John M

How so? I was, let's go with heavy user of coke in my twenties and spent a fair amount of time with other people that did the same and bartenders with drinking problems were always a great hookup, it made them functional when they were drunk on the job and their hours allowed them to sleep of the hangover/comedown. But pretty much everyone I knew into it either got bored with it and didn't switch to another substance or switched to meth and ruined their lives/dead. But I'm gay and the gay community tends to have a very different view/relationship with substance use/abuse than the straight community.

Aren't we taking Buddy's supposed struggles with sobriety a little seriously for this ridiculous show? Was he abusing drugs and alcohol? Sure, I can believe that but not everyone, not even serious abusers need intensive and ongoing intervention to prevent relapse. I have a feeling that TLC would not put up with any potential legal or insurance exposure if Buddy was really at high risk of a major drug and alcohol abuse relapse.

Without getting to far in to specifics of my job, imagine if someone said you can buy a brand new BMW, like a 5 series and they would make your car payment for you every month and all you had to do for this car was give them the car payment bill every month by say the 14th of the month. And your life became "Hey, I got a phone call and they said they are going to repossess my car if I don't give them $2,000 by the end of the week! I thought you were going to pay for this?!" for hours a month explaining over and over again, "Remember these dozen times over the last two months I have contacted you saying I need your bill? Yeah, you never sent it to me." "Well, I know, I've been busy, can you just fix it?" This is my life.

Education for a lot of systemic reasons and I think at a certain point there hole you have dug yourself by intentional or unintentional choices when it comes to life and employment skills becomes insurmountable in their ability to attack it. Like I have this friend, sweet, great guy, he had a trade job that actually made him good money as far as education and family history and he threw it all away because he got it in his mind that he should have a white collar professional job like pretty much all of his friends. Now he is up to his eyes in debt from a for-profit college because he was unwilling or unable to understand that at the age of almost 40 he needed high school level English, math and computer classes to catch him up to an entry level office job making $12 an hour. One of the things I hear all the time from my clients is "Wow, what do I need to do to get a job like you have? Are you guys hiring?" and it's like, oh, that is sweet and I know your heart is in the right place but you aren't even remotely qualified for my position, like I'm planning on going back to school for a masters to advance in my career any further. There is a guy lower than me in the org chart and pay scale that is working on his Ph.D. "Keep checking our website!"

So I work in low income social services and unfortunately poverty is correlated with a bunch of other, not great things. You would be shocked at some of the things some of my higher functioning clients do and say, I'm often shocked and I have been doing this for awhile now. I often find myself boxed into otherwise solvable problems because of strings of staggeringly poor decisions by what would otherwise to appear to be functional adults with easily solvable problems had they done basic things like open their mail. And I'm not exaggerating, I've had to deal with like crisis level events because people will say things like "Yeah, I mean, I don't get anything like really important in the mail so I kind of just haven't opened it in a few months but then I got this phone call and it turns out this pile of letters the government has been sending me for a few months was important. Anyways, I haven't opened a lot of these, could you please just take care of it?"

I don't get the sense that Buddy is qualified for any job that he would want to have and got spoiled by the income and lifestyle that bartending afforded him. If you have the personality bartending can be a surprisingly lucrative career for someone that is otherwise qualified for stocking shelves at Walmart and isn't allowed to play with the inventory scanner.

Whitney, he needs Advil not Oxy for his back pain. His back is cramped from driving for hours, not because of a disc hemorrhage.

So in a past life I used to hang out with some minor pro-sports players and a local newscaster, celebrity, even incredibly minor celebrity is inexplicably infectious to a surprisingly large subset of people. It's really bizarre to see it up front in personal with people you know as that dude I sometimes have a beer with that does that thing for a living that I don't care about at all.

Does Buddy have the most beautiful penis on earth? Because even if he does OMG what is wrong with you women? Huh, crazy that the capacity of the venue is exactly the same as the number of tickets she sold "accidentally".

I feel like the problem is that her life is such a disaster that her only sense of control is meddling with the lives of people with solutions that she thinks are easy.

Whitney, you can't even clean your own ass, no one is asking you to solve their problems for them.

I feel like I should have anticipated this thing that I have spent two episodes gleefully anticipating.

You know what might actually be good exercise for an elderly woman recovering from a stroke? A nice walk feeding ducks.

I mean he was delivering pizzas part time, it's not like he was walking away from a career as a public relations professional.

I'm sorry, Whitney doesn't have an eating disorder now? We are going with this being healthy eating habits?

I'm not a police legalologist but it seems ill-advised to film showing yourself handling illegal drugs that were in your house on TV and I feel like TLC wouldn't allow that if it was real.

Sadly addiction is INCREDIBLY common in the gay community and he probably does not find his own story that interesting if not incredibly depressing. As has been mentioned before Buddy seems to glamorize his addiction a little bit, addiction in the gay community is much more normalized.

I was unfortunate enough to be part of a reality show taping (Charity event for a non-profit a friend runs) and watching the sausage get made was amazing. They were at the event but they did their own parallel event in a roped off corner and apparently there was this huge fight between two of the stars with finger pointing and yelling and anger. Well, it took several takes to get right so you would see them in a fight that looked moments away from getting physical, then they would cut and the two people that were in this ~huge fight~ would be smiling and laughing and talking to each other like they were having brunch, OK, time for the next take "YOU KILLED MY PUPPY, I'M NEVER SPEAKING TO YOU AGAIN YOU DIRTY WHORE!" cut, lol, omg, how many more times do we have to do this, oh, gurl, have I told you that you outfit is totes cute, OK, retake. "I TOLD YOU I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOUR SKANKY ASS AGAIN, LOOK AT YOU, YOU DISGUST ME!"

OK, in fairness to Whitney, her job is probably the television show, she films what, two seasons a year and I'm sure they take a few months each to fully produce, there are not that many jobs that will allow you to take that kind of time off and I suspect Whit is making in the very low six figures, high 5 for the show which is a reasonable salary for someone her age, especially with her limitations and capabilities. THAT SAID, WTF does she do all day? I was unemployed for around 3 months after being laid off and I literarily did somewhere around hundreds of hours of volunteer work in that time period just so I wouldn't go nuts sitting around the house.

Being recently engaged myself several people I know that don't have good dating histories have reacted rather bitterly to the news like it has anything to do with them so I can totally see that.

Yeah, how about filtering yourself in general and not just around your father?

I found out in my 30s that my father was my mother's 3rd marriage, I asked her about it and she was basically like, yeah, there was never any reason for it to come up, he was an asshole, it only lasted a few years, I was young and I regret it and we never had kids. Which was a perfectly reasonable answer and it has never come up again.

I have a national TV show but I need to get an RV to raise the profile of my fake dance class? I can't imagine why she never told Whit about her first marriage.

"I Never see Ashley anymore." Also "I've spent so time with this baby I am absolutely sure I need a baby!" Whit, who wants a baby, is concerned that her friend, a working (single?) mother spends too much time with her child?

Whit is going to keep an eye on Buddy? She can't even take care of herself.