The Vast Majority of Space is Dark

I've been reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time lately, and it's gotten me quite lost. Lost in the book. Lost wherever I am while reading it. Lost in thought. It's not the same sort of lost that often comes up when someone discusses their missing car keys or where they are on a map. This kind of lost, the kind I've always been drawn to, is a bit of the opposite. Instead of disappearing into the unknown while everything else is present, I am actually burning as the only light around while all else is dark. The best part about this type of lost, is that wherever I tread, I light the surroundings as I go. This may sound like the most romanticized view of life, but if you read a little of A Brief History Of Time, then this scale of what we are and what we know contrasted against how much we aren't and how much we don't know might start to make more sense.

People who know me may know that I like being this type of lost. Trudging through snow drifts on the sidewalks of Chicago and pacing the wide empty stately streets of DC well past midnight stand out in my mind. In the same way you would explore a level in a video game, say Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, I like to walk and drive and bike and go places I don't really know. There's not so much a point to it as there is a rhythm. It's especially nice to get to know a place at night when it's quieter and subdued. It's less safe, but it's more revealing. And in time, I find myself more acquainted with the place as I might a new friend. I may not know every detail, but I have a sense for them, and I begin to wonder how they see me.

That is the more difficult side of this being lost, worrying about how I fit in with any of it. If you spend too much time on that side, you will lose yourself in the same way as the car keys. It is in this way I am trying not to lose myself. I fall in love with whatever boring, strange, wonderful, or even awful thing I find lit in my path, but then I grow disillusioned by what I'm doing there in the first place. As I look for the next step, next job, next city, next life, I find myself clutching the daily things I fear I might one day take for granted, and mostly I find myself avoiding eye contact with the fear of doing anything to change anything.

The weird thing about staring into a lit screen in the middle of a dark room is that you quickly can't see anything else but the glowing, dull screen. Meanwhile, the longer you stare out into space the more stars, planets, asteroids, and the universe you see. I don't know what that means, but I like it.

Edward's Road to Recovery, Entry #3

Woah, this is a strange new format.  Hopefully everything looks okay when finished.

Anyways, today is as good a day as any to write about my experiences in the IOP (intensive outpatient) program of CATS, which immediately followed my stay in the day-treatment detox facility of the Inova hospital, because I just completed the ten week program last night.  I got out from detox on a Tuesday, I believe, and on a Wednesday began my first day of IOP.  At the time I was a bit hesitant, but because I had had such a good experience at CATS thus far--sharing my story and really feeling connected to both my fellow patients and the staff in ways that I never expected--I was pretty positive that IOP would be a worthwhile experience.  To make a long story short, it was most definitely worth it.

The logistics of IOP are this: it is a group that varies from approximately 5 to 12 patients, led by one counselor.  We would meet at the same place at the same time three times a week, for three hours per session.  Nine hours a week at first seemed daunting, but as the chemistry of the group slowly gelled into something really amazing, I honestly wanted the sessions to last even longer.  Like a support group, we would typically check in and/or talk about our plans for the upcoming weekend, to make sure we were staying busy and had a plan to get through the weekend without drinking or using.  However, IOP provides more of a structure than a group like SMART Recovery or AA, because each class was usually based around a unique topic.  The majority of the class would be spent with us going through various worksheets and discussing the topic of the night in great detail, with our counselor Becky pushing us back on topic if we strayed too far (and we inevitably always did).  We talked about things like PAWS (post-acute withdrawal symptoms, which can last physically for up to one year, and mentally for up to two, and consist of things like headaches, nightmares and bad sleep, body aches, and depression), self-soothing exercises (yoga, meditation, breathing, etc.), coping skills to deal with cravings, and creating a recovery plan.

I don't remember too much of the academic material from our group.  What I do remember is the people and the good times we had.  I think our group was very unusual in that we had an almost perfect chemistry, even as old members left (either to graduate, to sadly relapse, or just to drop out) and new members joined.  There was always someone there to welcome the new people and show them that in our group you could be completely at ease.  There was absolutely and truly no judgment, and people could say whatever they wanted.  I especially tried to cultivate an environment where everyone felt comfortable sharing their most troubling and embarrassing issues and stories.  I was known as the member who was the most willing to go all-out in terms of baring my soul and all the many blemishes of my past behavior.  Even people who were court-ordered into the group because of a DUI got a lot out of it, because we encouraged them to speak up and share their viewpoint, which more often then not was that they felt they didn't really belong in our group.  But we loved them just as much as we loved everyone else, because most of us had been there in our past, at a time when we weren't ready to admit that we were powerless over our addictions. 

For some reason the group seemed to excel because of its all-male demographic.  I know that others who had been in other classes said that the other groups were very weak compared to ours.  Basically people didn't really put much effort into sharing or participating in the other groups, and everyone just looked at the clock till the three hours ran down.  Ours was so different.  Maybe people would be shy for their first session or two, but eventually everyone would participate and share very intimate details about their lives, to which almost all of us could relate.  Our counselor was a girl, but she was pretty awesome, and being younger, she could hang with our group of guys quite easily.  My main job was when she asked us tough, personal questions, I would turn it back around on her.  For a while in there we did have one girl, who in my opinion was a bit much of an attention whore (although I enjoyed her own perspective in the class, since she was by a good bit the youngest member), but she left after a few sessions.  One of the lecherous old guys in the class, JR, told me that he thinks she left because she realized that he had seen her working (apparently not as a dancer that night?) at a strip club somewhere in the Crystal City area.  That might actually be the truth, considering she said she hadn't had a normal job in a long time, but still lived on her own and had a heroin habit.  In any case, it did feel like a bit of a boys' club, and there was that sort of foul-mouthed sense of humor that comes with the territory.  Another thing I was known for was being the one who cursed the most.  Dat's me.  (Oh, and I was known for my lust for food whenever someone brought snacks in.)

My only complaint about the group (and it's a small one) is that over time it became completely dominated by alcoholics, and (although I do have an alcohol addiction) because my drug of choice was heroin and opiates, I felt like a variety of viewpoints were not always expressed.  This isn't really the group's fault, though.  It just shows how many more alcoholics there are out there than other kinds of drug addicts.  I believe there were only three other heroin addicts in the group, and usually only one at any given time besides me.  We were all young.  There was also Ben, who I went through detox with, who was an oxycodone addict.  For whatever reason (perhaps because it's a suburban, predominately upper-class and white area outside of DC), I only saw one person in my entire stay at CATS who was there for anything else other then alcohol or opiates (his drug of choice was cocaine).  Though in general, an addiction is an addiction is an addiction, I do think there are differences in experience between older businessmen who drink too much and junkies.  But in a sense I like that they put everyone together, since we could all share and relate to our own unique experiences.  A lot of times I related more to older alcoholics than I did to other young heroin addicts.  I think there is a sort of shared brother/sisterhood among all addicts, no matter what kind of drug they were addicted to.  The treatment is essentially the same for all kinds of drugs, with some minor differences in the beginning, and the heavy burden of addiction bears down on everyone through the years in the same ways.

What I gained most out of IOP wasn't an absorption of knowledge.  Most of the facts about addiction and the methods of treatment and self-help techniques I knew about before going in, since I researched drug addiction so heavily during my years of use.  What I gained was simply the kick-in-the-ass impact of getting out there and doing the shit that I'd read about for so long but had been too scared to do.  I hated, hated, hated social groups and that sort of thing before treatment, but I would wager that I was the most talkative member of the group throughout my entire ten-week stay.  To me, what recovery is about is really conquering the fears which we've held so tightly and buried, leading to self-destruction and hatred.  It helps tremendously to not just sit there and dream about goals for the future, but to talk about them and write them down on a regular basis.  There is a great sense of accountability when I talk about my goals and then people ask how they're going the next week.  Although I already had a lot of aspects of my recovery plan compiled before I went into IOP, every single day I spent in the group I was more and more motivated to actually get out there and do the stuff: reading, writing, music, film, yoga, meditation, cardio, lifting weights, dancing, breathing, having sex, playing video games, traveling to new places, and of course making new relationships, and maintaining and improving old ones.

One of the key things to take from addiction recovery is this: there is a difference between compliance and acceptance, a difference between abstinence and sobriety.  We can quit because we have to; we can stop using drugs and still be unhappy.  Accepting sobriety means trying to do something every day of your life to better yourself.  It can be at times a very selfish project.  Because we have spent so long hating and destroying ourselves, early recovery is often a time where you are supposed to focus very strongly on yourself, sometimes at the expense of others' demands.  Laws of AA include that you're not supposed to date for the first year of sobriety or make any major decisions in your life.  It's all about a time of self-healing.  That is the most important part of recovery.  With time we can learn to give back to all those we have hurt, and most importantly to learn to help others who struggle with the disease of addiction.  Sobriety isn't being off drugs.  It is a lifetime journey towards happiness and contentment, and I think for me towards some kind of greater truth.

--Edward

Edward's Road to Recovery, Entry #2

Greetings from the ocean floor and from the eagle's vista perched high above, for the beauty of sobriety--after an extended stay in the rusty cage of intoxication/experimentation/growing dependence/physical addiction/depravity/hopelessness--finds me in a state of mind where I feel that I'm exploring the entire world again. Like a child, those of us who are newly sober have to learn how to do everything over again. To stumble over our feet, yes, but to get up again. Everything is so new, and our bodies feel like a raw nerve, but that is the beauty of life, something I have missed out on while constantly numbing myself for the last 7 years of my life. Whether through the warming embrace of opiates, the vicious implosion towards coma of alcohol, or the sheer white light of cocaine rushing through my bloodstream into my brain, I was seeking ways to hide from life. From feelings. From relationships. From responsibility. From growth. And I suppose ultimately from myself. All of these things are scary at first, but I finally feel like everyone else. I feel a comrade of those in the street, struggling against the everyday grind of existence, whereas before I was hiding from the beast, putting on a mask to pretend that I was like everyone else, when in reality I was a coward.

So let me backtrack to where my last post left off. Through the help of my sister and parents and a therapist, I found myself in the Inova CATS Day Treatment program. I had just had a two-month heroin relapse, after months of alcohol addiction, and I was throwing my hands into the air in surrender, because I knew that drugs were a force stronger than me. Why try to tame something which will in the end kill you? I knew from experience that I couldn't win that battle. With trepidation I went into the hospital for my check-in and first day. I wasn't really sure what to expect, other then an environment like the previous AA and NA meetings that I had been to. I was not a big fan of these, since I always felt that they had a cliquish environment which I found to be socially intimidating. Furthermore (and I know that the 12-step programs help a lot of people, so God bless it), I have always found the AA type of person to be excessively boring. They always seem like the lame, New Age type of person who believes more in meditation and sipping herbal tea than they do in humor and fun. I figured that this detox/rehabilitation program (technically, inpatient and day treatment at CATS is detox-only, since most stays there don't last more than 7 or 8 days) would be something similar.

So I went into the waiting room, and after much paperwork and slightly anxious waiting, I went in to see the admissions nurse. She asked about my health, bare-bones questions, and then asked me to tally off my abuse of all the various drugs that exist in my 7 years of intimacy with them. It was a rather sobering moment, and made me feel like a bigger addict then even I normally do, since I had to tell her about my dozens and dozens of alcohol black-outs, the thousands of times I've stabbed myself in the arms (and other places) to inject heroin, opiate pills, stimulants, or even far worse substances (which make me cringe even more than the more notorious drugs, since these undoubtedly did far more internal damage to my body), and basically the sheer variety of drugs that I had tried. I once prided myself on trying as many drugs as possible (and using the most potent ways of administering them) for research's sake, as if by doing this I was gaining some compendium's worth of worldly knowledge, instead of letting my soul slowly rot from within. However, as my various posts on Demons can show, I have never had a difficult time being honest to those around me about my addiction problems, except to those who would "get me in trouble" (i.e., girlfriends and my parents), so I tried to be as true as possible in my details.

I was eventually let upstairs to the more hospital-like section of CATS, which was where the inpatient people met and slept. As part of the day treatment crew, I would come every day from 9 to 4 to go to meetings and basically do everything that the inpatient folks did, but at the end of the day I had the freedom to go on my very merry way back home. Most of the people there were inpatient, not day treatment. And I think it's also safe to say that the majority of those there were alcoholics, as opposed to other kinds of drug addicts. However, this isn't to say that they weren't all just as bad off as me. I know a lot were worse off. Alcohol has some of the worst withdrawals possible--worse than heroin's if you are a bad enough drinker--and most of the people in early alcohol withdrawal stages simply stayed in their rooms, medicated into near-unconsciousness to prevent the incapacitating tremors and ghastly hallucinations of delirium tremens. I saw some people come to meetings that would talk nonsense, and a lot who were still shaking all over from the tremors (luckily I had only had minor bouts of this from drinking--I can't imagine what a full-blown bout of alcohol WDs would be like), so I always had a particular brand of sympathy for the alcoholics there.

I went to my first meeting there, and quickly, before the meeting, several people, including a very nice alcoholic woman, already introduced themselves to me and assured me that the place was full of "good people." Almost from the get-go I found CATS to be a much more welcoming environment than the various 12-step meetings I had been to before. I found it very easy to participate in the meetings and to interact with my fellow patients. I believe this is because we were "all in the same boat." When you go to a NA meeting, you are often surrounded by people who have been going to the exact same meeting with the exact same people every week for years. You are surrounded by people who have been sober for 2 years, 5 years, sometimes 10 or more. It's pretty easy to feel like an outsider at AA, especially since they have their own particular lingo, a shibboleth that consists of phrases such as "One day at a time," "Keep coming back, it works if you work it," and "One is too many, a thousand is never enough" (although, like most of their quotes, these do all have some truth in them). But it is the way they say them--in unison, timed exactly correctly, and so dispassionately that they sound like robots--that makes them feel like some foreign tongue to the newcomer. The air stinks of groupthink. But at CATS all of the patients are newly sober. They have come into the day treatment/inpatient center to detox from being on drugs, so even if they are followers of the 12-step program, they aren't sitting on their high horse anymore and are right alongside you in the trenches.

Another aspect which I love about this sort of professional treatment (which thank God I have insurance for) is just that: the fact that it's professional. 12-step sober support groups are a great idea, and clearly work for many, but they all have the feel of being rather amateur. This is even worse in the one SMART Recovery meeting I went to (SMART Recovery is an "alternative" to the 12-step programs, in that it promotes a recovery plan that doesn't depend on the "higher power" of the 12-step groups, as well as a more individualistic approach to recovery), which lacked even the basic organization and focus of an AA meeting God bless ya, I love all addicts on some level for the connection that we share, but most of them aren't exactly the smartest cookies in the batch, so it's nice to be in a program run by medically-trained professional doctors, nurses, and counselors, who have researched all about the disease of addiction and the treatments for it. One of the biggest things I get out of my continuing time in the CATS program is the sense of structure that it provides me in my recovery. The counselors work with each person to try to come up with an individual treatment plan, and while they are inevitably swamped with patients, at least this is better than AA/NA, where everyone is expected to do exactly the same thing, which is go to meetings all the fucking time to talk about what you are doing to get your life back on track (instead of actually doing things to get your life back on track, since you are spending all your time at meetings) and to get a sponsor. Everyone says that without a sponsor (someone you talk to as often as possible who has been sober for a while and is in the 12-step program; their main task is to lead you through the "12 steps" of the AA/NA program) you will fail. I find this to be a bit presumptuous. Why can't we be open with the people in our everyday lives instead of relying on this sponsor? I know that you are supposed to have close relationships with other former addicts, but I just don't see how this should replace the meaningful relationships that are already in my life. Perhaps this is because most addicts find themselves in lives surrounded only by other addicts, but my life is full of (relatively) sober people, and I think I can trust in them. What concerns me most about the 12-step programs (which even the professionals of the CATS program tell us to attend regularly) is the sense that it is like a lifetime without freedom. You are supposed to always go to meetings. I heard a member tell us the story of a woman who had 33 years of sobriety under her belt. She relapsed, and when this person went to ask her what happened, she said she had stopped going to meetings and that's why she relapsed. There is this sense of group pressure, much like organized religion, weighing down on the shoulders of a newcomer to go to the famed "after-meetings" (which I assume are just trips to a food establishment to hang out with other group regulars [what if I already have friends that I want to see that I like for their personality, instead of just for the fact that they have a shared group identity with me as a person in recovery?]) and to get a sponsor and to "work the steps." I wouldn't care if I thought the people at 12-step meetings were cool, but honestly (and I know this is the child in me, but I can't help it) I just see them as being the opposite. I see them as being people who can't fit in on the "outside," so they stick with their AA friends. And let's be honest, if you are friendly to anyone at an AA meeting, they'll be your friend (there is a saying that [and this is paraphrased] there are no strangers at an AA meeting; there are only people waiting to be your friend). I don't want that. I don't want forced phoniness, like any sort of organization breeds. I want to do my own thing. So that is my big beef with AA. The people just all seem so fucking New Age and, frankly, unintelligent, because anyone who follows anything--whether it be a religion, a political party, a way of life, or whatever--blindly and without hesitation or individual thought I believe to be a fool. I do see the point of AA. Many addicts aren't the smartest, or are surrounded by a world of poverty and unfairness, so for them AA is a group that provides them strength where they are weak. And I do aim to get the most I can out of the 12-step program, whatever that may mean in my future, but I don't plan on being a devout member the rest of my life.

Anyways, sorry for that extended rant. It is one of the biggest issues for me in recovery, as my peers and counselors always tell me I should be attending sober support meetings. To not do so seems almost out of the question. So I feel some sort of guilty need to do so, instead of actually ever wanting to (and the meetings I have been to have really done nothing for me--especially compared to my various CATS meetings, which do a lot for me).

I met some good people while I was in my day treatment program there. Most of the young members were opiate addicts like me. There was some heroin addicts, and some painkiller addicts. I met a very nice and well-spoken alcoholic man that said that he had blacked out every single time he had drank in the last 2 years, and was caught two nights in a row naked in a fancy hotel somewhere in Eurasia, blacked out and locked-out from his room, with nowhere to hide except behind a window curtain, which he wrapped around himself when he strode downstairs to the front desk. This isn't too far off from my own story of being awake for 2 or 3 days on amphetamines, finding myself locked in at my office building, late at night, trapped without a pass card, locked out from my car keys and phone, and without pants or underwear. Such is the craziness that drug abuse causes.

I met people who said they spent in the excess of $100,000 on painkillers, and those that stole tens of thousands of dollars from their parents and others to get money to buy them heroin. I met a man who spent 16 years of his life in prison (he is 42 years old), with a very gruff voice and an eagle-like intimidating stare, but that I feel has the heart of a teddy bear and remains one of the core members of my outpatient support group. For the most part, everyone was pretty damn cool I met. What made them cool is that we all shared our own minds, our own pains, and most importantly, our own personalities. 12-step groups have a way of erasing the watercolors of our personalities into a blank slate, where everyone repeats the same phrases and tell their life stories using the exact same narrative (the only thing changed are the names of the people in the stories). There were lots of AA/NA-devotees in the CATS detox, but there were lots of others who weren't. I found this mix of people to be very refreshing, and we all brought different viewpoints to our daily discussions and activities.

On my last day I was even a bit sad to leave. I wasn't quite sure when I would leave the day treatment program, since they told me I had to test negative to drugs two days in a row before I could leave. A slip-up that I eventually admitted to the staff of CATS when questioned had occurred after my first day of treatment. I got off at 4 and immediately went to buy some cocaine (which turned out to be crack-cocaine). I had had it on my mind all day, since I still had some money in my account and a hook-up for it, so immediately that went into my arm. As it goes, I do not regret this slip-up, since it proved to be a deciding factor in my sobriety this time. I ended up overdosing that night, surprisingly, since the shots that did me in were just 3 spoons' worth of remnants from all my previous shots. It actually took two needles full of vinegar (to dissolve the crack) to shoot it (I shot one, then immediately pulled it out and shot the second), and what hit me was the most intense rush on my lifetime. For the last 4 or so years I've been trying to find new heights in terms of IV rushes, but this one was the cap of my career as a rush-junkie. The bellringer started coming on before the first shot was even injected, but heedlessly I pulled out that shot after its completion and pressed down the plunger on the second. Even typing these words my heart starts beating fast and my mouth salivates and I can imagine my pupils dilate somewhat. IV cocaine has a way, like no other drug, of bringing about sensory recall when I remember the rushes. I think this is because it has the most intense of all rushes, so the body can easily recall it again. I believe that IV cocaine causes the greatest dopamine release in the brain out of all drugs (the sound effects that the bellringer is named after are caused by such a massive amount of dopamine flooding the brain at once--dopamine being the pleasure neurotransmitters of the brain), so it's no wonder that the body can recall its effects even months and years later. But this particular bellringer just kept getting louder and louder. I remember starting to get worried, since usually after a little bit, the noise subsides and the physical feelings grow less intense, but this just kept getting stronger. I started getting tunnel vision and my mouth was completely dry. I couldn't look anywhere else but at the tile floor of my bathroom, since I was growing scared and to look anywhere else would just be too intense. I felt like I would puke if I looked anywhere else, and that kind of physical exertion seemed out of the question, since I was gripping the toilet seat I was sitting on just to be able to handle this kind of unbearable force and intensity. My body started shaking, gradually at first, but then wildly, as my legs kicked uncontrollably and my hands flayed out against the wall and the toilet. I knew that I was having a seizure and a cocaine overdose, and I knew that if I went unconscious it would be a very bad sign. I was scared I'd fall unconscious and hit my head on the floor. I was scared I would bite my tongue, so I tried putting a towel in my mouth. My legs and arms were kicking everywhere, completely out of my control and contorting into unnatural positions, and I could only look on with horror, realizing that I no longer had any control over my own body and that something terrible had happened. My heart was beating in excess of 200BPM. I knew Bethany was watching in shock from my bedroom, and I vaguely got the idea that she came over a few times, but I kept pushing her away since I was afraid she would call 911. I was also dimly aware that my cat was on the floor near me, but none of this seemed real whatsoever. Even to this day, the entire event seems like something out of a dream--blurry, formless, like milk instead of the clarity of water. I knew that as long as I stayed conscious, I would make it out alive. I knew Bethany had an intense fear of death and also an intense fear that I would overdose one day, so I knew that she would be paralyzed. But I also knew that there was nothing else I could do but ride this out. It seemed to be taking literally a half hour to get out of this seizure. I was shaking uncontrollably, and my body hurt from the incredible strain I put my heart under. I just kept whispering to myself, totally helpless, "Fuck, fuck, fuck." I am a very fearless person when it comes to drugs. I won't say I was completely scared shitless, but this was the first time I had had a real, genuine drug overdose, and it was from an IV stimulant, which is definitely one of the worst things to overdose on. Only because of my extensive knowledge of IV cocaine and overdoses through research did I know that I would make it out of it alive. Had I been more ignorant, I probably would have been scared that I would die. But luckily, the intense surges of seizure passed by after a few minutes (according to Bethany, since to me it seemed like at least half an hour of my body being out of my control), and I climbed into bed. My body kept shaking for the better part of three hours, gradually less intensely. I had only once before come this close to dying from doing drugs, and that was the night I was arrested after a 7-drug binge that ended with me running my car into a guardrail, almost hitting someone else, and getting pulled over outside of the Clendenin's house. But this time, because I wasn't blacked out like I was that night, I felt the full conscious effect of just how close I had come to the razor-thin line of mortality. I wouldn't say I was "scared straight," since even if I hadn't had this OD, I still would be exactly where I am today, but it was nevertheless a good kick in the ass on my way out the door of intoxication. I took it as a sign that that was all the rush I ever needed.

So these are some more of my experiences in beautiful, raw sobriety. I hope to write more about it in the future.

Cheers,

--Edward

Edward's Road to Recovery, Entry #1

First off, I want to apologize to all of the readers out there. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. This blog was my baby, and I had a lot of hopes and dreams of it becoming something special and bringing all of us together while allowing each writer to express themselves both creatively and emotionally. I have been completely absent on here since Sex Month back in June, and while I could say that I was busy with "more important shit," in truth I neglected my writing and commenting because I was lost in the depths of an intense drug relapse that ended with me shaking on a toilet uncontrollably in a seizure caused by an IV crack overdose. I want to make it up to you guys. I originally had an idea for this series that I would start writing about my time in day treatment rehab, chronicling each day as it was happening, but that proved too difficult, as there were a lot of things to take care of at that time and I didn't have enough time to really sit and concentrate and brood over my psychological neuroses that led to this relapse (I will talk later about how it wasn't even really a relapse, since I never totally gave up substance abuse in the first place). In any case, I will write about my road to recovery and happiness, away from the depths of polydrug addiction and depression and other woes, whenever the whim strikes me. My sincere wish is that this series will inspire others to share their own feelings of hopelessness, pain, and hope, and their own intellectual ideas about the nature of addiction and substance abuse, and how society deals with it.

I write this today while still sweaty from a brief workout at the gym, a place that I was paying $25 a month to be a member of even though I hadn't worked out there in almost two months (and I hadn't really consistently worked out in ever). This neglect of health and my interests symbolizes one of the most obvious facets of my substance addiction: it causes me to neglect the things that I am passionate about--whether they be my loved ones, my hobbies, and the things that I care about--because nothing is as important as getting loaded on whatever substance I find myself drawn to at the time. This is because these substances (for me, alcohol, opiates, cocaine, and meth/amphetamines) refuel the dopamine receptors (pleasure center) in my brain, which has lost the ability to maintain its own normal levels of dopamine through drug abuse and tolerance. I look back on my days of active use with disgust. Anyone who knows me knows that I have an obsession with cleanliness and health. How could I have gone days without showering, without brushing my teeth? Left my apartment in a squalid mess? Ate the kind of crap that I ate on a daily basis? I use this (Bethany would say OCD) obsession with cleanliness and organization, with health and strength, as a way to combat the self-destructive, yet soothing siren song of addiction that forever tries to creep up the walls of my consciousness and plant its egg of doubt in my dream of hope.

Let me try to backtrack here in our first entry to talk about how the last few months have been since my previous brush with opiates. It had been ten months since I had last gotten high on anything other than alcohol. I suppose on the surface, for someone not very educated on the topic of addiction, I was doing good, because drinking alcohol's a lot better than shooting heroin, right? When it comes to addiction, not really. Though I don't claim to have been at their level of dependency, I saw a great number of patients shaking and talking deliriously in the depths of their alcohol withdrawals when I was at rehab. Alcohol can suck your life and your wellbeing away just as fast as heroin can. In truth, my drinking was not as bad as my opiate use was in terms of how it affected my day-to-day life. It was probably worse for my health (alcohol being more of a toxin than opiates are), but I wasn't dead-broke and utterly physically dependent upon alcohol. I did begin to experience the symptoms of mild alcohol dependency towards the end of my ten-month binge, waking up in a bed soaked with cold sweat and piss, hands shaking uncontrollably, each day the same as the last. I wouldn't for a moment question whether I'm an alcoholic or not. I am one.

But most importantly, by continuing to abuse alcohol, I never really got rid of my addiction altogether. I never even really tried. I know that I acted all tough and optimistic a year ago when I was writing blog posts on here about how my life was going to change, but it was really all a bunch of bullshit. Yes, I really did believe those things. Yes, I did want to change. But I wasn't ready to take the necessary steps to get well. An addict can't go on using other substances like I was. An addict needs sober support. I can't just go to a therapist who I didn't even connect to and expect by doing that that my problems will suddenly up and disappear. What was most important with my drinking is that I retained the sly habits of an addict. I would lie about my drinking all the time, and hide it in shame after I told everyone that I was going to stop drinking (I did not have the strength to stop on my own without help). I would regularly get off from work at 5, alcohol having been on my mind all afternoon, drive to the nearest liquor store, and pour myself a very strong mix drink to drink on my commute home, already being drunk by the time I got out of the car at home. I blacked out almost every time I drank. Hangovers were an unfortunate part of daily existence that I had to learn to cope with. I cannot use any mood-altering substances with control. That is why I have learned I have to quit ALL mood-altering substances. That's how it is. I know it's hard for others to understand why I can't just have one drink, or drink socially, but I'm a person with the disease of addiction, and for me it's impossible.

Anyways, my drinking got worse and worse, to where I was occasionally drinking on my break hours at work, and, on weekends or off-days, drinking throughout the day starting in the morning. I went drunk to an ASAP (Alcohol Substance Abuse Prevention or something like that) class, which I was assigned to for driving under the influence in the first place. I was just drinking to shut my brain the fuck up. This isn't any different from shooting up cocaine or heroin or anything else. So really, my slip back into drugs was inevitable.

It started with some Percocets that I heard a friend was prescribed. I begged this friend for them, and offered them an exorbitant sum so that I eventually got them. I took all of the 20 pills in two different sittings over less than 24 hours, and wound up feeling slightly dopesick. My brain was again already hooked on the deadening warmth of opiates, something I hadn't even craved for months and months. My dad was prescribed them soon thereafter, and I stole large amounts of his, which he found out about, causing me even more pain and shame. Soon enough, I was back on heroin.

It is true what they say, that each relapse is darker than the previous one. Almost immediately (I knew this would happen, honestly), I was back at the same place I was before after months of using. I needed a big amount just to kill the withdrawals, much less get high. Every time I use again, there are more negatives and less positives. I stole money on a daily basis from work, pawned all of my prized possessions at home, and manipulated people I cared about to get drugs to shut my mind off. I don't regret my relapse and any of the actions it caused, because it made me who I am today and the suffering allowed me to hit a bottom that forced me into the treatment I've always needed, but I am deeply sorry to anyone I hurt or let down or manipulated in the throes of my completely selfish drug binge. I say this from the bottom of my heart.

Luckily by this point in my life I knew that I couldn't get out of this hole on my own. I knew that I needed help, and admitted as much to those around me. Although resistant to the idea at first, I ultimately knew that I needed more complete and organized treatment then I had received before. I needed to work the process that millions of addicts have worked before me so that they could get better: detox/rehabilitation, counseling, group therapy, sober support, and medication. I wasn't willing to do any of those steps before other than counseling, and that is why I never really got better. I will talk more about how treatment is going and went at the beginning in my next entries. I really truly have hope that this time I can finally slay this very real demon of addiction (please remember that addiction is never the root problem--something else always lies underneath, but what that is with me, I am not sure of at this time). But having hope without having a plan and support is a futile thing. I think I have all three right now.

One day at a time.

--Edward

PS: For anyone interested, my sober date is 8/26/11. As someone said in one of my meetings, I don't like to put too much focus on my clean time, since it is like you are counting down towards something that is going to end (these were his words, and although I don't truly understand them, I like what he had to say). For me, it just puts too much pressure on an abstract number that is ultimately meaningless. What matters is happiness.

Demons in My Britches

I can't help but use Greg's iconic name to title this post, since he wrote it in high school and the name sums up the feeling of those years. I will try to use a little tact and restraint when writing this post, but the topic at hand is a risque yet meaningful one: sexual adolescence and the fucked-up mind of a teenage boy.

Having always found the sex drive somewhat painful and distracting in life in general, the peak years of the agony were from grades 6 to 10, I'd say. Although I'd already had some crushes prior to this (see here), middle school was when the insatiable snake known as sexual lust began to rear its head. I remember Carl Athey in sixth grade gym telling me about porn Web sites for the first time. Of course back in that day (pre-high-speed Internet, which still hasn't really come to Waterford) it was pictures only, but it was a very exciting time. God knows how many girls I fantasized about in our grade, but it was a lot. It was really just frustrating, because I think for the vast majority of us, we had completely no luck or even hope with girls back then. I know I didn't. There was a long time in my life where I didn't think I would ever have a girlfriend, certainly not have sex. I don't know how many people had it in middle school, but I would say compared to the rest of the world, the numbers in Loudoun County were probably pretty low (I'm sure if you look at a graph with income per capita it would show that the richer areas have people losing their virginities at a later date, and as we've mentioned before, you don't get much richer than Loudoun).

Anyways, this continued for the first few years of high school. As I commented on Matt's post, Greg and I would come up with lists of the hottest girls in our grade/school--a complex process that took place over a week or two and involved much thought and planning. On the whole, I felt we had a very accurate list, although unfortunately I do not have it anymore. Lisa Gillenwater and Kristy Clark were definitely the top two picks on both of our lists, though. They were icons.

Looking back on girls I liked back in the day, it seems obvious that I really only liked girls based on their looks and then constructed some elaborate backstory in my head about what their personality was really like. This had no basis in reality. I would romanticize them, I'm sure knowing full well that I would never, ever date them or anything, and imagine that they were something they were not. Probably the same thing happened on girls' part everywhere. Thought unintentional, it was basically a complete objectification of girls' looks, which still happens to a degree and probably still happens completely with a lot of guys my age.

I think what changed junior year is that I actually really started talking to girls--and not just ones I lusted over. I became more comfortable with the opposite sex. The first girl I would consider a non-lustful crush in high school was Brandi Shackleford. We both ran cross country back when we were sophomores, and were both the fastest in our grades. Looking back this was a poor choice on my part, but at least we actually talked and hung out some. Ultimately I feel like she was just fucking with me, but those were the early years for me. After that, I heard many a story involving her, but I cannot say whether these are true or false, since we never had much contact after sophomore year. It seems like she changed a lot, and obviously did not run cross country anymore. This almost seems like a shame to me, since she had some pretty genuine talent and ran a 20:00 5K sophomore year from my memory. But then again, who cares about those things but me?

Then there was my infamous crush on Johanna Faroe. Now some people who were there at the time will make a lot bigger deal out of this than it was. But in any case, I liked her probably because she talked with me and we had a good rapport (Jake smiles somewhere in heaven). Looking back, I was probably a self-esteem boost for her, but oh well, she's not a bad person and we still talk some. This was one of your quintessential dating-but-not-doing-anything relationships. I mean, what the fuck? At this point in my life it seems ridiculous to spend so much time with a girl and not even hook up and for me not to get a relationship out of it. But I was young and inexperienced with girls, so I went along with what I could get (this is not to put her down, but I didn't exactly push harder for anything more). For a very long time (and still), I was definitely sexually insecure and had some kind of underlying fear of girls/relationships/my sex drive, etc. But that is a twisted psychological story that cannot be delved into easily in this post/on Demons in My Britches (except through popular demand!). So that is probably another reason why I didn't care that much about pushing things farther physically.

Anyways, around this time I also started liking Alex Vlk, who became my first real girlfriend (Lizzie Christy holds the awesome title of first girlfriend in general, and I hope to fuck I'm spelling her name right here or she will kill me). I remember when I started hanging out with Alex more and more (which felt very natural with her for some reason), Johanna got upset and asked me out, which was strange, but I guess was just her way of trying to get me back even though she probably didn't really like me very seriously in that way. Anyways, I eventually lost my virginity to Alex and dated her for a long time, and what a long, strange trip that was, mostly because of me and my bouts of self-destruction which can be read about in other parts of the blog!

Sorry for this long, rambling, pointless post. But there it is. Demons in my fucking britches.

--Edward

The Town Drunk

Is there anything sadder than drinking alone? Blogging about it would probably trump it.

Anywho, why do people fear being alone? And then why do people fear drinking alone? Where do these stereotypes of desperation and pathetic conditions come from? Alcoholics, maybe? Could it be our society's addiction to alcohol as the bonafide social drug of all time? Perhaps.

So you drink yourself stupid and silly until you end up doing childish, terrible, and even inhumane (literal meaning here, "not human") things with your gang of roustabouts, but the moment you leave them and pop open a bruskie with just your lonesome, now you're a low life. Beforehand, when you were puking on someone's front steps while your friends chanted, you were a king, but it's only now that your alone is when you're a loser. All right, maybe you were a loser with your friends too, but somehow not as pathetic, somehow more justified. Is that why it's so easy to get away with shitty things in groups (think war, or worse)?

Loners get shit on. Why? Because they have the gall to exist without someone next to them for support/blame. How pretentious. Either that or, How sad. I guess it depends on how they find out you're a loner. If it's because you convey to people that you spent some insurmountable time alone and then told everyone how great it was, you'll be a Thoreau-type loner. One who hides then comes out screaming about how hidden they were.

Or they came upon you alone. You told no one, you were minding your own business, and then they barge in and demand via text, email, phone, or face, that you participate with the Group. This is the perceived-to-be-tortured-type loner. You may very well be fine, if not very pleased to be alone, but that's not possible in laws of physics of (western) society. If you're meditating, then it's bound to be a part of some homework regiment for a pilates class or perhaps it's servitude in seclusion.

That's another important note, solitary confinement. The hole. The ultimate punishment in all (Hollywood) jails (don't know about the real ones) is solitary confinement. This goes a bit deeper, because it's not just about being alone, it's being forced to be alone. It's being cut off rather than wandered off. It's not exactly what you call on your terms. They're trying to eclipse any knowledge you have of existence, without actually cutting you off from your existence. That's pretty sick. However, in such a time as now, or, the digital age, (everyone go, "ooooooooo"), forced seclusion vs. incidental seclusion is a good contrast to use in finding out what people really fear about being alone (assuming they do fear it of course).

I can bet that around you right now are at least two other things that could occupy you, whether music, texting, gchatting, facebook/Internet, TV, movie, or physical people talking to you, there is probably something readily available for you to switch to the second you blink away from this screen. And if not, you could access them within seconds. We live immersed in mediums. We are swimming in them, often oblivious to how many there actually are. So being alone, to us, to our culture, our society, our what-have-you, is rather like getting out of the pool with no towel and standing there, shivering.

It's an endangered species, time alone. Rare, strange, and alluring. Is it natural selection that has picked it off, or just because it's such a good target (intentional selection)? What even counts as being alone? The internet tends to bleed the once certain boundaries of this all over the place.

If you're playing solitaire on your computer, you're alone. If you're browsing through websites, you're alone. If you're reading emails or browsing through forum or blog posts, you're alone, but you're listening to the thoughts of other people. If you're talking on the forums, sending out emails, commenting on some video, or even posting on a blog(!), then you're alone and what, calling out in the dark? If you're "chatting" with someone online, then you're still technically alone, but you're finally in touch with someone; there is a seemingly conscious connection between you and another person(s), which is distinguishable from the disjointed repeated replies in email or facebook messaging. Beyond that is an actual phone call, dare I say videophone call, and even holographic calling (yeah?). But still, somehow, you're technically alone through all of that. Only when you are in the presence of someone else without a physical/digital/Pink Floyd wall in between you two, are you not alone. Seems like with all the texting and chatting and shit, we're still alone just as often as we were before the technology came along. In fact, we may be alone even more often because we inevitably end up staying at our computers longer while talking to people online instead of in person. And yet, there's an unnerving feeling that we're all more "in touch" with people than ever before.

The truth is, everyone is alone (naturally). And the other truth is, this is not a bad thing. It's not even a good thing. It's just a thing. We've created the perceptions surrounding it to conclude whether it's good or bad, and I think the perceptions have lost touch with what it means to be alone and to be with others.

I would say it is in our nature to be drawn to other people, to not want to be alone, and to feel better when it's confirmed that other people feel this too. In this sense there may be a natural fear of being alone. But just like any fear, there is something deeper within the actual feared entity than the fear itself. At a primal level, at an existential level, sitting alone (even at a computer) is peace.

The Chamberlin Offensiveness Scale

(1 being the least offensive and 10 being the most offensive)

1: The music seems to be louder than necessary, the beverages include an obscure beer and overpriced mixed drinks, and no one is particularly that memorable. It's also getting more crowded by the minute. You are vaguely apprehensive and have been sidling toward the door for the last half hour without even realizing it.
2: The family event has grown tiresome after a couple hours, but you know you're supposed to hang around at the table. The conversation is relatively banal, mostly about jobs and projects around the house. No one has said a bad word all day or even mentioned a topic that might stir up some controversy.
3: After finishing a long and thorough post on the Iliad on an esteemed literature blog, you refresh the page and notice a response from user with a name you don't recognize. Their response is immediately annoying to you for being only one line long and filled with typos and capitalization errors when identifying characters and places in the story. They ask you to summarize in a couple sentences the overall theme of the Iliad, noting that the Cliff Notes version has been copied so many times and it would help to get a unique take on it all. Apparently, they've got a big essay due in a few hours and have decided to stain the forum with their ugly desperation.
4: Of the many technological and hip things, gchat says messages were not received when they are, Youtube lacks a button to keep a song on repeat, and Netflix expires movies on the Instant Stream without warning. Roped into here is when people say, "Happy Birthday" to you on your Facebook wall, even though they never see you, don't know you're birthday, and you probably will never speak to them again. Uno mas; people clicking "Like" on anything that moves on the Facebook feed. Actually dos mas; statuses about all men being boys, name-dropping random celebrities, and about how bored you are that you're driven to writing a status and spill all that boredom on everyone else. Finally, deleting/untagging things, although you admit that it is necessary in some of the most extreme times, just not all the time.
5: You flip the dial on the car radio and your ears are given a quick douse of Boston's "Peace of Mind". You desperately change the station to hear, "Free Fallin'", then try to flip it once more to hear, "Life in the Fast Lane". You pass out from exhaustion at these songs as the car drifts into a ditch.
6: You show up to work and are given crap for your car looking like an senior citizen's (because that's who you got the car from in your family and for free) and your clothes for not exactly matching colors. Coworkers look at you funny when you open a bag of expired chips and began to eat. They appear to envy your youth while simultaneously being disgusted with your lack of concern for the little but important things in life.
7: The frozen food item that you've purchased reads on the box, "Serves 3 to 4 People". You pop it in, throw it on your plate, and gobble it down within a minute and 47 seconds. You feel somehow even hungrier than you did before, and the many digit number of calories is staring at you from the back of the box. How could such things ever make you full? Ten minutes and the cabinet's remaining stash of snacks you had bought for the week's lunches later, you are bloated and curled up on the couch cursing the societal norms of food volumes and prices.
8: You are given shit for not knowing anything practical and/or manly. "How come you can't talk about sports with us. Do you not like it? Wanna go dismantle the truck and put it back together just for the hell of it?"
9: A great body of work, series, and/or school of thought as well as the community and culture that went with it, eventually gives way to newcomers who spit on the past, push for increasingly superficial changes to the old system, and all but destroy what was once pure and good, all the while having not even the slightest knowledge or care of what they've done and what has happened.
10: Self-unawareness.

Off the scale: See the comment on this post by ctrl+F for "Joe's Crab Shack".

Desert Lives

There's not a whole lot to say about breaking into the post-college, post-school world of what is, the rest of your life. It's kind of like what I would imagine trying to describe a desert would be like (having not ever been to a desert); it's simply to vast to limit your perception well enough to take something away from the site. There's no longer anything that contains your life, nicely boxed up in five years of Elementary, three years of Middle, four years of High, or four years of Undergrad (variations on all apply). No, this is like a liquid set free on a surface, only to discover you kind of liked being held from spreading so thin. This is all not to say that this sort of outlandish new world I find myself in is somehow reportedly negative, but it is to address the true wild potential of the new world fearfully from a cubicle in a desert. (Sort of unrelated - I heard that British guy quote something I liked about deserts in a Planet Earth DVD, that the sands never stop shifting and being blown around on the surface, but the actual bases for the greater mountains of sand in the desert haven't moved in thousands of years.)

Now, you feel like you need to find something to build up from the ground to do something, because otherwise you might end up building yourself up from underground; like if we don't do something soon we'll have latched onto some sort of greater problem with life-girl, health, career, family, etc. and there will be no room to see anything else. I mean I guess that may be the big sort of hallucination of this desert, the big dreams of youth that appear hazy in the distance and when you get to them you're no longer providing for yourself, it's all for the next generation's chance to chase their undulating fantasies on the horizon. That may sound kind of sad, but in all honesty, I feel like at the rate I've been going over this year and a half into the desert I will probably be just fine with slowing it down. Don't get me wrong, I wanna live it up and see things and do things and all that, but I feel like I already have and already am. Not that I've led a glamorous life, but I tend to chronicle things with writings, pictures, and memories in me kopf, and each part of those, every little place/person/thing was like a little universe in itself. I feel like a life is a rather deceptive concept in that it pretends to be something that it's not: one entity that is complete and whole. School makes sense in a lot more ways than the after-school world because of those ~4 year intervals. Four years is about the length of time that my memory holds up, if that. Four years feels much more like a life than an entire life does. Childhood even feels like I lived three or four lives because of this, all of which were millenia ago, and I'm not even that old compared to a good chunk of the population. And the fact that I don't even have a distinct beginning of it all, no start of all memories that led to now, but rather a strange mythical past meshed between actual memories and fabricated memories from pictures and others' tales, that makes it all the stranger.

I guess I'm in the middle of something like my 6th life already based on those terms, and maybe in that sense of things I've got a couple years left of doing whatever I'm doing now before I'll just blank it all out and start over again with something else. People worry too much about the ultimate direction of things. People worry too much in general. I like that things can and do change, it puts things in perspective, as weird of a perspective that may be over time. I guess I've just spent so long trying to carve out something so defined in school that it ends up being a lot easier now to carve out much smaller things instead some grand, oppressive Career/voyage/journey that in reality is impossible to steer, control, or even hold onto. Unless you have the capacity for it, the education system we spent our lives (many at that) in was built to ship us out at a velocity and trajectory for the sun (when extrapolated). "It. just. don't. make. sense." It's a lot better to catch those fucking sand winds in some kinda sand-sailing type vessel and just ride those suckers out until you can ride them no more.

Blood Simple, Part Deux

WARNING: SPOILERS

So, I finally got around to watching Blood Simple. I apologize to everyone, because I was the biggest proponent of the film club from the start, and I feel like I'm the reason it's not happening at the moment. I really do want it to happen eventually, and I definitely am not holding you guys back from starting without me, but I just feel really busy and stressed with other things at the moment. The lack of time to do what I want to do really stresses me out, and I guess I just feel full of anxiety lately.

Talking with my therapist I guess makes me have to confront a lot of things that I normally push away. Like, I know they're there, but I tend to block out a lot of things because they are just too depressing to me. Using drugs was a way of never having to confront the issues that have always bothered me as long as I can remember. Stuff like feeling my life has no meaning--no idea what I want to "do with my life." Stuff like worrying about how I will be alone the rest of my life. Just a lot of stuff that I feel like I have to confront now and deal with, like it's on some sort of checklist where I have to complete something every single day or I feel like I haven't done my job. I guess I feel a lot of pressure from recovery in this sense--that it's something I have to confront, and clearly it's important to my long-term well being, but it's like I have so many other goals that I put off for so long...my passions or just things I want to improve with, that I put off because my main focus was drugs. Like, I wish I could practice guitar so bad, but I just don't feel I have the time right now. I know, I can hear people saying now: If you really wanted to play, you would make the time. This is the truth, but I guess I prioritize other things over it. For instance, I've been abusing my body for so long that I feel like I really fucking need to get healthier and work out more and just fucking try at least, because God knows I don't try enough in life. And I want to focus on reading over music, because I just feel so insecure about being unintelligent, that that really bothers me. I hate that feeling. What can you do about it, ya know?

I guess I have this big conflict about being productive versus doing things that I care about or want to. Because, I mean, that line is a big blur, because if I ultimately follow it to its logical end, that would wind up with me doing drugs again, because what I really want to do is go out and find some crack and smack and just fucking relax. Because I guess when you've been so used to taking the easy way out, that becomes what you really want, even if your good sense tells you that isn't what you need for long-term happiness. But, like, I always feel the pull between doing things that are good for me versus doing fun, social things. I mean, I guess I can't go out drinking as much as other people my age do. This is the prime in our lives for that sort of thing. I guess other people are just different than me. That's just how I've always felt. Everyone else can go out and get fucked up and it not be a big deal. Like they don't have to worry about it. Sure, they probably worry about a hangover or whatever, but who has to worry more than that? Sometimes thoughts like that lead me into a bad headspace--like that I make everything so much harder for myself than I have to. Nothing can ever--ever--be easy for me. It's just always been like that. I mean, I don't exactly look at most others and envy them. I like being an individual. But sometimes, I just wish I could make things easier for myself. But that's the way it is. Mostly, I feel some guilt about drinking when things like NA or my therapist make it seem so bad for someone like me. I don't know. I just want to be a normal person my age sometimes. But I guess I kinda fucked that one up a while ago. I really should just think less and not stress about it. I'm young and I have a long life ahead of me. I remember that thought would have used to depress me. I am somewhat indifferent about it now.

I really do want to do movie and book clubs, but I don't really want to add that additional pressure on myself right now, because I already feel a lot of other pressures, which I don't really feel like going too much more into depth here right now, not because it's boring for me to write about, but because I feel like it'd be boring for you guys to read about. I'll get to those eventually, and music and videogames and other stuff hopefully, but I feel like I should concentrate on myself more for a while, because really that is what I've been neglecting so long. It's hard, though. I guess mostly just because it seems like I surround myself with a lot of other normal--no, not even normal...successful--people, so everyone else is pretty much living their own lives. Whatever, I'm not doing that bad. I hate that point where the motivation to quit drugs starts to shrink when you realize that you are still yourself in the same old life you were in before you started doing drugs in the first place.

Okay, onto the movie. Holy shit. What a frightening film. I wish I had been a bigger part of Coen month if they put out stuff like this a lot. Daniel is right--setting is key here. Texas. Yeah, what a frightening and alien state. I feel like out of all the contiguous states, Texas is the one that most fascinates me and scares me, because it represents something that resembles my deepest insecurities and fears. And yet I find it darkly attractive for some reason. I love whenever movies have those shots of the gigantic oil wells pumping. Large parts of this movie reminded me of The Thin Blue Line, which is a documentary about a murder in Texas. There is something about the vast landscapes there that really makes murder that much scarier, because the participants find themselves isolated through the gigantic size of the landscape. They are like insects. There is nowhere to run, because even though everything is so big, it's also so empty. Like the fucked-up PI says in the beginning, in Texas, you're on your own.

As Daniel says, there are some great visuals in this. I was also really struck by the sound, and not just by the music (Four Tops FTW!). In so many scenes, there is some ominous repeating noise (whether it's a ticking alarm clock, a fan swooping on the ceiling, or water dripping). I love the line when the cuckolded husband says he's in hell. Because that's really what this movie is to me: it depicts the hell that is human existence on earth. Does anything go right in this movie? And the visuals and sound really push this point forward. Like I said, this is a fucking scary movie. It was almost like I was watching Fearfest on AMC a few weeks early. I love it for that, though, because I love horror movies.

It also reminded me of a Hitchcock movie, in that it follows a group of people ranging from morally ambiguous to pretty damn evil. I thought it went all Psycho on me and killed off the heroine in the first hour, but the Coens one-upped Hitchcock (is this possible?) and proved me wrong. But while Hitch often followed some pretty fucked-up people, his directorial style did not wallow in the darkness the way it does in this movie. The Coens seem to inhabit this world along with the characters. I love this kind of '80s movie that is almost over-stylized in its darkness. It seems like a Brian DePalma influence (Carrie is one of the earlier movies that does these kind of crazy camera shots). The 1970's was when directors really started to bring a lot of moral darkness into their films, because of the abolishment of the Hays Production Code that had for so long censored movies and because of the cultural events of the '60s and '70s, but it seems like the '80s took this nihilism and darkness to its Gothic extreme (pretty much everything seemed to be taken to the extreme in the '80s). This is a prime example. God bless '80s horror films, because this might as well be one. I want to watch Monster/Fearfest so damn bad this year.

--Edward

The Analogy Will Set You Free

A quote from an oft-forgotten but too-quickly-spoken-about-once-remembered movie, Road Trip, goes along something to the likes of (thank you IMDb), "Yeah, I can teach Japanese to a monkey in 46 hours. They key is just finding a way to relate to the material." The pronounced pothead character of the movie teaches the main guy ancient philosophy by relating all of the figures and philosophies to WWF wrestling and the characters and plotlines therein. I always liked the idea of this but was basically too lazy or a little suspicious that the tactic might make me have to do extra work to learn the material at hand. Either way, most of my material-learning days are over for now, and I'm thinking of using a similary method for a separate purpose, that of getting through the day in a completely mundane and yet-to-have-an-anlogy-applied-to-it-to-make-it-more-interesting environment.

Today I am Batman. I am Bruce Wayne and I am Batman. Danny Elfman tells me this, and Hans Zimmer tell me this. My cubicle = my mansion. The bathroom stall = the batcave. Matt, the guy two cubes over is Robin, and we take on the scum that thrive in the system of ENERGY STAR for Buildings. Each building is a criminal with a record, which we review, and every once in a while release from Arkham Asylum (the On-Hold folders) into the world once rehabilitated - not that I do that task all that much, that's more for the police (the rest of Cadmus on ENERGY STAR team). But when they try to slip applications by us and cheat justice, we slam down on the on-hold applications and lock them the hell up.

Soundtracks are key in immersing yourself in a fantasy at work. Labeling people as characters works really well too. Coming up with a good and evil always helps tear up the gray areas of the office life. I'm going deep in on this one, see you guys when I wake up.

My Monkey, Pt. 2

Now towards the end of my junior year, things changed. It is actually somewhat weird. My girlfriend and I broke up and I think I found a bottle of Vicodin on my porch perhaps on exactly the same day. I remember going to her house where I knew she was going to get in a fight with me and probably dump me with this bottle in my car, and I remember just a feeling of numbness as she was crying and screaming, because it’s kinda fucked up, but I was probably thinking, Fuck this, I’m just going to pop some pills and get high and none of this will matter. That was pretty much how my drug use started again, after this long period of abstinence. My urge to get high had never really gone away. I had just given up on it as being something which I couldn't do for availability reasons. But fuck it, I was finally free and single, and nothing was going to stop me. That whole summer I think I was pretty depressed and empty feeling, since I had been in this relationship for a good four or so years by this point, and it’s not easy to give that up. When I got back into drug use, I think I wanted to keep away from opiates and addictive drugs. I did things I had never done before, like acid, ketamine, and molly (powder MDMA). Of course, my old addictive signs were immediately beginning to rear their heads, as I decided to IV the molly and ketamine (these are kinda a no-no, but I was such a needle fiend, I would put anything into that barrel just because that’s what I loved). When the option came up to get opiates, how the fuck could I turn it down?

This is when I got into really heavy opiate use, on an unprecedented scale for me. I was doing IV Dilaudid and OC almost every day. I finally found a good heroin source, and when I first shot that up, I knew there was no other opiate for me. IV heroin topped them all. There was seemingly no downside. It was so cheap and lasted a long time and the euphoria was great. It didn’t turn me into a nodding-out mess, but made me sociable and happy and energetic and motivated. I don’t think a day went by from when I first got heroin that I didn’t shoot it up. I knew that I was going to become physically addicted this way, but I just didn’t give a fuck. It got to be that I needed a heroin shot to get out of bed, because I couldn’t face the day otherwise. Eventually I knew I needed to stop or I was going to get really hooked, so I made a pact with myself to not use for a number of days. Almost immediately I started getting feverish, feeling miserable, every bone in my body aching, sweating while shivering. This was the first time I had really felt somewhat serious opiate withdrawals (when I was doing coke back in the day and shooting OxyContin for the comedowns, I had had my first bout of any sort of withdrawal, but it was relatively minor), and I made it all of two days (which I see now as being pretty damn good self-control compared to what I turned into) before I had to fucking give in and shoot some more H. Ah, the motherfucking relief! Eventually, I made it through some more heroin and detoxed, which was pretty rough, but soon enough I had bought more and more heroin. I used opiates basically every single day that entire semester, 3 or 4 or 5 times a day. It was just a routine, and you grow to need it completely. Every single morning I would wake up freezing cold, stomach retching, feeling like absolute shit, but that was what I loved, because that first morning shot of heroin was absolute bliss, turning your nightmare into a heaven-like happiness where you felt on top of the world.

Eventually, I had no more money and knew I needed to stop, because I had a heroin problem and it just sucked living your every day by the dose, just waiting for that next shot so you could go about with your life. I had to go cold turkey again. This time was a fucking nightmare. I have never felt so goddamn cold in my life (withdrawals in the wintertime suck), and it was like the cold was out to get me, to literally inflict pain on me. Sick to my stomach, couldn’t sleep properly for days, drenched in sweat. Ugh, never want to go through that again. This was when I made it my goal to quit opiates.

Of course that did not last long, and soon enough I was back on heroin again. I don’t know how many times I’ve relapsed since I said I would quit, but it has been a whole lot. I’ve realized that it’s simply impossible for me to quit on my own. I need help, I really do. Very few serious drug addicts can quit on their own. When the option came up and when I had the money, I would always end up buying more heroin and coke to shoot up, because I was such a fucking fiend. It’s tough coming off heroin after a long time, because even after the withdrawals, you just feel so depressed and low and without energy, since the drug depletes your brain’s ability to produce endorphins naturally for a long time. The most I made it in this period was just a little over 3 months without using, which was actually pretty good.

Eventually, I found more and more sources at home, which was bad (previously I was getting all of my drugs from people who shipped them to me). This was basically when my most recent binge began, and never really ended until now. Over time, my usage also escalated greatly. Whereas I always used to pride myself on using moderately, because this conserved more drugs, was safer, and produced a more manageable high, I turned into a binge-monster. I started shooting up really big quantities of meth, which would leave me a freaked-out, paranoid alien up for days at a time, and this became just one more rush that I was addicted to. I would binge on IV heroin and cocaine. Whereas before an 8-ball of coke could last me days if I was shooting it, I could barely make it last one now. Whereas before, cocaine was the most euphoric substance to me—albeit with a nasty comedown that needed to be corrected with a shot of heroin—it became a nightmare. Even from the very first shot onwards, it turned me into a paranoid wreck. I would hear voices that weren’t there and feel like my heart was beating out of my chest, because the rushes were so strong. Almost no drug use was fun anymore. But I just couldn’t stop—I was such a creature of impulse, subhuman.

I became highly addicted to opiates around this time, and when I had legal problems that really made me depressed and scared, I just binged harder on them to cover up the anxiety and pain. My tolerance grew so much bigger then it ever had before. Whereas before, a one-bag shot of heroin would’ve knocked me on my ass, soon I was shooting 5 or more bags at a time and not really even feeling much other than the disappearance of the creeping sickness which reared its head every 8 hours or so. I’ve always liked the monkey on your back analogy for whatever reason. You have to silence that monkey constantly, just to keep him in his cage, with a shot of heroin. Even before I’m sick, I start to feel anxious and uneasy, and I have to think about where that next shot is going to come from. If you wait longer than this, you really start to feel bad. You lose your voice, your stomach is churning, your hands are shaking and clenching. I hate how merciless heroin addiction is. Every single fucking day is like that. Once my addiction had become bad enough, I would begin almost every day by throwing up because of how sick I was, then digging up whatever used cottons I had to try to get a measly bit of heroin out of them so I could at least somewhat appear presentable, but this is a terrible way of living. I would never feel really normal until I got a bunch of heroin in me, and even then it never seemed to be enough to get me a satisfactory high anymore. I can’t remember the last time I had a really good heroin high.

I need to stop, I need to stay quit. I can’t go back to that lifestyle. It throws away all your money, but more importantly, it destroys every shred of self-worth and happiness you have. I hate it so much, but find myself blindly drawn to it, because somehow I never feel normal in life without drugs in me. I was actually starting to before I started this last binge, which has gone on forever. It just takes a long, long time to feel normal again. You can’t expect to just quit heroin after you have been using it for a good long period and feel happy. It’s a long process and it takes tremendous amounts of work. If nothing else, I don’t regret my drug addiction because it has made me a more positive person. I realize that I have to work for things in life instead of sitting here waiting for them to happen to me. That includes my own happiness. I don’t regret ever taking that first pill, because it took five years to do it, but my drug addiction has taught me that. It has also taught me to not judge others with problems and to show more empathy towards others. We are all in this world together, and though it sucks an awful lot of the time, the best we can do is help each other through it.

I do not feel that a serious drug addict can ever quit drugs unless they want to do it for themselves, though. Others can help, but it's really their own path to follow. You can't push it on someone else to quit drugs unless they are willing to do it themselves. They might act better and act like they are going along with the program, but I guarantee they are just putting on a mask and lying to you. I tried to quit drugs for my girlfriend who I loved, and it didn’t work. I didn’t really want to quit until I had gotten myself deeper into drug addiction. Though I ultimately lost her because of my problems, I guess that is how things were destined to be. I also don’t view drugs as being “evil,” and I don’t necessarily think they should be criminalized at all. Our government wastes countless millions and billions of dollars on a war on drugs that it is clearly losing terribly, and the ghettos of the world are in shambles because the black market of drugs there have destroyed them. Whatever happened to my life wasn’t heroin’s fault—it was my own. Everyone has a choice about whether they abuse these things or not, and though they are addictive, I think the responsibility ultimately rests on the user’s shoulders and on the user’s shoulders alone. That being said, drug education is a very important thing and I strongly believe in it. Some of our country’s drug policies disgust me, like places that ban needle exchanges where addicts can pick up clean, fresh needles for themselves instead of sharing needles and spreading diseases, or our infatuation with throwing drug addicts into jail simply for doing drugs, turning them into more hardened criminals who will ultimately turn into repeat offenders. But that just seems to be how things work in our country, so I don’t have much more to say about it. You can research a lot of these things to find out more. I don’t like to preach. But I do know that opiates, amphetamines, and cocaine are not good for me, and that is something I have learned through experience, so I have made it my goal to never do any of these substances ever again. I have long since learned that I cannot do any of these things in moderation, because I am an addict and it is simply impossible for me. Total abstinence is the only way. I also really don’t feel like binge drinking anymore, since that isn’t particularly good for me and is merely replacing one substance for another. I know I can do this, but I can’t do it alone. I plan to seek out therapy and attend meetings and just try a variety of things to stay clean, because I’ve been trying to get clean for over a year and a half now.

--Edward

My Monkey, Pt. 1

8/18/10! I want all of you motherfuckers to mark that on your calendar as the first day Edward is free of his addiction. This is the first day I haven’t taken any form of opiate in over two months, and before that, I hadn’t gone 4 or 5 days free of them in a solid 8 months or so. I barely did anything yesterday—only a cotton shot because it’s a real bitch to wake up in withdrawals (however minor they may be, since I’m coming off of a suboxone detox and not a straight heroin habit) and have to go to work—but I didn’t want to start counting my clean time until I had straight-up done nothing. Of course my problem did not begin 8 months ago, or it never would have progressed to the levels I was using at lately so fast (well, I guess it could and does for others). I have been psychologically addicted to opiates for a solid five and a half years, and my real problems with physical addiction to heroin began about two years ago. I’ll use this post to try to talk a little bit about my history with drugs. I’ll cut this up into portions, because this promises to be long, but as a warning: anyone who doesn’t like long posts can go elsewhere. I’m writing this for me and me alone, just like I’m quitting drugs for me and me alone.

I made it through almost all of high school being pretty damn straight-edge. I didn’t necessarily look down on people who drank or smoked or anything; it just wasn’t something for me. I would imagine every single person who met me to this day would not think I was a party guy or a drug abuser. I don’t give off that image, and indeed for long periods of my life I lived up to this squeaky-clean image. I still don’t think of myself as a party guy. I’m pretty shy and reclusive, which I guess helped speed along my addiction, since for me drug use was never, ever about recreational or social use. I always did it so that I could feel good, fuck everything else. When I was a senior in high school, I got a prescription of Vicodin—a pretty large prescription at that—for some ailment I had that caused a lot of sores in my mouth, so that I couldn’t eat from the pain. I was one of those kids who hated taking medicine for any reason, just because like I said I wasn’t really into drugs of any sort, even over-the-counter or prescription ones, and was kinda macho about not taking them for pain or anything. Unfortunately, I really did need those painkillers, because I hadn’t eaten a meal in days. I am not the type of person who has really had many life-changing moments, but the first Vicodin I ever took was probably the single biggest defining one that happened in my life. I fucking loved it from my very first pill. Now I’m well aware that a lot of drug addicts do not start like this. For most this is a much longer process, and perhaps mine was different for a number of reasons. One, my love of opiates was heightened even more because I linked them with taking away any sort of pain, both physical and psychological. Just like the rush of IV heroin feels that much better when you are hours into withdrawal and you absolutely goddamn need that fix in your veins right now, that first dose of hydrocodone was that much better because it was sweet, sweet relief from the pain. Two, I was not introduced to drugs through social situations, which I do think dilute the effects of drugs for a variety of reasons. You tend to focus on the social experience more than the drug itself I think. That was not me; I didn’t give a fuck about anything else as long as I had that opiate in me. It is amazing how fast my perception of drugs changed from this one time, but that is just how it is. From then on, it was my mission to try as many kinds of drugs as possible because I had found my new calling.

Now at this time I had recently gotten my first real girlfriend. I was very much in love with her at the time, and we had basically spent the last 8 or so months together pretty much every single day. She immediately became concerned about my usage of these painkillers, because one thing that attracted her to me was that I wasn’t like everyone else in high school whose main goal was to get as fucked-up as possible on weekends and party as hard as they could. Also, I had a tendency to want to keep pushing it with the Vicodin. When one wouldn’t satisfy anymore, I would take two; when two wouldn’t, I would take three. And so on. This got her very upset, so eventually I said I would quit and got rid of my bottle of painkillers.

I do not remember how long this lasted, but at one point I just couldn’t help myself and continued using. This was when more signs of addiction began to rear their head: this was when I started to lie about my use on a daily basis and hide it. It probably was when I became more ashamed of my use, since it’s not fun to lie to the person you loved most right to their face about your use, but it became something I was good at and eventually it just became second nature, something I didn’t think about whatsoever. If nothing else, addiction makes you into a complete liar. Who would want to be friends with a drug addict if they told the truth about their problems? Not the kind of friends I wanted, at least, since I was never a fan of the people in the drug scene themselves. I tried to stay as much outside of it as I could other than buying the drugs. My use progressed, and I discovered OxyContin, which was a lot stronger than Vicodin. At this point in my life, I was still open to trying all sorts of drugs, since I wanted to discover what all the highs had to offer. I was doing amphetamines and coke and stuff like that a lot. But I always came back to opiates in the end, and they were what I loved most. That feeling of relaxation and the beautiful, tranquil euphoria I never found anywhere else. I think I got caught by Alex (my girlfriend) one more time in this period, but other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing. After I got caught that time, it was another two years before she found out again, in which time my use would of course escalate (as it always seems to).

My drug use picked up when I went to college, since my freshman year was my loneliest, most depressing year that I have ever had. I had absolutely no friends, and I think my drug addiction made me have an increasingly negative worldview. I felt like I was looking at everyone I saw through a cave, and no one could get close to me. My drug addiction really changed my attitude, in the sense that it just made my views a lot darker. I realized there were millions of others like me, not necessarily drug addicts, but a world full of people with depression and anxiety and so many other problems. What kind of a world was this where so many people were suffering? Why does everyone act happy all the time, when they are just denying that people like this exist? I thought all of the smiling, happy people I saw around me were full of shit—not real human beings—or else they were only smiling on the surface, hiding the pain that lurked down deeper inside of them. I couldn’t relate to anyone around me, I thought. I just felt like an alien wandering in a cold, barren world. It should be noted that I was not really a junkie at this point, because I still had some shards of self-control which would disappear later in my life. I didn’t have particularly many drug hook-ups, since as I said, I knew no one at school, so I would only get drugs at home and bring them back with me. It amazes me now that I could have coke or painkillers on me and actually have them for weeks. What self-control! The first time I tried heroin was when I was a freshman at JMU. I drove to Baltimore with some guy and picked up some, but afterwards I decided it wasn’t worth doing again, since it just felt very sketchy and the heroin I got wasn’t the best. I was not injecting at this time in my life, although I don’t think I had any huge qualms against it. Most of what I remember from freshman year was the constant craving for drugs. Since my connections were not great, I was often left drugless, reading up about them online, wishing so bad I had them. Almost every waking hour was spent thinking about drugs.

Basically from the very start of my drug use, I had the bad habit of self-medicating. Since I am a shy person and probably have some anxiety issues, as well as of course depression, any time that I thought I would be uncomfortable, I would take some drugs. I used drugs all the time to do presentations, for social events that I dreaded, for people that I didn’t feel like dealing with. Any time I felt down and I had drugs around, that was what was going in me. That was just how I was from the start. I think even from the first few weeks and months I knew I was an addict. I think for most addicts, there is a long period of denial, but I don’t ever remember one from me. After all, if I couldn’t give up drugs for the person I loved the most, someone I felt blessed to have in my life, how the fuck was I not a drug addict? After all, I was not stupid and knew that drugs would bring unhappiness into my life, although not particularly much at this point. I really just felt like my drug use was inevitable. I never thought about stopping at this point. It really was a long time before I started to feel like I had a bad problem.

The first time I ever injected a drug was the summer after my freshman year. This was another major turning point for me. I was buying drugs with a guy and we got Dilaudid, which is a really strong painkiller that exhibits a very strong rush if injected and is somewhat worthless through other routes of administration. He offered to shoot me up my first time, and I agreed, because like I said I didn’t really have any strong qualms against injecting by this point (I honestly forget if I was that against it to begin with, but I’m sure I was more against it than I had become by this point). Because it’s such a strong drug, he didn’t put in very much for this first shot, so I didn’t really feel it. It was really just as well, since almost immediately after he shot me up, his mom came in screaming at me to get the fuck out, that she knew her son was using again. He was a lot bigger junkie than I was at this period of my life. Anyways, I took my drugs and a syringe and got the hell out of there. The first time I ever injected myself, later that night—that was the real turning point. I put in more Dilaudid—2mg or so—and proceeded to register to make sure I was safely in a vein (which proved to be a lot easier than I thought it would be), and then slowly pushed in the plunger. Goddamn it, this was the best fucking feeling I had ever had. It felt like all of the air was sucked out of my lungs and there was this colossal tightness which gripped my chest, and then the most euphoric warmth possible began to emanate out of the very center of my being, it felt like my soul, and it overtook my entire body, releasing that tightness, turning it into pure bliss. It felt like I was floating in a whirlpool of warmth that was pushing my body about, and slowly I drifted away into the happiest place I had ever been. Fucking A, I had to have more of that. I honestly don’t think I ever got that good of a rush again from an opiate—even shooting up heroin when I was deathly sick—but fuck it if I wasn’t going to try my hardest to get that feeling back. That was easily the best drug experience I had had up until that point, and my fate had seemingly been decided for me. I was going to be a needle fiend.

So I went back to sophomore year at JMU with a bunch of OxyContin, because, being me, I was not about to go back to school and meet my new, random roommate sober. I dreaded such things, just like I dread a lot of things. I had pretty much already become obsessed with the needle by this point: I was in love with the rituals of shooting up—the spoon and the cotton, drawing up the liquid into the barrel and tapping out the air bubbles, and especially the plume of blood as you register and you’re about to push in (how many junkies salivate over this image?). But of course, most of all I loved the rush, something you get from no other method of administration of a drug. It was like starting drugs all over again. To me, drugs are so very different when you shoot them up versus doing them in other ways. Every drug has a distinct rush, and I wanted to feel them all. So going about research with this state of mind, I read that coke had the absolute best rush IV. I had to try this. So I went about getting some coke and OC for the comedown (I would never again do any stimulants without an opiate for the comedown, because that shit sucks, especially if you are banging the stimulant), and began my first experiments with intravenous cocaine. Although at first I did not load up enough coke into the needle to be on the safe side (I read about people saying to put ¼ to ½ lines into it), but once I put enough into the spoon (probably a lot more than I was snorting at the time), I found nirvana for the IV drug user. The cocaine bellringer (named thusly because of the loud, metallic ringing that fills your head after you shoot a big enough shot) was the absolute best feeling I ever had. As much as I love Dilaudid and heroin rushes, they simply pale in comparison to a really good shot of good coke. The euphoria is untouchable. I also walked into one of the most compulsive drugs there is. What makes IV coke so addictive is its combination of that almost absurdly intense rush with a very short duration, so I would end up shooting again and again and again to keep that high/rush going. It turns your arms into a bloody mess as you have to keep re-jabbing the same veins over and over again with increasingly blunt needles (at this point I had not discovered that you could order boxes of 100 needles online for cheap), often missing shots because your hands are shaking so much from the excessive amounts of coke that you can’t register properly and keep the needle in the vein as you inject (also coke is a local anesthetic, so it tends to shrink your veins with use as well, making all of this even harder). All of that stuff just comes along with IV cocaine use—the price you have to pay for that pinnacle of pleasure which you will end up chasing through thousands of dollars and wasted years.

This was pretty much precisely the point where I lost any last remaining shreds of self-control that I had. I was a slave to that needle. I told myself every damn day to not go on a binge, but every damn day I ended up failing. I started looking like a mess and becoming more and more reclusive. Really everything flew out the door; all that I cared about was getting that big fucking rush. Thankfully, this was the two years later that I was talking about earlier, and Alex found out about my drug use again. She told all my drug dealers not to sell to me anymore or to tell her if I was buying from them (since she knew most of them, because I was still buying drugs only around home at this point). Because of this, and because I made her drug test me, since I said I would never be able to quit otherwise, I was able to go pretty sober for the next few years. It was insanely hard at first, and I would sit by myself in my room with my old needles, putting them up against my arm and pretending to inject myself over and over again, and because my mental recall of those insane rushes was so strong, I would actually get lightheaded and my heartbeat would jump up. I even shot myself up with water, but decided this was just more of a terrible tease than anything else. The first few months were really, really hard, and I think for a long time I would try to cheat the drug tests by getting high on various shitty things, but eventually I think after about a year drug use left my mind alone. Things were not perfect in my life, but at least my whole day wasn’t consumed with thinking about buying drugs.

Part 2 later…

--Edward