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"The Devil ain't a who" |S:03E.71
"The Devil ain't a who" |S:03E.71
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About this episode
Jerry Wayne Longmire shares his personal journey with addiction, focusing on his experiences with opiates and the impact they had on his life and work. He reflects on the societal pressures and justifications that led him to rely on painkillers, revealing the struggles of balancing work and personal pain. The episode also touches on the challenges of the publishing process for his upcoming book, and the importance of honesty in discussing addiction. Jerry's candid storytelling provides insight into the complexities of addiction and recovery.
Topics:
addiction
opiates
personal stories
recovery
publishing challenges
blue collar work
mental health
government policies
How much wood could a Woodchuck chuck if a Woodchuck could chuck wood? A whole mess of it with the right pills. The devil don't come in an angry man, he's charismatic, gregarious, helpful even.
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Welcome to the Wrecking Yard. I'm Jerry Wayne Longmire and y'all are
presumably still y'all. All are welcome here in the Church of Internal Combustion. We just
asked that you show up with an open heart.
Let's see if this works this time. My camera's giving me a little grief this morning. It stops
recording every 10 minutes. I can't figure out what's going on with it. Hope you guys are having
excellent weekend. It is Sunday morning for me, about 10.30 in the am now.
It's been a busy week. Not even really a bit. Well, yeah, it's been a busy week. Not so much
with comedy work. I did have shows last weekend. I was performing at the racetrack here in Houston,
Sam Houston Racetrack Park. I'm a little frustrated with those guys right now.
Still hadn't gotten paid for that gig and they want me to go to San Antonio this weekend and do
two more shows for them. I'm hesitant to drive my ass to San Antonio when I hadn't
gotten paid for the last gig yet. We'll see what happens. I'm looking forward to those San Antonio
shows. I'm feeling a little sketchy right now about everything. We've got a lot coming up,
man. We've got San Antonio this coming weekend and then I'm going to go out to the lemons
on Sunday when I get back to San Antonio and go see my good buddy Christian Mental Ward with
Everyone Racers podcast. They sponsored me most of my first season of the Rec and Yard podcast and
they're a good bunch of people and looking forward to getting to hang out with all my buddies I met
last year at the lemons event. We are... I'll find myself in a strange position
and that government shutdowns have not affected me too much in the past. I've never
worked for the federal government, never been in the military, never had to depend on anything from
the federal government, you know, aid and stuff like that. I mean, I've gotten aid and stuff before,
but never had to deal with it during government shutdown and it's selfish, but by and large,
it's never really affected me before, but this one is affecting me funny enough. Some governmental
policies are somehow getting through to my little universe and affecting me and it's kind of strange,
but my book, we're trying to get it out by fall of 2026, but now we've got a hold up
with all the printing because most of the books are printed in India or at least a large,
large, large portion of written manuscripts and books are printed in India
and because of tariff rates and I don't understand it all, but basically it's stuff involving the
tariffs on their end is it's putting a delay on everybody's books getting printed, which is
it's a little strange to be dealing with. So you wouldn't think geopolitics would,
global politics would get in the way of getting a book printed, but apparently this is where we're
at is where we're at. On top of that, we're finishing up the ARCs, you know, the ARC's got
to be done here in November, so we can start going through all the sub right stuff, but when you get
all those pages have to be copyrighted. Well, there's nobody working in the copyright office
right now. Copyright office is shut down to essential employees, which means there's like
three people there running the whole thing and they're not doing any of that kind of stuff right
now, so they don't get the government back on track. We're going to be delayed on that and that's
just a weird, strange position to be in that I have not ever found myself in. I guess I should
count myself lucky I hadn't been in that position yet. I'm sure it will resolve itself as things
tend to do and all the saber rattling ends and everybody figures out what they're going to
get together on and that whole nonsensical theater that happens in Washington, D.C.
Makes me irritated because I've had to read more about it than I've ever really wanted to.
I just don't care for all that nonsense.
Days episode, I'm going to tell you right now.
I'm going to talk about addiction quite a bit in depth and in detail about
some things that happened to me and stuff I went through with opiates. And if that's triggering
for you or you're struggling with that, you don't want to hear that, I want to let you know that.
This might not be a good episode for you. I hate to see anybody miss one, but I understand.
It's a lot to think about sometimes and I'm going to try to be very honest about it and
sometimes honesty is not pretty. But I thought about it a lot this week, as a matter of fact.
For two reasons. One, one of the things we've been doing with my book, so Adam, my editor guy,
Buddy, he teaches editing classes, developmental editing for the, I guess it's University of
California, UCLA. And for the past two semesters, we've introduced parts of my book to allow his
students to try to break it down and try to understand it and help kind of shape them as
developmental editors and give them something to dig their teeth in really long. And
during the course that when we do that, so usually at least one class during that semester,
I will sit in via zoom and the students can ask me anything they want to ask me about the book and
talk to me about themes and stuff like that in the first book, The Reckon Yarn.
And it was very interesting the last semester, but this semester in particular was really good
feedback because it was not my normal demographic. Most of the students in the class are female and
most of them pretty young college students. So it was a real test to see that it does,
will my book ring with these, these young ladies like the, will they find something to relate to
in it? And much to everybody's surprise, including mine, they related to it quite well.
And so much as a lot of them are really excited about seeing the finished version of the book,
and a lot of them are really excited about the second book, which gave me a great deal of hope.
But two of them, two or three of them gals got my head about something. They were going through
the book and they said, you know, when you, you're obviously kind of healed and well adjusted now,
but when you talk about some of the stuff you go through, you're almost kind of passive about it.
You don't, you don't really get into the grittiness of like what actually they were specifically
talking about drug use. And it just surprised me, I guess, because I grew up in the blue collar world
in the labor side of the blue collar world. And nobody ever asked me why I started doing drugs.
That was a question I never saw coming. I don't know. Like why, why, I did drugs the way most
people did. I started doing them at work and I got turned on to them through dudes I work with
and family members and stuff like that. I don't know. It just kind of floored me. So I got to
thinking about specific stuff I'd gone through and then I tackled a project this week and I
haven't tackled a big project in a while, at least big for me to be doing by myself anymore.
But I decided to, you all know, a few months back we had some little kittens and they got killed
by some stray dogs.
When those stray dogs come in, they tore my porch all the hell, our screen porch, all the hell
and did a bunch of damage to it. And there was also a bunch of damage done to it. Rachel's brother
used to live in this house and he, well he's schizophrenic and he did a lot of damage to this
place and also did a lot of weird electrical work. He's not, he's not proficient at electrical work,
but for some reason he decided to mess with a whole lot of the electrical system in his house and
every once in a while I find fingerprints of crap he messed with and I have to go in there and sort of
sort out whatever craziness he decided was how something should be done and fix it.
And this isn't like your normal run of the mill like, oh the last guy worked on this didn't know
what he's doing. I'm gonna come in here and set it straight kind of shit. Like don't get me wrong,
as a contractor I've done plenty of that. But this is beyond anything like,
to give you an example, when I first started working on this house, remodeling this house,
so my family could move into it, every time you turned the lights on in the kitchen there was
a buzzing sound in the wall. Now that buzzing sound had never been, I've been to this house
plenty of times, spent plenty of time over here working on stuff for grandma and never heard that,
but that all occurred after we removed him from the house and I would go in the kitchen,
there turned the light on, there was buzzing, there was heatful notes written everywhere and
all kind of crazy stuff, but I kept hearing in the drywall in this one part of the kitchen,
I kept hearing this weird sound, right? I said boy I don't, sounds electrical.
And I could tell that he had cut some of the drywall and done something with the drywall
and done a very poor patch in that kitchen, because his drywall skills are about on par with
his electrical skills. So one day I just decided to cut that drywall patch out
and what I actually found was like eight patches all through the wall in the kitchen,
where there once had been a, I think some kind of outlet I don't remember,
but he had literally just taken the black and the white wire and twisted them together
and stuck them in a wire nut, oh they didn't even have a wire nut, they were just tucked behind
the wall, he had decided that circuit wasn't energized anymore and they weren't touching enough
to make really good contact, but they were just enough to, this house was flipping breakers doing
all kind of weird stuff when I first got over here and then I just found these two wires twisted up
together, hidden behind drywall, like what the actual, I want to say the F word right there,
but yeah, what? Who does that? So I had to retrace that circuit, of course get up in the attic,
figure out where that circuit was tied into, where it was being energized and
it was a big old rigmarole before I got it all straightened out and he had done a lot of
weird stuff with the switches in there and had also put some coffee mugs in the wall
after he drywalled it up, which didn't, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I've never seen
stuff, but so I tackled this other, so when those dogs came and demolished this porch,
I knew I was going to have to redo it all at some point, but also in one corner of the porch,
we had a bunch of termite damage and we're having all those termites forms, those termites got in
some of those porch posts and eat them up after we thought we had already killed all the termites,
they showed back up and I have my good buddy Tim Moss, Wildlife Removal Services does pest
control, he come out here and got rid of the termites for me. So decided this week that I would
go get some lumber, actually I wasn't even going to get some lumber, I had this great cedar lumber
out here, I told you all the story of how I've drugged from place to place and I thought I had it
protected and apparently termites eat, see I was living under a livestock, I didn't think termites
ate cedar, I did not think termites were a fan of cedar because the terpenoids in cedar, but
them termites ate the shit out of my good cedar, I ain't got much, I'm gonna have to take it out
there and cut it, cut what's good out of it and plant it all down, but they did a number on some
of my good cedar boards, so I ended up having to go buy lumber for this project, which was not
something I was planning on doing. Pying lumber just sucks anymore, like it's always been kind of bad
going to Home Depot and Lowe's for lumber, like you can get a lot of crap lumber, but I just went
to get some one by two furring strips, which I know that's rough, you know, furring strips are
rough stuff, I'm not expecting them to be prettier trim level pieces of wood, but I thought I'd get
some furring strips and use the backside of the square side of them to hold my screen down,
it'll look nice, the old original trim on the porch is just real thin lath stuff and it just
doesn't hold staples or anything very well and I wanted something that's going to have a little
more substance to it, you know, as far as holding the screen up.
But man, the lumber selection at our Home Depot was just awful. I bought two
kiln dried, treated eight foot two by fours, one 10 foot two by four and a 12 footer and
just saved myself some effort, I primed them and pre-painted them before I put them in,
did like a couple of days before I started the project, laid all the wood out, primed it,
painted it, well supported on saw, saw horses.
No reason the world that wood should have worked, not a not a not a single reason the world that
wood should have worked, but that damn 12 foot and 10 foot two by four looked like silly string
after about a day. It amazed me how badly it warped up.
If you do any kind of carpentry work or anything like that, I know most people here are kind of
car oriented, but some of us do some carpentry and stuff, you know, working with crooked wood
ain't no fun. This adds extra level of frustration to the project, something that should have been
kind of easy. On top of that, the whole the inside of the porch just dirty and,
you know, 75 years of grime. I want to get in there and pressure wash it all out and everything,
all that good stuff and kind of start fresh with a new little space in there for us,
clean it up really good, pressure wash the floor.
All this is to get to a point, tell you, I just don't move as quick as I used to
on the job site. I'm a long way removed from young man used to get out there and build
half a boardwalk in a day. I'm also not on the drugs I was on when I was doing that.
It got me thinking when I was working on this porch and I've told you all the story.
But the last time I worked on this porch was about a decade ago.
It was right after Uncle Jerry died, great Jerry. Uncle Jerry went in the hospital
for what was supposed to be a routine
surgery and they were going to put a stint in and he ended up, they nicked a vein,
he ended up bleeding out. I thought Jerry didn't make it through the surgery.
It was devastating. It was a year after Rachel's father died and then she lost her uncle who was
the only other big male role model in her life growing up.
She lost both her grandfathers at one of them at a young age, but the other one had dementia
since she was pretty young and she didn't really get to have much of a relationship with him.
So her father and Uncle Jerry were her big, you know, those were the guys,
those guys and Uncle Jerry thought the world, the sun rose and set on Rachel.
They also thought that about my kid. He just loved my children.
He's one of those people in my life I'm mad he's not around because
we just bonded really well. Me and him saw I die on a lot of stuff that,
you know, Rachel's father didn't always see I die on, but Jerry had a little more in common.
So anyway, right after Jerry died, Jerry had been talking to me about coming over and
screening this porch for grandma. He had all the screens cut out and had them ready to go,
had all the new screen material ready to go, rolled up, organized and
he had been feeling too bad to do it and he had, you know, pondered whether maybe I would come over
and help him do it and I was, yeah, as soon as you get feeling better, we'll knock that out.
Well, he didn't get feeling better.
So the day of the funeral,
after the funeral, we had a little reception over here at the house.
Get together for the family. Instead of visiting with the family, I took it up on myself to
re-screen that porch for grandma because sometimes those of us whose love language
or acts of service, which I suspect mine in a great way is, I don't really have a problem
expressing my love for people, but my favorite way to express my love for people is through acts of
service. I wanted to do something for grandma and I couldn't do anything to make her feel
better about outliving her two sons and losing the one who was, uncle Jerry was like her caretaker.
He lived here with her and, you know, they had lived together for great many years and he had
taken care of her and she lost a lot with him and I just wanted to do something for her.
He says about 10 years, oh, it was 2016, nine years ago,
February. Get close on 10 years.
And I sat out, I stood out there and I re-screened that porch for grandma,
where everybody else ate chicken and hung out in the kitchen, swapped lies.
And I always, I thought it was kind of peculiar, none of those men offered to help.
Not a single man in what was left of this family offered to help in any shape or form.
But grandma was out there with me the whole time while I worked on that porch.
She stood out there and talked with me and watched while I worked on it and chatted with me the whole day.
She was just a special kind of woman.
But she told Rachel that day, she said, his work is very neat. J.W. does neat work.
And that always tickled me because it wasn't an adjective anybody ever used to describe me or my
work before, but it tickled me.
But I remember how quickly I did that screen that day, just in a matter of hours.
Now, during that, we kind of changed the design of the porch this time and everything,
but I've been working on this porch for four days now.
In between also working on the book and other stuff, you know,
my life's a little more compartmentalized now. I can't just devote a whole day to
something anymore. I have to make content. I have to answer comments, that kind of stuff,
do social media work and, you know, in between all that, find time to finish right in the book and
write these every week.
But I was out there working on that porch this week and just thinking about how my
body moves differently and how things have changed since I first got into doing that
kind of work, you know, especially when I was doing it for a living.
And I was thinking about what them girls said about, like, why did you get into drugs?
And it made me think back to, like, what happened to me?
What was it that spurred me to ever get on them damn opiates?
And the truth of the matter is it's because I got hurt. It's the same story for a lot of people
getting involved with those particular types of drugs. They got my Serbian shift knife or
whatever you want to call it, Amazon knife. I love his knife, but it's been dull for a while
and I kept meaning to go get it sharpened by somebody. But then I figured out a way to use
my little rolling sharpener with it by putting my rolling sharpener on a higher plane, even though
the blade's so tall that I could still use it. And so I'm going to work on that a little bit.
I apologize for some of the noise in advance.
I'm smoking some beef short ribs today and I'd like to have my knife all ready to go when it's
time to. So I've told y'all the story. I don't remember exactly what year it was, but
it was when I was working for Metco Industries. It was a testing company. And that's where I tore
my back up the first time. That's where I tore a disc in my back while working for that company.
And like a fool at the time, because I didn't know any better,
I trusted the workman's comp doctors. And the workman's comp doctors gave me a bunch of
Percocet and told me just to rest and come back to work a couple weeks. Everything be fine.
Well, I guess I just believed them. When a doctor hands you some pills,
gives you a prescription, you think, you know, they're looking out for my best interest.
Why should I take these pills? And I did. I took those Percocets and
those Percocets made me feel good. Made me feel not only like my back wasn't that hurt.
Hell, I feel like I could do more than they ever could before like I could focus better.
Get to work. I'd take one of them Percocets. Boy, I could shoot film all night,
move heavy stuff around, get more done. Well, you get more done. You can take more hours.
When you can work more hours, you get more money.
And that's a great deal of the motivation in the blue collar world. How many hours can I work?
How much money can I make?
It took me a long time to realize I was getting fooled by myself. I remember
when I first understood what it was that I was doing to myself was an old man
that I knew and was sometimes a bit of a business mentor to me. He told me one day,
Mr. Bob, he said, Jim and Jerry, you know, a man can make a living with his hands.
But to make money, you got to use what's between your ears.
You ain't never going to make money with your hands. Your body's going to give out first.
But you can make a living with your hands, but you're only going to make money with what's between
your ears. I wish that lesson had soaked in when he taught it to me. It sadly didn't.
And for a time, I took those painkillers and I worked that job doing that x-ray work and
it helped me get by. I could climb towers. I could still work. I could still do
things my body needed to do. Then after that, I got into comedy. And when I got into comedy,
I didn't need to be able to do those things anymore. And I quit taking those pills.
And I got into other things, got into other drugs, started drinking a lot. Drinking makes my back
feel better. That's the true story. Or at least makes me not care so much about the pain.
The pain didn't go away. I just found other ways to deal with it, but I also wasn't wrecking my body
on job site anymore once I started doing comedy full time. I was still young and
could sleep just about anywhere. Boy, what I would give to go back for that. Not,
I don't want to go back and be young again.
But what I would give to be able to sleep like I did when I was 22 years old.
To just lay down on it. I could lay down on the floor. I used to sleep sitting up
in the truck seat. You know what I mean? I could do that now if I had to.
I sleep in the wrong place in the wrong position now. I'm not going to wake up injured.
A few years later, me and Rachel got married, got back in construction work. My back started
giving me problems again. I went and saw a doctor and that doctor prescribed me high
codom. Just like in Percocets, I take them high to codom. Boy, I could go work all day.
I never partied on them. It wasn't like a party thing for me. I didn't take them and drink.
I didn't take them to have fun, but I took them every day. I took them every day. I would take
four of them every day. Every day. Like clockwork. I could tell when my pill was wearing off. I
needed to take another one. I used to take one in the morning right before I go to work.
And then I would bust. I would get there about 6 a.m. and I'd go hard until about 11 30 noon.
And I'd go eat me a little bit of lunch. I'd take another one of them pills and I'd go hard
in the paint until about 6 6 30 7 o'clock. And then when I got my truck go home, I'd take me another
one of them pills. No way. By the time I got home, I wasn't so much pain. I'd get on the floor,
play with them babies, hang out with Rachel.
Come about 9 or 10 o'clock. I'd take another one of them pills an hour or two later.
I'd be asleep and then get up 5 30 a.m. the next morning and do it all again.
And in those days, I generally worked six, seven days a week. I was trying to start a business.
But in early days, you know, I had a helper here or there, but most of it was me. It was me
unloading the wood trailers, me and and I was taught construction, you know,
by a family that this didn't, you didn't take days off because you were hurt. You didn't take
days off because you were sick. You just went to work. You just went to work. You had to go make
that money every day. It becomes a need. And then pills were keeping me going.
And you don't, when you, when you're in the middle of that, you don't look so far into the
futures to say am I always going to have to take these things. You don't think about that stuff.
You just think I need to work right now. I need to do this right now. Like I said,
it wasn't, you know, that's why I used to tell myself just right. This isn't recreational. You
need this. You know, after a while,
it gets harder to get them pills. Government started cracking down on them. They were having
an opioid epidemic in Kentucky and they want to make these pills harder to get. So all of a
you know, regular doctors wouldn't prescribe these pills anymore. Got hard, hard to get. I had to start
buying them. People that sold pills and those pills are a little bit more costly. So now you
got to work more and make more money to buy the same medicine that allows you to do the work again
with. Now you're using more of your medicine to work. And my buddy Steve at the time, I haven't
spoken a lot about Steve in this particular era. This is about 2011. I'm in the throes
of what I will call opiate addiction. I've been taking those pills off and on for nine,
eight years at this point.
And every time they were hard for me to get, I would try to quit them. I'd go,
you know what, I'm just going to quit taking them. And then God almighty, I've been more pain than
I've ever been in my life. Two or three days dragging myself to job site and getting behind
at work and not hard to be able to do anything because I was in so much pain. I'd go hunting them
pills again. And I don't know what it's like where you're at, but here in Houston, there was a solution.
So Houston had a lot of pill mills. And if you don't have a pill mill is I'll give you a basic
explanation and go see a pain doctor. I put that in quotations for y'all listening.
You usually just look pain doctors, chronic pain doctors, something like that.
You go see this pain doctor for this little bullshit exam and they would prescribe you a cocktail,
three pill cocktail. The most common one that I used to get prescribed was
the hydrocodone for the pain, soma, which is a muscle relaxer, a lot of wrestlers like using it.
And then usually it was like Xanax or something like that, some kind of
benzo, Valium or Xanax.
Which now, knowing what I know, you shouldn't take any of those three drugs together. They're a bad
kind. I think one of those combinations is what I don't want to say that, but I think Heath Ledger
died from some kind of combination like that. I don't know 100%.
It's a deadly cocktail. Those are not drugs you should be taking together. Benzo's are
terrifying, terrifying drugs. They're one of the few drugs like alcohol that can kill you if you
just quit taking them. Your body develops such a physical need for it that it can kill you if
you just quit taking them cold turkey. You need to quit taking them under a doctor's advice. Luckily,
I never liked that. I never took those. I didn't want to feel down and run down and Xanax just,
I've taken one before and it just, I didn't care about anything. It knocked me out. It's not my type
of thing. I also didn't like the muscle relaxers because it couldn't work. Couldn't take muscle
relaxer to work. And when I took them in the evening, they would knock me into such a deep
sleep. I had a hard time getting up in the morning. So I would never, it would never even take those,
but I would take those high decodones every day.
And when you go to these pain doctors, they give you this prescription, then you have to go
it's basically a pharmacy run by somebody else in collusion with the pain doctors. You have to go
to a specific pharmacy. It's usually not a very nice joint. It's not like, it's not like going to
Walgreens. You can't go get these prescriptions filled at Walgreens. You got to go to one of these
pill mill pharmacists to get these prescriptions filled and you have to fill all three prescriptions.
And back then, I think to fill all three for a month's supply would cost me about $180 plus
the doctor's visit was another $100. So you had to come up about $300 every month to go get these
filled. But, you know, when I found these pain doctors, I thought, oh, well, now I got a solution.
But because these things kind of work on the skirts of the law,
and mostly on the outside skirt of the law, they would get shut down and reopen and shut down
and reopened and doctors fired and doctors would disappear. And half time these doctors was on the
pills, too. And they would try to make it all usually as doctors in a rough part of town. It was
over in Channel View. It was somewhere you had to take a decent drive or was a lot of these doctors
up in Montgomery County at the time. So I would have to leave Conroe about once a month, take a
day off work and try to get you want to get you got to get the doctor like eight or nine o'clock
morning. You want to be one of the first patients seen. See this pain doctor because quicker you
get your prescription, quicker you get over the pharmacist, you might get yours filled before
they run out for the day because they could only fill so many prescriptions in a day.
And so you go over there early in the morning, leave an hour or two ahead of time,
get over there early in the morning, pay your money, see the doctor waiting line.
And there was a lot of different people in these rooms and I would think of them as junky. I would
think of them as drug addicts. I wasn't like them. I needed this medicine. I needed this medicine
to work. I wasn't like them. These were these are just drug addicts and the way of me getting my medicine.
Along with those people you also have, you would have five or six girls in there getting a prescription
and there'd be a dude waiting for them outside. And the way this work is he would wait for them
outside and he would drive them over to the pharmacy. He'd pay the doctor visit, pay for their
pharmacy, then they get your prescription and he'd give them a little handful of pills to get them
by and then he'd take the rest and sell it on the black market, dope market.
So there's always a couple handful of people like that in there too. You could,
these pain doctors were pretending like things were legit but nobody was asking any questions.
Maybe you go to the pharmacy. Sometimes the pharmacy is just a house.
Like there was one I used to go to over off Calvagate. It was what we call a little yellow
house pharmacy and it was just in a neighborhood and you go over there and there's bars all over the
stuff and you're just sitting in somebody's living room waiting to be called back and
get your prescription filled and they might, they might mark it up. Sometimes it wasn't 108.
Sometimes it was another, it was 200 something dollars.
Then I got to a point where my buddy Steve was taking all the pills. He liked Soma. He liked,
he liked all of it and he had friends that he liked doing pills with
and so I would give Steve these bottles, these pills I wasn't going to take
and he'd go sell them and we'd get some money back that I could put towards my next prescription.
But it becomes a cycle. You become,
I mean, I'm not, let me tell you something. The opiates will take over your brain. There's a reason.
There's a reason so many people are addicted to them. There's a reason people will hurt themselves,
physically hurt themselves, go to a hospital and get some prescribed to them. There's a reason
ER doctors have to watch out for drug addicts because people will physically injure themselves
just go in there and get them some pills. That's how good those pills are. I'll tell you when I
get them. They let my body move again, gave me that freedom back.
You don't realize you're being controlled by something until you're, you're steady off in the
depths of it. You don't realize what a grip it has on your mind and your soul until every once
while when my pain doctors closed down, I'd be like, I ain't going to take this mess no more. I
been so much pain. Now I've lost three days at work. Now I gotta go take another day, go find
another pain doctor, drive all over Houston, get my prescription filled. But by God, when you leave
that pharmacy with that brown paper sack full of them pill bottles, you just felt so like, oh,
it's going to be all right now. I just had to get my medicine. That's what you tell yourself. I just
now I'm gonna take on extra jobs and make up for this time I lost. You start mortgaging tomorrow
for today. And I mortgaged a shit ton of tomorrows for today's. For days that I needed to carry wood
up two flights of stairs and rebuild a balcony by myself. For days that I needed to run an alligator
off. For days that I needed to be able to do stuff that I couldn't do without them pills.
For days I needed to be able to work like Superman. And that was every day.
Pouring concrete by myself, mixing concrete by myself, pouring sidewalks, finishing sidewalks
till nine o'clock at night. You start justifying it, man. It's real easy to justify. I gotta have
this is the only way I can survive my family. You don't look as I'm taking anything away from
my family. It's I gotta have this is the only way I can support my family. I got to have this.
And I imagine there's there's people that do drugs for all kind of reasons.
Not all pain is physical. In fact, I think most people that really mess with any kind of toxic
get most of the time are looking away to ease some pain.
Whether it's emotional pain, traumatic pain, or actual physical pain. But you can read story
after story after story of people getting addicted to opiates in particular because of hurting
themselves on the job site or a dental procedure.
Them factory drugs is good. Factory drugs is real good. They get ahold of you.
You don't even realize they got ahold of you until you're off in it. So you're being owned by these
things. And then it gets a point
where it's just a cycle every month you're out hunting these pills.
And you're dealing with nefarious characters because sometimes you can't find a pain doc.
Sometimes you gotta go find one of these guys and save some pills. Now you're paying two,
three dollars a pill.
I don't know. I don't know how it happened so easily.
But at some point, I can tell you by 2011, I was living on these things. And when I couldn't get
them, I'd shut down.
Hell, I'm here one time. I went so far as I met some people. I don't know how they did it. I
assumed they robbed a pharmacy, but sold me a big like the pharmacist bottle of these pills.
And I scrambled to get the cash to do it because I needed them because I had to have them.
And then they just become a part of everything like you got to take them every day.
And they start and the thing is, is they're not really fixing the pain. They're just
masking it. They're just masking the pain. So while you're doing all this crazy building stuff,
I've talked about this before, you're just doing more damage yourself.
And I've seen, I've seen good men,
contractors, doctors, I know a judge that ruined their lives over these pills
that threw away everything they had worked for to keep getting these pills.
And not everybody, not everybody gets away from it. I was fortunate. I got away from it.
I got away from it. And I told you, my mother was dying at such a young age of liver failure.
I was like, I'm not going to end up in this boat. I got to do something about this. I'm not
going to be 57 and leave my kids alone in this world because I couldn't get off these damn things.
And I broke the spell and got free from, but it is one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.
And you tell yourself stuff to justify it all the time. But let me tell you,
my inner monologue was still telling me all the time, you're a junkie. You're a drug addict.
You ain't worth a shit. You can't do anything for anybody unless you take this
pill, put this pill in your body. And I say, no, I need this. I got to have this for work. I got
to have, I'm in pain. I'm in pain. I got to have this. But that inner voice the whole time is
talking to you. You tell yourself, you make constant justifications. I look back at now,
I can hardly believe it. And here's the thing is once you're in the grips of them, time slips by.
What was a year is now five years. And you look up and you're still doing the same thing.
I've been taking those pills for nearly a decade when I walked away from,
walked, crawled, when I crawled away from this most pain ever been in my life, breaking that habit.
You know, it affects with the way your body makes dopamine,
all these chemicals and your body stops making all that stuff. And so
there's no pain relief after you get off of them. Takes forever for your body to start
making chemicals the way it should again. I see people now still trapped in it.
Still stuck behind that, stuck behind that little devil.
Just trying to get them bothers me. Bothers me that something like this was ever available,
you know, with these kind of long-term consequences that come with them.
But you know, nothing gets in the way of money. After there's money to be made off something,
people are going to make money off of it. I hope none of you are struggling with anything
like that. Chances are maybe some of you are.
And if you are, I just want you to know that you're not alone.
I've been in that position. I know about all the stuff we tell ourselves. I know all that.
I know about the lies we constantly tell ourselves to make it seem like what we're doing is okay.
When I thought back, I thought back about those days about going to those pharmacies
and going to those pill mills and how degrading that experience was, and how I would try to
convince myself that I was better off than all the other people doing it with me.
Oh, they're just doing it because they won't get high. I'm doing this because I need this.
I got to have it, you know. I'm not like them. Those drug addicts. I'm just working man.
And I guarantee a whole lot of working men have told themselves that lie right up until it killed them.
A whole lot of them. I said, old Tyler Chilter song, keep your nose on the grindstone and out of
pills. They were so bad up there, man. They were so bad up there that they caused the heroin
epidemic in Kentucky when they took them. You can't just take something like that off the
mark. When you take something like that off the market, nobody get it. They're just going to find a substitute.
And apparently that black tar heroin is a good substitute or it was a cheaper one.
But the end of the day, I think
I think the most important thing you ever know is people will actually hurt themselves to get
them. That's that tells you everything you need to know about that particular little drug right
there. People hurt themselves to get it. People do strange things to keep that feeling, to feel
good. I remember my favorite lie that I used to tell myself was I wasn't addicted to drugs. I just
needed to work. I just needed to work. It wasn't about taking drugs. It's about going to work.
That's all I really needed.
Let's wrap that one up there for today and let's do some testimonials.
I got some pulled up. I got one in particular.
Where did I put them? There we go.
At Drifting Hobbies 2.77. Is that a Thor hammer necklace? I'm new to your podcast but I would
just feel about that. Every once in a while, I get questions about my necklace. It's a
take it off so you guys can see it. It's a Celtic axe necklace.
It's got some knotwork and Celtic knotwork on it and it's made out of silver.
My wife gave me this as a gift
after the birth of my oldest kid about 15 years ago. It was supposed to at the time
had a little card said it symbolized excellence in all endeavors but particularly those of the
family variety. I very rarely take it off. That time I took it off just now to show it to you
guys is probably the first time I've taken it off in a year or so. I wear it all the time.
It's just one of those connections to her and the kids and a different time.
Also at the time I was under the impression that I was mostly Irish
ethnicity wise but since then I've done some DNA testing and found out that I'm mostly Scottish.
Very little. I think it's like 30% Irish and 70% Scottish and Wales
but not nearly. I was told all my life that the McBrides were all Irish and all that good stuff and
they were but everybody else my family heavily Scottish descent. I was also told that we were
Cherokee Indian like every other redneck in the south but my DNA test didn't show none of that.
So it looks like I used to joke with people. I come from the whitest people ever whited.
There's a bunch of crackers over in Scotland cracking around and then they
they cracked it over to Virginia for a little will and then they cracked it off into Appalachia
and then some of them cracked it off into Texas but it was just a there's a long line of
cracker and farmers from Scotland mostly farmers.
Look at that story it's not much of a story behind the old Celtic axe.
Oh it's a little chilly out here this morning. I should have worn me a jacket.
Adderall buddy the Balden BW sorry I haven't been on the live show in a long while brother
know I still listen to every single episode but life is busy. I hope you're doing well and I
can't wait for you to announce a Pensacola or Foley Alabama show. Still want you to show up at OWA.
Buddy don't worry about missing the live show. I love when you guys come sit and we talk in the
chat and all that good stuff and watch the show together but this shows for y'all whenever y'all
need it. I like I'm just happy you're still listening to all the episodes and I hope all your
projects are going well and though I didn't the Pensacola show wasn't able to work out we were
trying to put that together with the Louisville show and that just didn't pan out and I'm glad because
my hip wouldn't have been able to handle all that driving or everything I was going on my hip at the
time but I will be in Macomb, Mississippi hearing about two weeks. I don't know how far that is
from me but I will be in good old Macomb, Mississippi at the Palace Theater. I'm going to the home
of the great well Jerry Clower going to Liberty County, Mississippi. I'm gonna go pay my respects
at the final residence place of the great Jerry Clower. I may even write a whole special episode
around that because Jerry Clower is a good it's just a good portion of what inspires me to tell
stories the way I do. Of course been a fan of Jerry Clower for many many years and never been out
there so I'm hoping maybe I can go over there and check out I know the museum's not open anymore but
I've read out some people and I'm hoping maybe I'll get to go over there and see at the museum.
I'm also going to run over and see the crash site
from Leonard Skinner's plane crash. One of the guys involved in this show is a real familiar with
it and he's offered to take me over I just did he writes for the newspaper there and I just did
an interview with him a couple days ago or be coming out any day now. I also just recently did
an interview not about comedy but about planned obsolescence and inflation with the Guardian
newspaper so that'll be coming out here pretty soon too and I'll post that on all my platforms.
Yep so we got a lot coming up
let's go all right here's the last one oh yeah I brought this up because
uh because I want to answer at Jeffrey Palmer 7294 I'm beginning to feel duped I think you are a
liberal with a beard after many times listening to you nothing personal that's just how I see you.
I have so many questions about this statement but I think it's a sad state of affairs
when a message of kindness is mistaken for a political affiliation or movement
first of all I don't think any of the political movements right now are
shrouding themselves in kindness I don't give a shit what side of the fence you're on
nobody's shrouding themselves in kindness my message is one of kindness
I mean though you make it clear that you may have watched and listened to my content you didn't hear
a word I said I don't take it personally though it's not the first time surely will not be the last
time that someone trapped in a false paradigm is going to label me to satisfy their own longing
for order in the chaotic world I get plenty of hate mail from the entire political spectrum
telling me how I fell them on a weekly basis
I have liberals calling me MAGA I have MAGA people calling me liberals uh it's just so funny
you know what I'm rooting for you both I hope you break free of that someday I hope you experience
the right kindness in the right moment that allows you to grow past whatever it is you're afraid of
it's hard I've been there I used to be flag waving this person that didn't have a clue what I was
talking about as well and it's hard for me to take something personal when I don't think you know what
you're talking about I'm not sure hey a liberal with a beard that's a weird insult do you mean like
Walt Whitman Frederick Douglass Abraham Lincoln Jesus which liberal with a beard
it's the weirdest thing it's just I think I don't think you have a I think liberal is a word some
talking head told you to be scared of whether it's one of these guys sitting in their pickup
trucks making videos about how everybody's wrong or one of these dudes uh on tv in a gray suit
making hand gestures so don't take it personally I just think you don't know what you're talking about
whoops
oh no oh no oh no yeah that was a weird one that floored me that that liberal with a beard thing
that's the funniest thing what do you even mean bro there's been a lot of them hell
and then there's like such a breakdown like you know I always wonder if people even know
what a classic liberal is anymore and what that means I think it's just I think I think we use
words wrong for so long that they don't even have a meaning anymore it's uh
it seems more and more commonplace these days that people just throw these words out there
and don't have a clue what these words mean or what they're supposed to be
anyways
wrap this thing up get out of here for the day I'm gonna go finish cooking my ribs working on
that porch without the aid of painkillers which let me tell you jw's a lot slower without them
that's all right at least I have control of myself now
you know
the devil don't come in an angry man
he comes in charismatic gregarious helpful even the devil's usually trying to fix your
problems or show you a way around them and I'll tell you something the devil ain't a who
it's a what it's that quiet part of yourself that whispers yes to things you used to know were wrong
just to keep the peace
just to keep the comfort
I wasn't addicted to drugs I was addicted to not being in pain I had myself convinced that was the
truth of it different kinds of pain out there it kind of breaks your bones and the kind that
sets fire to the parts of you no one else sees I tell myself that while I sat in them pillmills
waiting on my little paper sack of relief feeling I was inexplicably better than all the other
junkies waiting with me but the truth is I was one of them didn't matter how I dressed it up it was
the same devil in a different coat it was mostly physical for me I tore up my back working for a
company it paid me just enough to keep me loyal and broke me just enough to keep me quiet I took
workman's comp instead of justice and that's a deal with the devil right there when you trade pain
for a paycheck I didn't chase a high I chased a clock in I chased a chance to ruin myself a
little more to make other people happy to prove I was a man to prove I had value and ain't that the
lie that most of us fall for we call it work ethic but that's just a fairy tale they taught us to
keep making money off our backs
then I got to where I spent more time working to buy and find the pills than I did taking them
that's when there's a a quiet plaintive soft-spoken fella telling you that
you got a lot of work to do next week it's gonna be hard to do if you're hurting
anybody with any sense can look in the mirror and say it plain I can't keep taking these things
forever they don't even work as good anymore the story this story only ends two ways you
leave it behind or it leaves you behind bloated your body your soul malnourished cold and quiet
after you've run off anyone who ever gave a damn
that's the crossroads there's no altar choir ain't no altar call ain't no choir just you the
mirror and a choice it don't feel like one but you got a decision to make you get off the train
you try to figure out where you are or you throw more coal on the fire and make your way to Valhalla
I ain't here to preach at you I'm just telling you that I made it back
pain's still here sure some days I can't hardly walk but it but it's honest now and it don't own me
and uh church that's the only kind of miracle I believe in anymore
I'm rooting for you each and every one of you don't have to agree for me to root for you
you don't have to fix everything tomorrow for me to root for you you don't ever have to
solve any of it for me to root for you but I'm rooting for you because all along people
there was a few people that rooted for me and I know it's like to have somebody in your corner
by God I'm in your corner
I'm JW and I love you
so
well it's gonna do a little work but a little bit better off than we was
oh a bit tell about this rooster
back here on this property behind the seat back here in the back of our neighborhood
it's just kind of like small streets and a lot of open space and there's this fella over there
that lived on one of these back streets had a whole bunch of chickens and a couple roosters
and they just kind of wandered around out in the ditch all that stuff well there's a lot of
gentrification going on in the back of our neighborhood so back there right across from his
property somebody has built a whole bunch of condos and started developing that side of the
street well now he can't let his roosters wander the streets anymore I don't know what
they've done to this rooster but they have broke this rooster because this is some 50
cockadoodle do's from six in the morning until three in the morning just all day long just do
and you can just hear him all day long like every once in a while I hear a gunshot over there
and I assume somebody has shot themselves so they'll have to hear that rooster anymore
he just goes non-stop this rooster he's been going the whole time
but I was out here two in the morning last night on the porch hanging out and he was still going
then and he sounded so tired like can a rooster cockadoodle do themselves to death I don't know
but I think this will uh we've about decided he's protesting the new development
I suspect they've locked him up in a coop away from his hens
now anyways
now you're gonna do it again because I'm talking about it boy he was going all day
yesterday I was outside all day all day I could hear his full
mmm
the first time he'll smoke some of this but it's just a gun porch
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