Hey, and welcome to another episode of Call Me Donovan.
Today's December 10th, 2025.
I believe today is 928 days of alcohol retirement.
This one may wind up being a little bit of a downer.
So you get the joy of being my therapist.
Not that I've ever actually gone to a therapist.
And for the person.
Therapy, therapy, therapy, talk sessions, counselors, I think they feel a very important role in our society.
But I'd be lying if I told you that the last several weeks have been fan-fucking-tastic
because they haven't.
Now, to be clear, it's not that anything majorly bad has happened.
There are a lot of people out there that probably have had rougher days, rougher weeks, rougher months, rougher years than myself.
I've got a friend.
Now I've got to, oh God, try to reclaim my thoughts to where I was going with this.
I mean, when work calls, the thing that actually pays the bills, you've got to stop what you're doing and take care of business.
Business, or as my cousin used to say, got to grind that cheddar.
He ground that cheddar till he died.
Anyway, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.
I was assisting with putting everything together to get the telecommunications department.
That's what they called it for the city of Tifton.
But it was the cable broadband department within the city of Tifton called CityNet.
And he was putting everything together so that it could be put on the market and be sold, which it was.
In fact, of October 1st, 2009, CityNet was sold to plant telecommunications and became known as plant Tifnet, et cetera, et cetera.
I left a little, about midway, little past midway, 2012.
But one of the things, I walked into my office one day, and there was a coffee cup sitting
on my desk.
It was pretty green, not bright, not olive drab, but maybe a subdued forest green.
And it had one word on the coffee cup, and it was called Simplify.
And then, I got it back then, and I got it back then, I mean, I got it back then.
Aspects of my life that are just too complicated.
And sometimes I wonder if that's because I don't want to say suffer from, but have undiagnosed
ADD, ADHD.
And I say undiagnosed because I've never gone to a doctor to have it checked out, but my
oldest son did, and he was diagnosed with ADD or ADHD.
I'm not a doctor.
I need to have two beers.
I get sleepy.
I need to have at least three or four.
I'm in that sweet zone.
But then, I'm not going to stop there.
And by the time I've hit the eighth or ninth, I'm not focusing on anything, except maybe having
a good time being a complete jerk to the people around me.
But yeah, it did seem funny that I could concentrate better at a certain level of intoxication.
And I guess that's because it was slowing my brain down to match my body.
Again, not a doctor.
These statements I'm making could be complete bullshit.
But having what I will consider undiagnosed ADD, ADHD is probably the reason why I start so many
projects and then I don't finish them.
You know, my core is my IT business.
That is what makes the money for my family.
That is what keeps the roof over our head, the heat and the air conditioning running, the food on the table, clothes on our backs, water running, electricity, etc., etc.
But I get bored and I get bored quickly and I want to get into things that are more interesting.
And so then I start all these other little projects.
But then I can't devote the amount of time that is required to these projects.
I mean, this podcast is a prime example.
Now, granted, it's more of a personal thing just to kind of, you know, check in with you guys and let you know how I'm doing.
And, you know, if you want to let me know how you're doing, then you can email or comment, etc.
But it's not something that I can, I feel like that I can do on a recurring, recurring basis insofar as every Tuesday morning, I'm going to drop an episode of Call Me Donovan.
No, I can't do that.
And I've enjoyed the tech podcast that Ben and I do along with Sam a lot of times.
He can't be with us all the times.
And occasionally when my son Tyler's here, he's in studio and we can do it.
But it gets boring, too, because there are there's a plethora of tech podcasts out there.
And I know I know even my friend Sam will say, well, that doesn't matter.
You know, there's always room for one more, maybe.
But there comes a point where you you have to look at it and go, well, is the juice worth the squeeze here?
Because with the tech podcast, South Geek News, and then I started doing this this bit because the main show is on hiatus, basically, until sometime in 2026.
And I need to talk with the guys and see, you know, is it worth continuing?
Is it something we want to keep doing or, you know, relegate it to once a month?
I don't know.
But I've started doing these little quick takes, calling them SGN quick takes, where it's usually anywhere from about seven to 10 stories.
I summarize them through chat GPT with a little bit of humor.
So you get about a five to eight minute quick deal rundown of what's happened in the tech industry over the last maybe week, something like that.
And, you know, takes about an hour in total from grabbing those stories and summarizing them and then recording and then fixing any of the recording mistakes I made and tightening it up and sweetening it and et cetera, et cetera.
All that post-production bullshit that you need to do to make it sound worth listening to and then publish it.
You know, so for a once a week type thing, take an hour of my time, not a big deal.
But I feel like I have too many irons in the fire.
You know, I have wrto.fm, radio tiff, the radio station.
It's a money sink.
Granted right now, because I'm on a special deal, it's less than $60 a month.
But that $60 a month could go to something else like, you know, groceries or helping pay down the mortgage on my house because I've started looking into that.
You know, I want to be able to retire when I'm somewhere between 62 and 65.
And yeah, I know that's hoping that Social Security is still there.
I also get a city of Timpton retirement pension, but I need the house to be paid off.
And so I started looking at how much extra in principle do I need to start kicking in to get this place paid off in, you know, maximum of 10 years, which would put me at 65.
And, you know, that's going to be another $200 to $300 a month in principle.
My mortgage and escrow and everything is over $1,000, almost $1,100.
So, you know, that's a total mortgage payments going to need to be about $1,300, $1,400.
Can I swing it?
I don't know.
I'm going to have to look into it.
But something like this radio station, which is costing me roughly $60 a month.
And when my special deal ends, it's going to be $70 or $80 a month.
And nobody's listening to the fucking thing.
I mean, do I enjoy?
I mean, I literally play it.
I have it here, you know, the local so that I'm not burning up the streaming time, which is 1,500 listener hours per month.
So, I listen to it because, you know, you got to eat your own dog food, as they say.
But I try to promote it a little bit here, a little bit there.
I've promoted it in the Tifton Talks newsletter, which there again, that's something that I'm not even sure is the juice being worth the squeeze.
Because we already have in this area, we have the Tifton grapevine, and they do a phenomenal job.
They're actually reporters slash journalists.
I'm not.
And I don't make any allusions to the fact that Tifton Talks, the newsletter, is supposed to be that.
I have said that it's not.
It's not supposed to be something to compete with the Tifton grapevine.
But I have a couple.
I mean, we have 250 subscribers to it.
They have 9,000 or 10,000 to theirs.
And they get ad revenue on advertisements and stuff because they have the eyeballs.
I do not.
And it's yet another one of those things where I would need to really pour more energy and effort into it than I have.
I mean, I would need to literally become somewhat of a roving reporter and maybe add things into it of a local nature that would be beneficial for the newsletter and things that people would want to read or maybe see in video.
That type of thing.
I've got a Tifton Talks podcast.
Haven't produced an episode in several months for it.
Got something hopefully coming up in January that should be interesting to everybody, especially when it deals.
If you're interested in AI and education, secondary, post-secondary type of education.
Hopefully that'll pan out, been in talks with some folks and we'll see.
But I got all these things.
You know, I started this, I started trying to do this morning show called The Morning Drip, which would be an exclusive for the radio station.
And the impetus for that was in this area, we do have a morning show on one of the radio stations down in Valdosta and they stream it on Facebook every morning.
But it's really a heavily right-leaning conservative broadcast.
And so my idea of The Morning Drip is more of an even keel, center, left of center, I'm going to go after Trump kind of thing.
But so, and here we are where we have to take yet another break.
So I just got a text and I need to go assess somebody.
So I will pause right here and try to recollect my thoughts when I come back.
Okay, I'm back again.
Little issue with a client and Adobe Acrobat.
But anyway, so yeah, I guess to narrow this all down so that I'm not going to continue to record and get interrupted for the next 30 to 45 minutes.
I'm looking at going back to that coffee cup, which I think I still have the coffee cup, but unfortunately it got cracked while it was being washed one day.
So I don't use it anymore, but I wanted to keep it because it's kind of a keepsake.
But I think I just need to simplify.
I feel scatterbrained most days, you know, trying to make sure that I do the best job that I possibly can with my IT consulting business, but not let that necessarily be all I am.
But then in my endeavors to try to be more than that, I feel like I get stretched out and stressed out and I can't do justice to all the various things, all the various endeavors that I want to pursue.
As I've already said, the radio station could probably do a better job with it.
I currently record essentially three, potentially four podcasts, but not every week, not every month.
We have, of course, I have this one, which is my personal podcast.
Then we have the tech podcast, South Geek News.
Then Ben and I do Agenda Fluid.
Then I was trying to do, though it's actually a morning radio show, The Morning Drip.
I do produce it as a podcast with the idea being that we do replays of the show on another property I own called RadioFreeGeorgia.com.
And then if you want to actually just consume the podcast, then it would be a paid thing hosted over on Substack because that's the easiest place to do it.
And I don't even know if that's even fucking worth it because, again, I'm running into the too many irons in the fire, can't focus, can't put enough effort and attention into it.
That show I had decided was going to be Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and I needed to do it from like 7 to 8, 7 to 8.30, something like that.
I'm already getting up at 5 in the morning, having my cups of coffee, doing my morning constitutionals.
And quite honestly, that's also that time frame is when it's best for me to do work for my clients, remote work for my clients on their systems before they get to the office.
And so I've painted myself into a corner where it's very difficult for me to do a morning show because I can either have to start and do it earlier or I have to attempt to do it closer to like 8 to 9, 8.30 to 9.30 to 10, something like that.
But then, as is already evidenced by the number of times I've had to pause recording this, the gig that actually pays me money is the one I have to stop and drop everything for.
So, yeah.
Complain, complain, complain.
That's all this son of a bitch does, right?
And so I feel disjointed.
I feel stressed out.
I feel scatterbrained.
And though I love this time of year because it's the holiday season, this holiday season, quite honestly, for lack of a better way of saying it, has just fucking sucked.
Halloween was kind of cool.
You know, we had good food for Thanksgiving.
But honestly, with everything that's going on in the world and specifically what's going on with the United States and this fucking administration and all the court cases and this and that and the other and the people getting snatched up off the street and silenced and deported to places that they've never fucking lived.
It's just it's just all too much.
And trying to maintain alcohol retirement, sobriety through all of this, I mean, number one, I recognize that it is it is a necessity.
It's it's a good thing for me because as much as I would I would love to swizzle down some tequila or brewskis or rum or gin or whatever.
I just know that once that would get in me, I would I would just turn into a raging I don't know what you would call me, but it wouldn't be good for me.
It wouldn't be good for my, quote, brand, if you will.
Not that I have a fucking brand other than my IT company.
And it would potentially put all of that in jeopardy just for me to run my mouth about shit that really doesn't matter, you know, and dealing with the stresses of being married coming up on 36 years.
You know, I've got as the saying goes, I have more days behind me than I have in front of me now.
Probably have had for a while trying to prepare for the future because there I have a goal in mind, as I've already said about retirement, if it's even feasible.
I'm just not fucking happy.
Let's that's that's the easiest way to say it.
I'm not happy.
And the things that previously were in my life that did make me happy, I can't do.
You know, the alcohol made me happy or at least I thought it made me happy.
Let's put it that way.
And my life is much better off without it.
Don't get me wrong.
I I will be the first to admit that.
But it it brought me comfort.
It brought me joy, along with all the other complications and bullshittery that it brought along with it, stressed out, you know, my marriage and things like that.
But it's not there.
And there are other aspects of my marriage that aren't there that always made me happy.
And that's that's all I'm going to say about that.
I'm not looking to get divorced.
I'm too old to get fucking divorced.
And I just I I couldn't do that to my wife.
I just couldn't do it.
You know, I'm for better or for worse.
That's what we signed up for.
Right.
Sickness and health, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm here.
But I guess lack of a better way of saying it.
What about me?
Toby Keith song.
What about me?
What about I?
What about number one?
Me oh my.
But I feel like I'm I'm I'm I'm putting everything that I possibly can into everything that I possibly can.
And I'm I'm not getting anything back.
And maybe that's the way it's maybe that's just life.
Maybe that's fucking karma.
Maybe all of the less than stellar things that I've done in my life.
And I mean, don't get me wrong.
I'm not a I'm not a criminal.
I'm not done anything like that, but I could have been a better human being.
I could have been a better husband.
I could have been a better father.
And those things do weigh on me from time to time, especially being a better example to my kids.
And a lot of that had to do with with the drinking could have I could have been a better example.
I could have been a better father to my kids, which in turn also means I could have been a better husband to my wife, probably a better friend to my friends.
Fuck, I could probably be a better friend now to my friends, but I'm only empty, man.
I don't have anything left to give.
And it's it's a desert in there.
Still care about people.
Still care about my family.
I love my family.
I love my kids.
Care about love my friends, but I got nothing left.
And I don't I don't know how to solve that.
I don't know how to resolve that issue.
I can't feel that figure out how to fill that damn tank back up.
Anyway, I guess that's where I'll end it.
You've probably if you're still here, if you've made it to the end of this, probably not almost 30 minute by the time I cut it down and do the post production.
If you've made it here.
I hope I haven't soured your mood.
Hope I haven't depressed you.
And if you've got some legitimate words of wisdom, I don't I don't need you coming at me, go and put on your big boy britches and shut the fuck up because I already know that.
But if you have some suggestions, some legitimate suggestions or you want to share your story with me, email me.
Don at call me Donovan dot com.
It's the best way.
Don at call me Donovan dot com.
And let me know what you think.
Let me know what you're going through.
Let's see if we could commiserate our misery together.
All right.
That's it.
I'm out.
Take care of yourselves.
Hope you have a wonderful Christmas and a happy and safe new year.
If I don't record something before then, that's where we are.
Peace to you and your family and your friends, your loved ones and all of that.
Take care of yourselves.
Bye.
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