Surprising line of tweets yesterday from Mike "Timex" McDonald -- a successful poker player on and off the felt. Don't really know him well, but I had always pictured that he had his life pretty well together. However, apparently he suffers from depression and claims he was close to taking his own life in 2018, with Bourdain's suicide changing the way he saw things.
https://twitter.com/twt/status/1221705188714668032
https://twitter.com/twt/status/1221705448136617984
https://twitter.com/twt/status/1221705964308615170
Interesting.
I also wonder which former friend tried to blackmail him into outing him as a sexual predator, and what the accusations were going to be. In fact, his tweet doesn't even make it clear whether or not the friend was making up the accusations -- or if he really has something he's hiding. Weird. It could be something stupid like having slept with a 16-year-old when he was in his early 20s, but I'm really curious to know now what that was about. And was this "friend" also a known poker player? So many questions...
Anyway, depression sucks, and finding inspiration in someone else's suicide is not common, but if that's what caused McDonald to start getting better, then good for him.