15 Years Sober Today

Living Life Without Alcohol

Me circa 1988 (age 5)

Circa 1998 (age 15)

Circa 2006/2007 (age 23/24)

Somehow, on this day, September 24^th, 2025, I have reached the milestone of 15 years sober. I had my last drink on the night of September 23^rd, 2010, in San Francisco, California, at the wild and tender age of 27.

This is a miracle.

Most of you who’ve been following me for a while now know my alcoholism story more or less inside and out at this point. I drank from 17 to 27, only for one sordid decade but, believe me, that decade was intense. (Read about the beginnings of it in my coming-of-age novel HERE.) In that one decade there were not many sober days, or, at a minimum, not many days that I didn’t have at least some alcohol in me. Probably something around 85% of that decade I was in some form of gray, brown or, most often, blackout.

I remember, in high school, coming to out of a total blackout only to realize I was actually somehow driving, that my car was packed with half a dozen buddies, all the windows were down letting in the icy January air in, The Adolescents or The Lower Class Brats were playing full volume on the CD player, and that we were rocketing at a scary 100 MPH on empty Highway 33, at 3am, having come two hours south from LA where my punk rock friends and I’d gone to see some 1980s punk band play in Hollywood, likely at the Troubadour.

I’d look around me, seeing all the sleeping and passed-out bodies, understanding that the only thing holding them and myself back from death was my body somehow operating this automatic skill in a blackout. Blacking out felt like time travel: You took the medicine and suddenly zoom: You came to hours, sometimes even days later, in a different place and time, with different people.

I remember hanging out with my buddy Jason at his house when he was 21 and me 20, rented out by he and three of his buddies in white trash Oak View, the town sandwiched between wealthy Ojai, where I grew up, and Ventura, where I’d been born and went to elementary school. I blacked out all the time. I never knew what I did or where I went during these blackouts. Years later, Jason told me that routinely—almost every time I stayed there—I literally passed out cold on their kitchen floor, a few feet in front of the refrigerator for some reason. This became so common that Jason and his roommates simply normalized it, laughed it off, made fun of me as a drunk, and stepped over my cold, lifeless body when they needed another beer from the fridge.

I remember the night I was drunk and playing with a knife and “accidently” stabbed myself two inches deep in my upper right thigh. I was rushed to the ER where the doctor stitched me up and labeled it a “gang wound” on the report, which made my friends and I cackle. We went home and kept drinking.

I remember the bums in Ojai we got to buy us beers as long as we gave them an extra couple bucks. I remember “fishing” for beer with my buddy Dash, standing in front of liquor stores around town and asking people over 21 to buy is brew. And I remember the one time we did that and the guy was an off-duty cop.

I remember literally one night, drunk, trying desperately to break an empty forty-ounce bottle over my head. (I failed.) I remember doing what we called The Iggy Pop Dance, where, performing for my punk buddies and a few punk girls we partied with, wasted of course, I’d put on Iggy’s song Search and Destroy as loud as I could and, using a pair of large, fully extended scissors, I’d madly slash my arms and torso, trying to mimic our proto-punk rock god hero. Blood everywhere, deep cuts, some of which are still there as permanent scars on my body, at age 42.

I remember being 19 and getting into my car after slugging a whole bottle of Southern Comfort. (I drank and drove constantly.) I passed out behind the wheel, drove across two lanes of the twisting, narrow country backroad between Santa Paula and Ojai called Highway 150, and crashed into a tree. I woke up hours later, covered in vomit, with the sound of the tap tap tap of a policeman’s metal baton lightly against my driver’s side window. They took me to Ventura County Jail. My car was totaled.

I remember the women I treated horribly, both emotionally, verbally, and, sadly, a few times physically. I remember the women I yelled at to never, ever comment on my drinking.

I remember getting arrested another time and literally calling the cop a “pig” and spitting in his face. Miraculously, he did not beat my ass. This is likely because I was a white upper-middleclass kid in early 2000s Southern California. (Lord I was lucky so many times!)

I remember passing out in an alley in Baja one night and waking up several hours deep into Mexico with people I didn’t know and in a car that wasn’t mine. I’d been kidnapped. Eventually, later that day, I made it back (illegally, without ID, and lying in the back of someone’s car) to San Diego, where I was living at the time.

I remember the constant moving, from city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood. I moved five times just in 2008 alone, all over San Francisco. I couldn’t stick with an apartment, a roommate, a girlfriend. I lied constantly. I was full of anger, self-hate and fury. I estranged myself as much as I could from my parents and family.

I remember pushing my ex, Rose, to the floor in front of her entire extended family at her sister’s apartment in the Outer Richmond in San Francisco in 2008, literally passing out with my head in her aunt’s lap. I was blacked out. I was told what happened the next day. Amazingly, Rose stayed with me for a while longer. God bless her for finally leaving me later that year.

I remember the anger and savage bitterness I felt towards what I perceived as a cold, aloof, emotionally detached father and a controlling, domineering, self-involved mother.

I remember being friends with Silas Downey, a SHARP skinhead (Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice) who used to be a neo-Nazi skinhead and had shifted to “our side.” He claimed to have moved from Ireland on his own at age 13. We once went to the beach and he took his shirt off exposing pale white freckled skin…and about three bullet wounds and two gnarly knife scars slashed across his chest. He told me the stories of his wounds. He told me about prison.

I remember, at 22, living in Santa Cruz and meeting some sketchy drug addicts who I proceeded to shoot heroin with.

I remember feeling lost for so many years—from my pre-teens through most of my twenties—barely graduating high school (I was expelled three weeks before senior graduation but was able, after a drug and alcohol rehab program, to get my diploma) and having zero career ambitions. All I wanted to do was live on my own, drink, have sex with random girls, go to punk shows, and get by. I remember the two dozen or so different shitty dead-end jobs I worked between ages 14 to 27, never happy, never going anywhere, never meeting my potential, never pursuing the one thing I’d always felt passionate about: Writing.

I remember doing all the drugs there were: Heroin, coke, LSD, magic mushrooms, ecstasy, somas, Vicodin, pot, booze, you name it.

I remember driving blind-drunk, before and after blackouts, when I had to cover one eye in order to see more or less “one” road. I remember violence: Fist-fights with guys I didn’t know on streets I’d somehow found myself on; crazy brawls between “my crew” and someone else’s; cutting myself; the screaming rage fights between me and my mother.

There were good times, too, of course: In fact some of the best times of my life: Being pulled into The Punk Rock Anarchy in High School by two guys who literally changed my life overnight. (Discovering punk rock and that community in Ventura and Ojai was like finding my tribe after a long Homeric odyssey.) Partying with friends. Surfing and skateboarding through all those years. Parts of my key relationships with the scattered, brave women I loved in those days. My Kerouac hitchhiking trips (read those stories here, including the true tale of when me and a guy I met on the road stole a car and got pulled over; he’d just been released from prison) around and across America circa 2006, 2009, 2010; these journeys for several months each time were absolutely life-changing and probably offered me the most revelatory insight on the human experience, and also gave me the most writing material ever.

And then there was hitting bottom, getting sober, leaving Oakland and the SF Bay Area for Portland, being introduced to AA and the concept of a Higher Power. Returning to the Bay Area only eight months later in June of 2011, going to therapy, doing AA, doing meditation with groups, going back to college yet again (it took me 11 years and seven colleges to finally get my BA degree), finally focusing on my writing, reestablishing relations with my parents and family, getting my first short stories published in literary magazines (even getting paid), becoming a book editor, having the first sober, serious romantic relationship of my life, which lasted four-and-a-half years.

And then that relationship ending. Owning a home. Moving to NYC. Chasing all my dreams. COVID. Returning to California in 2021 when my father was sick with cancer. Being his caretaker alongside my mother for two years until he died on June 2^nd, 2023. Turning 40. Falling in love with Britney. Getting married. Moving to Lompoc, north of Santa Barbara (where my folks had moved, leaving Ojai in 2020 after 30 years there). Then selling my house, buying property in Portland, and Britney and me moving there, too. The process getting the visa for Spain, chasing that dream. Following that dream, going to Spain.

And here we are/I am. Today is 15 years sober. I haven’t had a drug in close to 20 years (miraculously I was somehow able to quit drugs cold-turkey on my own at age 24 continuing only to drink until 27). Hell, I haven’t even had coffee in close to 15 years, nor a cigarette. We live abroad, which was a long time dream. I am a published author. I’m a married man. We have three cats. We travel often. I love my family, imperfect as we all may be. I have done the 12 steps many times, made amends with people. I am not the same kid I was at 17 or 27. I have matured, changed, grown.

Of course I am far from perfect and, as I have suggested, there have been plenty of struggles in sobriety over the last decade-and-a-half. Because life is still life. My personality, while matured, is still my core personality. I have the same DNA. My childhood trauma is still my childhood trauma. But I have learned over these years how to walk through hardship, such as losing a relationship, losing a parent, moving cities or even countries, dealing with COVID in a city where I knew nearly no one, family 3,000 miles away, pursuing a career as a writer and book editor. Getting sober doesn’t magically make life easier. In fact, in some ways it makes it harder because instead of taking the medicine and numbing out, instead of hiding and running away from fear: You have to face that shit. Nothing is harder than this, and nothing is more rewarding on the other side.

My life has never been easy, despite my racial and financial privilege. I grew up with two good, loving if imperfect parents who provided me with everything I needed and then some. I never lacked for love, food, support. All the possibilities of the world were open to me. The hardship mostly came not from life itself, or from anyone else, but from within myself. That’s what alcoholism is: A self-sabotage, a self-hate, a feeling of perpetual worthlessness, a constant feeling of fear, a need to tear everything down, the sensation of boiling rage at the world, a perpetual attitude of victimhood, the need to assign blame to others and point the finger which, as we know in AA, is always pointing back at us.

All my life I have gotten in my own way. Sometimes I still do. Even now I have a thirst for danger and risk, for pushing the limits, punching against boundaries, even if not in the surreal-like dangerous ways I did back in the drinking days. (For example, drunk, leaping off a moving freight train I’d hopped in Seattle, backwards, my body smashing against the pebbles half a foot from the tracks. Or being drunk and high on LSD in rural Maine and playing with loaded guns.) You change but you never completely, totally change. In some ways I’m still that angry, pissed-off 17-year-old punk rock kid. I’m still that freight-train-hopping 26-year-old madman. But I’m also the sober, deep, sensitive 32-year-old about to buy a house. I’m also the 36-year-old writer chasing his dreams moving to New York. I’m also the 39-year-old man helping his father die in peace.

And the 42-year-old husband and author living with his wife abroad, in Spain, outside of America.

In 15 years everything has changed and nothing has changed. Life has expanded and contracted. I have found self-love and self-acceptance. I blame no one for my issues anymore. I take personal responsibility. I am able to be there for my mom when she needs me, and for my wife. These three cats are my “kids.” This life is my own.

These chains, which once bound me in so many ways, have been removed.