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… I enjoy being able to talk to one another in the language of our private little club of former odd-ball’s. Not that that has changed much in my case. We do have a nightmare in common; we’ve all been to hell-and-back and have lived to laugh about it. I cherish my friendships in the AA program, well most of them, but I did discover that having more than a platonic relationship with somebody in the program is like inviting two garbage trunks to have a head-on collision going 100 miles an hour..!! That’s another story for another time. I want to talk about DUI vs. Murder....

On 60 Minutes, a case involving 24 year old Martin Heidgen of New York resulted in his being charged with murder. He was convicted of 2nd degree murder and given a lengthy prison sentence. Here in California some months back, 22 year old Andrew Gallo was charged with murder in the the case involving Angel pitcher Nick Adenhart and two others. My name is “Hoot” Hooten, author of Drunk & Disorderly, Again – My name is Hoot, I’m an alcoholic. If someone dies as the result of DUI, should the driver be charged with murder? How can DUI be called murder if the American Medical Association...

Or… maybe I’m crazy or did I hear right. Several college presidents across the U.S. have gotten together and think it would be a good idea to reduce the drinking age to 18! My thoughts? Oh, hell no!! Let’s just take a quick look at maturity. In the United States 14 % of our population is between the ages of 16 to 19, yet this age group accounts for nearly 30% of all motor vehicle accidents. In a recent survey, it was revealed that 12 teenagers die in accidents each day, mostly, boys. The primary reason for these astonishing numbers is lack of maturity. Our brains are just not fully...