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...

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,...

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...

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...

Hello you bunch of drunks… and I love you when I say that. I was reading from Buddy T. at www.about.com when I saw this headline: Novelty Seeking Individuals are at High Risk Parental alcoholism is a risk factor for children to become alcoholics themselves, but that risk increases significantly if the children, especially boys, have novelty-seeking personalities, with risk-taking, thrill-seeking and impulsive characteristics. Another piece of the crazy puzzle of my life, came together. As a boy in Grants Pass, Oregon, I’d jump off anything, anytime, anyplace into water. My brother and I jumped off...

I was cruising up the 101 this morning, on my way to play golf with my buds enjoying the beautiful cliffs of Pismo and Shell Beach, reflecting on how much I have to be grateful for. As I looked in my rear view mirror, there was a bone-head in a jacked up pick-up truck, about 20 feet off the ground. He couldn’t have been more than three feet behind me. I could barely see the middle of his grill in my rear view mirror. I pulled over and let him pass; ever grateful for the two jack-ass rule I learned from a friend in the program. (Allow two jack-asses a free pass across your path, per day, without any...