Pumped up on that chalky sunshine,
The moon is fading to another vicious morning.
Spent my hours beneath the starlight in the wind,
Lovingly hitting repeat on every action I’d begin.
Glassed eyes and withered muscles ache,
Blood thundering past a thirst impossible to slake.
The ride was hot and heavy to the top,
Until we picked up speed enough to never stop.
Exhibitionism at it’s finest calls for a complete strip down – but like most nudity, sometimes those watching would prefer the clothes stayed on. Authors must dangle and hope the meat on display attracts the eye. Easier perhaps when your life is wrenched from the most vivid hallucinations of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson then run through the Douglas Adams’ improbability drive. Prodded with LSD and electrified glow-sticks into the Minotaur’s lair to play. Surely that would entertain?
This is a lifelong dream, a Purpose or a calling that I’ve never been able to just put ahead of everything else. Please share, and thank you for taking the time to browse. Thank you.
Drugs/Alcohol: “I am not an individual, yet each singular person has the capacity to carry my spirit into the world. I am multiplied with each additional user, yet the core of what I am remains the same. I am not contained within powders or bottles or needles. Merely vehicles by which I extend myself physically into the world. On the plane of thoughts, I am a gateway to dreams, goals, opportunity, capacity, capabilities and opportunity. Emotionally, I am happiness, relief, dependable joy, relaxation, inspiration, and intensity unleashed. For your spirit, I provide for comfortable faith in a tactile form which offers succor to all who kneel and bring me inside their life.
I am a God who responds. Who ensures your prayers will be answered immediately. I am gratification instantly without the annoyance of patience. Why would you not want me? I an the perfect answer to your questions not even asked.”
Wolf: “I’ve seen your work in my life, in the sickness of a father, the loss of my home, tears from mother, and a sister who doesn’t know “DADDY” as anything other than a voice on the phone. There are no dreams with any substance you truly provide. No lasting materialization of each temporary respite from reality. Each fades to an increasingly nightmarish awareness as you strip health, dignity, and passion from those penitent before your strength of persuasion.
Smiles only mask tears as, boldfaced, your flock sells such sweet lies to the innocent children begging for the love of time lost.
“Physically, regardless of form, you corrode the natural state of each being. You disregard the value of life, diminishing the ability to explore the world we inhabit. Your demands for attention outweigh the critical needs of food, water, and shelter. You let your acolytes freeze, burn, and starve for your favor. Their dependence on you grows until your absence inflicts pain while your presence soothes the body and places the agony on their mind and soul. You are rust on a cog in the machine that is our body. Our one indispensable and limited currency to share and create precious moments with – time. You cut our lives short, and we can never regain that. Each moment so brief that we are hardly aware of its passing until it has gone. Even having escaped you, the damning repercussions of your presence will haunt the body with ailments and injury well past when you have departed.
You are the plea for death, to cut life short in mercy, for in desperation you trick our bodies to betray us.
“In mind, you cause your lovers thinking to be so distorted as it must be to fit existence into conforming with your view of the world. It must warp to escape the horror that has become life. Defenses of the mind are erected, devolving willpower in lieu of rationalization, justification and denial. Barriers to the truth that they are not intellectually inferior, but infected by a sickness of the mind that cripples the capacity to confront, honestly, personal shortcoming in order to improve upon them. You delude, misguide, frustrate, reshape, and manipulate the mind until your followers rely on you to lead and direct every choice and belief.
You weaken the gift of thought, voiding the opportunity to mentally defeat you. No answer do you offer, only the question, why?
“Emotionally, you shatter confidence, replace hope with fear, pride with arrogance, love with hate. You contaminate innocence with misery, motivation with desperation, joy with despair, excitement with impulse. Regret begets guilt, guilt begets shame, and shame erodes the experience of the present and the internal support of conviction and commitment to construct a fulfilling future – much less belief in an ability to do so. Satisfaction and acceptance with hollowness and insecurity. You are the complete removal of optimism and hope.
You are the ultimate resentment in self. You are obsession, self-loathing, and self-destruction.”
“You are bankruptcy of the soul, there is no spirituality to be sound in you. Where faith should increase as blessings are counted, gratitude succumbs to grandiose beliefs about our place in the spectrum of control. The dilution of the spirit by artificial inflation of ego. Eyes are cast down instead of up when your supplicants seek nurturing. All values are destroyed to make way for your replaced design of integrity.
Your capital is misery, spreading like a plague to crush out the glow we each are born with – the blessing from beyond. You become the reason for prayers unanswered.
Drugs/Alcohol: “Child, you have not tasted the wealth of my love yet. There is fire here to prime you to any task filled at your slightest whim. Oceans of milky light cast from the fullest of moons to soothe you into peaceful waking slumber to dream and adventure as only the imagination can let you.
Courage at the waiting lips of a bottle wanting to embrace yours as only a lover could….”
Wolf: “No. Lies. Stories. Manipulations and deceit. No. Not now. Not ever. You have stripped away the love that once beat loudly in the heart of the man I knew as father. I’ve seen his broken eyes, and watched the crippling frustration of a young man dying as an old one.
No. You have claimed enough from me and my family. You CANNOT and WILL NOT have any more. Leave, you are not welcome here.
Please excuse grammatical errors (proofreading at 4am is tough). This is an excerpt from a story I’ve been working on to try and process my absence and loss of family owing to drugs and alcohol. Wolf is actually the name of my son, and I am so proud of him. He knows (I hope) that he is still my sunshine, now and always, even if I can’t be there. Format was played with a little. Please comment, email me – I am truly interested to know what the larger world thinks of this kind of writing.
From a general standpoint, every mental illness (at least in my experience) offers it’s afflicted a slightly varied experience from the next in line. The numbers rattle off to “BiPolar Disorder Type I – Last Manic Episode Severe w/o Psychosis.” Next up is the well beloved Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) rounding out with Borderline Personality Disorder for good measure.
In a world of “medicated everyone” not many people blink an eye when the sack of pills comes out. Though in a strangely uncomfortable way it occasionally strikes me to explain what they’re all for and watch them adjust their demeanor in that so common and anxiously polite manner I’ve come to expect.
Here’s the kicker. When I was running a sales organization with a 150 reps, and quotas, plane travel 5 days a week – outside of the unchecked alcoholism at the time – you would never have known. The counselor that has finally found a checkmark next to his name for me continuously tries to reinforce that the mania can be used as an asset, a tool.
That’s where the differentiations come in for all of us.
In the early stages, mania feels like the beginning of fearless adrenaline rush without any edge. Endless possibilities are all within easy reach potentially. The stacks of chaotic problems encroaching all around are not only solvable but nearly laughable in their simplicity. With a blossoming confidence that transcends arrogance to simply become conviction that ANYTHING that I want to do right now I could do. Usually, I start walking, headphones in, my face will become unable to hold onto anything but a ear splitting toothed smile as I laugh out loud looking at the oncoming traffic. Air crisps or whistles across my skin. It’s the first moment you meet a new woman, it’s the first cigarette in the morning, it’s a tank of gas in the car and a world to explore, and it’s far to exquisitely perfect to be sustainable.
For me, this is where it starts. To the reader, if you felt as though there was nothing you couldn’t accomplish, the world was your oyster for a day – would you find it tempting to hold onto that?
Challenge #1 with comorbidity and dually diagnosed:
The logical outcome is the circular pattern of up, down, feel bad, look for other options. Recovering from addiction is reliant almost entirely on the willingness to simply hand in the weapons and stop fighting. Surrender to the reality it is a losing fight, and if you stay away from using, you are on your way to brighter things.
Mania is deceitful though. Sure, it’s easy to throw an ungodly sum of anti-psychotics down someone’s throat until the pattern may well be nearly impossible to repeat. It could be argued on some level, that while a Thorazine shuffle isn’t a high quality of life, if it’s sufficient to overcome the initial hurdles of early sobriety without a high flying manic swing knocking you off the tracks, I don’t know how hard I’d argue against it.
That said, I’m a stubborn and foolish individual who continues to bolster the thought that, “If we just edge down the manic swings a touch so that I don’t feel like me I bet it would work…”
The reality is that I’m trying to stay high without thinking of it that way directly. My brain will pull magnificently orchestrated rationalizations out of the neurons they were stuffed for a rainy day until I’m willing to concede, that maybe, just maybe, this time everything will balance out. This is where the big kicker comes into play.
Challenge #2 deals with facts:
I had written something try and put it in perspective for my poor parents who have watched this for 15+ years. Mania tried to capture all the blended excitement and frustration attendant with the feeling.
In essence, as everything builds up further and further, I force myself into a corner where the only outcome is going to be using my own self prescribed medication, or face another hospital which in the throes of mania seems completely ludicrous.
I recognize that the world looks at the series of insane adventures that have certainly occurred, the days without sleep, the spontaneous flights of fancy and even actual flights as something only a “crazy” person would do. Certainly, there is an element out of the norm, that’s why I’m taking medication and working on counseling in the first place. But for all the oddness, I delude myself with imagining that there is an element of jealousy beneath the demeaning words tossed around.
When things fade down, I’m always certain to get right back into the cycle with meds, visits, check-ups, retrospection. Invariably when the cycle completes I’ve lost my job, money is gone, probably overdosed once, and I’m homeless and coming back to family with my hand out. There is an absolutely bittersweet element to everything related to the upswings in BPD (much as I’m sure there are to the down as well).
This is not a life that I want to lead. I am working to follow the directions and accept the help of those still willing to offer it. So often though – just like with drugs and alcohol – all the progress fades away when the world takes on that special hue, sharpens up, and the rush comes on. I’ve lost homes, my wife, family, my life 6x (god bless Narcan), and even access to see my children for fear I’ll disappear again and leave them devastated. In the same breath, I left my pregnant wife nearly bankrupt and verging on foreclosure before she divorced me, and since, there are wide oceans of wreckage that spill against the happy homes of those that dared to care.
If you happen to see someone else having the time of their life while they pour gasoline on everything they’ve worked so hard for – speaking from experience – the smile is masking a far greater pain and frustration then is easily seen.
Tears from laughter and tears from misery both look the same.
This was originally written as an awareness building essay for another site that didn’t use it, so I’ll feed myself (and anyone who cares to listen to me prattle) the leftovers. Thank you for reading, and I really would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. ~S
Living like a cat last summer,
Couldn’t afford sheets or real food,
But the room was a soft pink,
And the lumpy mattress felt softer than the bricks.
Living like a cat I was,
Crawling under piles of clothes to nap,
Eating cans of tuna (pocket sized),
Basking in the sun so the shade felt cooler.
Cat life is great for those critters,
But at 6’+ and a bundle of seething “more,”
It’s feline for some but didn’t sit right on me,
So I’ll gladly hand it back this time around.
Feeling a bit more canine today.
Though cans of tuna still roll free,
I have a forever human to lick,
Hopefully I’ll get older than a pup –
— goddamn pet control still wants to lock me up.
Kicked out of yet another program last year….this time on my birthday 2015. Hiked 23 miles through New Bedford and wound up shooting coke under a bridge to celebrate….detox the next day. Sigh…madness and mayhem on tap.
Suicide Blues
Information overload leaves a catatonic state,
Insane flashbacks that babbling never slakes.
So, I’ll lift a glass or grab a spoon,
Always a delight to numb out while speeding towards one’s doom.
Sweet and luscious memories deride me in a torrent,
So, I’ll hit it twice and blank it out till I become abhorrent.
Streets, infections, jails, and horrifying youth,
Tweaked out, blacked out, cracked out, hiding from a truth.
It hides behind each one I take, lurking in the corner,
A queasy feeling critter all sewn up dark,
“Truth” is my last remaining mourner.
With bulging eyes and clasping paws it looks comfort to provide,
But I’ll show it how, I’m living now, in ghastly fear and pride.
Battering awareness until thinking is a chore,
Wish it didn’t taste so good or I’d be less a whore.
So feed me everything you’ve got –
The booze, the pills, the lines, the rock.
Pump it in as fast you can until I’m outlined in chalk.
Eventually all will fade away and leave behind my friend,
“Truth” says that all this time it was just fine to reach out for an end.
I could have saved my aching skull from cracking at the ridge –
It’s too late now though, and all I dream of is hanging from a bridge.
A portion of the memoir thingamajig I’m working on…think Hunter S. Thompson meets the Tasmanian Devil on acid and they go on a road trip…I have no idea how bum alive….
Me at 17…
The first time I had ever warn (my Santa Hat) it off season was in 9th grade….I didn’t want to fall into any of the socially nebulous categories that everyone knows of in high school. I was a rock climber, I was smart, I was weird, and I wanted to do drugs. A Santa Claus hat during the end of Summer into the Fall seemed lie a sufficiently bizarre calling card to elicit the kind of attention that I was hoping to draw.
Turns out I was right, and years later, when I wanted to recall some memory from those individuals who remembered my reputation for dropping acid before school and freaking out in the commons, getting the entire science glass tanked on ethyl chloride while the teacher gave a presentation, robbing the gym locker room, getting suspended and expelled for very mysterious reasons and then disappearing for a year and a half – all I had to do was put it back on. It became my calling card, my cape, and my identity. If I needed to become the villainous madman ready to do anything at any cost – burn the world to the ground for just one more $20 – let’s bring in Santa! It was stupid and youthful….but I thought I looked fucking good.
Realistically, I was a skeleton. Nearing vaporization. At one point I0 was standing 6’2” tall and weighing in at a staggeringly huge 135lbs. of skin and bones. I’m pretty sure if you looked close enough you could see the molasses my thickening blood had morphed into trying desperately to move beneath the paper disguising itself as my outer layers. The hollowed out chunks in what was my skull were no longer recognizable as anything describable as attractive windows to a soul – just aching cut outs to coals of frustration, mindless chattering banter between myself and the seas of demons that I was tormented by constantly by my own actions which invited them in to travel between my buzzing ears. There’s a tattoo that is perched forever on my left shoulder these days. It started during the final days of the longest spin I ever got spun on. It highlights the image of me face in all its weirdly grotesque glory going into the 300+ hour awake mark.
At that point there’s nothing real left in the world. The fabric of existence has been ripped to pieces, and resewn by crystalline fingers into a tapestry of madness that drifts between the cosmos. Ethereal, haunting, overwhelming when it chooses to present a new scene for the viewer to be engulfed in with neither option nor control over their role to play. One moment they may be a super star drug tyrant overseeing the peasant users around them – fools to touch such tools as these that they cannot hope to understand…..the next, huddled underneath the glovebox with a permanent marker jotting down the next sequence of license plate numbers and their related car descriptions (particular attention to be noted to the gold Volvo which is always third in line at each intersection) which form the state wide task force that has been deployed to hunt you down after the systematically arrest each of your friends and turn them against you.
The tattoo shows the lewd, cheek partially raised, only one sided grin that became a permanent fixture on my face for several weeks. There was something that was both somewhat charming – think everyone’s favorite super villain from Batman – and terribly off putting. There was no rhyme or reason to why I was “smiling”. Nothing phased me, or it. The situations that were plaguing my now nearly homeless existence; the impending and quickly approaching doom that I seemed determined to drive myself to by ingesting enormous quantities of ice all at once – to that extend that even when the dealers or our funds would dry up for a day or two, I could ride the high for the intervening time without coming down even a touch. Even when I was passed along right after the initial outline was laid in by the artist (also a middle man to my dealer who was trying to knock me out with sleeping pills unsuccessfully to get me out of my psychosis since I was freaking people out) to a black man who worked at Starbucks with less polite sexual intentions towards my nubile young body….couldn’t let the smile waver.
I really can’t even remember that much of what happened, nor if something did. Though I have to assume since I’d been awake for well over the 450+ hour mark by the time I got to the basement with its strange purple feathery covered couch and mood lighting and all I had eyes for was the pipe – who knows what I would have been willing to do. I can recall dancing for him with no shirt on. Many, many, many plants upstairs. Lining the kitchen counters. And he had a fascination, bordering on obsession, with ensuring that I only used the blue part of the lighter flame to hit the pipe. It had something to do with it being the neutral part – but it doesn’t make sense to me in retrospect. Didn’t matter then, I just know he had almost a ball of some truly superb crystal, and even typing about it now I can feel my heart accelerating and my eyes start to cross dreamily.
How oddly sick isn’t it? In a recollection of potentially being raped over drugs by someone I didn’t know in their basement – where I believe I can account for being locked for nearly 3-days since I didn’t make it to detox until the 28th day of being awake, which I went to almost directly from there. But that aside – despite the fact of what is happening during the recollection – it actually inspires a desire in me to go get high on the exact same substance precipitated the event in the first place.
Being an addict sucks, it really does. You want the things that kill you worse than the things that save you. It’s like the survival instinct we’re supposed to be born with was installed backwards and then given some extra juice.
“We fucked up the orientation Ted, may as well make it run fast and aggressive eh?”
Love to hear your thoughts!
To Ink - a blog from Melting Neurons 