If you’re the alcoholic in your family, then you’re always to blame. No matter what it is, if it’s bad and it happened in your household… YOU’RE TO BLAME..! Some of the crap I pulled made me guilty of even the stuff I didn’t do. No doubt, that’s what rolled around in my guilt ridden pea brain. Let’s look at the alcoholic’s children. Can we say for certain that the behavior of these kids is the result of having an alcoholic father? According to Jorge Valles, M.D., the general tendency is to say yes. If a boy misbehaves in school and it’s discovered that his father is an...

Hello my Fellow Drunks: Where do we get these lame expressions that are plastered all over the walls at AA meetings..? After all the years I’ve been working on changing the way I behave in a sober world, I’m still amazed at how often I awkwardly manage my life. The Main Ingredient, with Cuba Gooding Jr.’s father as lead singer, sang it: “Everybody Plays the Fool, sometime.” When I played that song on the radio, my comment was, “Yeah, but I just wish my turn wouldn’t come up so often.” Even though I laugh about it, it’s an ongoing feature of my personality. Now I come from a...

This is a blog with a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous language. I apologize to those who are reading this, that don’t attend a Twelve Step program, it’s just that AA saved my life and it’s doing so for those close to me. In AA, which took me a long time to digest, time means a lot. We all want to be able to say, “Yeah, I’m working on my second year.” Sometimes, doing time is just that – accumulating time. What’s important is HOW you do your time. For me, waking up, having a chat with God, reading from my 24 Hour book and setting a goal to be a better man today than I was yesterday,...

A twenty year study of the drinking habits of our senior citizens reveals some interesting factors. Aside from the fact that life gets lonely when your partner passes away and a drink or two helps pad the pain, it’s important to keep an eye on yourself, or your mother or father. The study found that older adults are more likely to engage in high-risk drinking, which is defined as more than three drinks per day or more than fourteen per week. Good grief, I used to down 14 drinks in one sitting on a regular basis. I spilled more than three drinks a day! I’m not bragging, I’m just sayin’…....

Hello my friends…. Recognizing you’re an alcoholic doesn’t necessarily mean you’re on the road to sobriety. For many of us, like me, it took years of living in and dishing out misery. So I’ve decided to give you an opportunity to hear firsthand what happened on the day I finally came to grips and found sobriety. On the front page of my website www.mynameishoot.com click on the opening chapter of Drunk & Disorderly, Again – My name is Hoot, I’m an alcoholic. It’s a FREE three minute audio of me reading Chapter One. Drunk and Disorderly, Again - Chapter One Alcoholism is not a...

Hello my fellow Drunks and those who have suffered with us. If you made a New Year’s resolution to quit drinking, but didn’t succeed, it’s time to take a look at what may have caused your relapse. For me, whenever I did a little “Stinkin’ thinkin’” I knew it was the alcoholic in me telling me, “Go ahead, this time it will be different.” That’s the same voice that used to tell me, after I closed the bar, “Call a couple of your old girlfriends, they’d love to hear from you. It’s only three in the morning.” Relapse is so common in the alcohol recovery process that it is...

Hello my fellow drunks and those of you who got the worst of our behavior. I was addressing the “Pity committe” in my head the other day, feeling like I’d been cheated in life because of my alcoholism. I recognized my backward slide down the highway of B.S. that eventually leads to the corner of Fifth and Vermouth, where the Last Ditch Attempt Saloon is located. I immediately made a sharp left turn back onto sobriety lane and quit my Stinki’n think’n. Years ago, Ernie my sponsor and mentor for life, (he demands continuous prime time mentions) sat me down with an old...

My beautiful friends from around the world. For the past several years, we at the Hooten household have been enjoying what has become an annual tradition in Germany. You’d think that a website dedicated to sobriety would take a dim view of this kind of behavior, but we don’t, because it’s a comedy skit. Every New Year’s Eve, half of all Germans plop down in front of their TV sets to watch a 1963 English comedy sketch called Dinner for One. Even though Dinner for One is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most frequently watched TV bit ever, it has never been...

Last weekend I drove from the beaches where I live in California, across the state on “blood alley,” as State Road 46 is known, because of the many head-on crashes there.  Nearby at Cholame there is a memorial to James Dean who died in a horrible car crash back in the mid-fifties where the 46 and 41 intersect. Oh man how I hate two lane roads. At one point the adrenalin kicked in as I challenged every horse my Chrysler 300 C’s Hemi-powered rocket could give me to get around a continuous pack of 5th wheels and RV’s pulling Toyota RAV 4’s and small Jeep’s. Undoubtedly, they bought those...

Being a drunk, is awful. I know, I was one for most of my life. In my book, Drunk & Disorderly, Again one of the worst nights of my life was at a chic night club in Houston where I had been emceeing.  I foolishly got into a “tequila shot contest,” went into a black-out and lost all control.  Cost me my job and I was tops in the market on the radio. That stuff doesn’t happen to me anymore, I’m 12 years old and enjoying life big time.  It’s funny when someone comes to me and says, “You know what John did,” then describes something he/or she did that was...