i were to pick a city and i've been and i've been around that has the strongest recovery norfolk is absolutely it's transitional living too yeah yeah yeah yeah so i'm at the lincoln once again i relapse after 14 months of of you know my son being born and so so then that i'll do it for my son is gone again so i'm the kind of user that if i fuck up then i might as do it but you know go all the way and um so i ended up i bounced back to my grandparents as once i end up getting sent to grand island nebraska at this i don't even remember what it's called it's it's like a it's a hospital but it's a but it's a detox center i don't remember

what it's called um and they moved me into this house and i remember it was 2016 because the cubs won the World Series. I'm a Cubs fan, and we've waited like our whole lives for this time. I remember you. And I'm watching the game sober 26 days. And about three days later, I go out for a Connor McGregor fight. It's when he wins his double belt

and I drank that night. And drinking was always prevalent in my life at this time. I ended up getting kicked out of the house and I'm running around with a guy from there. Grand Island's very, very known for methamphetamines. So I get hooked up with this chick and a lot of people when they use meth they smoke it or they snort it or they do all these different ways to kind of you know transition their their way into shooting

it i skipped all that i said this girl was like listen this is how we do it do you want me to shoot you up and i was like sure you know you had never done meth up to this point i want angela once with i mean we we've done it dabbled in it just never like let's go get some if that that makes sense and she does it and i had never no drink no nothing no kid being born nothing ever felt at that time as as as pure and amazing as that felt yeah and the next like that that that's when that started that chapter of my life started as as an ivy meth user now just to pause like holy shit first thing to say is like again with the miscarriage thing i i had a miscarriage thing i had a miscarriage and we also had a rainbow son my son is my son is my son is two years old now but

The pain of really looking forward to the pregnancy, and, like, you know, it's not just, it's something that you're really committed to. Like, let's have this kid, right? And then that loss, it hits you in ways that you don't expect, and it leaves a scar on you for life. So, genuinely, you know, my heart goes out to you, and I relate to that experience. With regards to meth, we haven't, we've had a lot of alcoholics on our all-2 human series. I don't think we've ever had a meth user. so I'm assuming most listeners out there I've probably never tried meth

what is it like that first time what feelings explode in your brain that make this just a wholly new experience so for me it made me have the ability to not be so depressed about who I was as a person I no longer looked at myself as a negative person

anything I wanted to do I could do I had all these thoughts in my head that finally were starting to clear up and I could just shoot them out at 100 miles an hour and figure shit out, the euphoria that comes from meth is like waking up in heaven, dude. It's literally like it's warm. When you first do a blast, it's, your whole body goes warm and you get this tingly sensation of pure freedom. It is the only way I could really explain it. It's basically like waking up on your best day and that best day being like the rest of your life. You know what I mean? So the feelings are at first. The feelings at first

are just so like you're so excited everything's interesting everything everything like like makes sense to me and like every all these things that were tying me down and making me feel so negative about myself i didn't care anymore it was okay so i so i guess the main thing meth did for me initially was it didn't make me hate myself so it felt like liberation yeah exactly and uh and i was up bro like that like i i i was really up like it's it's a it raises you to a height like a heightened height like a heightened like way of being and and and I was just up and I and I literally could there was no tiredness attached to me anymore you could just go 24 I could go and do anything I wanted to do without stopping now and it was fun compared to cocaine if more people would have a cocaine experience

even more people would have an adderol experience how do you compare the high of meth to those things okay so the difference between meth and coke is that meth doesn't stop with cocaine you're going to feel like you're having to redo that drug to maintain that high very quickly. Every 20 minutes, yeah. Sometimes, yeah. That's a cool story. You're the first print I ever did Coke with. Really?

Yeah, with Tyler B-D out outside of B-Dubbs. Be? I got a block of that thing. You would I remember so deeply. Sorry, I'm really bad at the names, dude. I'm so sorry. We tracked that, but, uh, yeah, we went out to the back of Buffalo fucking wildwing. And your Jeep, dude, we did.

And we were, it was a 20. And Tyler, like, screwed us over. He was like, yeah, I just give his 20, here's a tiny line. Me and this, he was the first driver to Coke with, really, yeah. Tyler, Tyler, also that trajectory Tyler took. I mean, who knows where Tyler is now? He was my best friend at, like, 13. But he was never liked that.

He was like, he was a kid that bench pressed every day and was, like, the fucking eighth grader and shit. And it was super into sports, select teams on every fucking thing. And then reuniting with him, and he was now selling Coke was fucking crazy. That's crazy. Tyler on meth is like Mike Tyson on meth. Cocaine at the time. Yeah. Okay, but yeah.

Do you guys remember, it was my birthday, and we were playing football? And I got an interception. Yeah. And I'm running. And I'm running, bro. And Tyler, and I didn't see him. And Tyler, and Tyler, and Tyler, sorry. Tyler, okay, we got to fucking stop say his last name.

Just like Tyler. He hits me. He hits sticks me. Like, Madden 05 hits me, bro. Oh, my God. You're still left your body, dude. It was funny. He cried on your birthday.

First of all, Tyler shouldn't have been hitting that hard. No. He was way bigger and stronger than fucking everybody all the time. He was getting upset because he was losing. He couldn't fucking stand to lose anything. A video game, he would break a light or something. He just had a royd rage without the roids. He unloaded.

He fucking lit your ass up. He unloaded his dad's relationship on you. Which is so fucking deep. I saw that relationship and, yeah, I wonder where it is now, but he had daddy issues. Yeah. We got to take all that out, all the names. I'm so sorry. It was a good tackle.

We'll just do little beeps. It's a good tackle. But I really deeply wonder where he is now because, yeah, very, very, he's my best friend for several years before I even met, you know, you guys. Have them on the show. That'd be awesome, actually. But, okay, so now you're into meth. So now the drinking continues. So, and that's another aspect about meth.

So my whole life, I didn't know how to not drink. You do meth. You don't need to drink anymore. Oh, really? I mean, I could drink two shots that whole day, you know, or not at all. so in retrospect now i know my brain was like okay see this is okay because you're not drinking anymore which was it which i know sounds insane but that's how my brain worked it was like now i don't have to be an alcoholic anymore and you're productive yes yeah that's another thing

exactly and uh so yeah it it took me like drinking i've been through some rough spots there's been some really sketchy situations but meth is a whole different group of people you know there are a bunch of people that have been up for five to seven days they're all hallucinating a lot of them are in psychosis a lot of them are and it's just in the places you find yourself in you know them places you never thought you would ever and i made it normal i'm sitting there like yeah this is cool there's a dude dead in the back like you know what i mean like we're all just hanging out and it it just and where it goes back to us sitting at hitchcock together yeah to then and if i would have took a sec like how

did it ever get there but it did you know and it's because i never thought that it could that was the biggest thing i never thought it could and didn't plan to to to not let it happen so that's how it happened well said damn so right right away you're hooked instantly that the second it the second she did it i knew that's what i wanted to do i knew that i found the thing that finally made christian complete damn so then yeah play play that out you're in your mid 20s at this point okay yep i'm 28 okay so What's the situation with your son in the previous relationship? Okay, so in this... If you're okay talking about it.

Absolutely, I would love to. And so me and her have a huge falling off. And I remember there's nights where I'm watching my son grow up through pictures she sent in me. I remember being there when he was born, clean. And then now I'm looking at him walking around the house and I'm sitting there just beating myself up over it. And so it was very, I was a very, I was the exact and the epitome of what I said I would never be. because of what my dad did to me, I turned into that. That was one of those moments where everything hit me like a wall.

Because my whole life, my crutch of using was always, well, my dad wasn't there. If I had my dad, I'd be better. And yet here I am doing the exact fucking same thing to somebody else. Brutal. My son, you know, and so, yeah, it was very, it was very eye-opening to me. It put a lot of things in a perspective that, like, maybe I just wasn't that good person. and I was trying to hold on to my whole life. I finally started realizing, like, I'm just this big problem.

But I still wanted to blame other people, but I was running out of people to blame. You know what I mean? And like, so, like, dude, yeah, man, it got to a point to where meth was, it consumed my life. I no longer was doing small crimes like shoplifting. I found myself burglarizing homes. I found myself, you know, stealing cars.

All the things that, like, all the things that, like, all the things that when you think of a story of how someone's going to turn out you you would never think that and and that was my normal you know it was nothing for me to wake up in the middle of day do a blast and then get with a group of guys and say all right what do we need to go get and why do we like we were big on boosting this was a time where at walmart you could steal things from walmart take them back return them and you could get a gift card for them so how we lived was there was this place in columbus that had a gas station right next to the walmart it would take the that card for cigarettes and gas so we could get our cigarettes, our gas from all the, and we would steal these, like, so literally dude, we just, we turned into, I just turned into a monster man, you know, to put it, to put it

lightly. Every day you're getting up, you're doing meth, and that mess's going to last the whole day, and you're using that high to go out and get the money that you're going to need for your basics plus your next amount of meth. Yes. And every day carries like on to the next. That's the craziest

part is that like especially when you're not fucking sleeping yeah exactly like it's not like a etchish sketch where you shake it and it's a new campus new thing no it's like you're carrying over all the delirium of like

not sleeping and just the the smells and just the way you are whether it's alcohol but especially meth because you're up you're just moving and you're just carrying this momentum of like what five six days

yeah Easy. And another thing with meth is five or six days staying up, but it's nothing, dude. And it's not that we're just up. We have to be up because we're constantly doing something to go get more. You know what I mean? And yeah, dude, it put me in all these dark, dark areas. It was like years that I didn't even talk to my son and stuff like that. And I tried to keep a relationship with him throughout it, but it was so hard because sometimes I didn't have a phone. There was oftentimes I didn't have anywhere to live. And it's just, and I don't want this story to get twisted because none of this was anyone's fault of my own, you know, and I realized that much later. So this isn't me saying, like, if anything would have been different. But what I'm trying to say is, though, is that meth turned me into a person that I could put all of the things that I should be carrying about on the back burner. And it wouldn't affect me at that time. And it wouldn't affect, like, what I was doing. but it turned into like this pattern of mine

to where like I would randomly reach out to Tori and be like I want to see my son or you know what I mean I'd have these spurts of that but like meth meth just changed me completely there's no follow-up there's no consistency exactly exactly and there's no there was just no I lost a lot of weight I wasn't eating

you know the people I was with it didn't matter you know and yeah dude there was there was times where I would go three four days without taking a shower I was living at shooting ranges With just a bunch of people with needles all over the ground You know Shooting ranges like guns No a shooting range is is a place that people go to shoot up drugs

Oh shit They call it a shooting range Because that's just where all the people are meeting out to do that Because you know if you go to a party It's kind of hard I don't know what they're good You're good It's kind of hard to go to a party and be like

Hey anyone want to fucking shoot up with you know what I mean Like that's not a party thing you start with But these were places Right by a salsa Yeah So there are places They're literally houses Yeah.

Yeah, just a house. It's a trap house where people shoot help. I see. So now you mention a little bit about getting skinny. I'm very fascinated with the deleterious effects of meth on your physical and mental well-being. Okay. So what happens to your body? Like, what are some weird things that goes on in your physical being?

Okay, so you start to lose weight rapidly. And this is just physical, right? Yeah. So you no longer are hungry ever. You can go two, three days without even thinking about eating. I would go like three days just drinking Pepsi and you know I'm a Pepsi I was gonna

I still had a Pepsi how hydrated are we there I'm about to die bro my lips are you know what I mean like I just and and uh Jesus but yeah dude I was skinny I was I was out of shape but this is and this is what I want to get into

this is this is something that's that's also just as important my mental capacity started to break down and I have a lot of mental health issues that the methamphetamine raised to the point to where I would go into psychosis. So imagine this. You're

hanging out with your girlfriend. You guys are getting ready to go to bed. You know nobody's in the room. You know that it's just you guys there. But the second that light goes off, someone starts fucking her right next to you. And your brain is telling you that this is happening. You're looking over there. You're shining flashlights on it. You're not

seeing anyone, but you're still hearing them. And you spend 12 hours laying there, traumatized, going through this episode, where you think someone's having sex with your girlfriend, and nobody's there. God, damn. Not only for me, but for her,

imagine her having to lay there and be like, what are you talking about? Because I'd fight with her. Who is that? Who's here? Why is someone in this room with us? You know, and I would, and these psychotic episodes I would go into

would last for days. I was going to ask that. I would call her at work and I'd video her, and I'd see someone in the phone. And I'd be like, who the hell's with you? She'd be in her office at work. Nobody's there. Nobody's there.

And so, dude, I, the methamphetamine turned, like, it altered my brain to a point to where I, where I'm not talking hallucinations. I'm talking about meth found my fears, my deepest, darkest fears and turn them into a reality right in front of me. And I lived it every single day for three plus years. I was just living in the most fear-based mindset, scared out of my ass. Everything anyone does is against me. I'm laying down to my girlfriend getting screwed by someone right now. next to me and my first thought the next day is how am i going to get high today god damn man yeah everything is a tightrope like you just have to walk the line and you're

holding like that bar that they hold to keep balance like that's the meth but you realize that you don't have to be walking this line except you force yourself to you don't have you don't have to like like the way i get i put it is like when you walk walk across that line to another building, nobody told you to go to that building. But you tell yourself you have to. That's the addiction. Dude, exactly. You tell yourself, you have to go to that building.

And now you're walking that line. And it's like, no, just come back. Just turn around, come back, and you'll be fine. But no. You can't. You walk that line. What now? So when you're in this multi-day meth-induced psychosis, does meth itself take you out of it temporarily?

Or just can you can, how do you get out of a psychotic episode? I did, I used Seroquel. Okay. Um, I needed to sleep. The main thing for me was I, I, I, and even now, because when I relapsed two years ago, it had been like 22 months since I used. But the second I used again, I went into psychosis instantly. So that's, yeah, so that, that, that, that put it in retrospect for me that now my brain is, is, is, is damaged so much that, like, if I use it,

once it's instant psychosis now so like what and to answer your question i apologize using never would take me out of it using would just like it was the one thing i could do that would take my mind off it long enough because i had to go through the action of doing it the ritual it would take my mind off long enough to like get ready for the next freaking thing that was about to happen if that makes sense so i needed to sleep and eat and every time i slept and eat it'd be like waking up and like the golden gates are around you dude like you're ready to just live your life to the fullest and yet every and it would feel great the the the voices weren't there anymore because by this time um there were so much they had me on all these meds like they thought i was schizophrenic like

it was getting to the point where they thought like these because i was lying and saying these things are happening when i wasn't using so they're thinking these things are happening like just to me normally so i'm getting yeah i'm getting these meds that i should not never and i'm taking them while i'm using so so like i'm on these non-schizophrenic meds going through with meth-induced schizophrenia oh my god and so it just it was it was it was bad man and and and i and i held on to this facade that i wasn't that bad the whole time too so how many years how many years did you use meth where does the m gk story fit into this period so the mgk story was um that had been 21, 22, something like that.

Okay. I use meth from 28 to 35. Okay. So. But I thought in the MGK story, you were on meth as well? I was. Okay. But that was what you were in a day.

The heroin was the... The heroin was what OD. You can't OD on meth. Oh, really? No. So with meth, you can never take enough meth to overdose. The only thing that will happen is you'll over-amp your body and you'll fall asleep. Oh, wow. Yeah, it can't actually kill you.

It can't make your heart beat too fast. No, it'll over amp and you'll fall asleep. Like that's the highest it can get is where it's going so much. Your body just shuts down. It literally just shuts your whole shit down and you fall asleep. Because your body now is so desperate for sleep that it's like we're pulling the cord. We're pulling the core on your body and you're going to sleep. God damn.

So mental health struggles. Yes. What mental health struggles were already present in your life? And then how does, how do those mental health struggles play out? I mean, you mentioned psychosis and taking anti-schizophrenia medicine, but what core mental health issues did you really have to resolve or contempt to resolve as you move into recovery too? So I think one of the main ones was depression.

I always was just in this state of where I was just always so sad and I was always so bitter. And I had all these, like to me, depression, it took such a hold on me that like, no matter what was going on in my life, me being as depressed as I was, I thought I had to use drugs. to get out of it because I thought that that state I didn't really I couldn't pinpoint what that

state was and I couldn't like put my finger on why I was feeling the way I was was which it turned out to be depression but that's what it did to me it made me feel like I needed to use because I couldn't get out of the state that I was in so depression was the main one for me and what's crazy is meth took once I stopped using it took like 98% of all these mental health issues I was having off the table just stopping using alone I I I'm not on any meds right now. I don't take one psychiatric med at all. All my meds are just

we threw them all away two weeks ago I think so it was the drug dude. It brought up like when they say that they can mess up your brain and drugs are bad or whatever they say it's true because they literally can make your brain function in a state that it's

not supposed to. Totally. And just minus the meth even just the alcoholism is going to make you depressed. Yeah. I mean long term alcohol use that's very clear What do you do? What do you do? We'll get back into some of this stuff. I'm very interested about your time in jail. But now that you're 16 months, so? Yes. How do you take care of yourself? What have you learned about taking care of your physical body and your mental health that actually do help? Okay. So the things I do now, I do have five kids that I live at home with. I have a really

good job that I work as well. I play a lot of basketball. And a huge distraction for me is gaming. I'm a really big gamer. Another thing for me is writing music. I love writing music. And honestly, there's no like thing I do to take care. I want to get into fitness. I would love to start working out again. I actually am getting ready to get a membership in

because I just love that active side that I need to be in. But the main thing I do, and it's not rocket science, man. I go to work. I take care of my kids. I make sure I'm home on time. If I tell someone I'm going to do something, I follow through with that. So my conscience is, is, is, always in a state that it needs to be like you guys i'm going to be here between four and four

50 the old christian would have rolled up about 450 my bad and drunk and you know and like wait what we're doing the wrong address yeah yeah so you know what i'm saying like if i say something to somebody today i want them to know that i'm going to be there so those that's how i take care of myself as i is i'm a man of my word you know what i mean like if i say because because using whole dude I lied through the whole thing. I lied in treatment. I lied to girlfriends. I lied to my parents.

I just, I'm a liar, bro. And I lied. And so today I do my best to make sure I don't lie. And the more that I keep my, to keep my inner conscious cleaner, and the more I follow through what I'm going to say, the easier it is to stay clean. Beautiful. And you lie yourself too.

Exactly. I was going to say self-worth. Because, like, you, it's kind of crazy where it's like you're doing something to yourself negatively, but you think about it, like, are you tricking yourself into thinking you're a better person or not? Like, you think about it, you go, okay, everything's above water, everything's good, and it's like, no, it's not. It's like, no, I'm trying to convince myself that reality is not the way it is.

When you're in the midst of, like, addiction. Yeah, yeah. So, like, living just streamlined, like, my thoughts and actions actually, match up together is like i mean normally that just seems like no duh like that's existence but for acts and alcoholics that's like so novel absolutely addiction requires you to to lie which severes relationships brings down your sense of self-worth yeah you have it you have a guilty conscience or you try to drown that guilty conscience and just living in a true upright and honest way builds up that self-worth and has that self-respect component to it you have to live in a

different reality like that's the biggest thing is that you have to like when you're using yeah when you're using and drinking uh like you have to live in a different reality that you take with you because like you have all like the sneaky spots and the drinking and all that stuff but that's just to like keep yourself together but you like you hold that for yourself just to exist in the normal life. Right. So you, like, you, like, separate yourself to, like, you have this, like, secret life that's you, and then you have, like, I'm the normal person.

That's presenting to others. Yeah, presenting, yeah. You talked about maintenance lies, too. Yeah, basically. The whole hierarchy of types of lies. Yeah. But lying is just built in. If you're going to be an addict of any sort, I think they're lying is just sort of a,

it comes with the territory. Great. Well, that's awesome to hear about those things, and we'll get back to where you are now and recovery and how that process has been but of course a big part of your story is also trouble with the law you're talking about boosting and stealing cars and burglarizing homes and shit

so what's what's the history with the legal system what's your longest stint and what's your experiences in there because of course I assume that you're off the drugs when you're in prison so you have clarity come back maybe not so it's a funny story I'll start by the story of how I got caught for the charge that sent me to prison and then I'll tell you

brief history of my criminal history so i'm i've been up for six days i'm uh i did this thing in norfolk where i would run on these train tracks and i would think that cops are following me and it would be my goal every night to get away from them and every time i got away from them i would pump myself up like you're one of the best cop runners in norfolk and never and never was a cop chasing me ever but i did dude i was i was good at it dude i was fucking good every night i'm like out of my chest bro like it was it was crazy but so anyways i i'm running i'm doing my uh daily cop run as i'll call it and uh i'm running from them i end up in some job site lose my shoes uh shoeless yeah yeah always end up shoeless eventually i i lose my shoes

and i'm and i'm and i'm on i'm like laying in this pond because i feel like cops are over over my head and chasing me and shit and I lay there for and I fall asleep and then I wake up and I'm like okay cool they're gone so I get up and I'm I'm shoeless you know obviously and I go to this house and I knock on their door nobody answers so I walk in um I go in there I go into their kitchen I open their fridge there's a Gatorade I'm fucking thirsty yeah drink the Gatorade there's also some leftover catfish in there for I don't know for some white box that sounds good it was good So I take it out. Put it on a paper plate, throw it in their microwave.

Yeah. Make yourself that out of? I did. I was hungry. What time of day? What time of day? This was the, like, one of the, I don't know. I mean, I'm pretty, the sun was out.

So, and, uh, I'm in there. I'm eating catfish. I'm on their computer checking my Facebook. Are you doing their taxes? Yeah. I should have been. On the computer checking Facebook is insane. Their dog is on my lap, bro.

I'm petting their dogs. Nintin's tired of it. And I'm checking, I'm checking my Facebook messaging people. You know what I'm saying? I saved my login information just in case I wanted to check in later. You know what I mean? You got to bookmark that. I did, I did.

So I, and it's all normal to me, you know, this is normal. And so then, before I leave, I'm like, well, God, I might as well steal some stuff. So I get two duffel bags. I start, I take a PS1 for, who still has one of those. You play Parapida. Yeah, right. NBA Street. One is the best, right?

So I steal a PS1. I steal, like, this laptop that had to have been, like, not even a full laptop. It was like this big. But in my mind, I kept having, I kept doing this number thing. 50 bucks, 100 bucks. You know, so the PS1, 30 bucks. So in my mind, I'm like, dude, I got like 400 bucks, you know what I'm saying? No money.

No, no, dude. I had, like, some rappers and, like, a receipt in there. Somehow negative money. Yeah, I lost money. So I'm walking with these two bags full of the dumbest shit you could ever steal from a house. Like, if you're going to hit a house, steal a TV or like, you know, take some. I got like nothing, dude. I'm going to see your mothballs.

No shoes on, you know, walking just broad daylight with these two duffel bags. And I'm like six blocks away from the apartment I'm staying at, right? And I'm like, you know, dude, I'm tired. This grass is like cutting into my feet. So I need to stop for a second. You know a long day. I did. So I go to this apartment complex, and I'm like, I'm just going to sit here for two minutes.

That's it. I sit down. I'm in between a washer and a dryer, and I sit down, and I fall asleep again. I get woken up by this Mexican lady. What are you doing in here? And I look up, and I'm like, what do you mean? I live here. And she's like, you need to go.

I called the cops. I dumped the bags, and I start walking off, right? I get about four blocks up the road, the cops stop me. I ain't got nothing on me. I ain't got no shoes on me either. And they literally pull me over, search me. Was those all your bags back there? No.

What do you mean? What bags? They let me go. I go home. I continue using. Fast forward three months. Somehow they correlated those bags with a girl who said that she didn't notice she was missing. The reason I knew I didn't steal anything is because the girl came home and didn't think anything was missing.

Yeah. She got home and she's like, it's my house you know nothing was missing that she needed everything was still there she could do everything she needed to do except play PS1 yeah that PS1's gone though

but no she uh so she uh she finally realized that one thing I took was I took this it was like an old it was like a digital photo album that would play random pictures of their family and I must have said 85 bucks

and threw that in the bag or something you know what I mean and so I took that and that's the one thing she noticed and when she noticed that, then she started looking and then she noticed all the idiotic things I did take. Was that she noticed that day? It had been

she did the report about a day later I'd say when she noticed that her album was missing and so she writes a report and the things that she writes that she's missing are all in these bags and then they have it in correlation with me stopping

there with the bags. They didn't see me with the bags we kind of fought that in court. Long story short is they that's that's how I got my my sentence to prison and what was the convicted charge attempted burglary okay which was a class 3A felony first felony in my life um my my criminal history because that's what you asked originally is it's it's very small it's it's a lot but it's a lot of small charges i have three DUIs three shopliftings uh three trespassings uh i i can't remember all of them i have no domestic what i'm trying to say is these are all petty misdemeanor crimes.

No violence. But there's a bunch of them. Right, right. If that makes sense. Like, there's, there's, there's, there's just a lot of them. So, this was my first felony. Um, and the, the lawyer's saying, you're not going to go to prison. You know, you, you have a history, but you have no felonies.

So I go into court that day and I think I'm going to go home because, maybe get probation or something. Exactly. And, um, but I actually had another case going on at that time. So. And this case was where I asked a buddy if I could use his car. And I did this a couple other times, but this was the one time I got in trouble for it. I asked a buddy of mine to use his car.

He let me use it. And then I would just take off for six days with it. And this was a buddy of mine. So he called it and stole and he did what he needed to do. And eventually I was at some gas station randomly and I got caught with some mess. So I'm looking at these two charges. at the same time. Two felonies. The felony, the latter, the one I just told you about,

I got probation for. What was the charge on that? Was it the guilty? Possession. Oh. So, no, they didn't, when they caught me with the car, the guy, he didn't press charges. He just took his car back. So, um, when I got hit with the possession, they gave me probation. So going into it with my burglary, my attorney said, you're probably going to get probation because they're not going to want to screw up their probation they just gave you. They're not going to want to counteract it judges don't like doing that this judge did not care about that he sentenced me

to three years in prison oh my god and if you can imagine your whole like it goes back to that where you never think you'll be yep when he said three years and he hit that hammer it was like all the emotions of it's it's going to be okay someday the safe knit yes we're finally gone when when someone says for the next three years of your life you're gone god damn everything and and that door closed. They take you right away? No, they took me to, they took me to the holding cell

and then I had to get transferred to Lincoln to the D&E to get processed. But just the feeling of that door, like, you know, metaphorically door, just closing on your life. And that's when that hits you. That's when everything you've done in your whole life finally catches up with you.

And you're fine, like, you hear about, nowhere to run. No, you can't, where? Yeah. I'm in prison now. Like, I'm a prisoner. And I finally had to, had to look inwardly and say, man, like, this is where your life ended up. And there was no more lies anymore.

There was no more, like, I'll do that. I was in a room. Couldn't leave. So. What age were you? I was, when I went into prison, it was 2018. So I was six years ago. So I was 29.

How long did you end up serving? I did two years. Two years. And then you got out for? I got out for, uh, Pope. They have this thing called post-release now where they release you and you do 18 months of probation. So that's, I did not parole out, though. I did my whole number.

Okay. So I did two years. So in that post actual serving time, you're on probation for 18 months or you have to come in on on weekends or how does that? No, I'm on probate. Once leaving prison, you're on probation for 18 months. And if you screw up, you go back to prison for whatever time's left on your post release. I see. I see.

So now your time in prison. Okay. What is it like? What are the people like? Are you in a minimum security prison? How does that work? So you go into prison and you're thinking like it's about to be crazy. There's going to be people stabbing people.

And don't get me wrong. They're like I got lucky. I went to OCC. So that's the prison in Omaha. And this is like a country club, guys. So, you know, all that I was just saying about my world shattering. Like when I got to OCC, bro, they had a basketball league, a softball league, free food, cards, a bunch of things.

of people to hang out with how can you get in uh they had a weight pile all my friends were there i'm like two years can i get like four no i'm just kidding it sucked but but i went to there's other prisons in nebraska that are that are hard yeah that that people fight all the time i was lucky enough to go to a prison that where that it's it's not predominantly as you would say quote unquote hard it was a very relaxed prison nobody was fighting every there was still fights so i'm wrong I got in four fights while I was there. I'm one, I'm one and three in prison. Because I can't fight, bro.

But I did win one, and I'm going to talk about that, you know what I'm saying? But there's this dude called, his name was eyes. And he had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids. I farted. He didn't like it. He called me a bitch. And Christian's whole life of not being able to fight. I finally got one.

And you best believe I walked out of him. I was flexing out. But no. He dropped his ass or what? Oh, dude. Somehow we went to wrestle each other. And I ended up in a position. to where my arm was free

and I'd been working out for like a year and a half so I was strong got some power so I held him and I just happened to land in a position to where my arm was free

and I just like kind of closed my eyes and swung at him as many times as I could I broke my thumb you see how my thumb oh yeah holy shit

I don't know how to punch so my pinky and I broke my pinky and I won and we stood up and he's bleeding and it's just that moment where I'm like

I finally got four black eyes yeah absolutely you ain't calling him eyes no more you I was going to say, but he kissed. No, the ones I lost. The ones I lost were horrible, imagine this dude

trying to square out. Because the one you won sounded. The one. You got hurt yourself a little bit. I got lucky. I know I broke my feet. Yeah, you have casualties on the war you won.

What was the worst one? The worst beat down. The worst one was, we stole a TV from somebody. And we didn't. Yeah. You get TVs in prison. And a group of guys I was with,

we went and stole a TV from someone because you can get like a hundred tokens for them. tokens are the currency you use and buster i know right tokens are what you use for pops okay but they also can be used for like to purchase things drugs food and stuff like that so we do it for a hundred tokens we didn't know he was protected he was protected by some mexican gang in there oh shit so four mexicans bring me into a room and they're like did you steal the tv and i'm like yeah so then they just they beat me up they stopped me down they punched me a couple times it wasn't too bad sure i think i was in my bunk too days and tops what was your worst injury from that one from that yeah um my worst well see i have this nagging injury do you guys remember when i flipped laura's car no nope okay i was going to pick her up from work and i flipped her car and i dislocated my hip and i was still i was drinking out when i left the hospital i went drank again nice of course i did they gave me this boot that was required to fix my hip so now that fight re dislocated it not re dislocated it but re-slocated it but

aligned it so I'll have this moment where I'll get to a point where I can barely walk it feels like someone's pushing on the lower part of my back so when they stopped me down that was my worst injury is that that got re-agravated and then I was on my bunk for like a misalignment yeah it's a misalignment to where it makes it so you can't walk right it's the worst thing were they putting the boots to you on the ground yes yes they we have Velcro shoes in prison now but but but yeah dude that I think that was the worst that was that was the worst thing to me like I said guys prison was prison was It wasn't bad.

Yeah, yeah. And now... Sounds pretty bad, but... It was bad being away. For what you said, it sounds awful. It was bad being away, but here's what I will say about prison that did help me. My biggest issue for getting clean was I was always in a room full of chicks. My biggest thing was I could distract myself from a female.

The treatment in prison is all dudes. You're all there. And, dude, I had never learned more about recovery than the treatment center I went to when I was at OCC, which is why I had my 22 months clean when I came out I did relapse so I'm not like you know and however you want to put that on the measuring stick but that was the best recovery I ever had 22 months I had 22 months coming out of there

and I was on fire coming out of prison like so like you were just focused dude I was focused I could go to work every day like they taught me how to be a man like all the things that I always wanted to do that treat those nine months in treatment in there just it was amazing dude. Wow. It was amazing, bro.

Damn. One of the best treatment centers I've ever been to. That's rehabilitation. I was going to say, you mentioned drugs in prison. How does that, how does, I mean, you stayed sober. No, I, so there, so I'm talking about the 16 months after

I got out of prison. I stayed sober. Right, right. They got this, they got, they got, they got drugs in prison. What we did was K2. Yeah. Oh, shit. So 25 tokens, you get a stick. You take two hits. You go, watch Rick and Morty. It's pretty it's not harmful.

You know what I mean? You can't have an episode where you like fall out, go up front for a little bit, but that was my, I didn't use no hard drugs in prison. Okay. That sounds harmful. I mean, K2 can get weird. Yeah. Am I minimized it? That sounds not great. I mean, I tried K2 for a while there too when it came out and it was legal and all

the head shots. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. And I never had a terrible experience with that I started here and like this dude crashed out on it and this dude had like weird seizure thing and so i just like i'll stick with regular weed now yeah yep so that was that that that was prison not only was it easy and i was very grateful because i i literally went in thinking this was going to be the hardest two years in my life i thought i was going to be fighting i thought i'd have to join the peckerwoods shave my head get tattooed you know the whole nine but but it ended up scary yeah dude i was scared dude i was scared bro i came alive my biggest fears

is like somehow if i end up in prison like it just i don't know why it just scares the fuck out of me just even just the idea of being contained the claustophobia you can't get out yeah and normally dude i don't you guys know me i can talk myself out of pretty much any situation you know what i mean like i'll be like no i don't know but in there you can't like they're like fuck you dude like you know they don't care so i didn't have to do that and like i said my prison experience is 80% rehabilitation and 20% like the negative of prison sure it was such a benefit for me i needed a break from society i wasn't even a good person. I was homeless. I was breaking people's hearts. I was hurting people's lives. I was

destroying my family. I talked to my son every day I was in prison. I wasn't doing that out there. So prison to me was that stepping stone and that point that got me to where I could finally realize what I needed to do with my life. And I got an opportunity to be in treatment and actually listen. Because in any treatment center before, I was listening, but I also saw Sally over there and she's pretty hot. So let me see what that's working on. this gave me that shot yeah because that distraction you want to attach to it because it erases the responsibilities yeah because like that change that you have to do is so arduous like it requires effort and everything like that so whether it's like you know for you it's like girls or whatever but it's just the distraction to not be on the path

that is uphill and hard. And prison kind of forces you to be on that path. It does. It does. And it did. Because if you didn't have that, you wouldn't have self, you know, directed yourself into that path. You had to have the time out, the breathing space, and the therapy. You know, we critique the prison system for not being rehabilitated. I think we need more prisons. No, no, no. Chill, chill, chill.

That's not the case, though, is most people go back. Of course. I just something, I've almost been out four years now, guys. And when I, when I, the people I talk to in there said, I'll be back within six months. So something, something clicked in treatment for me. Well, think again. For you, for you, it had a rehabilitative effect. Yes.

Because there was literally rehab inside. It really did, dude. Well, all it matters is what you do with your experience. Sure. Like, that's rehab or prison or Cabo? Yeah. Marigra? No.

Okay. So you get out of prison. Yeah. I'm going to turn his mic on. Yeah, sorry. So you get out of prison. You got a, you have a good. good streak.

Where do things go from there? Okay, so I get out of prison. I move into the anchor house in Norfolk, which is a three-quarterway house. Halfway house, you live there and you have to go to classes, you have specific rules, you have to ask for something to drink. Three-quarterway house, step above that. I can go find a job and do what I need to do and all that. I move into the anchor house.

I get into a relationship with somebody. who, it turned out to be one of the better relationships that I've ever been in, I'd say that. And we meet at just a perfect time and I'm going to meetings. I'm very pro-narcotics anonymous. I find myself going to work every day. The simple tasks of getting up and just being responsible are coming very easy to me, making me believe that I could have done it the whole time, if that makes sense. and before I know it

it's six months one year and I'm looking back and it's like I'm no longer living my life trying not to use I'm living my life where I just don't it's no longer a thing I have to think about or a thing I have to pinpoint or like yeah you have to put an asterisk

with Christian because he's not going to use today dude I just didn't use I went about my day and part of my day was not using it wasn't no longer this thing that I had to worry about in and make a big skeptical about I just went about my day and didn't use and and and I found that pace and I found that peace of mind within it and I just didn't use for kind of the first time in your life for forever and and and and it moved before I knew it I had my first house I had you know I worked at

a treatment center nice I was suddenly I was the emissions coordinator for a treatment center I'm helping the same people that are just like me get into treatment when I used to be making that call. I used to be the guy on the phone begging to get into treatment. Can you please open up a bed for me? Now I'm the guy setting it up to save that dude. I truly as a side note, remember where you're going with that. But as a side note, I always say the best thing we can do with our suffering is to turn it into compassion and take your specific form of suffering and help other people. Once you get out of that, help other people who are in that because nobody knows your situation more than somebody that used to be there themselves. That's one of the most beautiful things you can do. Yeah, I agree

100% Brett. And, and I found, dude, I loved going to work because I could get on my phone and talk to people just like me. And instead of living this life of just constant chaos, I could help people get out of it. That is so fulfilling. No shot of meth gives you that. No shot of fireball with your bros makes you feel like you're actually a part of something bigger than yourself. Meaning and purpose. Yes. Yeah. So, dude, I, I was on. I had never felt better. I grew my hair out real long. So, like, I had, like, a mean little ponytail.

I still was pretty big from... I still was pretty big from prison. So I felt good about myself. Yeah. And, like, this. Watch your mouth. Dude, so I... Dude, I'm telling you, bro, I...

Every day was such a joy for me because I could spend that entire day as my job to get paid helping the same person that I was not too long ago. Okay. And it was... It was one of the best thing that... ever happened to me and that's why I always say that no matter how many times you relapse that's the wisdom that you learn during those times of recovery you do not lose that you don't you remember what

it's like to not use because you've done it before you're never really back at square one right yeah you may have used again but you're not that doesn't mean you're a failure it means you're an addict so don't sit there and think you're unique and that you're so bad because you messed up Dude, you didn't lose all the people you've touched, all the friends you've helped, all the times that you didn't pick up, all those moments of clarity. You don't lose any of those. You maintain all of them, which is why I now, I used after that. I used after all those things I'm talking about. I went through the darkest moments of my life after that. But clean now, I revert back to some of the things I learned during them, during those 22 months all the time. I remember things I told clients. I remember if I feel like this on a Tuesday morning, I probably need to adjust something to make sure it doesn't carry over

into a damn bottle of Jack Daniels on Thursday night. I remember those things. So don't, if anyone ever relapses, that is not the end of the road. It's just you do not have to make it to where you cannot get up from it. It is not over. You can take everything you learned and everything you gained, pick yourself back up and be a better person

be a better person it doesn't end for you when you realize that's genuinely deeply powerful and coming from somebody who's been through it and I think that's so important to remind people and I'm sure you can even relate to that that feeling of despair when you do first relapse and that feeling like I am back to square one

it was all for not I haven't made any progress and you're like no that's not the way that is a lie that is a lie so then after this this moment of clarity and meaning and purpose and rebuilding your life, you do end up in a relapse again. How does that happen and where does that go? Absolutely.

So what I did was I did what I always do. And for the first time in my life, I had my own house, my own car, my own everything. And I decided to switch a few pieces in my life because I was on a road where I thought that I needed something different. And I thought that with all the things that I had, I could finally use successfully. I thought that I finally got to a point,

and to someone that may sound crazy, and I'll try to explain it, I thought that now I finally beat it. I thought that since I accolated all the things I spent my whole life wishing I had, now that I finally had them, using wouldn't be able to be so negative because I wouldn't be homeless.

I wouldn't not have a vehicle. I wouldn't not have a job. and I thought that that it would be different because of everything I had and what I didn't realize is that's just more shit to lose that's more all that than you can lose I didn't think of that

that's not how I was thinking I was thinking if I added it in I could now do the one thing I thought I loved my whole life and still keep the things that I had We're talking about drinking Yes alcohol no we're talking about using meth Really? Yes Oh shit you thought you could integrate

I thought I could integrate meth into my life. God damn, okay. Right, especially meth because it like, you know, you think about like opiates and maybe drinking too where like more of the pathogic or like you're like nodding out. But meth you're doing stuff like you're up and about like I do emails and shit. And Christian that strikes so to my core like I know we're talking about like the I can I can do this like using. new version like better and I can do it now because the same thing you said about like the recovery time you had that like all the impressions that you made and all the things

you did that you collected you use that same mindset to garner like I collected all this wisdom now now I learned how to use and live and like how to like now I can function with using, I can get the good feelings, I can get the escapism, I can get all that benefits, and I can function as, I can be responsible because I learned these things. Yeah. And that, the crazy lie you tell yourself, because, like, you think you've improved and you go, okay, before I was a addict, but I was, I was bad at it, but now I'm going to be, like, I'm not quite addicted to it because I have a functional life.

Exactly. He couldn't have ordered it better where in my mind was that. And for people on the outside, that does seem insane. Yeah, they're sitting there like, you're shooting up behind Arby's. Even when you were talking,

I thought you meant like you started drinking a couple beers again, but you're like, no, I'm doing... Yeah, I'm doing blast of meth, dude. But that is the addictive... That's the addictive logic, and that's the idea that you are an addict and that's a lifelong thing that you have to keep in mind.

There's no time when you can safely use. Because the better you get at staying clean, the better your disease is going to get at getting you to slip. That's just how it is. Wow. Yeah. The more great you feel about being clean and the more the closer you get to feeling like you got it

is the closer you're getting to that relapse, in my opinion. Yeah, because you learn all the, like, all the little side things and the deep, like, the deep things about you, you use that for good or bad. And that's like the, like, that's the crux of it all because when you have that in yourself, like you can either, like, use this for good or you can use it for bad.

And, like, it's kind of one of those things where, like, really smart people can believe dumb things because they can think of creative ways to believe the dumb things. Yeah. And it's the same thing with addiction. Like living with addiction, you can think about, like, a newfound, like, really smart way to live a life shooting up meth. Yeah.

And I went into instant psychosis. Really? So you tried a double? I tried it once, and I was. And what did this psychosis look like? I called my girlfriend at the time. I told her I'm packing all my stuff and moving in there. I think it's a great idea.

This is like 1130 at night. Nice. And I think that it's fine. it's normal i tell her i'm moving in we're going to be fine we're because everything's going to be great i just found out she was pregnant at the time we made love and um yeah we i my psychosis was it was voices um i was laying in my bed and it's funny because the weirdest thing about my voice is when i go into psychosis is it's people i know and are very close to me so two examples i i would go to work i worked at a place called uh great dane

And I used to install fuel tanks on these semis. So I'd be underneath a semi. And I could hear my girlfriend and my roommate disowning me for an eight-hour shift. You're not doing that right. Oh, my God. That's fucked up. Yes. That's fucked up.

That isn't tight enough. How long is it going to take for you to get this right? All day. Sweating bullets. In their voice. They're exact. That's what was so scary about this whole. thing was the voices were the people that I cared about the most.

And so when you hear their voice, it's like hearing your girlfriend or your mom or your grandpa speak your name and you're like, you want to listen. Why wouldn't you want to listen? Why wouldn't you think that's real? To me, it was real because those were the people that I talk to every day. But how could they be at my work? I didn't think that. That's not how I was thinking.

My thinking was, why can't they just be nice to me? Why can't they tell me I'm doing a good job? so then I would try to do it harder or better and I would mess up more and so my so then that's my first example my second example was I could lay in bed and there would be people outside of my windows

telling me that these insane things were happening to people that I care about or that this they were telling me like my girlfriend was with this other person they're driving around right now we just seen them you need to get a hold of them so I'm texting her where are you

I'm at home why no you're fucking not I know where you're at who put him on the phone and I would as much as I because there were so many times where I would fight these voices

I would look at him and I would come up in my head there'd be like the Christian versus them and like I could win sometimes sometimes I could be like no there's no way but after

18 hours of this battle in my brain eventually I'm like God it has to to be real. Wow. So that's what my psychosis has looked like. And that would be so ugly for someone to be like, why would you go back

to that? But like, in my brain, me going back to that, that doesn't associate with it. Because the mental health part I'm not thinking about. I'm thinking about the initial rush I get. I don't ever think about the 12 hours of psychosis I'm about

to go through. It's traumatic. Another thing I'll say is traumatic as all those things are. They don't deter me today like I went through all that but it doesn't it didn't like my feelings aren't hurt I don't I don't have nightmares about it it's not something that I think about every day but why you're in them those that that was the heart like those are some of the most traumatic things that ever happened to me that didn't affect me later yeah you know what I mean yeah I see what you're saying in the moment they're deeply traumatic and yeah crazy making but after the psychosis clears up and

sobriety it's like they never happen yeah so it's not that they're not traumatic because they are during those moments i'm traumatized because i'm going through this but when i get out of that state of mind that those things aren't even possible it's like a bad dream when you wake up it's like disturbing but you can leave it behind yes exactly so but what's crazy is on my last relapse the second i used the voices rim like they were the same voices again so it's like they just came back they were just waiting which is god damn yeah i'm not going to get into too deep of some of my thoughts about it because I think they're irrational.

But to me, I feel like in some way or another, when I use methamphetamines, I am somehow allowing some type of like spirit or demon that has known me my whole life, knows my fears, and the second I let him in, he's going to attack me with everything

he has. Whether it's literal or metaphorical, it feels like and is very much like a demonic possession. Absolutely. 100%. Well, and the big thing is like you were talking about like that doesn't seem appealing like to live a life of the stress and all this chaos and craziness but the the addictive mind tricks you to thinking you love it you love the stress but life is so boring life is so boring like just going to work clocking in doing all this stuff like you're moving and grooving you're doing all these things like life is like constant carpe diem dude you're just living in the moment now like you it twists it to where you're like I love the chaos I love this turmoil because it's exciting it's different I don't know what's going to be a while I have a home like something crazy is like I know it's crazy as that

sounds that's kind of an outlier but like truly you like the addictive mind like convinces you to enjoy the madness yeah yeah i i found uh i found uh some type some type of um what's the word i'm looking for triumph by getting through it when it passed i felt like god i got through that yeah for some reason that to me was more important than going through it so when i came out of it i was like i would like boost myself up and say look what you just got through and and i don't think this was consciously, but there's a part of me that wanted to see if I could do it again. Well, the funny thing is,

it's like, you did it, but to avail what? Like, there's no, like, plan. Like, you didn't, like, set forth and, like, I will get this reward for doing this thing. You just lived a hardship. Yeah. Right. Right. You're just like...

You didn't die, so... Yeah, like, whooo. I almost died. Wasn't that great? It's like, no. It's good you're alive, but, like, It's not, you didn't gain anything. Yeah. Yeah, man. It was messed up.

So you try again. You go immediately in the psychosis. Start getting crazy. People in your life immediately obviously have to notice. And then how does it spiral? Do you get a grip again? How do you get to the point of where you are now, where you enter that 16-month period of sobriety?

Yeah. So, big shout out to my current girlfriend. She, we may not always see eye to eye, But for one, she's a licensed therapist. Wow, that's awesome. Nice. So she's dealing with an active user while her job and education is based on helping those people. So she's going to work every day helping a bunch of, you know, however many people she helps in a day.

And then having to go back home and deal with the same stuff. But she stuck through, dude. We had our daughter. There wasn't a day. She didn't let me be in her life. um she uh she just stuck through it dude i don't know what else stuck with you through the whole left stuck with me through everything and she while using now granted i lied a lot about it she didn't know sometimes she was she i don't want to say she was naive i think she knew but she

loved me enough to give me the benefit of the doubt um we even moved illinois together while i was still in the depths of my addiction um it i mean the amount of lies that i've given this girl and for her to still even want anything to do with me is insane to me but we moved down to Illinois and you know you would think

that it would stop then because I'm nine hours from knowing anything who's the plug right but no me I go to the I go to what would be the Omaha

of Illinois and I go driving around is that Chicago it no it'd be like car So that's what's close to me. I'd go to what the city would be in my area. I should have clarified. That's on me. Um, and I go there and there's homeless people everywhere. So in my mind, I'm like, dude, they're not just homeless. They got to be using, right? So I'm driving to each of these homeless people. And instead of giving them money, I'm asking them for drugs. And finally, six, seven, eight guys later, he's like, yeah, I know somebody, you know. So. I know a fella. Yeah, I know a fella.

So I'm just with this homeless dude of my car, driving around a place I've never lived in before, going to get drugs. And that's how it started. It's like your concierge. Yeah, yeah. There's an aspect of peer perseverance and persistent that's almost admirable.

It's like, if that persistence is directed anywhere else, you're like, you know, you're succeeding in every way. Like, that's how they built the computer. Yeah, for real. So, damn, surreal. Yeah. So we, we, I find somebody. She notices that, like, I always, there's key things with me when I use. I'll stop eating. I'll start thinking you're cheating on me. And, oh, you know, like, there's, there's things I do that you're like, okay. That's that codependency fear, right? Right. Yep. It's, and it's intertwined into my brain to where that's why it comes out. But there's just things, you know, and they start noticing them. She starts, you know, it gets really bad. It gets to a point where she's kicking me out. I'm homeless in Illinois, away from my family, drinking in my car again. You know, it's just back to square one, worse than before.

Because at least in Nebraska, I could try to get a family member to maybe give me a place to stay for a couple days. Now I'm just by myself. And no job, you know, 1750 a month mortgage, got into this big commitment with me thinking Christian's going to be this new person that I'm not. and uh you know things things are slowly falling apart horribly and while i was in stanton this was towards the end of my 22 month relapse i i turned the once beautiful home of my recovery that i finally turned my life around into a trap house and i had this guy over he was stealing catalate converters around my area and he was bringing them to my house so we get raided I get a charge.

So, fast forward, I put, when I go to court, I push it. I'm not going to get sentenced for at least a year because I don't want to go to jail. So we push it and finally, May 9th of last year is when I went to jail. So that's when everything finally hit a boiling point. I should have got more time. When I initially got these charges, I was looking at five felonies and, And three misdemeanors. Can you tell us the charges real quick?

Yes, it was. God. At least the felony ones? Yeah, the four charges that I had were, they were all theft by, theft by. Abetment or aiding? No, no.

Aiding, yes, thank you. Aiding and abetting was two of the charges, possession of a controlled substance, and tampering with evidence for having them in my house. so or something like that and they dropped all of them they dropped all of my charges because i wasn't with this person got caught for many catalytic converters just one was i with them on and so but the one that they thought i was with them on they didn't have proof so they they loaded me up with charges to scare me yeah and then eventually let every all of them go i got one year in county jail

they sent me up to antelope county in neely nebraska here i spent six months there prison was great this place was one room no TV six people horrible food just it was the six it was it was the worst six months

this is in Nebraska jail is not meant for a long stage you serve a year in a prison yeah and then you get transitioned to six months in a jail yes okay so no no no if okay so in Nebraska if you get a year you do six months oh okay I see

because you do half your time so you got can you send us to a year but you go for six six months yep so i go to antelope and i'm in this room and i am finally feeling all the things of like you had now now it's no longer you've never done it before how are you here it's you just did it and now you're here again so i really took those six months to really think about what was important to me really get a hone in on what things about me as a person are negatively affecting not only my relationships but the way that I treat other people as well and how I react to jobs

and how can I be a better employee all those things that come into being a person I really took a minute to like think about that and to be honest the number one thing was I hated being in there so much that when I got out I did everything to this day to make sure that I'm never in that position again

the prison didn't make it so bad granted I did great when I got out thanks to the rehabilitation but this time I hated it, dude. Those six months were worse than any of my times combined. And it's not because people were fighting or anything crazy just because it was... It's because my daughter was growing up.

Yeah. You know, and that's what I want to get into. That's the thing here. I made a lot of mistakes with my son. You know, I hadn't been there for him the way I should have. But I've been there for my daughter since she's been born. The second I walk into the room after... the second I get home from work, you have a two-year-old running up that is excited that her dad's home.

I have never felt something like that before. I spent my entire life trying to find love through other women and trying to find all these things that are like to fill Christian. That does it for me. There is nothing like that little girl running in there and looking at this freaking junkie like a superhero. You know, she runs in there and she doesn't care that I've been to prison. she doesn't care that I that I've shoved needles in my arms she sees her dad dude

you don't get that from anything so that whole time in jail I had to listen to her through some of her early stage development over a damn jail phone and I'll be damned if I listen to any more of that this weekend coming home I got to see my son and my daughter

at the same time for the first time in my life they're in the same room together they were just in my backseat three hours ago when I took when I took when I took Colson back to his mother How old is your son now? He's nine Wow We had a pizza party at Mama's Pizza

And my whole family's there Holding my daughter My son's over there playing a bit He's a huge gamer And I and I just for a second I look back and I'm like No matter what I've been through Look at all the people

That I've hurt stole from Lied to You know Completely diminish their relationship And they're here eating pizza with me Because they're happy That Christian's fucking clean dude That's real love

Those things in my life Added in with the love That me and my daughter have for each other Are things that No Drug Or broken relationship Or any of those

Any of the bullshit that I used to hold on to Could ever come close to And I will protect that Every single day And the only way I can protect that Is by making sure that I don't alter Christian state of mind Because when my mind's altered, I will not love that girl the way she needs to be loved or the way that I do now. No matter how much I love her now, if I shove a drug into my body, she is going to become second real damn quick.

I refuse to do that again because I have never felt what it's like to have somebody love me the way she loves me. Iona is the single-handly biggest blessing that I've ever gotten in my life. And that is no shade towards my son because I love my son. my mistakes kept me away from him and he is he is in my heart and i love him with all he i'm still his dad yes but with my daughter it is just different because i've been there yeah and i'm telling you man me and her it's my best it's it's it's the best feeling you could ever imagine i mean incredibly moving incredibly powerful uh how could you not you know your heart flutter hearing that stuff and you know obviously everybody listening is 100% in your corner i want nothing more than to see you

continue to succeed um you said you have five kids now yeah so where where my girlfriend has had four kids without me yeah so I'm a stepfather to four of her boys and there's five five kids in her home hell yeah man so your you're your two biological kids are nine and two nine and two yes exact age of mine no are you serious my two sons what nine and two that's crazy it is crazy and and and and I got to say dude um I know I've shared a lot about uh me and Dave and and and all and how close we were But if there was ever a person that in my early stages, and I'm not saying, and I'm not trying to like, you know, blow smoke up your ass,

but I want you to know that I looked up to you a lot. You had a way of being yourself. And here's a few examples with music. Everybody's listening to some certain kind of music. Your goal was to listen to something that just Brett listened to because you wanted to be yourself. I took that with me. Try to be the best Christian.

There's a lot of other people in here. Let's try to be the best me. I learned that from you, man. And I just thank you for not only being my friend, but being a pivotal part of me on who I wanted to be just by being around you younger. Like it meant a lot to me, dude. Damn, that blows me away. I didn't know that you felt that way, and it's just incredibly kind to hear that and very sweet.

And you obviously played a huge part in my life as well. And we just moved on and we just kept stumbling into adulthood. And you don't reflect. You don't know that the gap is happening when it's happening. Only in retrospect do you see, oh, we faded away from each other. And then I'd hear something about you or whatever. And it's just, I can't tell you how good it feels to be in the same room with you again and to see the stuff you've overcome and the place that you are.

And the way that you speak is from a place of such deep authenticity. That that is Christian. That's not anybody else. You know, you can't fake that. And so, I mean, I want to say I love you and I love what you're doing. And it's so fucking cool to reconnect like this, man. And to hear that, you know, that you took that away from our friendship is fucking cool because there's this element of you said you looked up to me. I didn't know that at all.

But, you know, you were older. I know. You were cooler. It was like, oh, the upper class. I'm not cooler. And in high school, you know, every class up is something big. I was like, I have this dude that's older than me and all my other friends and I'm bringing him around. And I felt cool by proxy, you know, because everybody liked you and you were just, you know, a lot of times you were the, what's the phrase?

the spotlight of the party okay cooler yeah no like the the main like you would you would walk into a room and you would get attention yeah just by being yourself you're a magnet yeah absolutely and you did concerts and shit you know you would just do you and uh i always i always admired that as well so that's fucking cool um it's really great to hear where you are i have a couple questions now that we know the full span of your story um a couple questions looking back okay so uh one of the things that We've debated, and almost everybody that's come into this episode or to this all too human series, we've bounced this idea off then of, you know, where does addiction come from? Is it a response to childhood trauma?

Is it a response to adult life tragedies? Where is it just, you know, just the neurochemical hijacking? You just got hooked by a series of accidental occurrences and now you have a neurochemical addiction and you've got to kick it. Where do you think your, not only your addiction, but even to some extent your codependency, where does that come from? so I there's going to be two two parts to this answer the first part is this I there is no way that anyone could tell me that there isn't something going on that's predetermined for me to react the way I do to drugs and alcohol yeah it's I don't care what you say because if you put me and somebody else up against alcohol I'm going to keep drinking and he's not and we could be from the same cut of cloth or not you know what I'm saying so I think there's some there's something in my brain that was pre is a predisposition on what it looked like

if I use drugs or alcohol okay however once I get clean then it's on me because I spent my whole life thinking I'm an addict and I'm different

and I'm unique but if I get clean and then I have that choice if I use again granted I won't stop but then it's no longer this thing of where my addiction because I was clean

So, in my opinion, if I get clean, it's no one, pre-disposition or not, it's no one else's fault by my own. Radical ownership. Yes, because there's no way that after coming out of that, if I get clean and on a daily basis, I know that I can stay clean and I have the tools and the means and the, you know what I'm saying, that I should ever go back to it. Now, I have, count hundreds of times. So I'm not saying it works, but what I'm saying is in my belief system, when I get clean, it's on me then. And I feel that.

And I think that's awesome and that's true. And it's almost the mindset you have to have, that responsible. I'm owning my decisions. That is absolutely crucial. So, you know, nothing to say, like, there's a genetic component. Maybe there is childhood trauma. That doesn't take away from that radical ownership. And even if I always tell people this, like even if you are a victim, it's never healthy to adopt the victim mentality.

No, because if I go the rest of my life saying, yeah, I'm clean, but, you know, I'm an addict. So I'm probably going to use again. Then what's the point of even being clean then? Right, right. then you're literally saying you're giving yourself an okay for when you do use. What has been your biggest, the biggest tragedies in your life?

Okay, so my biggest tragedy was very recent. My grandpied passed away recently. I was going to ask about that. Because I know that you had that deep connection. Yeah. Take your time. We don't have to air this if you don't feel comfortable. No, it's fine.

So my my dad left when I was when I was younger due to his disease and if there was a person in my life that taught me what unconditional love truly means to its core it was my grandfather and I called him grandpa he was the kind of guy that it didn't matter if he were Dave Brett Kyle Krish all of you guys were just loved by him anytime you were in his home you were one of his kids and that's just the way that he did his life he lived his life for everyone else he was not not he was a very selfless person and he just he honestly when it if there was any a time in my darkest moments when i lost everybody the only person that would pick up the phone would be my grandfather losing him i i still have his number in my phone and i still call it often um and it's still to this day is just something that it's just the biggest one of the biggest regrets that I've, that I've ever had because a lot of his later years and his dementia, I was high in.

So instead of giving back to the dude that gave me everything, I was out getting high, not even calling to see if he was okay. You know what I mean? So, Grampy, and not only that, I would love to show Grampi the me I am now. Absolutely. I would love for him to get to see me with my daughter. I would love to walk into my grandma's house with Ayanna in my arms and go up to my grant because I know that he would grab that little girl and love her with all this

freaking heart and I don't get that chance because I was so clouded in my own in my own mess yeah yeah I mean I knew him um you not know him deeply and personally but every time I came over what you say is is 100% correct um my dad died a couple years ago at the age of 55 from alcoholism and my son was born a week later and so it's just like that all those that 30 years he should have had you know to see my son and to have that connection and just to know that's never going to happen so again another another part of our lives where we sort of relate with one another um i feel that pain deeply and i'm really sorry about that um another aspect of this is do you do you have or have you cultivated or is this completely irrelevant to you any religious

spiritual beliefs anything like that that you've been able to find any i'm being pulled in a lot of different directions uh my girlfriend's grandpa wants me to uh get into the Jehovah's Witness. I know for me that when I, the closest I ever got to some type of spirituality was just treating it as that spirituality. To me, spirituality is like how you treat people, how you, how you are with people. Like, to me, spirituality came from a group of addicts sitting in a room together and nobody's getting high. you know that's that's not supposed to happen so like to me i don't necessarily need to find some religious standing point although it's interesting because maybe i could add it into better myself

because one thing i will say about the whole god aspect is that even if it's not true that's still not a bad way to live you know what i mean so like i can't really knock them because like if it's not true they die so what they lived in a great life of helping other people and and believing in something so why would i knock them for that i agree So, but what I will say is I don't think I need a standpoint, but I do know spirituality because I learned it from Narcotics Anonymous. Fascinating. And you're at least open to the possibility that might come in. Yeah. Yes. I share the, I mean, I share that as well. Like there's something about spirituality. It's helping people. It's service to others. It's other orientedness. And in that is a deep connection with other people. And the opposite of the immature, you could say addictive, but even just just general narcissistic, ego, self-centeredness that are, kind of promotes the me me me the selfie culture yeah what am I doing I got to put my

life out there and once you make that switch of like other people are more important and having a kid can often do that other people like their needs have completely subordinated anything I want to do yeah and it's it's sometimes uncomfortable because you don't have the freedom that you would sometimes want but it's something spiritual in that you are subordinating your ego your personal desires to benefit and serve somebody else and that in of itself is spiritual it's relationships man it's what's the most important thing

absolutely another thing I had is do the felonies how do the felonies play out with regards to trying to find a job okay good question so I'm working at a bug farm yeah uh bug farm so I literally

dip crickets into a bucket to feed the lizards and distribute them out to our beautiful nation and I hate in my life dude I'm working at this damn bug farm, stepping on bugs all day, and I'm at Casey's, and this guy's there. And I'm like, hey, what up? And he's funny, and he says some joke to me and my girlfriend, and I thought it was hilarious. So I start talking to him, and on a whim, I'm just like, so what do you do for a living, right?

And he's like, well, I work on a coal mine. Southern Illinois coal mining's very, very popular. It's how a lot of people make their living. There's a lot of them down there. Anyways, he says, I do this coal mining. He's telling me about it. I'm like, okay, well, do they care if you're a felon? No.

Do they drug test you? You know, like, what are the parameters with this? They drug test you because I want a job that keeps me accountable. You know, obviously, I don't want to be working with a bunch of people that are getting high because who knows what could happen. So, anyways, long story short is I go down to this custom staffing place. I fill up my paperwork. They say, in order to be a coal miner in Southern Illinois, you've got to take this five-day core. or three-day course for surface, five-day for underground,

you're probably not going to have a job for eight weeks because it usually takes time to get in these courses. Well, I'm, like, desperate to get out of this bug farming business. So I call, I call them right away. I call the college. And I'm like, hey, is there any chance you guys have, please tell me you have a class coming up. I'm trying to get this job.

We have one Monday. I'm like, cool, I pay for it. Fast forward a little bit. what I do now is I work on a on a mine. I drive a 40 ton Mack truck. I haul gob on a coal mine making I mean I won't say the number but it's the most I've ever made ever

in my life. We can live comfortably and my history has nothing to do with it. I got lucky I got lucky so I may and I don't have a degree or anything and here's the other thing I love my job I drive this truck around listening to atmosphere listening

to music you know jamming out writing lyrics like all day long and I just dude I love it bro the song that I was trying to think of earlier when I was talking about God loves ugly and fuck you Lucy it's a God's bathroom floor dude how many times I've heard

Gership dude my passenger seat ref and every line for line brother um is they still hiring at that dude they are my uncle asked me the other day he wants to get a job he was a bugging out um so speaking of atmosphere

uh your music how has that music, that strain, then you have, how does that survive through all these ups and downs? Okay, so, as you know, I've always been into music. Music has been the center point. I'm the type of person that, like, I don't just listen to music. I, like, live in music. You know what I'm saying? Like, no matter how I'm feeling what's going on in my life, I can find a song that can kind of get me through that situation. That's how music has always been to me. You've always been like that. always and so like i we would make music together me and kyle made a bunch of dumb songs together you know what i'm saying or whatever but i think it was 2016 like i really wanted to do something because i remember i was writing some lyrics and like i could start writing lyrics about what i went through and like it actually like felt good to get it out on paper right and like it took ownership

of what had like it took away the power of like feeling all those feelings i had about those things i could get a piece of paper out right about a relapse and i can i can no longer have to like completely involve myself in that thing anymore and not only that like i felt like i was pretty decent at it because i was listening to i wasn't listening to these stupid songs growing up i was listening to like lyrical geniuses slug is the man like slug is one of the best artists of all times he transcends all types of music in my opinion the storytelling the way he wraps the way to be at the top of the underground game but still stay there even though he could have went dude his whole story to me in general is just amazing and his lyrics are dope but anyways

i i took a lot of that from him and i found out i was pretty good at it i've always been a singer you remember when i used to like do full-blown like concerts in kevin's car do i remember dude Marks basement Yeah Yeah dude Concerts And so I just The music has always stuck with me

But it wasn't until about four years ago They had this app come out Call rap chats Okay so like It's always a dream to make music But you can never really like Get all the things that you need to do lined up

The studio The how like Time to do it Where how do I even do this on audacity I've never even heard You know like all these things rap chats was this easy app that I could record on and get this music to other artists with a click of a button

so I made like 32 songs does it have beats built in yes and you can import your own oh nice so but not only that you could you could see how you marked against other people on the app like other people vote yeah no no like as far as like the trend like people listening to it because because it displays your music on the app so people will listen to just you your music on that app and it can

trend that way to get to the people that created the app so I was getting songs and then I transitioned to rap fame which is where he listened to some of my music and this is how I know that I got something going to where I don't know what's going to happen but I'm going to try I would drop a song on rap fame

I would see other people drop songs on rap fame my song would be featured so what that means is they feature it like they have a little page where you can go to on their on their app it goes to songs of the week pick of the week and they will put the people that they pick out of the millions of users on this app they would pick certain songs from people and i noticed that eight out of nine of my songs are featured on that damn list yeah you know what i mean so like i'm

sitting there and i'm thinking you know i i got something so rap fame the the technology getting easier and more accessible it's it's a double-edged sword now there's so many artists out there it's going to be a lot harder to get made but at least I can separate myself a bit because they're not featuring everybody they're featuring a lot but they're not featuring all these it's not the whole pond

that's getting into this so that's kind of where it went for me I started implemented singing into it I learned how to do backup vocals I learned how to do harmonies I learned like all these things remember that music video you saw that I shot never never thought that I could even put together something like that

and like as I go I'm I got this manager that from Illinois, he's always, like, pumped me up and said my stuff's good. So I had a good, like, support system. And every song I've made, whether I've put it on Facebook or there, I have never had someone say it's just all right. You know what I mean? And this isn't just from people that would normally just say, you know,

oh, that's good because you're my brother, you know, or whatever. These are from people that I don't know. Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of where my music is at the time. I'm working on my first country song right now. and it's really cool it has it has it has a fucking sick it has like a guitar in it like I'm trying to branch out because of MGK you know I'm just kidding I'm trying to branch out to different genres because I feel like that's what that's what a lot of people are doing post Malone just made his first country album I mean people are doing it and I think the more versatile I can be the more open the industry might be to letting me in there which is my ending goal obviously yeah but just the journey of continuing to make music express yourself to think therapeutic aspect of like almost feels like journaling because you're externalizing inner chaos that's in as unarticulated when you articulate it you get it out there it's in front of you and you put

words to feelings that are amorphous yeah which are as in and of itself therapeutic we're definitely going to play one if not more of your songs um in this episode so people can can check it out it's really good music like honestly i told you like it one of your songs was stuck in my head yep learning to change you and when i saw that video what the first thing that that hit me knowing you from all those years ago is like oh shit he's constantly been progressing he's adding elements that we would never think of back then

and just the way the sonic the sound of it is just more mature and you're layering in things so it's like this is real advancement and that's one thing like so I don't know what it's called I probably should know that as an artist but so what I would do in that song that you saw is I would rhyme

the first and the third bar together and then the second and the fourth bar together and that through the whole thing and I didn't see too many people doing that often. I do that in like 85% of my music. That's just the type of style I have. So it makes it more unique that I'm not rhyming every line, but I'm rhyming the one after

with the, you know, two back. And we actually spoke after I dropped the video. I messaged you on Messenger and we talked about it briefly and you were like, man, you have come so. So you actually did. I vaguely remember that. You gave me my props when that dropped all that time ago. I still hold out hope that we could do a shoe list

song together. Come down. Absolutely. What would it be so fun just to... You get LD 50 on there? No. Retire. I mean, we would be like shitty compared to Christian, but, you know, put it out on your albums or anything.

I would be terrible. All right, do you, I'm going to ask, the way we're going to wrap this up is advice for people that are going through shit. But, Dave, if you have anything else you want to say or any questions you might have, I know I kind of lead some of these discussions. So I want to make sure you have a chance to say anything. No, man, I was looking forward to this. Like, this is so fun. And, you know, what we talked about, like, in our lives, those formative years of us, like, together, we were in terrible places, like, bad spots, but we were with, like, good people. And, like, just to find each other, like, kind of in this swamp and this murk, like, these lighthouses to each other, like, it was just, like, just, like,

The three of us is so good to be there and we all had our own paths and, you know, we branched out and we had to learn life as it envelopes. But coming back together, it's just like, hey, isn't this like insane that we're still doing this thing, but we're still the same people that I knew back in my Toyota Camry and back in 48th Street and more tattoos, more gray hair? more low points in our lives more tragedies and sufferings but still the same fundamental people and this surreal feeling of reuniting after 15 years and it's the same feeling I had with Dave because me and Dave spent 10 years or so apart from each other and then we came back together to create shoeless one of the first things we started talking about as we rekindled our friendship was doing something like this together so it's just a surreal feeling and it's so fucking cool and I hope we can continue to to have connections for the rest of our lives honestly

because as we said in the beginning that transitional phase of our lives and we're finding out who the fuck we are is so influenced by the people you're surrounded with so all of us have the marks of each other in our personalities to this day yeah couldn't agree more with that so as a final way to wrap this up

certainly people listening are listening to a show like this because they themselves are struggling with addictions of various sorts or definitely know people in their lives just statistically if you know if you know more than five people you know somebody who has or is struggling

with some sort of addiction What advice would you give to people out there, both who are struggling themselves or who have a close family member they really love and they're trying to reach? Well, for the first, if you are one decision away from changing the entire trajectory of your life, all it takes is the one good decision to say, instead of continuing down this path, I'm going to try to do something a little bit different. you know the way that you the fear that you have of going through detox and the fear that you have of them drugs being away is nothing compared to the fulfillment of not having those drugs in your body anymore and that is and I know that that might sound like yeah what do you mean what I mean by that is if you're afraid of what it's going to feel like when you're going through those detoxes all you have to do is hold on to the thought of what it's going to feel like when you don't even have to have that fear anymore yeah plain and simple because guys three days of sickness for a full week of knowing what you did last night is always something that I'm going to take it every single day of the week. It doesn't matter if you have had 10 years, five years, one day, whatever, and you've went back out there. You do not have to stay there. It is not part of your story to continue your relapse. It doesn't have to be. All you have to do

is just take the little things that you did when you were clean, make a phone call to the right person and get right back on that horse and you have just as good a chance as anybody else to living the life that you always dreamed. You do not have to live in that sickness,

you do not have to live in that chaos, you do not have to wake up every day doubting yourself, lying to yourself, hurting the people you love. You can make one decision right now, even if you're listening right now. Make that phone call and ask for help. get into treatment, get into detox, go to the family member's house you know is going to keep you safe.

Whatever you need to do, you need to do it right now. Don't wait. Don't wait for one more drug. My cousin just OD'd last night and died. We're never going to see him again. All it takes with the drugs we have out there today is that one more use and you're not here anymore. Do not wait. Do not hesitate. Pick up the phone and ask for help because you do not need to live life. that anymore amen yeah for the loved one keep loving them but don't enable them yeah we're gonna leave it at that and we're gonna play us out with a song from what's your rap name titta titta titda hit it I sit back in I reminisce Thinking about when we were little kids

And all the stupid shit we did Can't believe all the things that I fucking missed I hope you know you made me proud I wish I could have been around To pick you up when you was down To be there when you start to drown But I remember getting loud And wrestling up on the couch

The living room is like a crowd And going nuts every single time the rock came out Now maybe this is overdue But I think it's time you heard the truth And yeah I know I'm older too But what I'm saying is I'm always looking up to you And I never should have up in bail With all the things I must have failed

But since we're talking to the nail I don't think I'd be here if it wasn't for that voicemail Bro, here for you, never forget that, right? I love you. Learning to change I'm learning to change. And I know you're hurting from all of this pain And you don't deserve it

You can't see my face But you give me purpose The reason I'm safe So I'll keep on learning Learning to change I guess that you'll be turning out Ain't it crazy all the time flies And from the moment I looked in your eyes

I knew that you were really mine Yeah See I didn't have a dad too So I know what that can do I just hope you understand soon You're not the reason I make bad moves No We're talking now and that's a blessing

You make me laugh Just being in your presence And if there's something I'm regretting It's any second that you ever felt like you were less than I promise that I'm here to stay And I know I live far away But each and every time I pray It's for the moment that I get you see your face to face

And I wish I could have watched you grow And showed you that you are my home But if you ever feel alone, just know I love you and that's more than you could ever know. Learning to change. I'm learning to change. And I know you're hurting from all of this pain. And you don't deserve it. You can't see my face

But you give me purpose The reason I'm safe So I'll keep on learning Learning the chain Learning the chain Learning the chain Learning to change Learning to change

Learning to change Learning to change Well, you're strong. Let's get it. Get up. Come on. You're my big girl. Let's go.

Come on. Don't be stupid. Let's go. Get up. Bro, here for you. Never forget that, right? I love you. Big bro.

I love you. Never forget that. Fight. Always fight. Always fight. That's what we're about.