Wickenburg

"I promise there is a reserve tank on new cars."

It's pitch black and there is a torrential downpour outside. The words ZERO MILES TO EMPTY have been flashing on my heads up display for the last five minutes.

"Didn't you do this drive with your dad just 8 weeks ago?"

My mother is clutching her seat belt as if it will make the car more fuel efficient.

"Worst case scenario, I'll get out and walk for help while you stay in the car and play Solitaire on your iPad. It will be great."

She doesn't look so sure.

We're about 5 miles outside of Wickenburg, Arizona...a place I couldn't have placed on a map two months ago, a place that I am now strangely well acquainted with.

We pull up to a single pump gas station named Barry's as the car sputters to a stop.

"Never in doubt," I say with a shit eating grin on my face.

We top off and make the jaunt to our 2.5 star Best Western. The front desk lady implores me to make it to breakfast in the morning, claiming she makes the best bacon in Wickenburg. I promise to stop by.

Meanwhile in room 223 my mom hasn't been able to find The Bachelor. I call the front desk.

"What channel is ABC?"

"12"

"I have on channel 12, it's not the Bachelor."

"Oh sorry honey, The Bachelor airs at 7 o clock in Arizona."

My distaste for this one horse town grows by the minute.

I'm here to bring my brother to LA. I was here to visit him over Christmas and over the past two months his doctors have decided that he belongs in Santa Monica, precisely one mile from me.

My feelings about this are obviously complicated. Six months ago I got a phone call that he was missing and now he will live a stone's throw from me. Meanwhile, I drank 24 beers last Saturday and walked onto a dance floor proudly declaring that I could probably take any single girl in the bar home. I'm not sure I'm the best example.

In the past 30 days, I turned 30, found out a friend's cancer had returned, missed out on like 4 jobs, but also found out that my show was picked up...oh and my mother has a chronic nerve disease. To say it has been a bit of a roller coaster ride would be underselling it. Yet here I am, forced to confront life's challenges with little to no idea what I'm doing.

I walk down the 'main drag' of Wickenburg and peer into the one bar the town boasts, wondering if the sad cowboy I had drank with on Christmas night is in there still waiting for his life to take off in a certain direction. He's not, just two men playing pool. Apparently rainy Monday nights in Wickenburg don't pop off as hard as I had hoped.

I walk into a Circle K and grab a forty of Coors and a bag of potato chips. Seeing as I'm already drenched and I doubt a police officer would mind given the weather, I go ahead and pop the beer in the parking lot as I wander around the abandoned town. There is a McDonald's in the distance but I figure my Jalapeno chips will likely provide a sufficient supper.

I return to room 223 to see my mother already asleep, her hand bandaged to cover the damaged nerve endings in her finger tips. I finish my beer while watching Minority Report on HBO. I fall asleep with the television on.

The following morning my mom wakes me up for breakfast at 630, something I am not too happy about. After two months of sitting on my ass, waking up prior to sunrise seems especially cruel. Living up to my word though I make my way to the continental breakfast. The bacon is OK. Certainly not something I would point out in a Yelp review, but it suddenly dawns on me that this may be the only breakfast place in Wickenburg, hence serving the 'best' bacon.

We arrive at my brother's facility at 8am and manage to load our rental Camry with 5 bags full of his thrift shopping. Apparently the hot thing to do in this Phoenix exurb is to hang out at the Goodwill and buy random shit. He has 17 hats and 8 women's head bands. I steal three.

The first two hours of the trip I play a podcast. This allows me to wake up and emotionally prepare for the conversation to follow. I have never been good with sharing my feelings, I'm even worse at listening to people share theirs. I haven't had a real conversation with my brother about what's been going on with him the past couple years at all, and I'm nervous about the truths that I may discover.

We're at about the California border when I start to learn about rehab romance and codependent relationships. I learn about the 'thirteenth step' an especially horrid situation where males pray on women with less than a year of sobriety to fill the void in their lives.

I learn why all of the upper middle class kids are now hooked on heroin. (It's because they run out of painkillers to steal.) I learned what narcan can fix (heroin overdose) and can't fix (heroin cut with elephant tranquilizer) Then I start to wonder why we live in a world with elephant tranquilizer. Do we really need elephants? Do we need them tranquilized? What do you do if you are the mother of a child who dies of an elephant tranquilizer overdose?

My head is spinning by the time we pass Palm Springs. Texts are rolling in from my softball team. "Who is bringing the beer to the tourney this weekend?" My Park City chain asks "Can we just stay up for 96 hours next week?"

And it kills me because I legitimately care that we have been at our Palmdale tourney and I would love it if we stayed up for 96 hours in Palmdale. I want my heart to be in the right place, I WANT to be focused on Al-anon meetings and figuring out the best way to be a support beam, but I'm just lost and I kind of wish I could make it all go away. I can't.

As we coast into Santa Monica and I'm unloading luggage in front of a counselor so that she can search it on contraband my first thought...MY FIRST FUCKING THOUGHT is 'wow this sober living house could have been used to throw a crazy banger.' My second thought is 'man the Indiana Purdue starts in an hour, at which bar am I going to watch it?'

I don't want to think these things, but I do and it makes me feel just worthless. How does one become a beacon of light when they are consumed with just as much darkness. I hear about how kids become hooked on Ambien and Xanax and I think about the fact that I openly request these things before a flight or how I've taken hydrocodone on a Sunday before because I had a bad hangover.

"Why don't people just stop when they're getting a little in over their head?" I ask.

He looks at me deadpan. "They can't...that's the point."

I return to my home and see bottles of alcohol and a gigantic bong strewn all over the apartment and think to myself, this is all my fault. I glorified everything. I made it look to him like I was a fucking rock star when in all actuality, I was just a kid skating by but hiding all the negativity from the world.

Sure I've done some cool shit, but at what cost? I realize that some of us can just get away with it and others can't.

So what do I do? How am I supposed to feel? No one prepped me for this, no one told me how to react. I look down and realize I am wearing a parody DARE shirt. I was just in a house of addicts wearing a fucking Chive shirt that makes fun of a company that tries to get kids not to take drugs.

I rip it off and throw it away. I wonder if I will change and the answer is probably no. If I started living the life that I thought I was supposed to instead of the life I wanted to live it would end it bitterness and regret.

But what I can do is just be there. I can believe that things will be better.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do, so maybe I'll just start with listening. Anyone can listen. I may not have anything to add, but I can listen and say the words "I love you." And that's gotta be a decent start.

My mom picks me back up and we head down to her hotel in Hermosa. We make plans to go to Harry Potter world, we buy tickets to a Bruno Mars concert. I map out some hikes, I get a reservation at Malibu Wines and make sure our next five days are some we don't ever forget.

I thought life was going to be easy.

I thought I could just kinda fake it until I make it and then everything would be ok.

But then when your father has open heart surgery, your mother has a chronic illness, your brother is fighting some shit, you realize...life is not easy. Life is hard. But there is really nothing we can do about the curveballs that life throws at us except roll with the punches and try to make the most of every day that we're here.

I can't dwell on the past or the bullshit that I've been dealt. I can focus on making memories, being a generally good guy, and doing my best to make the experiences of my family and friends generally pleasant.

So tomorrow I'm not going to worry about that what I can't control, I'm going to take my mom to Universal Studios, buy my brother a wand and get a fake Slytherin tattoo because life's too short to not be a wizard, at least for a day.