Hello world! Its been a very long time since I’ve written anything at all on here and I went through some massive changes, spiritually, geographically, and even matrimonially! I moved to Florida, became Catholic, albeit not a very good one, and married a woman I love with a 3 year old daughter who is now 7 and we are in the process of adopting!
So much to unpack there! I’ll start with Covid and dirty rotten scoundrel politics. I’d moved to Tampa Florida in October of 2019 with my fiancé at the time, but we broke up in February of 2020 after fighting like cats and dogs. It was painful to say the least. Few things though, save 9/11 have been more surreal than seeing our country turn itself inside out, over that debacle, that now seems was mainly about selling snake oil medicine. I happened to be in Las Vegas twice in late February and early March for two different shows, and the day after Trump announced Chinese tourists had been banned from visiting the US, I was in Paris, the casino, not France, and I’m not kidding when I tell you two buses filled with Chinese tourists pulled up, meandered on in to the casino and went and filled the breakfast area. The first few days of my visit, there had been a few tourists, mostly Americans, and then opposite of the news, the place filled with Chinese that last day. It would be another couple of weeks before full panic set it.
The breakup with my fiancé hadn’t yet happened. The second trip out to Vegas though was when the real Covid panic hit. We were all at the ConTech show 2020, when the global hysteria set in. I’ve always felt it had a real national security level emergency feeling to it. One of the largest tradeshows in the world, this year I know 140,000 attendees, and they just shut the whole thing down. I had to wait in the airport all day, as everyone flights were moved, and there were a lot of soldiers and drone support airmen in the airport as well, being moved from Vegas. When I arrived home early, my fiancé didn’t pick me up at the airport, and we broke up a few days later.
I had launched my book, Spiral’s End, Hepatitis C and Me, the year before and had lackluster results with it, primarily because I didn’t promote it at all, hating that name with every ounce of my being. I had hoped the name would help with the Amazon SEO, and I’d had it professionally edited and cleaned up as well, but used the same cover. Still the name is terrible, lol, the originally name Hippopotamus Sea was much better, subtle, creative. I mention it again though because I did still have a Social Media presence with it and it comes into play during this covid story.
But first the bottom fell out. Sadly as a man in Western Civilization, much of our identity comes from financial stability, and as a salesman in tech, construction software specifically, I am probably over invested in tech like Tesla, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia, so when the crash of 2020 hit the stock market, I was punched hard right in the gut. I lost a lot, a very big percentage of my nest egg disappeared relatively quickly. Around this time too, my fiancé had moved out, and a few weeks later met another man who she was head over heels for, and wouldn’t return my calls or texts, and with the move to Tampa, losing my network, my financial status taking a hit, I simply went into a tailspin. I had a bit of a spiritual experience as well, realizing that that relationship ultimately failed due to my own character defects, lust basically without expounding, and that the TRT I’d been on for a few years probably wasn’t helping I decided to kick that as well. This was probably ill advised at this exact juncture. I’ve now cycled on and off it a few times over the years, and as a man in sobriety, 19 years sober in December 2026 I can tell you this is not nothing, but can cause extreme mood swings, depression, and can last months. I didn’t know this the first time I cycled off though, I genuinely felt like I was losing my mind. I guess I was 13 years sober or so around then, and it just felt like the world was coming apart.
So I became a bit manic, as one is want to do. I began obsessively trying to fix up my house, which was awfully small compared to my Atlanta house, which I loved, and was a perfect mid-century model work of art I’d put all my love into, and this tiny house on the canal in Tampa just felt super cramped. It wasn’t helping so I began to work on it obsessively, as well as double down my efforts at work, and exercising like mad to try and kick the obsessive thinking about my ex. None of it worked, but I did fix my house up and get in great shape, waking up at 4:30 am and riding my bike 30 miles a day consistently from Town and Country, through Oldsmar, Safety Harbor, across the Courtney Campbell and back home every day before work. If you’d rolled up on my house at this time you may have found me single handedly trying to fix my boat lift, where in replacing the felt pads, all the beams fell into the water, with me on them and all my tools, racing against the tide to put it all back together, in 3 foot deep Tampa Bay tidal mud, just beating the waters, before my boat tipped over. My next door neighbor gawking at my antics the whole time ready to call the emergency crews. Or renting a scissor-lift to cut the Oak Tree branches, getting it done, manic, no planning, but executing, never mind a scissor lift doesn’t work well in sand, and I’m lucky to have lived as it settled and adjusted as I sawed off huge branches falling to the ground, narrowly missing my skull. I stayed busy.
At one point during Covid, I want to say around April, I was on Twitter, which we all recall was being heavily censored at this point, and I commented on a post by the Chinese CCP aligned Editor, Hu Xijin, something about you know my usual libertarian rantings around being on the wrong side of history, and I always just thought I was lost as a tear drop in the ocean whining to this guy, but this time I must have struck a nerve. Now my wife is not a fan of this cartoon, and its not my best work I’ll grant, but it did get a mild amount of AA fame and a few folks from conventions have given me recognition on these YouTube videos, but my series AA Boy Meets AA Girl on YouTube was public to try and help promote the book, SEO for booksfree.com and ultimately entertain, and the video at had gotten around 20k views by then. Arguably, save the post I wrote after Bin Laden was killed, my most popular publication of any kind. It was NOT linked to my Twitter account at the time. Within 10 minutes of my snarky reply to Hu Xijin, the Silicon Valley cabal of censorship had pulled my YouTube account, Facebook and Twitter accounts. I was absolutely shocked. I could not believe they were linked, and so infiltrated by Chinese Communists. Its shocking to me still. It verified for me that Covid was a powerplay, more so than a big pharma scam, though maybe it was both? I mean really who knows, the power plays were so hidden, so expansive, so malignant and secret that we just don’t know. The conspiracies now can’t be proven or unproven and mountains of evidence obscure every angle. We are truly in a doubt of real information and that is a book in itself, I intend on writing at some point. What I can say definitively is that they deactivated my accounts across all my socials instantly. I appealed and prevailed, but the power, and the coordination was not lost on me. It was real, it was powerful, and those agents probably are still in Silicon Valley in these big tech companies, thought quieter now. On this day as Chinese ships head to the Strait of Hormuz, and the Chinese embassy wraps barb wire around its DC offices, this cold war could become hot at any time. It is said there are many Chinese men of military age poised to go in the US at any point, we simply don’t know what information is real and what is not. I do know that day in 2020 they censored me, and by appealing I got all my links and socials turned back on.
Easter Sunday, Tampa police guarded the churches to prevent church goers from attending. AA meetings were closed in Tampa. Someone had the gall to tell me to quit riding my bike at 4:30 am thus breaking the curfew or whatever authoritarian overreach bullshit the Tampa local government tried to enforce via Facebook and I recall responding poorly, and threatening to post up in my house until the National Guard arrived if they wanted to stop me, and this was bad timing on my part. As fate would have it a few days later towing my boat, that had a 12.5 foot tower, I ripped the cable line serving the entire internet to all the homebound house arrested Tampa covid sufferers, basically LIVING off the internet, and old JB ripped their internet line straight out of the powerlines using my boat. The police arrived, as did an angry, almost medieval mob, and they almost arrested me! I was not making friends. The police openly discussed arresting me and I laughed at them, which they didn’t appreciate, but eventually let me go, there was some legal point about the neighborhood not having an HOA to press charges, but here I was 13 years sober, about to get arrested over a minor traffic incident. And frankly that has happened, with low hanging internet cables three times since because my boat tower is so tall but at the time, boy, with these riled up home bound Tampa residents, mad at losing internet, it was all very intense,. and I wasn’t making any friends in that neighborhood.
I kept trying to make it work though, I knew I loved living near the water, and going back to Atlanta felt like retreat so my mission was to persevere and this too shall pass. I’m emotional though, and I hadn’t had enough meetings, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of taking my boat way offshore and just not coming back. Having lost my father this way though, I’d long ago promised myself I’d never quit on life this way, and cause pain to all those I knew and loved and who loved me, but the thoughts were there. Even while fishing offshore, catching lots of fish, in the Gulf and the East Coast, I still was manic, sad, obsessive and it would be a year before my mind really settled down. I tried many things to calm my mind, and one thing finally took hold. Playing guitar. I found while learning to play I found peace. I guess you can’t be sad and try to learn something at the same time or maybe it was just music soothing my soul, I really don’t know. I’d owned guitars since my 20’s and even mention picking one up in a bender while in Little Five Points in my book, but I’d never sat down and attempted to learn. Frankly had my brother not accomplished this task I would have never had the faith to pick one up myself, but lo and behold I began to be able to put a song or two together and singing gave me peace. The first song I learned, poorly I’m sure, was El Paso, by Marty Robbins.
My Uncle Barton and I were talking not too long after, I believe I sent him a video of my playing, and he said, “That’s interesting you know your Dad was an Air Force brat, and began learning music, when your grandfather was stationed in El Paso.” I knew my dad had moved around a lot but I always think of him and my mom from being from Albany Georgia, perhaps because their home videos sound like they bother fell off the turnip truck. But also when someone dies in your life so young you don’t get their narrative, you fill it in yourself. My uncle went on to ask, “Did you say you were in Tampa? You know that is where your Dad, Barry and myself, (my two uncles) were all born, at MacDill Airforce Base. So oddly enough, a traveling salesman that has seen most of the country, just happened to move of all places, to Tampa Florida, after living in Atlanta 42 years of my life. I chose the one city my dad had been born. And something about it felt right. Though I knew I was in a tough spot, I loved being by the water and learning my dad had been born here did bring me some kind of peace.
Around this time, the black crows began showing up. Now the crows are significant, as are all birds, prominently mentioned in my book and some of my delusions, but my dad had a particular niche with Black Crows. I skipped over this in my book as you just can’t fit in every little detail, but it now becomes significant. When we’d moved to Sweet Apple Crossing in Roswell, after living in Norcross, and just before moving to Brookfield West, my father had begun to get a bit more dark. His alcoholism was taking root, I believe in retrospect, but he went and bought a boombox, for those who remember the eighties. And an audiotape of a crow’s distress calls, and man I tell you the sky would fill with black crows, thousands and thousand of ominous black crows and he would laugh like the mad hatter staring at the apocalyptic sky with circling birds, screaming at us. It was not lost on me then how odd this was, and this being the beginning of this descent into madness that would culminate in his taking his head off with a .357, I have never super appreciated a big flock of crows at any time since. Well fast forward to Spring 2020, really early summer I believe and the trash was not getting picked up at the nearby Starbucks consistently and the crows began to gather. A murder as they say. By the thousands. For weeks on end. I’m not playing any God forsaken distress calls, they are just gathering, and while they traveled to the Starbucks it did seem like they had chosen my house specifically to make their headquarters.
I tried firecrackers, I tried a BB Gun, and my neighbors weren’t fans of either or me by this point if I’m being perfectly honest with all my antics, and so I just had to suffer. I hoped against hope they would go away and they just didn’t. it went on for days, then weeks and then months. Around this time, I visited my buddy Greg Steiniger in Saint Pete Beach, and the beach felt absolutely magical. The cool breeze off the water and salty air. I just loved it. This is where I’d wanted to move in the first place, well Tierra Verde, but my fiancé at the time had thought we wouldn’t get any work done and so we settled on Town and Country with a boatlift, but this beach was amazing. He told me I could easily rent my house out, and we should find a house down here. I told him to start looking, hell interest rates were at 2.65 in June/July 2020. I felt silly moving after only living in the Tampa home 8 months or so, but then I returned to my house, and there were 4 dozen black crows on the dead tree limb poking prominently from the canal, that had been an Ospreys home when we were house shopping. My fiancé had tried to feed it a Sweet Potato, and I lost the argument trying to convince her otherwise. The osprey never did become vegan. Those crows chased it off though.
We found a house in Saint Pete Beach though, a mid-century modern. And it was small but the feel of it was clean, modern and efficient. I will never doubt the impact good design has on my mind, though rationally it seems like it shouldn’t if the utility is the same, all things being equal, but I’m telling you, design matters and that house in Tampa made me miserable, while mid-century modern brings me peace. I can’t explain it. On the way to the house on the island, I saw three green parrots. They were beautiful, exotic, gorgeous. So much nicer, more pleasant than crows, a breath of fresh air.
I thought I was crazy though being chased out of my house by crows, and I literally went to a shrink, fully expecting her to tell me I was delusional, crazy, here is some medication. But when I explained the crows, and then the three exquisite parrots at the beach house, a medical doctor told me, “Sometimes the universe just tells you what do do.”
I’d also met a woman in AA that I really liked. She was bright, beautiful, and seemed to enjoy my company, though our philosophies were different, they were also vastly similar. She was a Jungian, she was sober, and we both had a deep respect for Alcoholics Anonymous, and both had been grateful beyond measure for sobriety. She had a daughter, and she was not easily won over, but I did think a nice house at the beach couldn’t hurt. The AA meetings at Saint Pete Beach had been another strong pull, not to mention the beautiful girl at the meetings, but the fact that AA had effectively closed in Tampa and remained opened in Saint Pete Beach was impactful as well. I moved, and moving to be close to Audrey was certainly a factor.
I would later learn she lived 45 minutes from that Blind Pass clubhouse, in Largo, but due diligence and planning has never been my strong suite, I’m much more ready fire aim, execute execute execute. She’s a planner, and that’s good for me. It didn’t happen over night, but we are married now, and we are one court case away from adopting my daughter, as I write here in April 2026.
So I moved to the beach in August of 2020, I closed on the house. I feed those parrots still, and sometimes they follow me around my little island. It’s magical. There is much more to tell, the court case has been intense, the absent biological father, a chronic heroin, crack user who stole from Audrey and abused her emotionally, verbally and has paid nothing in support since our daughters birth decided to fight us tooth and nail, and we’ve been in a lengthy court battle that can be its own book. Their defense is that he’s “sober” while being on Kratom, an opiate, and a travesty of justice and good common sense that it is legal in gas stations, while most of the country has never heard of it, a responsible adult capable of fathering it does not make one. That it keeps him off the needle is not what we would consider sober, and we are praying the court sees it this way as well. \
I look back on 2020 and the crows, and not unlike my brushes with darkness in the past, it all led me back to the light. Darkness is God’s double agent, eventually we all come home.
There is a romantic notion to me, that my father pushed through the veil of death and the beyond, guiding me to music, nudging me along to Saint Pete Beach, allowing the universe to whisper in my ear, this place is not for you, but there is a place you’ll love and that has been my experience.
We say in Alcoholics Anonymous that you’ll be rocketed to a 4th dimension. That finding God’s will is the proper alignment of ones own will, and that it will become easier and easier to discern. Life is either magical, and filled with God’s miracles or it is not, God is either everything or he is nothing.
He is everything, my sobriety is everything. Love is everything, and God is love. I feel it walking my puppy, daughter and wife around this island, and I feel it speaking in meetings. And just like guitar in 2020, I’ve felt it in learning to vibe code books4free.com.
I sell AI in the Contech space, and I’ve learned much in the year, to the day, I’ve been with this silicon valley start-up. Two Stanford PhDs, some of the smartest men on the planet, hired this ex drug addict, alcoholic, in and out of juvenile and jail, to represent their masterpiece software, that uses AI to process construction POs, Invoices and Packing Slips. While there, in the process of learning their software I’ve learned to vibe code, and as a result I’ve built books4free.com for the 3rd or 4th time, but this time all myself, with the help of AI.
It’s amazing, I’m obsessed and passionate about it. I hope you’ll come along for the ride! I’ll write more later but wanted to just update the world. Thanks for reading, more to come.
JB Smith
Founder
Books4free.com
JB Smiths Blog - Author @ books4free.com 