The Drunkalogues

Here endeth the exercise.  This is - i believe - my last episode of The Drunkalogues.  It's been a great experiment.  I'm thankful to all my guests and listeners for participating in this exploratoin of stories about addiction and recovery.  For the last episode, my friend Paul Kolsby - a writer and producer on Ozark - interviews me. 

Whenever I think of incomprehensible demoralization, I think of this episode... just the bafflement at the inability to stop and the inability to imagine a life without it.... but he makes it throughhhhhh!!!!  

Sometimes, it's amazing to me that with all my privileges and advantages I've still struggled to make it through this life. And yet my next guest is a guy who really had none of that - absentee parents running from their own mess inflicting their trauma on their poorskids. And somehow he found a way through - a way that was aided and abetted by drug and alcohol abuse - but a way nonetheless. He ha...

When I was an assistant at William Morris my boss would sometimes hire this masseuse - Steve - to come into the office and give everyone neck and shoulder massages. And he would laugh that my session was always a kind of wrestling match. "Nick, relax," he'd say. "This is meant to be enjoyable!" This next interview feels a little bit like that. We wrestle for a rhythm that works, but somehow get th...

Kaila Yu used to tell people that she was born in Tai Pei, she was actually born in Lawence Kansas and moved to Southern California at a young age where she was reared by her tiger mom parents until she discovered ecstasy and cocaine in Socal's rollicking rave scene of the early aughts. She dropped out of UCSD and became an import model making money as a pinup girl in the underground world of stre...

This was one of my very fist insterviews, and I really didn't know what to expect. Every interview back then felt so fraught - like there was so much at stake.  As you can see, this one was pretty intense! It's starts out with some fun stuff about Terrence Trent Darby and Shawn Michael Howard's earlly career and then takes a turn... here are the original notes (which I beleive my guest dictated):...

I made this podcast just as the pandemic was starting to let up.  What a joy it was to be back in the same room with a guest... even though most of my intervies now happen online regardless... Patrick O'Neil's new book "Anarchy at The Circle K" - chronicling his life as a tour manager for punk rock bands like The Dead Kennedys - is out now.  He is also a teacher and a substance abuse counselor. Bu...

It's gotta be tough to live in the shadow of a famous sibling - your identity always somehow tied up in theirs.  It got especially complicated for my next guest, because his famous brother, Chris Farley, died of a drug overdose and then he found himself guarding his brother's legacy through the Chris Farley Foundation - a non-profit dedicated to the prevention of substance abuse -  while he was en...

Joe Hart is the balm you need in these fractious times! here are the original notes! I've wanted to interview Joe Hart from the moment I started making this podcast as he has always exuded a powerful empathy for everyone around him even when things in his own life were clearly not going his way.  He grew up in New York in a house his dad built with his own hands and eventually moved to Los Angeles...

I have a new podcast.  It's a storytelling podcast.  It's called Mortonopoulis.   You can check it out here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mortonopoulis/id1798342136 or visit it on substack where it exists as an essay writing exercise. https://substack.com/@mortonopoulis?utm_source=user-menu Lemme know what you think!! Peace.

Lindsey Van Wagner grew up in and around Washington, DC and like so many of her contemporaries joined the federal government after college.  But the nine to five slog really wasn't for her.  A gnawing sense that she needed something more drove her to act out with booze and relationships until she hit her breaking point and sought help through a twelve step program.  Ironically, it was only once sh...

Daniel Schwarzhoff discovered pretty late in life that he was not really a Schwarzhoff: that the man he had always considered his father was not his biological dad.  It explained a lot.  At least it gave a shape to the chaos that had marked his early life.  He rose above that chaos with a career on Wall Street but brought a lot of it with him as well. When it eventually became too much, he found a...

Patti Clark grew up in Redwood City where she overcame a childhood marked by absentee parents to graduate high school and attend a good college. A sort of divine intervention shaped the trajectory of her life and then a tarot card reader helped her recognize her own addiction.  She spent 13 years sober, determined to raise her own children in a way that was different from her own upbringing, but t...

Frank Conniff has been a stand up and writer and producer for many tv shows like Sabrina the teenage witch but he's probably best know for his role as TV's Frank on the Peabody Award winning cult hit Mystery Science Theater 3000 where he also served as a writer. I discovered Frank as one of the many members of my extended clan of Murray-McDonnell cousins. When I started doing standup, everyone in...

My original notes...   Jamie Niven is the son of international movie star and academy award winner for best actor, David Niven.  But I really knew him from my parents crowd of waspy New Yorkers spending the summers out on Long Island where he was always the life of the party and where growing up I had rarely seen any of his set get sober.  He had a career in finance before becoming an entrepreneur...

Reposting this as it again proves sadly timely in my community, and Clancy Martin's book is an invaluable resource for suicide prevention.   Clancy Martin is the author of the recently published, highly acclaimed memoire - HOW NOT TO KILL YOURSELF - which is also an enlightened and practical guide to suicide prevention.  Clancy speaks from experience as he is the survivor of at least ten attempts...

John Machado struggled wiht addictoin for years before a doctor's visit necessseitate a meeting with an addiction specilist who helped get him into rehab to begin a long process to recovery.. They say relapse is a part of the process of recovery but this convesation made me think that maybe the road to recovery is paved with all kinds of experiences some of which form the building blocks of a heal...

John Giordano grew up in the Bronx, a child of organized crime and despite joining his first gang at the age of ten managed to save himself from that fate thru his dedication to the discipline of competitive martial arts. But when his recreational drug use spiraled out of control in his twenties, he suddenly found himself on the receiving end of an intervention organized by the same criminals who...

Keep seeing Eric in my social media feed, and he is always just so frikken funny, innovative and original.  Impecable delivery.  Check him out!  He talks here a lot here about what it was like to grow up as a gay man in the mid-west!   Eric Hahn is a stand up comedian who grew up in a steel town in Ohio where he started drinking at age 12.  He narrowly escaped a career as a butcher before finding...

I first met David when he was an agent at CAA repping the likes of Oliver Stone and other high profile filmmakers and writers.  He was part of a powerful club I only got glimpses of and boy did it look fun. But it was also addictive, and he shares here the journey to a more measured form of contententmen. 

Nick Jonsson grew up in Sweden where drinking beer was kind of a way of life.  His drinking escalated when he moved to Australia for college and then got out of control when he started working in advertising and PR in Southeast Asia where the ex-pat community thrived in a lively and inexpensive bar scene.  His life was turned upside down after a couple job losses and he soon found himself drinking...

This episode is largely about addiction to pornography as Powerful Eric struggled for years to overcome his own pornography addiction.  Ultimately, he stumbled on a shift in perspective that helped him get well, and he has built on that shift to create a program for other addicts that shares some of the tools I employ as well.  While this podcast is largely about drug and alcohol addiction, addict...

I came across Tom Vaughan on twitter and started following him for his helpful screenwriting tips, and then one day he tweeted something about his sobriety and I reached out to see if we would be interested in coming on the pod.  He graciously agreed, and I imagined some sort of quasi-scholarly discussion about story structure and sobriety.  Little did I realize, Tom and I had crossed paths in my...

I interviewed Nena about two years ago...tho it feels like a lifetime.  We were just coming out of covid and it was one of the first times I'd been back in the room with a guest.  I would say that in the interim, interest in hallucingens has only grown as mushrooms seem to have quickly become both the medicine of choice and the party drug of choice....   here are the original notes!   I've been wa...

Sometimes I do a podcast and by the end of the conversation my guest and I are friends for lise. Such was the case with Jenny Aurthur! Original notes: Jenny Aurthur grew up in a somewhat nomadic family - traveling in a large bus to organize neighborhoods for the Communist Labor Party, and while her parents never married, they maintained a strong family dynamic. So it was especially traumatic when...