Over on Substack Iโm writing about the last seven years of my life. Itโs the first draft of the whole story. All of it.
Below is a short excerpt. Iโll be releasing chapters every few days, along with โWhereโs Hunter?โ a video series exclusive to Substack.
Check it out. Link is in the replies.
The Laptop
They called it the laptop. I will call it that too, although the name is not accurate, the provenance was never established, and no court or forensic examiner ever certified the chain of custody that would have made it evidence rather than theater. I will call it the laptop because by now the word belongs to something larger than a piece of hardware. It belongs to a story they needed me to confirm, and I am done letting them tell it.
Their origin story begins in a Delaware repair shop, but it does not end there, and it did not begin there either. By the time a legally blind computer repairman named handed a hard drive to Rudy Giulianiโs attorney, men had already been traveling to Kyiv and Vienna and Zurich for more than a year trying to assemble exactly this object. The laptop did not surface and create a scandal. A scandal was constructed, and a laptop was produced to anchor it.
So. The laptop.
Here is what was on it.
Twenty years of my life, or a version of it. Messages sent at hours that don't belong to anyone sober. Photographs I would never have taken in daylight. A record of every way a body can fail its owner when the owner has stopped trying to help. None of it is a single dramatic moment. It is accumulation, the slow daily work of an addict doing the thing that is killing him because the alternative feels like dying faster.
All of that was on it. I am not denying any of it.
That is not a small thing to say. I have spent years in rooms where men and women with far less scrutiny than I have faced tore themselves apart trying to account for what they did in the middle of their disease. The inventory of an addictโs life is never clean. It is not meant to be clean. Recovery does not erase the record. It requires reading it. I have read mine.
What I will not do is accept their lies.
Because a record of what is on it, or more precisely, what was not, exists.
(Read the whole story on Substack)
@MahomeSZN@iThinkIsee12 Knile Davis. Aside from being from my alma mater, his opening kickoff return that propelled us to our first playoff win in decades was such a great moment.