Before we start this podcast, I want to say that every project I have pretty much has
a village behind it, and this one is no exception.
I want to thank the patrons who stepped in on my Kickstarter to really make sure that
this got off the ground.
Denise Grady, Caden White-Wattam, Amanda Peake, Todd A. Davis, Jay Grant, and Corey Watson.
Without you guys, I wouldn't be sitting here talking with the awesome guest that I'm
about to talk to.
Thank you so much.
I thought about starting off my episode today with a Romulan word of the day just to kind
of make you feel at home, as soon as you do the Klingon word of the day.
That would have been, but that was thought of about two minutes before I hit join on
the podcast.
I was like, not today, not today, but maybe, maybe one day.
Welcome to It's Your Loss podcast, where raw stories of resilience and healing are told,
all while uncovering and destigmatizing the diverse symptoms of loss.
Welcome back to the podcast.
If you missed last month's episode, well, it's your loss.
I'm host Michael LeBlanc, and I am here with podcaster, stand-up comedian, extraordinary
guy all around, and he smells vaguely like chocolate chip cookies.
I don't know what that's about, but it's amazing.
Everybody say hello to Todd A. Davis.
Todd!
Hey, how are you?
I'm doing well, man.
I'm doing well.
Hi, Neon, man.
I'm really excited about this.
I'm very excited to have you on, because I was on a podcast beforehand, but you showed
me what a professional podcaster is.
You gave me a script, which I did not give you.
You always sound good.
The video is vaguely nerdy, especially when you're ready to go, because right now, I'm
seeing some weird, some chords and whatnot.
Yeah, I can't decide what to do with these little LED lights.
That's what this string is.
But I have my Star Trek comics.
You do.
I've got a broken TARDIS lava lamp.
Oh, that is what that is, isn't it?
Yeah.
Oh, that's great.
I have some Marvel hardcovers.
My D&D stuff.
I have some horror movies stuff.
I have my Walking Dead collection.
I have the Enterprise BCND over my head.
Which are holding up the LED strands.
It's a good use of them.
Yeah, exactly.
My office is just chock full of nerdy, of nerdy fun things.
It is a mess, just like my personality.
Well, I love it at the time that I came over there, man.
I just walked around there and I just, every corner of that little space that I saw resonated
with me on a very nerdy level.
And speaking of things that be considered nerdy, one of the things that you're actually
going to be the first person that I try this out on, there's a spot on my side on sheet
that says what your favorite game is.
And ideally what I was going to do was play over Zoom games and that's not going to work
because I feel like it takes away from the conversation and also this is the whole thing.
So I scrapped that.
So instead, you said that your favorite game, according to this was Super Mario Brothers
Wii.
Oh, yes.
And so I took it upon myself to print out the horoscope as it pertains to Mario.
And what I need to know from you, what is your birthday?
December the 26th.
Day after Christmas.
While you look that up, would you like to hear the joke I tell everybody when they find out
I'm a Christmas baby?
Oh, please.
So the person says, you know, oh, Christmas baby.
Yeah, mom and dad actually did a really good job of making sure that, you know, it was
a very special time for me.
On Christmas, I got really great gifts and then the next day I got the batteries to put
in them.
But I'm bummed.
Home comedian.
Everybody available for parties, bar mitzvahs, corporate events.
You can't hear it, but I'm sure there's a room full of laughter for you out there.
Somebody's applauding for you.
All right.
That's the running motif of my entire comedy career.
Somewhere there's a room full of people laughing.
I tell my wife all the time is like, you don't have to laugh at my jokes for me to know I'm
funny.
I'm hilarious.
All the way at the back of the page, because obviously, you know, the area you have to
make me flip all the pages to get there.
According to this, so you are a Capricorn.
Yes.
Okay.
That one is right.
Good.
That means this is from a reputable website.
It says your King Boo.
And yeah, you tell me how well this fits you.
Also known as the master of illusions.
King Boo is the main antagonist from the Luigi Manson series.
King Boo is the bow bowser of the Luigi games.
Why?
Okay.
I'm going to get this.
Good fit for the Capricorn Zodiac sign, the bowser of January's.
What?
I should have vetted this.
Anyway, as someone who controls over the booze, it says that King Boo, here we go, is a good
manager.
However, one of King's boo's weaknesses, however, is he's unforgiving.
I don't know.
I think I know you a little bit, Todd.
I'm not feeling that one.
I have been known to hold a grudge or two.
As I'm getting older, I'm realizing grudges are not worth holding onto.
So I am, I am slowly letting those go.
Master of illusions.
I feel like putting on a face to do stand up comedy, putting on a decent face of voice
to do podcasting is a little bit of a magic trick.
You got to kind of put forth your best foot or your best voice, or you got to at least
make it till you make it as much praise as you gave me at the beginning for the professionalism
of my podcast.
I have been on podcasts before for years before starting my own.
And it was kind of a combination of, hey, I see this show is doing a certain thing and
here's what I like.
These are the things I don't like.
So let's lose that.
And then I would appear.
I would appear on another show.
And I would say, oh, this is the same thing.
Oh, these are the things I like.
Get rid of the rest.
And I did that a couple of other times.
And by the time it came down to start mine, it was kind of, all right, I'm going to make
notes.
I'm not going to be married to them because I don't want it to sound like I'm reading
off of a cue card because if I start reading something, it's going to sound pre rehearsed
and it's just, it's going to fall flat.
So I do like the spontaneous nature of a real conversation.
But at the same time, I kind of set a goal for myself of, I want to have some of the
Star Trek actors.
I want to have some scientists.
I want to have some authors and some of these folks may or may not have done podcasts before
or have a certain public image to.
That's true.
Yeah.
They got to project a little bit.
Exactly.
I wanted to put those notes together and send them so that they are the most comfortable
that they can be in this particular environment talking to somebody they may not know.
Yeah.
So, you know, in doing that, I mean, you've been the recipient of my notes a few times
and they are pretty thorough, but at the same time, there's enough room in there for
casual conversations.
Plenty of flexibilities.
So while we're talking, I flipped over to mine, which I was born May 7th.
It's a tourist.
The one that I'm pretty happy about, my favorite color is green, forest green specifically.
But evidently, Yoshi is the tourist of the Mario world, tends to make friends with other
members of the same species, commonly seen as green.
One of the tourists' favorite two colors.
Oh, I didn't realize that was that simple.
Okay.
I'm basic.
All right.
Cool.
Since Yoshi loves to touch and taste people and objects around him, he matches his tourists
as well.
His uncanny resemblance between a tourist and Yoshi tells us he was fit to be this zodiac
sign.
So that's what Mario can teach us.
I love to taste people and I love the color green.
Hey, you know what?
I'm a horror toge.
There's people in this world that pay a lot, that pay a lot of money to be tasted.
That's true.
And pay people a lot of money to get tasted.
So that's nice.
I could read it off for you, but I think it would sound better coming from you.
Todd, what have you lost in life?
Well, two big things spring to mind.
The first is maybe a bit abstract, but the loss of opportunity as a younger person.
Growing up, I was very outgoing and creative to a point where I started to show inclinations
toward creative writing and storytelling and acting.
But those things were not encouraged by anyone really in my life at that point.
I'm talking probably high school years, you know, the formative years.
Now, and even, you know, and all of that stuff, even into stand up, like I just turned 40.
I am.
Happy birthday.
Thank you.
I am one of the ancient relics at the stand up comedy club amongst a bunch of 20 somethings
all getting up there to tell their jokes.
And I think to myself, you know, gosh, you know, I'm not quite at a decade of doing stand
up, but what if I had started 10 years earlier?
You know, what if, you know, what would have happened?
Where would I be creatively?
If I had pursued acting with all the gusto that I did other things in my life, you know,
where would I be?
Where would I be with that creative writing?
Had I pursued hell, something as simple as an English degree and college, you know, when
you're supposed to go to college right after high school?
That's what they tell you.
Yeah.
They tell you to do that.
Well, sort of.
They heavily imply that.
But if you're a little thick like me, it doesn't really take.
But basically, you know, it was because the youngest of three.
And so my parents had me when they were in their 40s and they just kind of, you know,
it's 13 years between me and my next oldest brother.
So they kind of let my brothers and Looney Tunes from the 40s raise me.
Now that gave me a unique perspective being raised in a house full of adults and watching
cartoons during the day, you know, like I said, Looney Tunes from the 40s.
But then hanging out with my brothers who were in their teens.
Actually by the time I came around, my oldest brother had already moved out.
He's 20 years older than me.
Oh, wow.
They had us generations apart.
But by the time I was three, four, five years old and hanging out with my the middle brother,
my middle brother, Chris, Jim is my older, my oldest brother.
He was watching David Letterman Saturday Night Live.
The kids in the hall.
Like 18, 19 by that point, right?
Yeah.
17, 18, 19.
Yeah.
And so that kind of gave me this my sense of humor and my style of comedy.
I've always had trouble describing myself and my comedy style, right?
But someone else said that my style is highbrow silly.
And I love that.
It's so it's so compact.
But knowing my background of Looney Tunes and late night stand up like that kind of
fits.
Yeah.
So that track.
And I've kind of gotten around the idea of losing that opportunity is when I look at
myself next to these 20 something year old comedians who are doing their jokes, I'm coming
to it with the perspective of an additional 20 years of life and being married for over
a decade.
And more.
You have more to pull from your, your bag of tricks is a little more full than these
20 something people who are getting on stage.
Well, exactly.
I mean, I don't know all their lives, but I, I feel like I could make you accept.
Same assumption with that.
Yeah.
So, yeah, you know, that, that's the first thing, the loss of potential life.
I guess it was the loss of a, an alternate reality for me.
Sure.
Somewhere out there, there's a Todd who's either on SNL or directing films or acting
in films or doing something like that, writing comic books or something.
But the other, the other big part was the loss of my mom when I was 19.
She got sick the summer after I graduated high school a year later, she was gone.
She had a disease called scleroderma.
The term literally means a hardening of the skin and it shows up in like your hands that
they kind of turn white and they get hard to the touch.
Yeah.
And she actually had it in her lungs.
In the end, the lungs couldn't get the oxygen into the blood and she, which caused her to
have a heart attack.
Yeah.
There's, there's not much, there's not much coming back after when your body decides
to not bring in oxygen, which I can relate.
My mom passed away from a COPD, which I mean, she was bringing in the oxygen, but the CO2
was staying afterwards.
And so it was just kind of like a quiet good night basically.
She went to bed and yeah.
Jeez, Louise.
I feel you with the, the loss of your mom.
You know, I don't want to treat this like a game of poker, but I think I can one up
you with the loss of my father as well.
Now, I feel like, you know, the older you get though, the more you can just keep pulling
out of a deck of cards that you've been slowly building over life is like, right, here's
mom, here's dad, here's an inlaw, you know, oh sure.
We feel that, you know, in that deck of cards, you know, you also have the, the more abstract
stuff.
So it's, it's cool that you started off with the abstract because when a lot of people
talk about what they lost in life, they want to talk about the people.
They want to talk about the, the physical stuff.
I haven't yet talked to a person who has had a loss of a limb, but there is a guy that,
you know, I may be talking to that was born without them.
So he kind of came with, with a deck that was already started for him.
And yeah, the things that he's done with his life, he's inspirational speaker.
He's a standup comedian.
He's, he's an author.
I mean, he's, I mean, he's living his life.
And he's a lot lighter than a lot of us because of the limbs that he doesn't have.
And I said, I really hope to get him on the show where we've got people out there searching
for him, asking for him.
Who would you say were your biggest naysayers, your biggest obstacle makers?
How did you get around them?
I think the easiest one to point to is probably school guidance counselor.
I was one of those kids that on graduation day, you know, you walk up, they hand you
the little leather bound folder thing.
Oh yeah.
You go back to, you shake the hand, you go back to your seat.
I was the one who opened it, saw that it was in there, took a big sigh of relief and then
relax.
But yeah, you know, a school guidance counselor, I think a conversation or two, or hell, just
looking at my grades, barely passing math, barely passing science, doing pretty decent
in English.
Oh, he's really good at chorus, really good at acting.
Like, that should probably be a discussion.
Mom and dad, they are the definition of boomers.
My father was born in the forties, served in Vietnam, more of a practical mentality
of, well, that's all well and good, but you need a tangible skill.
You need, you know, something that you can, a trade that you need a trade, boy, you need
a trade.
Exactly.
Just taking a small break to tell you that this episode of the podcast is brought to
you by Dink, spelled D-I-N-Q-D-N-D in the coffin hold of the USS Enterprise.
It's my first book, a memoir in which I tell you about trying and failing in the Navy's
school for nuclear operators, all while juggling marriage and depression.
Where does D&D come in?
It's woven all throughout the book.
Check it out on Amazon as a paperback or on Kindle.
The link's in the description below.
And it was kind of encouraging some time ago.
I mean, I was still living at home, but I ran across an article about Robin Williams,
who his father, the same way.
I heard that before, yeah.
Yeah, take up a trade and he became a welder.
Fast forward a few years to, I had a short term job working as a welder's spotter, basically
making fire watch.
That's why I was a fire watch for a welder, which basically involves standing there, watching
the guy do the thing and making sure he doesn't catch on fire.
But at the same time, do a Google search of what a general welder makes.
It's pretty decent money.
So looking at that, I kind of wish someone had had the conversation, either my dad or
a school guidance counselor to say, hey, look, you're doing these creative things that are
great.
It's going to be very difficult to earn money in the arts.
That's the reality.
Here are some simple things that you can do that will put you in a better position to
earn money down the road.
One of them, what I was already involved in martial arts.
Seriously, if you're listening to this and you have young kids, martial arts isn't on
their radar.
When they are done with eighth grade, get them involved in martial arts.
They'll have a black belt by the time they go to college.
That looks good on a college transcript.
It also looks good on your resume and job applications.
That would have looked good on my resume or job applications, but I was doing martial
arts.
I was just doing a simple karate class.
I was showing them a certain stretch, just a simple back bend.
A little too far, my diaphragm seized on me.
So I fall over and I'm having a coffee fit.
They think I've hurt myself.
They use that.
They told me at the time, it's like, well, you hurt yourself, just doing the simple thing.
You can't do karate.
So they took me out of it.
Turns out that we had to run because of the dealer that they had been getting their weed
from.
They had smoked it instead of sold it.
We had to run so we can no longer be in that area and go to that karate class.
I wouldn't find that out until way later.
I thank them for holding that information from me until I was old enough to understand.
But yes, you're right.
Following through with that is, yeah, it looks great.
Even going back to certain trades like being able to weld or being able to drive a forklift.
Sure.
A forklift certification.
That's where it's at.
Yeah.
A CDL.
Gosh, if you got a CDL, you'll make money.
Keep talking these sexy things to me and this is going to turn into a different podcast.
I worked with a comedian who had a day job at a bank.
They were a bank teller.
And at the time I still had my nine to five, which was paralegal.
And I said, are you a notary?
I said, no, I was like, trust me, spend the 25 bucks to become a notary.
And it's with you for a decade.
You are.
You are correct.
You can leverage it for a little pay bump.
Any notary public that I've ever had to find in my life is like the most, they're doing
the most other non paperwork related things.
One time I found out the person I had been slinging burgers with for like the greater
part of three years was the notary public.
And I'm sitting there, I had just happened to mention to him.
I needed one.
They're like, dude, I got you.
He came in the other day had his, had his whole case in his stamp.
He's like, what you need?
What you need?
Hey, you come here, watch this.
We're going to get this handle.
All right.
Let's hurry up.
We got lunch rush.
It's great.
And it's so useful.
It's so helpful.
I mean, I'm not going to trade any kind of trade.
My goodness.
I mean, I'm slowly trying to do more, like more creative stuff between writing my book,
doing this podcast, doing social media creation.
And I still have my nine to five, which is a wonderful job.
It's the first longterm office job I've ever had.
Oh, it's still not where I thought I was going to be for the longest time.
I thought I was going to be an architect.
I went to school for that.
I went to ITT tech for that.
And now if you know anything about ITT tech, you realize how boned I am now that I can't
do anything with that.
I was ready for it.
You see, for me, it was more on the lines of just flowing along, I think, until I found
the right thing to float in.
And not a lot of people on my end telling me that I couldn't do things, which is why
I think I've tried to do so many different things along the way until I found something
that I'm comfortable, happy and thriving in, which I'm hoping that, I mean, I'm hoping
that's where you feel that you are right now.
Yeah.
It's a lot to keep up with.
I am pretty much in the position of when I talk to someone about my podcast, they go,
oh, how do you did it?
I was like, if it's not me, I'm having to ask someone and out of the goodness of their
heart, they are giving me their time and their creative efforts.
Because when it comes to scheduling the show, writing the script, booking the guests, hosting,
recording, editing, producing, uploading, hosting, and then promoting, that's all me.
Now I have some folks who have done some promotional episode cards for me.
My good friend of many, many years at this point, Justin Bishop, is very creative.
I think he even went to school for graphic design.
I told him what I was doing and he creates these beautiful episode cards that have all
the info and logo and the whole thing and they look gorgeous.
Again, he's a dear friend who out of the goodness of his heart has, yeah, here you go.
He cranks them out for me.
I've offered to pay him.
Those kind of people are godsends, man.
Oh, yeah.
I have offered to pay him on more than one occasion and he's like, no, man, I got you.
I got you.
I was like, okay, all right.
He also did my intro music, which incorporates some sound clips, Star Trek franchise.
I was just listening to your last episode, actually, and I normally skip most people's
beginning podcasts because I've listened to it for so much, but when you within, what
is it, like the first five, six seconds you hear Cisco say, this is a massive win for
the good guys, I think I'm getting that wrong.
But yeah, just the way that he says it and it just brings me into the whole experience
and I'm just in there just listening to the whole thing again.
The guy did a great job.
Yeah.
Justin put that together for me.
He's also been podcasting.
I think he's he and my other podcaster in crime, Gary Horn, who the three of us, Gary,
Justin and myself, were all co-hosts of Cinema Shock.
Yeah.
Justin's a big movie fan.
So is Gary.
I see a lot of movies, but I'm kind of the fresh perspective.
Gary, as he works with the National.
Yeah, he works with the National Wrestling Alliance.
So he kind of gets the inside track and Justin is the historian.
So between the three of us and we've all been friends for at least 20 years at this point,
we do Cinema Shock where we cover cult and genre film history.
And so we get into the the stories behind the stories of your favorite filmmakers.
And that's and that's been fun.
But you know, Justin and Gary started that podcast probably, I want to say, at least
a year before I joined, which was probably at least another year or two before I started
my own, probably getting the timeline wrong.
But they've been at it much longer than I know.
Yeah.
Nobody's going to know.
I was able to draw on their wealth of knowledge in terms of hardware, software, tips for doing
interviews.
Gary, I mentioned Gary works with the National Wrestling Alliance.
He does a lot of their backstage interviews with these wrestlers who just got finished
with their matches and stuff.
So they're out of breath, they're sweaty and, hey, come answer a couple of questions
on camera.
So that take that takes a little bit of a hook spot.
But you know, be able to stick a microphone in somebody's face and get those special moments
before they head off to the locker room or something is pretty is pretty important.
One of the things I did before this is turning into a how to podcast.
But don't worry, I'll turn it around at some point, I promise.
Okay.
One of the things I did as I was trying to beef up my resume in terms of writing and
creative endeavors was I was and still am playing fantasy football.
And I thought, you know what, why don't I do like some sports writing?
And I started covering a local high school and a local division to college football team.
And that was another great boot camp in terms of can you keep writing?
Because I was the only one in the press box without a laptop.
So I was handwriting everything.
Oh, gee.
Nice.
Oh, yeah.
And then as the game wound down, I had to fight my way through the crowds to get down
to the field to grab a couple quotes from star player, the coach, somebody and do all
of that, get back to the house, put the finishing touches on the article and send it off before
midnight.
And wow, that is tough to do.
That's twice a week for 10 to 12 weeks in a row.
I'm feeling tired just thinking about that workload.
My guy.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, don't get me.
Don't get me wrong.
Like one thing about being creative and wanting to pump things out and trying to stay on a
schedule is like knowing how long it takes either write something down or edit it, you
know, the the long time in between conception and presentation.
Now, that that alone, I guess I could probably turn into like a loss of time because think
of how much time we've spent staring at screens and whatnot.
What could we have been doing with our life?
Oh, sure.
It also kind of put me in the position to be more creative with my use of time.
So high school plays Friday nights.
College more often than not plays Saturday.
Saturday, right?
I know that much.
Yeah.
So after the weekend, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I was looking up the rosters.
I was even writing some tentative titles for the article based on the mascots and the names
of the school.
So I got them ready to go for multiple different scenarios, whether it was close or whether
it was, you know, a big blowout, both directions of who won.
So I tried to do my due diligence of like, OK, here's my titles and, you know, do as
much work as I could beforehand so that I could focus on the game and the stats for
that particular evening.
And it was a really, it was, it was really sobering sitting in the press box next to
another writer.
And I was like, OK, well, have a good night.
I was just just out of curiosity.
When's your deadline?
And he goes 10 minutes ago.
I was like, oh my God, OK.
Game is over yet.
But geez, Louise, before then I would sit and stare at screens and really take my time.
Get on every word and make it would go back and rewrite things, trying to get it in that
final form.
Right.
And I think one thing that the sports writing taught me was just do it.
Just put it, just put it out.
Just put it out and you might get a chance to do a second draft.
But you got to be on top of your game so that you can crank this thing out and get it in
on time.
And that, I think, taught me to not be so precious with my words so that I can, bringing
it back, afford to lose words that I would hold dear.
Because you've got to let go of some things sometimes.
Yeah.
Especially, say, like writers, the things that they write, think how much they spend
creating these characters, these situations, these worlds, if they're a fiction writer
or flow of ideas, if they're, say, I wanted to say a fact writer.
That's not a thing, a nonfiction writer.
And then getting down to the final thing and realizing, you know, I probably have to,
like, cut or reshape all of this.
That alone, I think, could probably start, I've had to cut and shape things.
And I have, like, the moments of, like, anger.
Like, why did you write like that?
And then regrets.
And then, you know, I just, I just, like, blow through grief the whole time.
One of the things we were talking about before we actually jumped in here, we were talking
about writing in general and how authors, I've written one book, I've got two thirds
of a first draft, like somewhere out there in the world, which this November I'll be
hitting hard again.
We were talking about, you said, hey, leave your book on a shelf, 10 years, come back
to it.
And I can only imagine what I'm going to see and how I'm going to feel about that when
I see it.
You mentioned that you thought about rewriting some of your old stories as you were looking
at them.
And I was thinking, like, what if some of, like, the bigger authors, you know, thought
like that?
I would love to pick Brandon Sanderson's brain because the style, his style is most
of all the same when it comes to fantasy.
I mean, obviously, his books are wildly different from each other.
They're all connected by his cos smear, cos sphere, but his first book, it felt so blocky
and compared to what he's got now.
And I love, I love the man's work.
I really do.
But wonder if he ever goes back and he's like, man, you know, if I had the time when
I rewrite that novel, and I don't know, you know, I think maybe he kind of thinks of it
as kind of like the first, you know, stepping stones of what he was starting to create.
I remember trying to read Anne Rice's interview with Vampire.
I loved the movie.
I was like, you know what?
Let's gosh, if this is the movie, imagine the book.
And I could not get through the first 10 pages.
It's, listen, I don't need three pages of you describing Louis shirt.
Yeah.
Let's let's move it along.
So you know, I always wonder if there was if, you know, rest in peace and rice, but
like, I wonder if she had ever thought about taking it back to formula and, you know, seeing
because I mean, the movie is such a well told and well cut together narrative.
It's very, it's very well presented.
I don't know how much she had to do with an, with the actual movie adaptation itself.
I would imagine at that time a pretty good deal.
Yeah.
And watch me like Google later and be completely wrong, but it always helps to have somebody
who when you're making into kind of like a different format, you know, they've got like
a couple of writers going, well, that's, that's great that this works in the book, but we
can't describe her internal thought process for 45 minutes while everything else happens
around them.
And this is not how this isn't going to work.
Yeah.
I think because of that team that probably helped out with that was instrumental to getting
everybody to know the story of interview with the vampire.
Yeah.
And now that I think about it, I think she might have been the credited screenwriter.
So maybe the movie was her second crack at it.
Maybe it was.
It may have been.
I'd say I'm a better, a better writer.
And would, would, yeah, right.
Like, luckily for us, this isn't a writing podcast.
Having I said, let's just shift tones completely before we run out of room.
You mentioned that your mom passing was one of your other losses.
How recent.
Well, I was, I was 19 and I just turned 40.
So we're talking, you know, 20 years ago.
Okay.
So you're 19 years old, you know, you're, you're, you're, let's be honest, most of
us, they want to say that you're, you're an adult by the time you hit 18, because it's
very important for legal reasons.
You know, by the time you're 18, you can do a lot.
But emotionally, let's be honest, you don't really start solidifying until you're like
your mid 20s.
Fair way to ask it.
How did your mom's death shape your life?
It didn't really hit me at first until it didn't, it didn't hit me until I saw, until
I saw her in the box.
And that was kind of, let me back up and just say, you know, living here in South Carolina,
we are in the buckle of the Bible belt church on every corner.
It's yeah.
So raise.
Trust me, I know.
Yeah.
You live close to the pickings that, you know, if an ice cream shop closes down, boom, it's
now a church.
So I, I understand.
Being raised in that environment and going to school in that environment, my father graduated
from Bob Jones University, which listeners, if you don't know, take a second and Google
it.
Google it.
It's kind of, yeah, it's kind of a big deal in terms of like Southern Baptist educational
institutions.
Yeah.
If you want to be drenched in it, go there and visit their museum sometime.
It's a, it's a very well curated museum.
Yeah.
It is actually like one of the best religious art museums in the world.
Yeah.
It's really nice.
So much so.
We went there with my agnostic, sarcastic friend of mine who she was like, Hey, for
a laugh, let's go to Bob Jones.
And I'm like, what do you mean for a laugh?
Like, what do you think is going to happen there?
She's like, I bet it's going to be so funny.
Even she was kind of like somber and humble as she was going through.
It's like, holy crap, this is really well done.
Yeah.
I'm being raised in that.
And then seeing my mother in the casket, I felt a big sense of betrayal by my faith.
Having a father who was at least neglected by his parents, sure, causing him to say,
well, fuck the world.
I'm going to nom.
Am I allowed to curse?
I don't.
Yes.
Okay.
I'm not going to be a team band on this specifically.
So.
Okay, cool.
But yeah, he, he just said, you know, fuck it to the world and went and joined the military.
And then when things were starting to get a certain way in the military, he said, well,
screw that, I'm going somewhere else.
And then he went to, he went to Bob Jones and got his masters of divinity was on track
to be a preacher and that's a certain, that's a certain turn.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Wow.
Masters of divinity.
And at a certain turn he, he rejected that as well, which Bob Jones isn't cheap.
It is not.
Which put our family into poverty.
You can imagine being a Vietnam veteran and then diving headfirst into a religious belief
that you're really not 100% invested in.
You can imagine how my father treated my mother.
Not great.
I sure.
So when she passed away, my initial thought was like I said, of betrayal, but the, the
overarching theme was you took the wrong, you know, to God, you took the wrong parent.
And that gave me a big crisis of faith.
And I think my first, I mean, it was my first real big loss as, as a young man growing up.
That kind of set me down a path of dark emotions and dark thoughts.
And you know, at that point I was heavily into martial arts, which as good as martial
arts is you're still engaging in hand to hand combat.
You're still engaging in violence, which does certain things to you.
That's true.
Yeah.
You can only do that for, for so long and time after time without having some kind of
kickback on your system.
Exactly.
So, was, you know, kind of stewing in this dark emotional, psychological sludge.
Finally, I started putting pen to paper and I wrote my first comic book.
It was sort of just dumping all of this negativity out on the page.
Sure.
And it's so how long in between your mom's passing in the ink to page?
I finished, I finished it roughly a year after she passed away.
So in that time, probably once the dust settled, got started on it, maybe a month after she
had passed away.
Okay.
And then just cranked it out.
The interesting thing is I distinctly recall as I'm on that last page typing the words
the end.
Yeah.
And as soon as I hit that last E or that D, I'm good at spelling.
It's the only English version of the end.
Yeah, exactly.
But as soon as I hit that last letter, it was like someone came up behind me and took
a backpack, a big heavy backpack off of my shoulders.
It was a bizarre feeling.
But I was like, I think I'm okay.
I think I'm not okay, but I'm better.
Starting to heal maybe.
Yeah.
And then the guilt set in because I was feeling better when my father had lost his partner
of 40 years.
My brothers had lost their mother as well.
And I was starting to rebound.
Now granted, I was much younger and kids tend to bounce back from these things faster than
someone older.
But I took that draft and I showed it to a friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine,
who also knew my family and knew my mother as well.
He was going to a great guy.
He's now a tattoo artist.
Jason Bunner.
And he's, you know, shout out to Jason.
At the time he was in school at Winthrop University and getting an art degree.
He's graphic design artist.
He's, as I mentioned, he's now a tattoo artist.
Art has been his whole life.
So I showed it to him and he said, you have to let me do the artwork for this.
And at the time, I didn't even really structure it like a comic script.
It was just sort of a brain dump of a narrative on paper.
And he said, you got to let me do the artwork for this.
I said, okay, for, for what?
He goes, well, my thesis is coming up for, for school.
And I need a, I need a subject.
And because we're friends, because I knew your mom, you know, I'm also into comics.
I'm a big comic book guy myself.
He goes, you got to let me do this.
I said, okay, yeah, sure.
It's yours.
And he's a huge subject to use as a thesis is raw and emotional and as powerful as that
is.
Yeah.
I could see why he saw that and was like, this is, this would be perfect.
That's yeah.
And the nice thing was, is he did it beautifully.
The artwork's wonderful.
Oh, that's great.
And because his parents saw it as a school project, they footed the bill for printing
in full color.
All right.
Hardback, a hardback edition.
I think we produced six copies total.
I've got two of them.
They're on my shelf.
And yeah, it's, it was really nice.
But you know, like you, like we said before we started to roll, I, you know, certain
things happened in the editing process.
Things got changed a little bit here and there.
And even just in my own personal growth as a writer, as a storyteller, if I were to tell
the same story today, they'd be worlds apart.
Of course.
And I've, I've considered going back and doing a second pass at that story.
And every time I get to thinking about it, I see it sitting on my shelf and then I take
a second guess and I'm just actually, no, I don't, I don't want to revisit that.
So the loss of my mother gave me this book, but because I've let those feelings and emotions
go because I've lost those, I'm not going to do another version so that that's a lost
version that will never be seen or read.
I guess.
Yeah.
So the bad turned into something good.
Yeah.
Wanting to revisit it's probably a bad idea, which is actually probably good for me.
And the monkey and the weasel keep chasing each other around the tree.
Um, well, so it sounds like to me that your coping mechanism, um, it probably mostly senders
around creation, which is, is great.
I mean, a lot of people have different, different methods, different modes.
Mine seemed to be creation as well.
The whole reason I started the sitting with you, which at the point was called sitting
with Michael platform at all was to deal with the emotions after my mom passed, which has
been much more recent.
It's been six, seven, eight, eight years.
Eight years.
Had it not been for that, I wouldn't have started doing vlogs and I wouldn't have started
thinking about doing videos and then all this.
It just, you look back at it, the path looks very, you know, nominal.
You're like, okay, I can see exactly where all this happened.
But at the time, man, you're just forcing your way through.
Yeah.
Hindsight's a, hindsight's a funny thing.
It really is.
You even know that as a younger person.
It's a common phrase and you, okay.
Yeah.
I know what that means.
But then when you get there, like now I'm 40 and looking at the 20 year old Todd going,
where are you thinking?
Thanks.
Thanks for not doing anything too stupid.
Thank you for me still being here.
20 year old me.
However, you're all more on.
Right.
So quick diversion into a funny story about thank you.
I'm still here.
Yeah.
During our trip to the UK, we landed in Edinburgh, December 21st.
And that's where we spent.
Yeah.
That's last year.
That's where we spent Christmas and my 40th birthday.
It was an absolute blast.
I got stories for this.
I enjoyed the Instagrams.
I enjoyed it.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
That was some good stuff.
Just before we got on the train to go to London, we stopped at a little pub and I said,
you know, some of the things are different here.
I'm not a big Bailey's drinker, but I seem, you see it all over the place.
Yeah.
They're in the UK.
I think I got advertised pretty heavily the last time I went.
Yeah.
So I said, you know what?
Let me get a let me get an Irish coffee and they brought the Bailey's.
And I have the guy brought it from around the bar.
We were we were there at a very slow time of the day.
So there were only a few people there.
He brought it over and I said, you know, I actually we used to work at a still and we
made a product similar to Bailey's.
It was fresh cream, rum and a five grain bourbon as opposed to cream and Irish whiskey.
Right.
And I said, really?
I said, yeah.
And then I started to tell him the different cocktails that I used to make with with that.
Yeah.
And at one point and I will wear this as a badge of pride, a Scottish bartender leaned
over to my wife and said, how is this fucker still alive?
You're right.
You should wear that as a badge of honor.
That's great.
Sorry.
A little rubber trick.
That's great.
Yeah.
That's great.
That was one big question after the conversation and you pretty much like during one, I got
to ask about, you know, do you feel glad at all that your mom died?
I mean, that was just a huge question I got to ask somebody.
So to you, obviously that's not the question.
But do you do you ever find yourself revisiting the guilt or how much guilt do you even have
about the idea of thinking you took the wrong parent while you were looking at your mom?
In a sense, in a sense, some point I don't recall when, but I sort of I don't want to
say I repaired my religious thoughts and beliefs, my faith, but I redefined them and restructured
them and have a better understanding in my own heart and mind of this life when juxtaposed
with whatever comes next.
That being said, because my father treated my mother the way he did, I've begun to look
at myself in my own marriage and how I treat my wife and my friends, my colleagues and
co-workers.
And there was a time where I thought, gosh, dad never trained me.
It didn't teach me it.
He didn't teach me a goddamn thing.
But at some point it changed into I know what not to do.
So learning that, thinking that that was a loss of instruction has turned into a big
gain of knowledge, of avoidance, of a pretty big pitfall.
When your wife tries to talk to you to television, get off the couch once in a while.
Dude, I hear you resonate with that so much, actually.
The other part of it is, and maybe a little more, someone who was raised in religion,
you always hear the phrase of vengeance is mine.
I will repay, say, at the Lord.
I don't know the book chapter and verse.
That's OK.
But that is what I feel.
I don't either.
In thinking that God took the wrong parent, my view on that changed as well in that dad
has to deal with the loss.
He his punishment is he's survived.
He has to live.
He has to keep living.
He learned he learned really quickly that the friends of Patton, Walt Davis were actually
the friends of Pat Davis.
Yeah.
And they went away real quick.
And now for better or worse, he sits at home.
All he wanted to do was sit in front of the TV.
That's all that's left.
He sits in front of the TV.
So he kind of it's as a writer, you who gains perspective, you learn to appreciate poetic
justice.
And yeah, that's kind of it.
I got to commend you for the strength of realizing that not everything that happens
negative in your life is necessarily negative to you.
You know, sometimes you're just there when negative shit happens and may affect your
life, but it doesn't necessarily have to shape your life to in the same kind of bell
curve that happens once that negativity happens.
Yeah.
That's that's that's a great strength, Todd.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
It's, you know, look, anybody who's listening, neither one of us have said anything about
it being easy.
No, no, no, it's not.
It stings like a motherfucker.
Let me tell you.
But you know, again, with perspective, with time, the hurt doesn't go away, but it becomes
easier to deal with.
Yeah.
And the heaviness gets lighter over time.
You get stronger with the heavy with the heaviness on your shoulders or soul, however
you want to define that.
If by chance you're listening to this and you just lost somebody, nothing I say is going
to make you feel any better.
It's going to sound hollow.
It's yeah.
It's they're going to all sound like cliches and you're just going to roll your eyes and
maybe even hit skip.
I would.
Yeah, that's right.
You're prerogative.
But go ahead, advertise skipping this podcast.
Do it.
Yeah, I was going to say.
Are you please don't please don't.
But just know that you're not alone.
If you've got that negative energy, find something to pour it into.
It can be some sort of creative project or some sort of self improvement endeavor or
something, anything, pour it into that and you'll be surprised at how much better you
feel instead of letting it sit and stew inside.
Yeah.
I'm a big fan of saying that anxiety always anxiety, stress, grief, all of it seems a
little bit smaller once you have a chance to express it.
Yeah.
Which, which is great, which I think that that's a that's a good natural closing spot
right there.
I, I was going to say, hey, you got any words of wisdom?
I feel like you, you nailed it.
Good job.
You're quite welcome.
Well, top four, I fully close this out, man, which again, thank you so much for being here
in the first season of the.
Where can people find you?
If you're interested in hearing me talk with my friends about fun old movies, head over
to cinema shock.net.
That will give you links to the show episodes as well as links for our merch and our discord.
If you want to hear me talk with a rotating panel of guests about the Star Trek franchise,
please look up a computer resume podcast available wherever you get your podcasts.
It is at computer resume on all of the socials.
And if you want to reach out to me directly, I'm at Mr. Todd, a Davis on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Letterbox and D&D beyond as long as they behave themselves.
Great.
That's great.
And you might even hear my voice a couple of times on that computer resume podcast.
If you get the right.
That's right.
Yeah.
As always, this is the host, Michael LeBlanc.
And if you miss next month's episodes, well, it's still going to be your loss.
Thank you so much, John.
Thank you, Michael.
This has been an absolute blast.
I appreciate it, buddy.
Not a problem.
See ya.