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I drink whiskey because of Deadwood.

In the mid-2000s, I was depressed, divorced, and devoid of basically everything. I had two young children who depended on me, a few half-finished novels, fading dreams of becoming a filmmaker, and little enough cash that my days were spent chasing consulting work in an attempt to derail my increasingly successful pursuit of indebtedness.

One night, late at night, late in the summer or early in the Autumn, lights out, kids asleep, with perhaps a candle burning, I decided to watch the first episode of Deadwood. I don't remember why. I had never been

It was late 2006. For the previous twelve months, I’d been dealing with divorce. Not just divorce, but divorce with children. I had been a stay-at-home dad for almost five years when everything went downhill, and I was having trouble finding work, because most of my career contacts were on the west coast while I was in Chicago. I was hemorrhaging money to bills and mortgage payments and late credit card fees and daycare, plunging further into debt every hour. Depression colored my entire view of the world, and it regularly mingled with fear, sadness, heartache and loneliness. I