Final Summation...

Goddammit I hate memory sometimes.

And everything it leads to.  Nostalgia.  Reminiscence.  A concrete sense of Self.  Rambling, confessional blog posts about supposed childhood sexual traumas.  And so forth.

After all that, after my whole humiliating confessional frenzy here in my last few posts (holy crap, was that all the way back in February??), I have to admit now that I'm not entirely sure my memory of these early experiences is even correct.  And I've wanted to write and post this explanation for a good while now, because those posts are still sitting there on the front page, like a severed head at a dinner party; but I've been alternately too busy, or, mostly, too embarrassed by the whole ordeal to want to return to it.  But I can't just leave that shit up there for anyone to read without any context or resolution.  I have to put this to bed.

So here's how it all started.  I was driving to work that February morning, and there was a discussion on the radio of how children respond to parental abuse.  I don't remember what it was exactly, but something they said reminded me of this childhood friend (I'm going to start calling him "Bill" just so that I have a name to refer to him by).  I hadn't thought about Bill in many, many years.  I remembered some of our experiences together, and I remembered his big, angry father.  And that's when I suddenly made the connection and realized, "Oh!  Bill was abused by his father!"  And everything else just followed from that.

I still believe that to be true; I believe Bill was abused (at least mentally and emotionally, if not physically or sexually) by his father.  But the rest of it, I must admit now, I am significantly less sure about.  I know that Bill and I "played doctor," but I don't remember all that we did.  I don't actually remember how far our sexual play went. And, I am forced to admit to myself and all of you now, I don't actually remember who suggested what.  I thought I did at the time, but I've since realized that's not true.  It was just too long ago now for me to remember it clearly.  It was so long ago that even the things I do remember clearly are suspect.  And through my research I discovered that I would be forced to admit something else, something much worse:  it is entirely possible that I am the one who abused him.

Reading through literature on the subject, I was surprised to find out that one of the more common, and yet least often discussed, forms of childhood sexual abuse is to simply educate a child about sex too much at too early an age.  (It had never even occurred to me before my research that this could possibly be considered a form of abuse.)  Sex is one of the most complicated and complex of all human interactions, and a 4 or 5 year-old child is simply too underdeveloped to be able to fully understand it (hell, a lot of adults are too underdeveloped to be able to fully understand it, for that matter); and so therefore giving a child that age too much information on the subject can often lead them to act out behaviors that they are not able to fully understand, process, or deal with in a meaningful way.  That's the basic idea.

My mother's policy was that if I was old enough to ask the question, then I was old enough to hear the answer.  And she was always very quick to let me know that if I ever had any questions at all, she would do her best to try to answer them truthfully and completely.  And she lived by that statement.  And I was a very curious boy.  I had a lot of questions.  And she answered every one she could.  So I remember that throughout my childhood, basically until high school, I always knew more about sex (among many other things) than any of my friends or classmates seemed to.  I was proud of that, actually.  It made me feel grown-up.  It made me feel strong.  And superior.  (Realizing now, as I type this, that this may have something to do with why I value intelligence so highly, in both myself and others.)

But in terms of my memories of my experiences with Bill, that throws everything into a new light.  I only actually remember one thing we did that was definitely Bill's idea, and while that was a little dirty, it also wasn't exactly sexual, either (we were naked, but there was no touching); it would fall squarely in the category of "normative childhood sexual play."  I don't actually remember what else we may have done, or who might've suggested any of it.  But I know that in my memories of all the other boys (and some girls) who came after Bill, I was definitely the aggressor.

The hard part to admit, is that when I suddenly realized that morning that Bill had been abused by his father, I didn't then "realize" that he had actually been acting out his abuse on me, as I originally wrote.  No, the truth was that I actually just assumed that was the case, and didn't recognize that I was making an assumption.  "OMG, Bill was abused by his father!  What do abused children do?  They act out that same abuse on others.  He must've been doing that to me when we played doctor!  So that's why I then went on to do it others; I was acting out his abuse on me!  That's where it all started!  It makes perfect sense."  And it does make perfect sense.  But that doesn't automatically make it true, either.

I still don't know what happened back then, and I probably never will.  But I have to admit that the much more likely scenario seems to be that I was actually a victim of childhood sexual abuse, but the abuser was my mother, not Bill.  And it seems much more likely that I was acting out my abuse on him (and all the other boys and girls that came after him) rather than the other way around.

Bill moved away before we even hit puberty.  I haven't seen or heard from him since I was a child.  I have no idea what his life has been like.

If you're still out there, "Bill," I hope you're okay.  And if you're not... all I can say is, I'm so, so sorry.

It wasn't my fault.  I was only a child.

Apparent Exaggerations...

Still need more time to write out the full story/explanation, but I did learn something that requires an immediate update.

I knew that the language I used yesterday didn't feel quite right.  It seemed inflammatory, and loaded with a ton of connotations that were not actually part of the experience I was trying to communicate.  But what other language was I supposed to use?  How else was I supposed to describe it?

Well, finally getting around last night to doing some very preliminary research into the topic of child-on-child sexual abuse, revealed the rather obvious fact that I'm not the only person in the world who has ever had experiences like these, and that as such, there is already a whole lexicon available to me to describe it, if I had only bothered to look.

I learned right off the bat that I was not, in fact, molested.  I was not abused.  What happened to me would be characterized as "Normative Childhood Sexual Play," even if it was a little more advanced than most.  The difference being, I was never coerced, or threatened, or manipulated, or made to do anything I didn't want to do.  All this friend of mine did was suggest the ideas; I went along with them willingly, even excitedly.  And I enjoyed them completely, to the point that I then went on to suggest them to all my other friends for the next 20 years.

What I went through was a normal part of growing up that pretty much everyone goes through at some point.  The big difference for me, was that it happened to me about 10 years earlier than the average.  I was regularly having sex in elementary school, and I was having the kind of sex that most other people don't even know about, much less start trying to engage in, until middle school or high school.  (Oddly, I steadfastly maintained my virginity, however technical, until I was much older; I think having so much sex as a child made my virginity seem more precious to me somehow, and I was determined to save it until I found someone I really loved.)

I still think my friend was abused, though.  It's the only explanation I have right now for how he could be so sexually aggressive, and adventurous, and knowledgeable, at such a young age.  And so it's still possible that, from his point of view, he was acting out from his history of abuse.  But whether he was attempting to abuse me or not (who knows how he would've responded if I'd said no), I wasn't abused.  I went willingly, and loved every minute of it.

And while I feel a lot better now, knowing that I don't actually have to wear the "childhood sexual abuse victim" label for the rest of my life, there's still a lot left here that I need to unpack.  I'm still not sure what all this means, or what I'm supposed to do with this new information.

We Are What We Remember We Are...

I realized this morning, that I was - rather technically, I must caveat - molested by one of my very first childhood friends.  And that this series of events was directly responsible for shaping a very large portion of my personality; of who I still am today.

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this.  There's way too much story there to be able to tell it all right now.  But I had to at least get this much, the realization of it, the acknowledgment of it, out of me and into existence, before I forgot it again, or subsumed it in some other way.

I feel like I'm supposed to be upset about this.  But I don't think I feel particularly upset about it, at least not yet.  (There is a small part of me, however, that is upset at myself for not being upset about it, for whatever that's worth.)  I'd always remembered - and still remember - our "playing doctor" as being entirely consensual.  (As much as it could be, at least.  We were about the same age at the time, so technically, legally, neither of us could consent; but we were also the only ones involved.  So how does that work?)  So, I've never felt - and still don't feel - victimized in any way.  I feel no enmity or ill-will towards this individual, and never have.  And the parts of my Self that I can now suddenly attribute to my early friendship with this person (at least, the ones I know about) are not things that I've ever felt particularly bad about or wished to be different.  Nor have I ever felt a need to investigate their root, or determine their origin.

Which I guess is part of why it feels so strange to suddenly know where they all come from.  I received an answer to an absolutely massive question, before I had ever even asked it in the first place.  There's an almost vertigo to it; the sensation of it makes you dizzy.  A memory you've had for almost 40 years, and suddenly, from out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, one tiny little detail you'd left behind somewhere along the way comes back into focus; and it fits like a keystone into place with all the other memories it connects to:  that time, that place, those people; filling in a hole you never knew was there; and now you see it all so clearly, understanding it all for the very first time, after 40 years; and that realization leads to another, which leads to another, cascading down through your history like a line of dominoes, until suddenly four decades of Self have been re-written.  You understand yourself now in a new, better, more complete way, a more whole way, than you ever have before.  But you also know now, that you're not who you thought you were; and you never have been.  So, then, who are you?

That's kind of a lot to handle when it all hits you in a matter of seconds while you're driving down the highway late to work on a Monday morning.

So, yeah.  This one's gonna take a while to unpack, I guess.

Gaze Deep Into My Navel And Despair...

How am I supposed to grow up?

I want to grow up.  I really do.  No, more than that, I need to.  I need to grow the fuck up.  I'm almost forty years old, but I still see myself as if I were twenty-five.  That might sound appealing on some level, at first; "young at heart" and all that.  And maybe it would be, if that's what I wanted for myself.  But it isn't.  I want to grow up.  I need to grow up, because I can't keep living like I'm twenty-five.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.  I can't eat like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't move like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't party like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  Fuck, I can't even sleep like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  It all hurts me now in a way that it never did, and I can feel myself breaking down at an astonishing rate, as if the force of Entropy inside me were being fed by some radioaction of chemical combustion.  Accelerated Decrepitude.  But on the other hand, trying to live within my almost-forty means, while still feeling like a twenty-five year-old inside, is so monumentally depressing that I can't even fucking bother; I always just end up feeling like I already have one foot in the grave.

A twenty-five year-old trapped in a forty year-old body.  How incredibly pathetic.  How incredibly modern.  How incredibly privileged.

But how am I supposed to grow up?  I don't know.  My observations tell me that for most people, this happens as a natural side-effect of breeding.  That creating a child shifts all perspectives, and forces the new parent into a maturity that cannot be achieved through any other means.  That makes sense to me.  I can understand that.

But I'm never going to have any children.  So what am I supposed to do?  How am I supposed to force myself to achieve a state that, for most people, requires quite possibly the single most life-altering event they will ever experience in order to achieve?

Sometimes I think, maybe I don't actually need to grow up?  If I don't have any children, then what do I need to grow up for?  Why do I feel this need anyways?  I can only assume it is because I reflexively compare my life to the model my parents set for me.  When I look at myself, and try to judge whether I'm doing well or not, I compare it to the life they lived.  And I always feel myself coming up short.

They went to college.  They got degrees.  They worked hard.  (My father still works harder than almost anyone else I know, and while my mother never worked as hard as he did, she still inarguably worked harder than I do now.)  They bore and raised children.  They owned houses, with yards and multiple floors and everything.

But I dropped out of college.  I have no degrees, and probably never will.  Yeah, I have a career that doesn't leave me wanting to kill myself, but I still hate it, just because it's work, and I hate work of any kind; I hate being forced to sell myself every day in order to sustain myself.  I don't own a house.  I own an absurdly tiny condo that I hate and will never be able to sell for as much as I paid for it.  I am almost certain I will end up having to live in that tiny little box for the rest of my life, watching it deteriorate around me, with me - and that thought terrifies me on a regular basis.

And even these modest achievements - a well-paying job that I can sort of do well and tolerate, and a tiny little condo I'm trapped in like a prison cell - even these barely note-worthy accomplishments I never actually earned; I didn't work hard to achieve these things.  I got this job because some well-meaning middle-aged women that I worked with took pity on me, and talked to their bosses, and told them they knew this kid they thought would do well as a programmer.  And they were right - I am a good programmer.  At least, I'm alright.  But again, not because I try to be, or because I studied or worked hard or went to school or anything else.  I just have a natural talent for logic and pattern recognition and symbology, and so I am a naturally decent programmer.  I could be a great programmer if I wanted to be; if I tried to be and put forth the effort.  But I don't.  Because I don't care.  I only want to put forth the minimum amount of effort to get by, and save the rest for indulging in my life's pleasures.

And it's a similar story with my "home."  I didn't work hard and save money every day so that I could eventually put a down payment on my dream home.  My grandfather died, and since my mother (his daughter) was already dead herself, the portion of his life's wealth that should have been hers (and he had worked hard all his life to achieve that wealth) came to me instead.  And I used all of that money to buy the apartment I had been living in for almost a decade at that point.  The biggest, most "adult" accomplishment of my life - becoming a home-owner - and it only happened because I was in a position to profit off of the deaths of two of my close family members.  And so it has never felt like an accomplishment to me.  It feels like blood money.

(It's true that I performed magick to get the job and the money and the apartment, but even taking the assumption that my magick worked doesn't help the situation any.  Magick is a short-cut.  It's easy compared to actually working hard to learn or to save money.  And it's fun to do, and for that reason alone I wanted to do it, whether it worked or not.  So even assuming that I came by these things through sorcery, it still doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me.  It still doesn't feel like I really earned them.  It feels like I cheated.)

And I will almost certainly never see that much money again in my lifetime.  I can barely maintain a savings of more than a couple of thousand dollars at a time.  I live paycheck-to-paycheck, even with my fairly significant salary.  I've always been that way.  If I have money, I want to spend it on making myself feel good right now, and I can't seem to deny myself comfort or happiness in the present, in order to save it for some undefined future.  As I've written here before, I feel like the Grasshopper, fiddling away as the first snow begins to fall.

But why do I determine the value of my life by comparing it to my parents'?  They were completely different people, living in a completely different time.  And who wanted completely different things from their life than I want from mine.  And I know this.  But I still can't shake this feeling that I am somehow failing at life, because I seem to remember my parents being so much better off in their twenties than I am in my thirties; or will be in my forties.  I just want to be happy, like anyone else.  But I constantly and consistently feel that the things that make me happy aren't good for me.  That they are self-indulgent, or immature, or masturbatory.  That I am a bad person for living my life the way that I do.  But trying to live my life any other way always leaves me just as miserable, if only in a different way.

I just want to spend my life relaxing in the bathhouse, playing games, reading, writing, watching TV and movies, sleeping, eating, drinking and getting high, and punctuating the whole thing with the occasional orgasm.  That is really all I want from life.

And I feel like a worthless waste of a human being for feeling that way.  I hate myself for feeling that way.  But even so, I have no idea how to change it; I have no idea how to want anything else.

Okay, sure, I want other things.  Bigger things.  I want to have a big house with a yard and a basement and an attic.  I want to be able to support myself through writing, or some other form of creative expression.  (If only I could make a living playing games!)  I want a sense of accomplishment.  I want to feel like my life mattered, in any way.  I want to feel a sense of confidence that when I'm gone, I will have made some mark on the world that is all my own; that I will leave behind something more than a pile of carbon dust.  I do want all of these things.  But when I think about them, and I envision the monumental amount of work it would take to even try to achieve any of them - with no guarantee of success! - I lose any hope I may have had about ever actually achieving them.

Because I know that I will never do that work.  I just don't have it in me.  Achieving anything of any real significance requires a single-minded devotion that I just don't have.  Have never had.

Because deep-down, I don't want to be great.  All I really want is to be comfortable.  And I guess I am.  So I should be happy, then, right?  Then why do I feel this way?  I just wish I could learn to be happy with what I have, instead of hating myself for not being able to be great.

I guess what it all really comes down to is this:  I feel lazy, and I hate myself for being lazy, but I don't know how to make myself be anything else.  And I hate myself for that, too.

+          +          +

Or maybe I'm just depressed because winter is coming, and I'm all out of drugs, and I can feel both of these things gnawing at my bones.

Lost In Recvoery...

Ok, so, in hindsight, clearly not the most righteous stance I've ever taken.  But I still don't think I did anything wrong.  And I just can't help but bristle at the idea that my attempt to view an explicit media with clear artistic merit has caused me to get lumped into the same group as the guy who spends his lunch hour spanking it in his office.  And it really bothers me that, because of this, I now have to fear for my job.  That just seems wrong to me, but I'll drop the subject now, I swear.

In other news, I think I'm going to go back to a SMART meeting tonight, if I can get home in time.  (Yesterday's Inauguration has snarled traffic all through the surrounding area.)  I haven't been to a SMART meeting in months.  It got to the point where they became more of a hassle then they were worth.  I never got very much out of the meetings, and I often felt worse afterwards, which struck me as rather counter-productive.  And having to give up every Tuesday night (and Tuesday morning for that matter, as I had to get to work early to make sure I could leave early so that I could get to the meetings on time) became rather tiresome.  I wanted to make sure I attended enough meetings on a regular basis to establish myself in the group, and to be sure to give them a fair chance (and not make any decisions based on first impressions), and get a sense of what I could expect from SMART in general, and from this group in particular.  And I accomplished that.  And if I'd felt as if I was having trouble maintaining my sobriety, or that attending these meetings would help me maintain my sobriety in any way, then I would've continued to attend.  But, as neither of those were the case, I decided to take my Tuesday nights back, knowing that this group was always there, should I ever need help again.

And now, I think I do.  I had always assumed that, in regards to my sobriety, the only person's reaction I needed to be concerned about, was my own.  It never occurred to me that other people that I care about might have as difficult a time dealing with my sobriety as I did.  I've known that my wife has been missing her "drinking buddy" since I sobered up; we established that early on, in just the first couple of months.  But, honestly, I didn't really think much of it; it just didn't seem that important.  She didn't seem all that upset about it, and my focus, frankly, especially in those early months, had to be on maintaining my sobriety, and not on whether or not She had someone to get drunk with on Friday nights.  I don't think either of us realized just how important it really was to Her, or that it was actually about much more than just missing Her "drinking buddy" - it was about my entire personality changing, again, and for the first time, changing in respect to the ways that I treat Her.  And as the months have dragged on and on, and the situation has remained unchanged, Her feelings about it have apparently grown worse and worse, until we are at the point now where it has become a painful and difficult problem in our marriage.

And I don't know what to do about it.  I thought things had unarguably changed for the better.  I'm much more even-keeled now than I ever have been before.  Yes, I still have my ups and downs, but everyone does.  But whereas before every emotion was turned up to eleven, now I never get much higher than a four or five.  I used to be full volume every minute of every day.  Every high was the highest high possible, and every low was the lowest I could get.  And in terms of how I treated Her, that meant that when I was happy with Her, she was the Sun, Moon, and Stars to me, and I loved her more than Romeo ever loved Juliet; my entire world revolved around her.  (Which sounds beautifully romantic at first, but try living up to such ridiculous and fantastical standards for ten years.  It can't be done.  And I did a lot of damage to our relationship trying to keep her up on that pedestal for so many years.)  But it also means that when I wasn't happy with her, I hated her, because she was completely ruining my entire fucking life.

Now, my feelings never get that ridiculously, over-the-top intense.  I still love her, and I still sometimes get angry with her, but I don't treat her like the be-all-end-all of my existence, nor do I treat her like the worst thing that ever happened to me.  All of my feelings for her, both good and bad, are much softer and quieter, much more reasonable and responsible, much more practical; and so completely fucking boring.  Because while both of us are clearly glad that I no longer feel such intense anger at her every time she makes me feel anything bad, from her point of view, my world used to revolve around Her.  And now it doesn't.  And that hurts her.  It hurts in a way she has a very difficult time understanding, or articulating.  And it's very confusing.  Because while she's certainly glad that I don't yell at her anymore, and while she is definitely very proud of me for all that I've accomplished these past eight months, she's also really hurt and upset; she feels rejected, because, from her point of view, I don't seem to love her as much as I used to.  Which isn't true at all; I still love her just as much as I used to, I just don't express it as intensely.  But how can she be expected to know what I'm really feeling, if I've completely changed the way that I express those feelings?

And then, on top of all of the hurt and rejection she's already feeling, she ends up feeling very guilty, too.  She feels guilty because she understands that my sobriety is clearly a good thing for me, and she wants to be able to support me in that and feel proud of me.  And by feeling hurt and upset in response to my sobriety, regardless of how else she feels about it, she feels like she is doing something wrong, and hurting me, and undermining my sobriety.  Which, unfortunately, I have to agree with, in a sense.  It definitely hurts me to know that I'm hurting her.  And it definitely makes me want to drink, because I feel like that would make her happy (and I'm kind of hard-wired to want to make her happy).  But I don't think she's doing anything wrong; on that point we disagree.  I can't blame her for how she feels, at all.  I would almost certainly feel the same thing in her place.  And I think it can be said that, almost certainly, she has been the one the most hurt, she has been the one who has lost the most, she has been the one who has sacrificed the most, for my sobriety.  And I could never expect her to just be a hundred percent happy about that.  I feel horribly naive for not anticipating it ahead of time.

But now, what do I do?  How am I supposed to respond to this?  How should we deal with it?  What can we do about it?  In the addiction/recovery cycle, most people end up feeling like they lost their loved ones to the addiction side of things, when the addict reaches the point where the only thing they are capable of caring about anymore is using.  We're really fortunate that we've never had to face that problem.  But I've never heard of anyone feeling like they lost their loved one to sobriety.  In all of my experience with addiction and recovery, I've never heard anyone say, "Now that you're sober, you don't love me the way that you used to."  And now that we're unfortunate enough to be faced with that problem, I have no idea how to deal with it.  I have no experience to draw on.

And, so, back to SMART.  I'm hoping someone there has some experience with this, or has at least heard of it before.  At the very least, I'm hoping to come away with some perspective.

Will me luck.

Eleven Years...

Eleven years ago today, we were packing to leave the beach.

Princess and I, and two of our friends, had just spent a lovely post-Labor Day week at my grandfather's beach cottage in Delaware, and our vacation was over, and we spent the morning packing up to return to our "normal" lives.  (I didn't know it at the time, but that was the last time I would ever set foot in that cottage on the beach, where I had spent part of every summer of my entire life up to that point.)  When we were finally ready to leave, and packing up the car, I turned my cell phone back on for the first time since I'd arrived a week earlier.  About a minute later, I found I had a dozen voicemails from my father, all from that morning.  I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and heard recording after recording of my father telling me that the United States was under attack, to turn on the TV, and whatever I do, not to come home.

We hadn't turned on the TV once the entire week.  When we finally turned it on that morning, we were all horrified, and dumbstruck.  And as we stood there, watching the towers burning, I remember thinking to myself, with odd clarity, That son-of-a-bitch is going to use this as an excuse to invade Iraq.  My hand to gods, that exact thought crossed my mind, followed immediately by, No - no way - that's ridiculous - even he wouldn't do something that horrible.

We decided to stay another day, because no one was quite sure what was going on at that point, and it just felt a lot safer out there in that sleepy town on the seashore, then back home, next-door to D.C.  That was one of the most surreal days of my life.  We were glued to the TV all day, watching what looked like Hell Come To The U.S.  But where we were, it was a beautiful, just absolutely gorgeous late-Summer day.  It could not have been more peaceful, or serene.  It produced a strange sort of cognitive dissonance that permeated the entire day for all of us.  Nothing we did felt right - if it fit with the scene around us, it didn't fit with the way we felt about what we knew was going on at home; and if it fit with how we felt about the attacks, then it seemed really out-of-place with where we were at the time and what we were experiencing just then.

Not knowing what else to do, we partied that night like it was the end of the world.  We did shots and got wasted and played Truth-or-Dare until we were all drunk and naked.  (Trust me, it was a lot more fun at the time than it sounds now.)

And the next day, we went back home to a world that had completely changed, in ways we would have a hard time understanding or coming to terms with for many years.  I still haven't completely come to terms with a lot of it.


Addendum:  I didn't want to make my post today about this, because I didn't want to be perceived as disrespectful.  But I feel like I have to say it, for several reasons.  It's just been on my mind a lot lately, and I don't want to bottle it up and pretend it isn't there.  And yes, some people might perceive it as disrespectful, but I don't agree with that opinion, and if I start basing my decisions about what to say or believe off of what other people might think about it, then I'm lost.  In my opinion, today is the most appropriate time to address it; the only appropriate time to address it, really.  It would seem oddly out of place on any other day, and waiting until next year will not have changed anything one way or the other, and by then I might have forgotten it, and lost the opportunity to express these feelings for good.

Let me preface this further by saying, I am not a conspiracy theorist.  I do believe that conspiracies can and do occur, but I am also a skeptic by nature, and 99% of the conspiracy theories I hear are clearly, demonstrably, ridiculous.  However, that said, there is something about the official story of what happened that day that has just never sat right with me.  I know a lot of people are going to consider me an ignorant, monstrous anti-patriot for saying this, but that doesn't change the way it appears to me.

I have never believed the story of United 93.

I am truly, truly sorry if that bothers you in any way.  I don't want to upset anyone, and that certainly has nothing to do with why I'm writing this here.  But it also doesn't do anything to change my perception of the situation, either.

It just always struck me as too neat, too tidy, too... American.  It's like something out of a storybook, or a fairytale.  Or a Hollywood movie.  It's just too perfect to be real.  The fact that they just happened to be lucky enough to crash in an uninhabited area.  The fact that the one plane that didn't hit its target just happened to be the last one, and just happened to be the one headed for the White House.  The fact that on that day, of all days, for this story that is fairly dripping with patriotism and Americans-Are-The-Greatest glory to come out, from the government, has just been a little hard for me to swallow.  From the first time I heard it, it has felt exactly like the "your dog went to live on a farm upstate" story a father would tell to his child.

I tend to follow the "Occam's Razor" style-guide when it comes to conspiracy theories:  the simplest explanation is the most likely.  That's one of the many reasons why I've never believed that 9/11 was an "inside job" (even though it would've felt so good to blame Cheney and Rumsfeld for it); the idea that the federal government could organize a conspiracy on that massive a scale is simply ludicrous, and laughably so.

But the idea that they might shoot down a passenger plane that they believed was on a suicide mission to crash into the White House, especially after three other planes had already hit their targets, and without knowing how many more there might be?  And that if they did, in fact, shoot down that plane, that they might, on such a tragic day, tell us an up-lifting story of everyday American heroism, rather than the truth - that the United States government had been forced to kill some of its own citizens, in order to prevent the murder of far more?  Those really just don't seem that far-fetched to me.  In fact, they seem kind of plausible.

And the more I've been thinking about it lately, the more I've come to realize, that if that is what happened, I wouldn't even blame them for it.

Even if the U.S. shot down United 93, they wouldn't be responsible for those people's deaths.  The terrorists who hijacked that plane, and pointed it at the White House are the ones responsible.  There is simply no argument about that.  I mean, honestly, what else should the government have done?  Let the plane destroy the White House, just so that those Americans on that plane could live another hour?  Is there anyone who could truly argue that there was some safe way to quickly bring that plane down without injuring anyone?  If the government had the means and opportunity to take down that plane - and I don't think there is any reasonable argument to be made that they didn't - then, if I'm honest with myself, I don't see what other choice they had.

And you know what?  I wouldn't even blame them for lying to us about it.  Those men and women on that plane are everyday American heroes, no matter how they died.  Just like every single person who died in New York or D.C. that day is a hero.  Don't they deserve to be remembered as heroes?  Don't they deserve better than to be remembered as innocent victims caught in the crossfire between their government and a handful of sick assholes?

Yes, you could make the argument that the lie was self-serving to the ones who told it.  And I don't necessarily think you'd be wrong.  But I think it's just as true that the lie honors the memories of those men and women in a just way; in a way fitting of Americans who gave their lives, willingly or not, so that others could live.

The official story of United 93 might be a mythology, but they deserve that, and much more.  A beautiful mythology to honor their deaths is, literally, the least we can do.

Before She Wakes...

It's quiet in here right now.  Early-Sunday-morning quiet.

When I'm lucky, I get two of these a week.  These all-too-brief respites of quiescence.  I've come to understand how much I look forward to them, without even knowing it; how much I need them.  To recover, to rejuvenate, to reflect.  To define myself.  To remind myself of who I think I am.  Who I want to believe I am.  To try and become the man I want to be.  The essence of Me-time.

As with most things, I feel I squander it too often.  Washing myself down the drain.  It isn't enough to simply relax, though that is definitely part of it; resting in preparation for the week ahead.  Once more unto the breach..., etc.  But Quiet and Alone come too rarely to be wasted on mere relaxation.  They are worth so much more than that.

Who are you, when you're by yourself?

When all you have to do, is be, what will you do?

Character, is who you are, in the dark.

It's time for my time.

And I know what to do with it.

Kicking Against The Muse...

Blah blah blah... what to write, what to write?

Kickball double-header in the July heat coming up in about an hour.  Not really looking forward to it much.

Still haven't gotten my computer(s) back.  Still no idea when I will.

Really looking forward to getting back into Mass Effect this weekend.

...

This isn't really writing.  There's nothing creative or interesting or worthwhile about simply cataloging the most boring minutiae of your daily life.

But I'm stuck in the office, bored-to-death by a mile-high stack of pointless busy-work that I've been groaning through for almost two weeks now, and I've got about twenty minutes to post something before I have to get ready to go to a company fucking kickball game, of all fucking things.  What am I supposed to do?  Make art?

...

...

...


Yes.

Yes, that's exactly what you should fucking do.  Make some fucking art.

If it isn't worth doing, then don't fucking bother.  You're just wasting time.

But I'm not an artist.  I'm just an approaching-middle-age-teenager; a pseudo-hipster dipshit.  A corporate wage-slave.  And a wannabe addict/mystic.

Everyone's an artist.  Most people just don't bother, is all.  All you have to do is make the effort.  It will touch someone, somewhere, in some way. 

Express, motherfucker!

Um, ok, uh, here goes:

*cough*
I don't know which upsets me more
That I am saddened by my Self
And my life
Or the Guilt
Stemming from the Knowledge
That I have no Right
Nor Reason
To feel this way at all

I'm a King
dressed as a Beggar

Who will give me Alms?

There, that wasn't so hard now, was it?

No, I guess not.  It wasn't any good, either.

You're still missing the point.  It's not about "Good" or "Bad."  "Bad" is inevitable, and "Good" is something that will come with time, or it won't, and there's very little you can do about that, so there's no point in worrying about it.


The point, is to do it.


That's all.

In Toto Memorium...

There's a War Memorial in the middle of my town.

It's a park, actually.  It's filled with dozens of memorials, each one for a different conflict.  Apparently, it's the only park in Maryland that commemorates soldiers from every American war; from the French and Indian War, all the way to the first Gulf War.  There's even a monument dedicated to the residents of Frederick County that lost their lives fighting the Barbary Pirates.

Apparently, there are also some soldiers buried under that park.  Which I guess is fitting, considering its purpose.

I first discovered the park a few years ago, on another Walpurgisnacht, while drifting through town in the middle of the night, in my usual state of psychedelic illumination.  It was knowledge of the bodies buried there that actually drew me to investigate it; tickling my sense of ghoulish voyeurism.  But I ended up having an entirely different experience.

I imagine most people have been to war memorials at one time or another.  Living in the D.C. area, it's an especially common occurrence; I'd lost track of the number of memorials I'd been to before I'd even made it to high school.  After a while, they just start to blend into one another, and it's easy to become desensitized to their meaning.  But, usually, those are memorials dedicated to one, single, specific war or conflict.  I found that the effect of a memorial dedicated to All American War to be powerful in the extreme, even to someone as jaded as I sometimes pretend to be.

The first effect I noticed is that there are simply so many monuments in this park.  And when you realize that each one is dedicated to a different war, then you begin to get a sense of the scope of just how much of our history we have spent trying to kill other people before they could kill us.  And you can't help but start to ask yourself, Have we ever been at peace?  Is peace even a realistic possibility?  Or is it just an idealistic fantasy we tell ourselves to soothe our sense of fear and alienation in the face of a violent, hostile, uncaring world; just like "God" and "Heaven"?  (How ironic that those two concepts in particular, so often the direct cause of so many wars, are actually responsible for all wars, in a way.  Would it be so easy for us to kill one another so often, and in such numbers, and for such ridiculous reasons, if so many of us didn't believe with such absolute certainty that they wouldn't really be ending forever, but simply traveling to "a better place?"  I would wager that Life means more to the atheist, who understands its true finality.)

But then I began to wander through the monuments, one-by-one, down through the history of our wars.  The Persian Gulf War.  The Vietnam War.  The Korean War.  Each one filled with names chisled in stone.  Names of people who lived here, in my town.  Who wandered these same streets at some point in their youth.  Some who even wandered the same school hallways.  Maybe some who had even lived on my street.  Fools and Heroes, every one.  Strong, and Doomed, and so unbelievably Brave.  Braver than I will ever be.  Braver than I ever could be.  And just boys!  Just boys.  They'd only just started.  They had so much left to do.  Just boys.  How is it possible that this country, of all countries, that coddles and insulates and over-protects its children to such a ridiculous, obsessive degree, could do all of this?  Could still be doing all of this?  It is literally, staggering.

And so many names.  So many names.  The World War II memorial is the largest in the park, by far.  A wall, ten feet high, and fifty feet long.  Entirely filled with names.  Our names.  And I wandered down that memorial, reading those names, trying to take it all in.  It was almost too much.  I could barely comprehend so many people, just from my tiny little town alone(!), all fighting and dying all over the world, not much more than sixty years ago.  How could that possibly have happened?!  And this, the most moral and just of all the wars!  The one where we were most clearly combating an Evil; the greatest Evil the modern world had ever seen.  It was still almost too much to believe.  But I finally got to the end of that immense list, and the end of that long wall... and then I realized - the list of names had stopped at "L."  Oh, no, I thought, it's not possible.  But I rounded the corner of that wall to discover, to my horror, that the entire other side was filled in, as well.

It felt like a lead weight had been inserted into my chest.  It was all I could do to keep myself from breaking down into tears right then and there.  I simply could not comprehend that amount of pain and suffering, on that enormous scale.

But the memorial that affected me most, and that I will always remember, was the memorial to the soldier boys of World War I.

I've always had a bit of a fascination with WWI.  It was, by far, the most gruesome and horrible conflict that humanity has ever seen.  The brutal combination of trench warfare and the advent of modern weaponry - the machine gun, the tank, the flamethrower, the grenade, the fighter plane, chemical warfare, etc., etc. - created an environment that was, quite simply, more akin to a meat grinder than what we think of as "war."  Almost forty MILLION people killed, wounded, or missing-in-action.  By the end of the war, Europe was running out of fighting age men.  So they were drafting men as old as seventy, and boys as young as fourteen.  More meat for the grinder.

At the time, they called it "The Great War."

The memorial dedicated to this human atrocity is obviously the oldest in the park.  It's almost certainly the first one built there.  It was sculpted in the style of classic monuments, with a bronze statue of a doughboy standing atop a large, octagonal concrete base.  Onto each of the eight sides of the base has been affixed a bronze plaque, each about three feet wide by four feet tall; and each plaque is, again, a list of names.  The names are so small that they are impossible to read without climbing up onto the memorial itself.  They had to make them that small in order to fit them all on the monument.  And unlike the other monuments in the park, which list the names of everyone involved in their conflict in any way, the WWI memorial is from an earlier time in America's history - it only lists the names of the boys who never came home.  Boys from my hometown.  Dozens and dozens and dozens of them.  All slaughtered.  Gone now, even from memory.  All that's left of them are names on a plaque, that you can't even read.

As I wandered around the memorial, trying to comprehend the weight of it all, I came upon one plaque that was different from the others.  It had fewer names, and was in a larger font.  I noticed it had a title across the top that was large enough that I could it read it:

"The Negro Men of Frederick County, Who Gave Their Lives In The Great War of 1917"

I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes, trying to come up with my response to that; to sum up how it made me feel then, or how I feel about it now.  I'm sorry, but I can't.  I just don't have the words.  I guess I should try to concentrate on feeling grateful that they were even included in the memorial at all.

I'll leave you with this thought for this Memorial Day.  Sums up my feelings pretty well.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.  And while you're out there, barbequing, and sunbathing, and partying - try to be good to someone.  Just because you can.

And just because, it's something.

Confounding Conundrum Countered, Conclusively...

Regarding the question, "if I'm still getting high, but just in healthier ways, am I really changing?  am I really getting better?" - a question I have been asking myself here repeatedly for some time now - I think I finally have an answer.

My counselor read my blog entry yesterday regarding the SMART meeting (I sometimes send him pertinent entries to keep him updated between sessions, and he is gracious enough to read them), and he sent me this reply:

A desire to want to get high and/or altering our mind/mood state is part of our genetic, biological, and chemical make-up as Humans. It is an underlying instinctual desire that we all have. That's why we have serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline, and various other chemical neurotransmitters in the first place. These chemicals are a vital part of our survival mechanism, that's why sex, eating, and exercise can feel ssoooooo gooood! These chemicals are a part of [our] neuro-chemical make up to ensure pleasure when we engage in these activities. These activities are necessary for the healthy survival of any species. A desire to feel good or even feel high or to alter our mental status is very much a part of who we are as humans. This is why every civilization known to Man has developed some sort of mind altering practices or substances. The harm is when we lose the capacity to regulate the chemical process either internally or externally. Excess is what changes the dynamic from healthy to unhealthy and triggers addictive behaviors.

Short answer:  getting high is just a part of who we are, and we wouldn't be here without it; so, healthy methods are okay, but everything in moderation, always.

It seems so obvious now.  And in hindsight, I feel like I already knew it.  I just couldn't find my own way there, for some reason.  I was over-analyzing the situation again, I think.  Missing the forest for the trees.  I'm glad I had someone there who could explain it to me in a way that I could understand, and use.  Thanks, Doc.

I enjoyed my workout-induced endorphin high this morning, guilt-free.


PS - I kind of want to talk about this at my next SMART meeting, but I don't know if that's because I want to update them on my progress, or if I just want to start a confrontation with the panicky facilitator and prove him wrong in front of the rest of the group.  Can't deny that'd be fun.  But definitely a dick-move, too.  We'll see how I feel next week, I guess.

S.M.A.R.T., Take 2...

Went to my second SMART Group meeting last night.

About half the people there last night, were not there last week.  So, it was almost like meeting a whole new group again; only about half the people there last night had met me the week before.  And the meeting began with the announcement that the person I had found to be the most annoying from the previous week was apparently now going to be the co-facilitator and help run the meetings.  Wonderful. 

It was very much the same as before in most ways.  A lot of older, broken, rather tired and sickly looking people, for the most part (there were a couple exceptions).  And again, everyone basically just spent their time detailing the mundane minutiae of their lives.  It's almost as if everyone is trying to answer the question, "What's been going on with you lately?" rather than, "How have you been doing with your recovery lately?"  And that is sooo boring to listen to for an hour-and-a-half, and just so completely not-helpful.

Once again, the facilitator (the guy who ostensibly runs the meetings) waited until two minutes before the scheduled end of the meeting to get around to me and the other new guy from last week (the one who shouted "Where's Happy Hour?").  Which put us, the new guys, in the position of having to choose between either being looky-lou's (listening to everyone else talk, but not really participating ourselves), or being the reason everyone else had to stay late.  Thanks a lot.  (To be fair, we could've volunteered to speak at any point during the meeting, but as "the new guys," it just doesn't feel right, somehow, to be interjecting and taking time away from people who have been coming there every week for years.)  I'm beginning to get the impression that this guy isn't a very good facilitator.

When it was my turn to talk, I basically gave a quick synopsis of the events and questions I described in yesterday's post.  When I asked aloud, "Maybe everyone needs to get high, and all we can choose is the method?," I saw the facilitator's eyes widen in panic, and he started shaking his head as if to say, "No!  No, don't say THAT!"  Which kind of shocked me and upset me a little.  Why the fuck is that a taboo question?  And I thought the whole point of SMART vs. other organizations was that this was supposed to be free of dogma.  So, what was so wrong with that question??

After I finished speaking there was a murmur of "Wow, good questions. - Yeah, those are good questions. - Wow, I never thought of that. - Whew, how do you answer that one?!," etc. from the rest of the group, which was far more reaction than had been generated by anything else said at the meeting to that point.  (Not bragging, just stating a fact.)  And then a bunch of people offered several comments (again representing more activity than had been seen in the rest of the meeting so far).

The really annoying, whiny woman who is apparently now going to be co-facilitator told me that I should trust my feelings (whatever that means - I just told you my feelings - my feelings are "this makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not sure I really am doing anything wrong") and to try an experiment where I accept it, and tell myself that it's okay to feel that way, and then see how that makes me feel.  (???)  And then another, older gentleman (who apparently is either a chemist or other scientist, or works with chemists or other scientists) started trying to explain to me in dumbed-down language about Endorphins, without actually naming them.  I interrupted him to say, "yeah, I know, the endorphins.  And they activate the opiate-receptors, so it's basically a naturally produced painkiller."  He seemed kind of shocked and at a loss for words after that (guess he was looking forward to dropping some science on me?), but went on to say that since my body is producing it for a good reason, then I should just enjoy it.  Which made absolutely no sense to me.  What fucking difference does it make if the opiate is synthetic or naturally produced by my body??  I'm still activating my opiate-receptors, which is the exact behavior pattern I'm trying to fucking break!  The idea that it's as simple as just Natural vs. Synthetic is completely asinine.  But I didn't have the heart to tell him that, of course.  I just nodded and smiled and tried to look grateful.  And there were other comments, as well, but none any more helpful.  They basically fell into either "trust your feelings/instincts" (gee, thanks, hadn't figured that one out yet) or "it's okay, so accept it and allow yourself to enjoy it" (no explanation as to why or how it's okay - just stating simply that it is, so accept it - again, thanks so much; I guess I should just do what you say and not worry about having to, I don't know, understand the situation at all or anything).

And so, after two meetings, I'm beginning to wonder if this group really has anything to offer me.  I keep hearing people tell their stories, and describe how they learned some lesson or wisdom that seems totally basic and completely obvious to me, and that I feel as if I learned ten years ago; and this coming from someone old enough to be my father, or my grandfather!  I came to this group hoping to learn something, and maybe find a resource that I could use for help when I needed it.  But over and over again, I keep finding that I want to help these people, that I want to educate them, instead of the other way around!  I'm not trying to be a condescending prick here, honestly.  It's just that it seems to me as if I'm already a lot farther down this road than they all are.  (When you think about it, I've been doing this my whole life - from before I even started using - while I was using, for crying out loud - and this is just the latest stage of it.)  I feel as though I'm asking people who are still figuring out the things I already know, what I should do next, when they can't possibly know, because they haven't even gotten to the point that I'm at yet, much less beyond it.

All I seem to have gained from attending these meetings so far, is a reinforcement of the same experience I have whenever I get in a group of other people:  I end up feeling like a condescending misanthrope.  (It's so weird - I used to need other people so badly when I was a kid.  I didn't know who I was without a group of friends around me to validate and support me.  And now, I can't stand people!  It drives me crazy to have to spend any significant amount of time with the general public.)

I don't know.  Maybe as I get more comfortable with this group, things will get better.  Maybe my influence will lead them to participate more and discuss more worthwhile topics.  (That certainly seemed to be the case last night.)  Or maybe as I get to know them better, and feel more comfortable inserting my $.02 into the conversation, maybe I actually will be able to help some of them.  And maybe helping some of them will help me in some fashion.  I don't know.  It's possible, I guess.  I'm going to give it a few more meetings before I make any decisions, at the very least; I want to give this a fair chance, and not make any snap-judgements.

And, worst-case-scenario, if this meeting continues to be this bad, or gets even worse, there's always another meeting close to my work that I could try out instead.  Maybe that one will be better.


More of the bizarre, "ironic" (?) signs from the back wall of the room:

"I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings."

"Don't Drink and Drive.  You might spill your beer."

"I <3 BEER"

"Don't Drink and Park:  Cocktails Make People Make More People"

The Mighty Endorphin...

Day 3 of my new-and-improved workout routine.  Running harder and faster, really getting my heart rate up there.

Around about the 15-minute mark, I started to notice some changes.  It was starting to hurt less.  In fact, more than that - I was starting to feel pretty good!  The music I was listening to was just suddenly so awesome!  And my eyelids were getting sooo heavy.  I was getting really drowsy, but not sleepy, and I wasn't slowing down at all.  I was still pumping away at a furious pace, to match the beating of my heart - left, right, left, right, left right left right left right bang bang bang bang.  It felt more like nodding, that state where the opiate is so overwhelmingly pleasurable that the user repeatedly passes in and out of consciousness, or "nods off."

And that's when I realized it:  I was really high!

And while I enjoyed it, and while I knew I was doing something good for myself - and so I should just let myself enjoy this, could even consider it my reward for putting in the effort - there was a part of me that still felt bad about it and felt like I was doing something wrong.  And then I was right back to trying to answer that same question I keep coming back to:  if I'm still getting high, but just in different and less destructive ways, then am I really getting better?

If my goal here was to stop getting high in destructive and/or dangerous ways, then I could easily answer that question, "Yes, I am getting better."  But that isn't my goal.  My goal is to try and stop needing to get high all the time, period, regardless of method.  Because if I can't rid myself of the need to get high all the time, then when the healthy methods stop working as well for me, or when I get into a dark place again for one reason or another (we all have them, life is full of dark places we must traverse once in a while), then I'm going to turn to unhealthy methods again to satisfy that desire.

I'm not going to stop meditating, and I'm not going to stop studying Mathematics and other Sciences, and I'm not going to stop playing video games, and I'm not going to stop having awesome sex with Her, and I'm not going to stop writing, and I'm not going to stop working out.  So, if I am getting high off of these things, then I guess that means I have to learn how to live with that.

So, then, can I adjust my goal of trying to not get high at all, regardless of method?  Is that even a reasonable goal to have set myself?  Can I reasonably expect to be able to achieve that without moving to a cave somewhere and spending the rest of my life meditating like an itinerant sage?  Is getting high just something that I need in order to make my life feel worth living?  And if so, is that true for everyone, or just me?  What if the only real choice I have is the method I use?  And is that something I can live with?  No, I can live with it.  But is it something I can learn to be okay with?

I don't know the answers.  But I know I'm not done asking the questions.

Pleasuring Myself, continued...

A reader left this comment on my post from yesterday, and I wanted to respond to it here, because I think it raises some interesting points that got me thinking about it a bit more:

Well I think the goal is to be happy moment by moment as much as you can. So what's the problem with pleasuring yourself? Just strive for getting outside your own ego as much as you can, and then you're still moving forward, I say. 

I'm not sure I can agree with that.  I'm not sure I should agree with that, for my own safety.

See, my problem is that, more often than not, that instinct or drive or need to pleasure myself, to make myself happy, has led me to do stupid, self-destructive things.  On more than one occasion now, it has come close to killing me.  And it's a virtual certainty that, if left unchecked, someday it will succeed.  So pleasuring myself is my problem.  And so I feel that, for my own good, I can't allow myself to just try to be as happy as possible moment-to-moment.  Because what happens when the thing that will make me happy is also something that hurts me in some way?

So I feel like I need to do something to correct that behavior, that need to pleasure myself.  And right now, I'm not sure that I actually am.  Yes, it's true that I'm no longer indulging in those self-destructive pastimes at the moment, and that I've replaced them with more self-constructive activities, but I don't feel that I can take any credit for that.  Because I didn't do anything to foster that change.  The circumstances around me have changed, but I'm still responding to them in the same way I always have before.  I still feel just as strong of a need to pleasure myself, it's just that the methods in which I want to achieve that pleasure are now different.  As I said yesterday:  before I wanted to get high and get off, so that's what I did, and now I want to meditate and study mathematics, so that's what I'm doing.

The root cause of my self-destructive behavior lies in that need to make myself feel as good as possible for as much of the time as possible.  Yes, I'm now indulging that need in a constructive manner, but since I had no hand it actually making that happen and am only following where the flow takes me, then how can I trust in that and believe that I am now somehow "better?"  I have put no Will into this.  I am not behaving any differently, not really.  I'm just responding to different stimulus in the same manner as before.  So, what happens when the novelty wears off?  What happens when I suddenly find that I'm not deriving the same amount of joy and satisfaction out of these healthy activities as I once did?

What happens when I finally do want to get high again?

Because that day will come, no question.  And if I haven't done anything to correct the root cause of that desire, then how will I be able to resist it?  And I guess that's the problem in a nutshell:  I'm not resisting.  Because for me, there's nothing to resist.

Most people in my situation (newly-sober addicts) are in a constant battle against their own desires.  They are struggling against themselves to try and resist the urge to do the one thing they want to do more than anything else.  And their entire recovery is built around that internal conflict.  I know that I am an addict because I have experienced that conflict for more of my life than I care to admit, and because most of the times that I have fought those urges, I have lost.  But that is not my experience now; that is not what I'm going through today.  I'm not getting high right now because I do not want to get high right now.  I am sober because, right now, I want to be sober.  I have no urges to resist or fight against.  They just disappeared, and I ran with it.  And so that makes me feel like I'm not really doing the work.  Like I'm not really getting any better.  That I just got lucky.  That I had a brief window of opportunity, and I seized on it.

But this is not going to last forever.  Eventually, the winds of my desire are bound to blow back in the other direction again.  And I'm going to need to know ahead of time how to respond when that happens, or else it's going to catch me off guard and I'm going to fall right back into the same self-destructive patterns that I feel so blessedly and falsely liberated from right now.  But how can I possibly prepare for that?  Should I be resisting every pleasurable desire I have, irrespective of de-structive vs. con-structive?  Do I need to be living a monastic life?  (Frankly, I'd rather OD.)

Maybe I just need to cross that bridge when I come to it.  Maybe there's no point in worrying about it.  Maybe I should just accept this period of productive activity for what it is, and be grateful that it came so easily to me.  Maybe I should just focus on how lucky I am that I don't have to go through that struggle the way so many other addicts do.

And it would be so easy to do all of that, if only I felt in any way responsible for this change of fortune.  If I just felt that I had some hand in bringing this release about, then I would know that I actually am resisting, that I am doing the work - just in my own unique way, outside the range of the typical experience.  The same way I seem to do just about everything else.

Maybe that is true.

Could that be true?

No, I don't think so.  I've fought hard before, and I've won.  And I've fought hard, and lost.  But this time, I wasn't even fighting at all.  I had given in to my desires 100%.  And even though I knew I was hurting myself badly I still didn't try to resist.  I just didn't have it in me.  But then I hit a bottom I hadn't even seen coming.  And it scared the shit out of me.  And I responded to that fear by running as fast as I could in the opposite direction.  Basically, I scared myself straight.

How can I take credit for that?

I can't.  I didn't really do anything.  I got lucky.

But what I can do?  I can be grateful.  And oh, how I am.

And I can look on the bright side.  I can make the most of it.  I can do everything in my power to get as much out of this experience as I possibly can, for as long as it lasts.  And if I'm lucky, and smart, then the things I learn during this temporary reprieve will prepare me to know what to do and how to respond when that inevitable day finally arrives, and my desires shift their poles again.

And that's gotta be enough.

Confessions #3...

"Is it really mine??"

She was curled up in the fetal position on her bed, a mattress on the floor, hiding her head under her pillow.  This tiny, terrified little girl, trying to hide from me the way a child might.

"Is it MINE?!" I screamed, again, as though the volume of my voice could somehow force her to answer me.

We'd been together for four years, since my sophomore year of high school; an eternity at that age.  She had recently moved out of her parents' house and into this tiny, barely furnished basement apartment across the street from our old high school.  Her roommate, a mutual male friend of ours, had just told me they'd been "screwing for the past month."

"Fucking TELL ME, goddammit!"  She curled up tighter and pulled the pillow closer around her head.  I could hear her muffled sobbing.  I have to admit, it made me feel a little better.

She'd told me she was pregnant a couple of weeks earlier, as we'd sat parked in her car, waiting out a rainstorm.  Even though we'd only had sex once in the month leading up to that, I still just naturally assumed it was mine.  After all, she wasn't having sex with anyone else.  And why else would she bother telling me if it wasn't mine?

She told me she was going to "get rid of it."  I could feel a part of me break when she said that.  At the same time, we weren't married, weren't ready to marry, weren't living together, didn't have jobs, and I had just failed my freshman year of college; we were hardly ready to be parents.  And I didn't really feel like I had much say in the matter, either.

"How are you going to do it?" I asked, as the rain beat down on the car all around us.  "Do you need my help?"

"No, I know what to do.  I looked it up in my book of remedies.  There's an herb, and I have to make a tea out of it and drink a bunch of it, and that'll make me bleed it out."

That sounded horrific to me.  "Wouldn't you rather just go to a doctor?"

"I can't afford a doctor.  And I don't want my parents to find out.  Plus, this method is supposed to be safer, and less painful."

"TELL ME, YOU FUCKING BITCH!!  IS THAT MY BABY YOU'RE KILLING OR NOT?!!"

The next day she bought a vial of Oil of Pennyroyal from our local Wiccan shop.  The concentrated oil was incredibly pungent.  As she infused a dropper full into a cup of hot water, the sickly-sweet aroma filled every corner of the tiny apartment.  It smelled like mildew and peppermint.  It was enough to make you gag, and there was nowhere to go to get away from it.

She drank two cups of the "tea" every day for the next two weeks.  Within a day, the smell began to ooze from her pores, mixing with the smell of her sweat.  If anything, that smell was even worse, like moldy garlic, with an astringent note mixed in, something halfway between nail-polish remover and hairspray.  It was nauseating.  I couldn't even stand to be in the same room with her.

Even if it hadn't smelled so strong, and so horribly, I don't know if I'd have been able to stand it.  Because that smell was the smell of my first child being murdered.  It was the bloody death of my son or daughter violently assaulting my senses.  And I guess in that way, it was almost fitting.  It would've seemed wrong somehow if it had smelled pleasant.  No, of course it had to smell like boiled death.

For the record, I was, and am, pro-choice.  I believe everyone has a right to make up their own mind on this issue, and I do not judge anyone for the choice they make.  If a woman has an abortion, at any point, and for any reason, I do not consider it the murder of a baby.  But I found it was easy to accept these things in the abstract, when they were about other people, and other babies.  I soon discovered I felt very differently when it was suddenly about my baby.

The tincture of pennyroyal made her horribly sick.  She bled constantly, and was bent double with vicious cramps for days.  She had trouble keeping food down.  She would get sudden fevers.  She couldn't sleep.  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would hallucinate.

I felt just as sorry for her as I did for myself, and for our unborn child.  It just seemed to go on and on and on.  I felt like this had to be worse than just going to a doctor and getting it over with.  But now it was too late for that.  I alternately tried to comfort her, and ignore her.  I stayed away from the apartment for days at a time, going out to get high with my friends, trying to forget what was going on in that tiny, damp little basement room.  I couldn't even begin to figure out how to deal with what I was feeling.  And while part of me wanted to take care of her and try to help her, another part of me hated her for what she was doing.

But then, after she'd been drinking the pennyroyal tea for almost two weeks, the oil almost gone, her roommate had casually confessed their affair to me, and all the nebulous, sickening things I was feeling crystallized into a razor-edged rage.  First, there was the sense of betrayal - they'd both been lying to me for at least a month now.  They'd been fucking behind my back.  And how could I be so stupid as to not see it!  But then came the realization:  we'd only had sex the one time over a month ago (her recent and sudden lack of sexual interest in me suddenly making sense).  But she'd been having sex with him repeatedly during that same month.  So how could she possibly think the baby was mine??  But, of course, she didn't think it was mine.  She knew it was his; they both knew it was his.  They just let me believe it was mine.  They just let me suffer through all of that, for nothing.

Because it was easier to just let me believe she was killing my child, than it was to admit that they were fucking behind my back.

I kicked open the door to her bedroom and screamed at her, "You've been fucking HIM?!"

"Oh, God, no!" she screamed, and curled up fetal, hiding her head under her pillow.  I continued to scream at her, getting louder and more angry, demanding to know if it was my child.  She wouldn't even acknowledge me, which only infuriated me more.  She just kept hiding in that ridiculously childish way, as if she could make me disappear simply by hiding her head long enough.

Finally, I'd had enough, and I grabbed her pillow and blanket and flung them across the room.  She covered her head with her hands, but I grabbed her arms and pinned them down on her bed.  Straddling her, holding her down, I screamed into her face, "IS IT FUCKING MINE?!!"

"NO!  IT'S NOT FUCKING YOURS!!  OK?!!"

...

I don't know what I expected her to say.  I guess it was more about forcing her to tell me the truth.  But, the thing is, to this day, I still don't know if she really was telling me the truth or not.  I don't know if she even knew the truth.  She'd lied to me about so many things by that point; she'd been lying to me for almost our entire relationship.  I can do the math, and I know that, statistically speaking, it almost certainly wasn't mine.  But, she said they'd used condoms.

And we hadn't.

So I still can't help but wonder.

And I know that I'll never know the answer - no one will ever know the answer - and that the numbers are on his side, so there's really no point in speculating.

But, if that's true, then why am I still thinking about it, all these years later?

It's Not A River, It's A Bullet...

"Denial is how it kills you," he said.

They were sitting on the beach, watching the waves, the Sun setting behind them, feeling the cool, salty air on their faces, and discussing their respective abuses.  They were three days into their week-long vacation, the first the three brothers had taken together since the youngest was still a baby, and the first they had ever taken together as adults.  The youngest had just recently graduated college, and this trip was a sort of present for him from the older two.  At that moment, he was back up at the cottage, enjoying his girlfriend, while the older two were on the beach, the eldest trying his best to educate the middle brother with whatever bullshit-wisdom he'd managed to glean by that point in his life.  He felt it was his duty, in some way, as the oldest.  Especially now that their parents were gone.

"Yeah, it's the denial that gets you.  That's the one thing they got right in those meetings.  You can have a relatively easy time of things, and keep using for a long, long time, so long as you don't start lying to yourself about it.  But the second you start thinking, 'I don't have a problem,' then the drug's got you, and you're done for."

The waves crashed on the beach in a constant rhythm, like the slow, steady heartbeat of the world.  A young family flew a kite together some yards away down the beach from where the two brothers sat, and a man fished the surf down in the other direction.  The middle brother sat silent, listening, not knowing what to say; not sure if he should.

"It starts off, you're just having a good time.  Being young and reckless and free, and feeling as good as you possibly can.  Nothin' wrong with that.  But, it's inevitable - at some point, it's going to change you.  That 'want' is going to slowly turn into 'need.'  And it's so hard to tell when that's happening.  And if you're not looking for it, you'll never see it.  So that's the thing - you have to always be looking for it.  Always.  You have to be constantly asking yourself, 'Am I addicted to this?  Am I starting to need it?'  And the first time you're not 100% certain that the answer is 'No,' then the answer is 'Yes.'"

The waves crashed, and the breeze kissed their faces.  The little girl screamed happily as she flew her kite, and a gull cried somewhere over the water.  The middle brother stared out across the ocean at the blurry blue line of the horizon, feeling sheepish and guilty, and more than a little stupid, as he so often did when he talked with his older brother.  He realized he'd never even thought of these things, let alone asked himself these questions.  Am I an addict?, he asked himself.  And he realized, he didn't know the answer.

"So, that's the key:  near-constant self-reflection, combined with brutal honesty.  It's the only way to do this shit, and be able to enjoy it, and not end up fuckin' dyin' from it.  'The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.'  You have to be able to look at yourself and say 'I'm an addict.  I'm a drunk.  I'm a fuckin' junkie.'  You have to be able to recognize that, and to accept it about yourself.  That doesn't excuse it, of course.  Doesn't make it ok just because you can admit it.  But, if you can't say that to yourself, then you'll never even have a chance to make it right, because you'll never even know that anything was wrong."

The sky was slowly progressing from yellow to orange, and the breeze was starting to pick up.  It was going to be a beautiful night.  The middle brother didn't think he could ask himself those questions.  And he was sure he couldn't answer them correctly.  His whole life, his brothers had always seemed to do everything better than he did. And he looked up to them both, and loved them both so much.  He felt surrounded by their greatness; almost comforted by it, in a way.  But that only made his feeling of mediocrity that much more acute by comparison.  He's talking about this like it's the easiest thing in the fucking world to do.  But I can't stand to think about myself at all, so how the fuck am I supposed to be able to do it constantly?  Hell, that's one of the reasons I like getting high so much in the first place, so I don't have to think about this shit.

"That is the only thing that keeps this urge in check.  Without it, you've got no reason to resist at all.  Remember, getting high is a constant downward slide, and at the bottom is degradation, at best; death, at worst.  You wanna stay up near the top of that slide, where it's all still fun and games.  Where it isn't consuming you, taking over your whole life.  And that honest self-reflection, that willingness to admit to yourself, and the world, that you have a problem, is the one and only tool you have to keep yourself from sailing off down that slide and into nothing."

A constant downward slide, huh?  Well, thanks for telling me that now, big brother.  He watched as the fisherman down the beach wrestled to bring in a sandshark, and remembered the first time he'd gotten high.  He'd been fifteen at the time, and it had been a Summer night, a lot like this one.  Big brother had said, "Yeah, I guess you're about old enough now," as though he were answering a question that no one had asked.  Then he'd said, "Follow me," and they'd walked out into the woods behind their family's house.  They'd sat down against the base of a big tree, and passed a joint, watching the fireflies come on.  To this day, it was one of the greatest nights of his life.  He couldn't help but feel that this warning was coming a bit too late.

"Drugs are a tool; they serve a purpose.  They're not inherently good or bad.  It's all in how you use them.  But they're a dangerous tool.  Like a gun.  And like a gun, you have to treat them carefully, and with respect, or they'll kill you.  If you don't ask yourself these questions, constantly - or if you can't answer them honestly - then you're done for.  You won't have any reason to slow down at all, and you'll use more and more, needing more and more to get less and less out of it, as it eats away at your body; your mind.  Your soul, even.  You'll lose your Self.  And then what've you got?  Because that's all you ever had, right?  I'm speakin' from experience here.  It's so easy to think you've got everything under control, and it's everyone else who has the problem, not you.  But that's the Need talkin'.  And you can't listen to it.  You just gotta keep asking yourself those questions, never stop wondering if this is the day it's finally happened to you - because it will, eventually, some day."

He'd heard this gun metaphor before.  It was one of big brother's favorites.  He honestly didn't know if he had a problem or not, but how could he say that out loud, to this man he'd looked up to his entire life?  This person whose approval he had sought for as long as he could remember, almost even more than he had their parents'?  He watched the little girl flying her kite, as happy as a person ever could be, and he thought about it, really thought about it for the first time.  He knew he didn't use anywhere near as much as either of his brothers, but he also knew that they were both a lot more successful than he was, and that they didn't struggle with anything the way he always seemed to.  And this had always seemed to come so easily to them.  But lately, it'd been all he could do to make sure he didn't get sick at work.  He could even remember a couple of times where he'd had to choose between getting high and getting groceries.  It hadn't been that hard to bum food off of people.  Easier than he'd thought.  Definitely easier than bumming dope.  He was sure his brothers had never been in a similar situation.  They'd never allow it.

"But as long as you can do that, as long as you can ask and answer those difficult questions without flinching, then you'll be alright.  You'll be able to see the bottom of that slide coming at you, and you'll have a chance to do something about it.  You'll be able to say, 'Whoa, hold on a minute here!  This isn't what I want.  I gotta cut this shit out for a while.'  But you have to be able to recognize that there's a problem before you can hope to do anything about it.  Ha, don't look so worried, little brother.  We come from a long line of drunks and junkies and users - it's in our blood.  Their voices are inside of us.  Listen to them, and they'll tell you what to do.  They'll steer you right."

He didn't know what to say.  What could he say?  He understood, and on some level he already knew.  But he couldn't do anything about it.  He wasn't like them.  He couldn't be honest with himself that way.  He didn't want to.  He knew he felt safe when he was with his brothers, like they'd be able to take care of everything.  And he knew he never felt that way when he was by himself.  His whole life, he'd wanted nothing more than to be like the two of them.  But he knew he never would be.  And now, he also knew, that would be the end of him.

I need to say something, he thought.  He watched that little girl with her kite and he remembered those days, what that felt like, and he knew they were gone, and he wanted to be like her.  And he felt the sting in his eye and he felt his lip begin to curl and he thought, I need to say it, I need to say it now, I need to say it right now... And he felt the breeze come on strong all of a sudden, in the opposite direction, a gust of moist brine blowing through him.  And he saw the kite dive from the sky in the sudden reversal of force, saw it dive straight at her, saw it smash her in the face and knock her to the sand.  Her shrill screams filled the beach, and the gulls took flight in alarm, screaming with her, as if they knew.

"Come on," big brother said, standing up and brushing the sand from his legs.  "I bet those two're done by now.  Let's see if baby brother has any of those joints left.  We'll get twisted before dinner."

...

This story was inspired by a piece of my dreaming last night.  In the dream, I was one of the two characters on the beach (not saying which), but I decided to write it in third person, just as an exercise.  As before, I just let it come to me, one piece at a time, sort of letting the story tell itself.

As much as I enjoyed writing this, I can't wait to have something else to write about.  It can't all be drug addiction and death.  I know I must have something else to say, some other story to tell.

Patience, child...

Emptying, to Form...

Where am I going with this?

What am I doing?

What's wrong with me?  Why am I so unhappy?

What do I want?

Do I love you, completely?

Do I love you, at all?

Or do I just need to feel loved by someone?

...

No.  No, that's not the right question.  I do love you.  We've been through way too much together for way too long, have too much history, for me to not love you.  There's a part of me that will always love you, in some way.

The question is, do I love you the way that I'm supposed to?  Do I love you the way that a husband should love his wife?  Or do I just love you as the one person I've been closer to in my life, and shared more of myself with, than any other?

And is there a difference?

Questions, questions, questions!  Everywhere I look it's more fucking questions!  WHERE ARE THE FUCKING ANSWERS?!!

...

I've moved out, temporarily.  Checked myself into a hotel for the week.

Why?  What do I hope to gain from that?  Am I just trying to "shake things up" - just introduce a little anarchy into my life to see what happens?  Am I just trying to force a random change?  Or am I trying to step out of my life, to gain some perspective?  Or am I just hiding?  Just running away?

I don't know.  I don't know if I ever knew.

I'm grasping at straws here.  Suddenly, every single little thing is pregnant with meaning.  Is this The Answer?  Is this what I need?  Will this make me better?  Will this solve my problems?

How can I get better when I don't even know what's wrong?  How can I find The Answer when I don't even know The Question??

Am I looking for fulfillment?  Or do I just want a happy, satisfying marriage?  Are they mutually exclusive?  Or are they one and the same?

...


I keep coming back to this one thought.  That I need to clean up my act.  That everything will be better, and I will be happy and content, if I just give up the drink and all the rest, start working out and losing weight and eating right, start meditating again and studying the Tao, etc., etc.

But then I also can't shake the feeling that all of that is just a bunch of middle-aged, white, American, liberal, hipster bullshit.

But I'm following my gut, aren't I?  That's what I'm doing right now.  I'm following my gut instincts, blindly, in a desperate attempt to get away from wherever the fuck I am right now, to someplace, anyplace else.

And it's my gut that's telling me to follow that path.  That salad yesterday (my first in I-can't-remember-when; it's been all pot pies and beer lately) was the best thing I've tasted in a long, long time.  It's was, literally, unbelievably, shockingly delicious. And there was absolutely nothing special about it - just greens, some veggies, and oil & vinegar.  I keep thinking about how wonderful it would be to just spend some time sitting still and being quiet.  I keep dreaming of my gomden the way I've so often dreamed of the pipe.  That stupid little weekly email quote from Pema Chodron felt like the Universe speaking directly to ME.

And it's my head that's telling me it's all a load of crap.

That means something.

Doesn't it?

But what if all of that only feels right because it's my safety net; because it's safe and familiar because that's what I do when I get lost in these existential crises?  ("Existential Crisis" - jesus, talk about a first-world fucking problem.  How spoiled of a brat do I have to be to even be taking any of this seriously?  But, what, am I supposed to pretend I have the experience of a migrant worker in Guatemala or some shit??  I DON'T.  I can only be who I am. And I am a white, middle-aged American liberal, who is fortunate enough to have the luxury of being able to engage in this kind of introspective panic.)

But what if that's what I do when I get in these situations because that's what I'm supposed to do in these situations because that is The Answer to these problems?!

Ugh, this is making me dizzy.

...

And way, way back in the deep down of me, I feel this fear.  This fear that I'm going to die here.  That I'm never going to get out of this maze of questions alive.  That any reprieve is only temporary, and that I will always end up right back here.

That they're going to find me, cold and still on a hotel bed, the same way they found my mother.

I'm scared of the way that feels like Destiny.

...

And She says, "I'm sure it hurts!  I can't imagine caring so much about so many things.  It must be exhausting!  Maybe you should get back into the Tao so you can let things go and ease your pain..."

And I can't help but laugh!  She has no idea I've been thinking that, or writing this here, at the exact same time.  Out of the mouths of babes...

Is it another sign?  Or am I just connecting dots to find the pattern in the chaos that I want to see?

...

Is all of this just because I don't like myself?  Is that why I feel compelled to do all of those self-improvements?  Because I feel like I would like myself better?

...

When I'm drifting like this, grasping at straws, lost and desperate in this vague and undefined way, I find that I start to obsess about strange things.  A lot of the time it starts as ordinary, banal escapism.  But sometimes it leads me to the Way Out.  The most famous example of this in my life so far, was reading Wild Cards in the bath way back when.  In about the strangest way possible, it was those baths that led me directly to my first direct experience of the Tao.  Changed my life forever.

Right now, it's The Moth.

I can't stop listening to it.  Every story just makes me feel, so much, and so powerfully.  And so I guess there must be something about that feel-ing that I need right now, just like I needed to disappear into the warm water back then.  I would assume then, that also like the baths, I probably will only be able to explain this obsession in hindsight.

Follow Your Instincts.

It's the only thing I feel like I can do right now.  When all else fails (and, let's be honest, all else really has failed here), then Follow Your Instincts.

It's the only thing I feel like I know, for certain.

...

Yesterday, the quote on Zen Pencils reminded me of Bill Hicks' "It's just a ride..." quote.  I got a strong urge to submit that quote to the author/webmaster.  In doing that, I had to find it in my PDA so I could copy and paste it into the email.

Just now, I needed to go into the same section of my PDA that holds all my little notes and stuff, to look up something else.  It was still on the same page with the Bill Hicks' quote.  That page is titled "Philosophies."

I have a collection of notes on my Philosophies of Life that I've collected over the years, stored in my PDA - and I had completely forgotten about it!

And there it was, right in the middle of the list:  The Tao of ManniMoonYin that had come to me so many years ago under such similar circumstances - the Tao that I had been led to from my bath.

How can it be??  It seems that I've forgotten my Tao:

"All things that are, are change."
("All things that are, are fire."  The only constant is change.  Nothing lasts forever.  EVERYTHING is mutable.)

"You cannot be good.  You cannot be bad.  You can only be."
(You cannot be "good," and you cannot be "bad."  These are entirely relative judgements - what is "good" for one will be "bad" for another, and vice versa.  The only thing you can "be," is Michael.)

"Look on the bright side."  "Make the most of it."
(This is the only life you get.  There's nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so - so find the good in *everything* - even your mother's suicide was a good thing when you figured out how to look at it right.  Choose joy, and you will be joyous.)

"You are amazing.  And so is everyone else."
(Glass houses; no one is fit to judge anyone else.  Judgement only leads to division, separation, and loneliness.  We are all One.)

...

That's 3 coincidences now today, all pointing to the same thing.  And today is my 3rd day of this desperate searching.


Even if I'm just connecting the dots in the chaos to find the pattern I want to see, that pattern is obviously deeply meaningful to me in some way.  My path clearly leads in that direction.  And if I am to follow my instincts, then how can I ignore the pattern I see in the noise, like meaning in an inkblot?


It seems that I have found My Answer.

...