Expect Delays

A short, warm farewell to Season One and a first look at what's next. David thanks listeners for sticking with him through a story that was as therapeutic to make as it was hard to live, then previews Season Two:  Duke & Duchess , a fictional six-part story about a young man fighting to get sober after losing his mother, written in a single week once the real story finally demanded to be t...

The series finale. With the Scarlett story finally closed and the marriage fully behind him, David steps back to make sense of everything: the poetic irony of an ending built from another beginning, the difference between loneliness and earned solitude, and a hard-won glimpse of detachment he knows will take years to fully live out. Between reflections on staying open to heartbreak, healing as a s...

Armed with the truth about Courtney's affair, David goes to war, stalking, threatening, and nearly losing himself entirely to a rage he'd never known he was capable of, before a friend's blunt intervention pulls him back from the edge. A drunken, self-destructive New Year's Eve at a friend's wedding almost kills him outright, and sends him home to face the wreckage alone. What...

Christmas without his kids for the first time in thirteen years sends David spiraling into a wry, digressive meditation on the holiday itself, before crashing into an achingly awkward lunch with Courtney, a near-fight at the movies that reveals a surprising new strength in his son, and a financial settlement that quietly guts him. Just as he starts believing 2024 might actually be his year, a call...

 A relapse timed to the exact hour his mother's plane leaves spirals into one of the darkest stretches yet, a designed collapse, an accidentally-sent confession that lands in the wrong inbox, and a holiday season spent hollowed out in circles of strangers who'd all rather be anywhere else. Then the episode pivots hard: December brings one last, doomed weekend with Scarlett, a Hamilton tick...

Scarlett finally puts words to what David didn't want to hear, that she was never built for the kind of relationship he needed her to be. As that call sinks in, a film about obsession forces David to confront his own pattern of falling for the fantasy of a woman instead of the woman herself. A male therapist cracks open the self-hatred underneath it all, and when David's mother flies in fo...

A near-relapse on a quiet Sunday night forces David to sit with the one thing he's spent his whole life avoiding: himself, alone, in silence. What follows is a sprawling, restless meditation on everything that fear grabs onto when there's nothing left to numb it, the true cost of trading comfort for poverty after divorce, a hard look at America's history of systemic exclusion, unlikely...

 An airport goodbye with no tears and no drama becomes the quiet end of something David can only make sense of through a passage from The Celestine Prophecy, the idea that relationships collapse when two people stop giving each other energy and start fighting to control it instead. Between reckoning with a therapist he abandoned mid-pandemic and the discomfort of knowing his ex now sits in that sa...

A tender morning after gives David real hope that Scarlett might be capable of something softer, until the day spirals through a burned dinner, a small kitchen fire, and a dead bird she reads as an omen he refuses to take seriously. A vicious fight over drinking at dinner gives way to something worse back at the apartment, a moment where David's clear refusal goes unheard, followed by a sudden...

Sobriety stalls before it ever really starts as David admits he never committed to the real work, and Scarlett's return trip becomes the perfect excuse to relapse. Between a financial squeeze that has him counting the cost of everything from movie tickets to mayonnaise, a raw reckoning with why his kids drift toward the parent who holds the power, and lonely nights at a go-go bar called Titill...

A couple of weeks into sobriety, David rides the euphoric high recovery communities call the Pink Cloud, until real life starts testing it. A cold soccer game brings a bottle of Scotch offered at the edge of a soccer field, a wall of distance from his own kids, and a chilling text from Courtney about a HELOC that reveals just how far out of his depth he is with money. Between clean blood tests, co...

David traces addiction all the way back to its roots: a first DUI at fourteen, a violent breakdown at sixteen that landed him in rehab for his birthday, and a family history of sobriety and relapse running through both grandparents. Returning to treatment at forty-three, he confronts his own judgment of other addicts, the delusion of being a "functional" one, and the people, Nick, John,...

After a ruined last binge leaves him wired, broke, and alone at dawn, David finally faces the full weight of what's coming: the divorce, the wreckage of who he's become, and a one o'clock intake appointment he's determined not to miss. Between a pre-dawn sobriety ritual and a raw reckoning with everything he's lost, he makes the drive to rehab with Radiohead's In Rainbows a...

Fresh off a breakup with Scarlett over something as small as a bartender admiring his rings, David unpacks who he'd actually become underneath the black leather and silver skull rings: a man split into two people, one present and sweet, the other cold and self-isolating. The episode pulls back a year to the motorcycle accident that shattered his leg on Scotland Road, the shock, the threats to...

Fresh off a week of stolen intimacy in North Carolina, David comes home to Millburn Standard dinners, Halloween pop-ups, and the fragile normalcy of trying to hold his kids together. But a family movie night at  The Exorcist: Believer  cracks something open he wasn't ready for. The film's possessed children, missing days, and dark force luring the young into ritual send him straight back t...

The night after a rough, almost hateful collision of bodies, something shifts in the air between David and Scarlett, something old, dark, and unnamed. A fever dream pulls David through a black sea guarded by ancient creatures and delivers him to a Hermit standing at the mouth of a cave, right before Scarlett's voice drags him back to reality with a very different complaint: his snoring. But th...

Days of sun, wine, and baseball with Scarlett curdle fast when a phone call lights up mid-drive: Brad from Bermuda. What starts as an offhand explanation spirals into a jealous, drunken confrontation at a nearly empty boardwalk bar, a shoved-off hand, a blade in his pocket, and David alone on a cold October swing screaming her name into the dark. This episode is where the fantasy meets its first r...

David flies south chasing a word he doesn't have yet, only later learning it's called limerence, the obsessive, uncertain longing that isn't quite love but feels indistinguishable from it in the moment. Between a tearful flight watching Beautiful Boy, an old jiu jitsu friend insisting Courtney's been unfaithful all along, and a screeching Mustang blasting Metallica pulling up to co...

David arrives in New Jersey with nowhere real to call home, moving into a camper parked behind a jiu jitsu school as December closes in. Between a broken sewage line, a wave of quiet humiliation from near strangers, and a bar of Crosby, Stills and Nash crackling out of a phone speaker, this episode traces one long, grinding day in the wreckage: a prep school interview for his son at an elite insti...

Recovering at his mother's house, David becomes a fixture of quiet chaos: sleepless nights, sad music, and a body running on fumes. A trip to a local bar turns an ugly moment of racial provocation into an unlikely friendship, while a phone call with Courtney lays bare just how far past repair the marriage has traveled, and how much of his own denial he's still clinging to. But the heart of this ep...

With nowhere left to go and a girlfriend who just hung up on him mid highway, David drives nine hours to his father's doorstep in Ohio, chasing the only open door left in his life. What follows is a raw, unflinching account of a two day bender that takes him from a hollow homecoming hug to a rundown motel room on the east side of Columbus, where addiction, shame, and a genuine brush with death col...

Beneath the mysticism of Episode One's Bermuda romance was a man in freefall: a marriage hollowed out by addiction, secrecy, and quiet retaliation on both sides. In this episode, David pulls back the curtain on who he really was on that scooter, a functioning alcoholic hiding cocaine, using pornography as a weapon in a sexless marriage, and watching his career quietly disintegrate as his hours...

A man flies to Bermuda to repair his relationship with his mother, and instead walks into two days that rewrite the rest of his life. Between a near-miss on a scooter, a prophetic conversation about divorce, and the best grouper sandwich of his life, David finds himself on a reggae-soaked dance floor face to face with a woman named Scarlett, sharp tongued, sun-kissed, and impossible to look away f...