The Blue Collar Buddha Podcast

For most of my life, I believed I was broken. Not temporarily broken. Fundamentally broken. I collected the evidence: childhood abuse, four divorces, four DUIs, and the day my infant son Malachi died in 1999. I turned everything that happened into proof that I was the kind of person who deserved to suffer.
But the question that finally changed things wasn’t:
“How do I get someone to love me?”
It was:
“Can I stop hating myself long enough to consider that I might actually be worth liking?”
I spent my life directing my energy outward—toward employers, partners, family, everyone around me—because giving that same attention to myself felt selfish. I never consistently considered myself someone worthy of the same effort I gave everyone else.
Then I started recording conversations with myself. No script. No performance. Just honesty.
And somewhere in that process, I started to like the person I was talking to.
Not love. Not some perfect version of myself.
Just like.
That became the doorway.
What this episode IS:
A raw confession about shame, self-punishment, and learning to stop abandoning yourself
An honest look at why liking yourself may need to come before loving yourself
A conversation about what happens when you finally give yourself the attention you have always given everyone else
What this episode is NOT:
A self-help formula
A clinical explanation of trauma
A motivational speech about becoming a better version of yourself
This is about one question:
What if the person you have been running from is the person who has been waiting for you all along?

July 31st, 1999, my infant son Malachi died. I carried that loss for years as proof that I was a bad person—that somehow I deserved punishment. But the question that eventually changed everything wasn’t just about grief.
It was about love.
I wanted somebody to love me. I wanted somebody to love. And I had to face a brutal truth: I didn’t know what the hell love actually was.
I had spent my life accepting definitions handed to me by religion, culture, relationships, and expectations about who I was supposed to be. I thought love was something you earned after becoming the right kind of person.
So I sat down with a blue Bic pen and an accounting ledger. No pencil. Because I knew if I used a pencil, I would start erasing. I wrote down what I actually wanted. Not the answer that sounded good. Not the answer that made me look like a better person. The truth.
And then I asked myself the question I had spent years avoiding:
What if love is possible for someone like me?
What this episode IS:
An honest conversation about shame, self-punishment, and the search for real love
A personal story about questioning the definitions of love we inherit without realizing it
An invitation to examine what you actually believe about your own ability to be loved
What it is NOT:
A grief recovery formula
A religious explanation for suffering
A motivational speech telling you to ignore your pain and move on
This is about one question:
What if you are not as impossible to love as you have always believed?

I recorded this on July 28th, 2026 with no intro music and no polish.
I am 60. No PhD. I spent most of my life feeling broken and out of place — parental abuse, four divorces, four DUIs, the death of my infant son Malachi. I abandoned myself by giving everything to everyone outside me because caring for myself felt selfish. It took decades before I liked myself. Only after that did I consider loving myself. That is when Sharon arrived. The archive episodes were born while she went through stage-three cancers so I could stay present instead of drinking.
This is the first episode where I play one of my own songs — lyrics I wrote. “You Love My Scars.”
If you are still crying into the pillow at night, still managing the impression, still convinced the real you is unlovable, the free book Kick Rocks is waiting. No email. No opt-in.
Just the truth.
 

Another archive episode recorded on a Friday morning in May 2023, and it’s a direct, unsexy look at the brutal necessity of personal accountability and owning our own shit. I rip straight into the core delusion and bullshit that our lives are shaped by society, our parents, our partners, or our past instead of the actual realtime choices we make every single day. I talk about the heavy baggage of my own past—getting caught driving drunk four or five times, stringing together four divorces, and serving as the undisputed king of "woe is me" while still playing the victim to childhood abuse and isolation.
Then we go straight into the dark reality of the floor: spending nearly three months living in a car—Hotel BMW, room 740 IL—with my wife, surviving off the McDonald's dollar menu, using casino bathrooms for bird baths, and sleeping under streetlights while hiding from security, even though we had jobs and money coming in. Think about that shit. Seriously. How fucked-up must my thinking have been to choose homelessness over taking the risk and getting an actual apartment? THIS is the shit we carry around us and don’t tend to take the time to truly think on with our whole selves.
The barrier wasn't the lack of money; it was the rot in the thinking: telling myself I couldn't have anything better because of bad credit and a felony record. This episode is about finding a way into the stripping away of the fear, ditching the victim songs, and facing the ultimate truth of the field: the only constant variable in every single experience of your life is you. It’s a call to sit your ass down for three or four minutes a day, stop running from your own thoughts, and start figuring out who you actually want to be before you wait for another close call to change your mind.
Fuck....

Another archive episode that I share with you. As always, it’s a raw, unvarnished take on the shit that happens on the inside of us when we buy into the bullshit and artificial “shortcuts” when we are terrified we aren't lovable just as we are.
Just as we are. Right. Now.
Sparked by watching a documentary on the late American bodybuilder and entrepreneur Rich Piana—a guy who owned his steroid use and physical obsession without hiding behind excuses—this episode rips at the polished veneer of both heavy lifting and modern spiritual consumerism and the lies and woo-woo shit that so many of us came to believe we needed to heed and listen to, lest we continue to find ourselves forever sad and alone—even in a crowded room with the alcohol flowing.
Thinking back on the grueling two-a-day workouts at a gym called Los Campiones in Minneapolis, and living in a cramped studio apartment off Westbank near the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and spending my nights as as a bouncer at a local bar called the Caboose, I also remember the days of donating plasma just to find a fleeting human connection; even if it wasn’t sexy, it was still better than sitting alone in the apartment cramming my hands against my ears to try and drown out my own fucking thoughts.
In this episode, I talk about the mechanics of using external armor to outrun internal shame, and guilt, and fear.
It’s an unflinching look at why we trade natural friction for fake promises, why the self-help cottage industry is full of quantum-babble bullshit that sells transformation without effort, and why no amount of muscle mass, status, or spiritual bypassing will ever save you until you stop waiting to be "fixed" and learn to enjoy your own company right now.

A raw, unvarnished rant recorded on a Thursday evening in May 2023, sparked entirely by a broken website widget and a couple of Guinness Extra Stouts. After getting pummeled all day on the customer service floor—absorbing everyone else's friction, listening to how nothing works the way it's supposed to, and carrying that weight home—I sat down to troubleshoot my site and accidentally stumbled across old journal entries and blog posts going back to 2019. Staring at that old writing triggered a hard, necessary question: Why do I write and hide?
This episode explores the heavy, invisible pressure we put on ourselves to perform, the paralyzing fear of vulnerability that makes us lock our real thoughts away in dark drawers, and the strange, disorienting realization that looking backward across the years is the only way to see how much ground we've actually covered. It's a conversation about dropping the fake polish, stopping the self-sabotage of keeping your true voice a secret, and realizing that surviving your own past is the ultimate proof that you are already living the life you once thought was impossible.

This isn't a polished episode. It’s a raw archive from April 2025, sandwiched between the reality of my life today in 2026. Two years of silence, a brush with the unthinkable, and the realization that all the "woo-woo" techniques in the world—meditation, manifestation, visualization—didn’t keep the fear at bay when my wife was fighting for her life.
In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on what it’s like to live in a state of hypervigilance. We talk about why we try so hard to control the uncontrollable, why we look for assurance in external systems that don’t have the answers, and what happens when you finally stop trying to "get over it" and just face the moment. If you've been conditioned to suppress your emotions to survive, this is your permission to put the armor down.

I was sitting on public transit, listening to two strangers tear an actress apart, calling her a "ho" simply for existing outside their narrow version of "normal." It hit me: we are all living in a prison of our own design, projecting our insecurities onto anyone brave enough to be themselves.
In this archive episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on the words "freak" and "ho"—labels I once used to judge myself and others—to show you how they are just tools used to keep us small. If you’ve ever felt like the object of someone else’s "righteous" scorn, this is for you. We’re talking about the cognitive dissonance of judgment, the myth of the "normal" life, and the absolute necessity of living on your own terms.
You aren't a freak. You're just living a life that someone else is too scared to even imagine for themselves.

spent Friday in federal court, and the date of my next deadline—July 31st—hit me like a freight train. It’s the 27th anniversary of my son Malachi’s death. Most people want you to be "brave" or "romantic" about grief. They want you to pretend you had this perfect connection. The truth? I didn't know him. I was terrified. I was resentful. I was a young Black man in Ohio holding a dead infant and worried, above all else, that I was going to prison because no one would believe me. We don’t talk about that shit.
We don't talk about the guilt, the jealousy, or the fear that the "rules" of family and love were things we were never taught. If you’re carrying a secret you’re terrified to say out loud—if your grief is mixed with shame, or your experience of "family" is nothing like what the world tells you it should be—this episode is for you. We’re stripping away the "pretty" version of survival and looking at the raw, jagged reality of how we define ourselves.

It's 10:12 on a Saturday night in St. Louis and it was hot enough today to slap you the moment you walked outside.
I've got two chocolate glazed donuts in me, blood pressure medication side effects I won't bore you with, a bunch of archive episodes scheduled and one contemporary one I forgot to post, and a wife in the next room who watched 70s Saturday morning cartoon themes with me last night while I got unexpectedly emotional about watching them with someone for the first time.
That's where this episode starts. That's also, somehow, where the whole thing lives.
This one is about the inner voice. Not the spiritual version. The actual one — the one that tells you you've earned a third Guinness, that your black ass needs to sit down and shut up, that nobody wants to hear from someone who's been through what you've been through. The one that works harder against you than any person ever has. Including the ones who actually hurt you.
We suppress that voice. We hide it so people don't think we're out of our minds. We perform being fine while it runs constantly underneath. And then we wonder why nothing changes.
I'm not okay with that anymore. Haven't been for a while.
The free workbook is at www.theloveofyourlifetime.com — scroll to the bottom. No email. No catch. Just the work.