I joined the Mormon church for a woman's ass.

Sure, I told myself that it was all about finding and getting “right” with Jesus, but actually and I knew it in my heart, I wanted that ass and I was willing to hang out with Jesus to get it.

I'll say that again so it lands the way it's supposed to. I sat through the missionary discussions, got baptized, moved out of my then-girlfriend's place so I could live righteously, stood behind the podium on Sacrament Sundays and testified to a faith I wasn't sure I had — and the whole time, underneath every prayer and every scripture I memorized, I was trying to convince myself that if I just said the right things long enough, I'd eventually mean them.

I didn't.

“It” didn’t. The “get right with Jesus” part. Didn’t happen. At least not in the way one would think.

That's not the even the deepest part of this episode.

I'm going to tell you about Malachi. Born May 20th, 1999. Gone, as in dead, July 31st, 1999. And what I decided about myself the day I found his body — a decision I carried around like a verdict for longer than I have words for. A combat medic who had never heard of SIDS. A man who was already drinking too much, already drowning in a marriage that started wrong, already running from something he couldn't name. And then a morning that stopped everything.

And I'm going to tell you about last night, 2026, and life having been lived into the moment that seems, like so many, just another mundane conversation in my head. Standing in the grocery store. The voice in my head making its case for a third or fourth Guinness for the night.

That fucking voice was patient, reasonable, persuasive as hell. Telling me I'd earned it. Telling me I could handle it. Telling me this time would be different.

It's the same voice and it’s one that I’ve heard many times about many things.

It’s the same voice that was with me when I stood at the one at the church podium all those many years ago.

The one let me know, deeply and effectively, after Malachi’s death, that I was indeed, without question, a living piece of shit.

The voice at the grocery store last night. The same goddamn voice.

And this episode is about learning to hear it without letting it drive.

Open your ears and your heart if you can.

That’s not some social-media shit—that’s how I move through life and found the kind of peace I didn’t even know fucking existed for people like me.

I'm 60 years old, sitting behind a microphone at 11 PM on a Sunday in St. Louis, humid as hell, not making a dime, and somewhere between a George Michael documentary and flipping someone the bird at a red light, something cracked wide open tonight.

And I fucking love it.

I've been homeless. A couple of times in fact. And the last stint was with my beloved wife. It’s that kind of shit that makes you wonder if you’re doing any of this “right”.

I’ve buried an infant child.

I've been married four times. Divorced four times. Four DUIs (and I wonder if that number matches the number of divorces in a deeper way… just sayin’)

I tried to leave this world on November 2nd, 1994 and I'm still here three decades later sharing what I have actually figured out in real time, and yet knowing that we still have those, “what the fuck that's supposed to mean” moment that seem to come whenever they please.

And tonight — not in a therapy office, not in a journal, not on a mountaintop — it got a little clearer.

This episode isn't about George Michael. Not really.

It's not really about road rage either. I mean, it might be, but I don’t think so.

It's about what happens when you stop using that question as a weapon against yourself and start actually listening for and to the answer.

Because "what the fuck am I actually doing" can destroy you or it can save you. It can burden you in ways that seem to beat the life and breath out of you, or you can sit with it and just let you and “it,” be.

And in so many ways, it really seems that the only difference is whether you're willing to sit still long enough to hear what comes back.

And yes, that can truly suck. Or not.

Other than that, it’s just a Sunday….

I didn't want to record today.

I said that into the microphone first because it was true — bad mood, grout cleaner fumes, two people with completely different internal rhythms trying to make something together on a Saturday when one of us wasn't feeling it at all.

This is what relationship patterns actually look like when the self-concept work is real and ongoing. Not the highlight reel. Not the resolved version. A farmer's market neither of us approached the same way, $32 a pound garlic from a vendor who knows you're hot and captive, a Led Zeppelin cover that personally offended me, and a woman who farted next to Sharon and kept eating her ice cream without a word of apology.

And inside all of that — the fumes and the garlic math and Sharon walking fast and then remembering she wasn't alone — two people with different inner voices, different relationship histories, different self-concepts choosing to be in the same day without either one pretending to be someone they're not.

That's the work. Not the theory of it. The actual lived version of what happens when you stop performing okayness for your partner and start being honest about what's actually going on inside you.

We also get into what happens to self-concept when you remove social accountability — what's really driving the behavior on the Carnival Cruise videos, the road rage clips, the person in the grocery store who stops their cart in the middle of the aisle and looks at you like you owe them something. It's not a race conversation. It's a self-concept conversation. About what people do when nobody's watching and the only thing left is who they actually believe themselves to be.

Sharon thought this episode was practice.

I deleted it before she finished the sentence. (hee hee)

This is We Say The Shit Out Loud — the show where two real people in a real relationship say the things most couples perform around, avoid entirely, or dress up so nobody gets uncomfortable.

Hey, if you didn't listen to Part One, why not? Hmmmmmm? *shakes his head...* Go ahead and listen to the first part....

__________________ I photoshopped my tattoos out of my dating profile.

Not because I was trying to deceive anyone. Because I genuinely did not believe I was worth loving as I actually was. That's what a damaged self-concept looks like in practice — you want the real connection, you want someone to see you fully, and then you show up as an edited version of yourself and wonder why nothing ever feels real.

This is Part Two of Family, Friends, Fakes and Frauds. Part One was about the inventory — who's in your life and why. This one is about the harder question: why did I keep attracting fakes and frauds in the first place? Because I was one. I faked giving a shit about conversations I didn't care about. I committed fraud by hiding what I was actually carrying — the abuse, the molestation, the suicide attempt, the grief — because I'd learned early that certain disclosures made people back away. So I tipped my toe into the emotional pool first to test how much they could hold before I went any deeper.

That pattern — performing okayness while privately drowning — is one of the most common relationship patterns nobody talks about honestly. It's how two people end up together, both faking it, both wondering why the intimacy never lands.

The way out wasn't therapy or a book or an affirmation. It was Skype. A woman on another continent I couldn't impress with dinner reservations. Nothing to do but actually talk. And somewhere in those hours of real conversation, the fraud stopped being sustainable.

Sharon is in the background of this episode arguing about whether 3:20 PM counts as dinner. She's also living proof that when you stop editing yourself, something real becomes possible.

Two jacked up people don't make something whole. They make something twice as jacked up. This episode is about how I finally understood that — and what I did about it.

I got my ass beaten with a rubber paddle while my father held me down with his forearm and my mother switched hands when her right arm got tired.

They called it spanking. I call it what it was.

That's where this one starts — not to revisit the wound, but because you cannot talk honestly about family without being honest about what family actually was. For me. In my house. On my specific body.

This episode is about the inventory. Family. Friends. Fakes and frauds. Not the definitions you were handed — the ones you actually live by, whether you've named them or not.

I'm going to tell you about the last time I saw my parents. My brother talking shit about my wife at our wedding while my mother stood there with her arms crossed. The choice I made that day and haven't reconsidered once. My father dying and finding out from my uncle because nobody thought to call me — and me not giving a shit, and being honest about what that says and doesn't say.

I'm going to tell you about the friend who only calls when he's been drinking. The brother who's wealthy enough to charter a private jet and didn't offer to help when we needed it — and how I sat with wanting him to and him not. The person who spends thirty minutes unloading their life and then says by the way, how are you doing.

And I'm going to ask you the question underneath all of it.

Why are these people in your life? What does keeping them there tell you about what you believe you deserve?

I didn't know families could actually enjoy each other until I married into one. That's not a punchline. That's the whole point.

I've got a cold Guinness, headphones on, and Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings playing while I talk into this microphone.

Very few people know I'm a classically trained flautist.

That's not the point of this episode, but it kind of is.

This one goes back to the beginning — not the beginning of the podcast, but the beginning of the pursuit. The Bible verses my father had me memorize while the belt and the rubber paddle said something completely different. The list of traditions I moved through trying to find something that made sense of what I was experiencing. Neville Goddard, Abraham Hicks, Eastern mysticism, the Church of Latter-day Saints, Elizabeth Clare Prophet — I needed answers badly enough to look everywhere.

What I finally understood is that the answer was never in any of those places. Not because they were wrong, but because none of them could tell me who I was. Only I had access to that.

You are the single constant variable in every experience you have ever had. Every single one. And until you're willing to sit with that — really sit with it — none of the books, the traditions, the courses, or the teachers are going to do what you actually need them to do.

I'm not counting listeners anymore. I'm not counting anything. Someone is going to hear this and know exactly what I'm talking about.

What do you hide? What do you submerge so other people will accept you? How much of yourself do you set aside just to keep the peace?

That's what this episode is actually asking.

I've been talking about bringing Sharon on for years.

Today she's here. Sitting across from me, right in front of the microphone, on a Monday in June that we weren't even planning on recording.

This is not what I imagined this episode would look like. It sure as shit isn't what she imagined either.

What you're going to hear is two people who have been together for twelve years doing what they actually do — which is talk, disagree, laugh, forget what they were saying, knock shit over, and somehow arrive at something true by the end of it. No outline. No formal introduction. No curated version of who we are.

Sharon refused to introduce herself. She was right to.

We talk about TikTok and why we haven't done it yet. We talk about Jelly Roll and Bunny XO and celebrity couples and irreconcilable differences and what it actually takes to make something real work. We talk about her cancers. About four marriages and four divorces and what made the fifth one different. About schedules and the word fuck it and why consistency means something different to us than it might to you.

And at the very end, Sharon figures out why she was resisting posting the TikTok conversation we recorded earlier.

It's a good reason.

She's here. It took as long as it needed to.

I made a list.

Four marriages worth of lists actually.

One could reasonably say that I sucked at finding the one to love, the one with whom all of life could be truly shared.

Four marriages.

Four divorces.

How in the actual fuck did I even think that a fifth was possible and not end up like the other four? Out. Of. My. Everlasting. Mind.

Right?

But you see, I still believed, despite all of the shit that I thought about myself, was that the right person with the right qualities was “out there.” And together, we would figure out the relationship from there.

Together.

Didn't work.

Until…

This episode is about what I finally asked myself instead — what if I stop focusing on the person and start defining the relationship I actually want? And what if I go even further back than that and ask who I need to be to participate in that relationship honestly?

I talk about the sexual abuse and what it did to my ability to be intimate with another person. About the litmus test disclosures — giving someone just enough to see if they recoil before you give them the real thing. About learning the hard way that preemptive disclosure doesn't work and that trusting yourself means trusting the timing.

I didn't know Sharon existed when I made my list. I didn't know what year she was born or what her skin looked like. I just did the work on myself and defined what I actually wanted honestly for the first time. And then she showed up.

I don't know how that works exactly.

I'm just telling you it did.

The free workbooks are at www.theloveofyourlifetime.com.

Start with The Mist. Everything else follows from there.