27 days in the hole/momentary Oprah
Do you know that song from the 70s? “30 Days in the Hole”?
I actually really dig that song though it’s wildly inappropriate for, say, the classroom.
I am twenty-seven days into my recovery from alcoholism, and I am looking forward to singing this song when I hit day thirty because, well,
life without beer or wine or ANY alcohol sometimes feels a little
like being in a hole. A sober hole. That just sounds . . . disgusting.
Speaking of songs, I was listening to
Cypress Hill’s “Hits From the Bong” this evening
and when my wife found me jamming to the song, she said, “Oh, honey. No. This is terrible.” I told her last night that she was “a perfect balance to my crazy” and I am just a regular Ladies’ Lesbian these days what with the romantic turns of phrase. (Romance is overrated. There. I said it.)
Is it though? Is “Hits from the Bong”
a terrible song? (I detest print language — unless it’s in Italian or Spanish — that “rhymes” but here we are.)
Cypress Hill reminds me of college — my happiest, earliest days
in college in the early/mid 1990s at a little liberal arts college in Wisconsin.
The song reminds me of laughing with friends.
Reminds me fiercely of my friend Megan,
with whom I still maintain a close friendship some twenty odd years on
(and I do mean odd). (love you, fool, if you’re reading this which I can almost guarantee you are not because this shit isn’t your style.)
So maybe I enjoy a really shitty song just because I have associated it with really fun and happy, largely healthy and normal, memories from my youth, from the hardest and most simple time in my life.
Yes, I’m waxing nostalgic about Cypress Hill.
Sue me.
Also, I use cannabis.
Tonight, I smoked some “weed” (fellow elders: “weed” is NOT “weed” anymore — it’s like a consistent, predictable thing now. it’s crazy!) in a small water bong.
I don’t usually “smoke” cannabis
(edibles are my favorite method),
but I had some weed a friend had gifted me.
So I smoked it.
Yes, I do know that many people in AA
abstain from all of the things. And I respect that but
I am not in AA to deny myself of every fucking pleasure
and medical convenience life affords — rather I am in AA
to keep myself from drinking because drinking will actually kill my ass out and because I like booze more than any other illicit substance (“illegal” or prescribed — drugs are fucking drugs) on the market (and I’ve tried a number in my forty-four years of life — by choice and by necessity). I like booze because it takes my feelings away, and my feelings are so fucking messy
(like everyone else’s messy feelings) and because of brain chemistry and ancestry and trauma and shit my brain doesn’t fire the way Plato’s “ideal brain” might function and so I spend 95% of my life in a state of,
at the very lest, very low grade terror and this is not even hyperbole.
I’m one frightened fucker. I think I arrived into life this way. No one’s “fault.” Just something shitty that sometimes happens to us human beings with our weird little human intellects and fragile, mortal bodies.
“Tis true/tis pity,” all that shit. (I’m really leaning hard into my Shakespeare tonight. See, kids, there IS actual value in reading The Bard:
maybe someday you will be sick or old or sad about a breakup
or divorce or maybe you’ll be grieving and changing and grieving
and changing and you’ll turn to The Bard for the blog you’ve kept
through a global pandemic.
Kidding.
I hope this NEVER happens to you, kids, again.)
Sometimes, at night or on weekends, I make use of cannabis
to alleviate my anxiety (though “anxiety” feels too tepid a word
for those of us who suffer from chronic anxiety as a true disease).
I do not make use of cannabis during my work life.
I do not make use of cannabis when I drive cars.
I do not make use of cannabis before or during an AA meeting or when I’m at one of my endless fucking doctors appointments or on the fucking phone with the fucking insurance companies which some days feels like a good 50% of my life and 50% of my life on hold with an insurance company is a straight up waste of life. A sin.
And do I use cannabis as a crutch?
Maybe.
Does cannabis make horrible, unpredictable,
life-threatening things take place inside
and outside of my body, mind, and soul?
No.
Frankly, cannabis is pretty predictable:
feel a relax, eat a food, laugh a bit more easily at
matters both funny and macabre. Focus on something
on which I might not otherwise focus.
So what?
Does cannabis interact badly
with any of my life-saving medications?
No. Does cannabis haunt my dreams and my past?
No. The worst thing cannabis has ever “made me” do
was like sit in wet paint when I was nineteen.
I ruined my jacket (actually it was an army jacket,
and I made it cooler by getting paint on it — so
it was an inadvertent win at the time).
If my cannabis use starts getting out of control,
I think I have the ability to be honest with myself about that.
I am nothing these days if not honest. Brutally, wonderfully
honest. Maybe it’s being 44. Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s AA.
Maybe it’s stage iv breast cancer. Maybe it’s the healthcare system’s fuckery. Maybe it’s the American education system’s rich possibility for deep change. Something in me has changed and I don’t want to go back to the person I used to be. It’s like the end of Thelma and Louise up in my brain, my soul, my body.
I don’t mean I’m about to drive off the Grand Canyon,
I just mean I can’t go back, and I wouldn’t want to even if I could.
As cornball as it sounds (and it is so cornball unless it feels true to you),
I almost actually like myself for the first time in my whole fucking life.
Isn’t that insane? That is INSANE. If you are sitting there, in your forties, still not liking yourself, go do a THING and figure out how to like yourself because like it or not, once we hit forty, we’re kind of in the early stages of “the skids.” If you’re not being honest with yourself about death,
now is also a good time to work on that shit, too.
My think-about-death-hand has sort of been forced
since I was thirty-four,
but that shit is hard regardless of when
we sit with it. But like all truths about ourselves,
this one, too, is easier when faced and accepted.
Let me know if you figure that death shit out.
I sure haven’t yet.
Can I be your momentary Oprah?
I don’t want to be “cancer lady” today.
So allow me, if you will (and I know you will),
to be Momentary Oprah.
Here’s what’s worked for me in the past twenty-seven days:
1) “Keeping it real with myself”: I must acknowledge, every day, that I have metastatic breast cancer because I must, every day, take and keep track of pills, labs, scans that are working to detect and slow the progression of what, for me, will be a life long, hopefully manageable, ultimately fatal disease. (I wouldn’t stop anyone from finding a cure, though. And I’m just going to go ahead and say what we’re all thinking: if men got breast cancer at the rate women get breast cancer, that shit would have been cured in the fifties alongside Polio.) So every morning, I “keep it real with myself.” I have metastatic breast cancer. Would I have died even if I didn’t get a recurrence of breast cancer? Yes. Am I going to die today? Tomorrow? Probably not.
So, chill, Gruber.
No one really, matter-of-fact,
knows for certain what is going to happen tomorrow.
2) Do one good thing for someone who is not a friend or family member.
This could be a co-worker, a student, a neighbor. Make this deliberate.
Choose someone you suspect needs a little “extra” that day.
*Don’t be a fucking martyr. Don’t kill yourself over the gesture. Maybe all you can manage is a nice email or text. Fine. You did your thing. Done.
3) Go to an AA meeting every day.
This one only, obviously, applies to alcoholics like me.
If you’re not an alcoholic maybe you could “adapt” this habit by . . . I don’t know . . . finding religion? I’m not a religious person, and I’m early in my recovery from alcoholism, so I really can’t say what would work for you if you tried the Gruber Method*Disclaimer: the Gruber Method only MIGHT work and half the time it doesn’t even work for Gruber herself.
Think about this.
Think about if Bob Heimlich’s maneuver worked
on everyone BUT Bob Heimlich.
Or it only worked on Heimlich “half the time.”
And yes, I know his name wasn’t “Bob,” but I don’t care enough
to Google.
4) Do one thing good for the earth every day.
This could be watering a plant. Or picking up a piece of trash or if you have the time, it could be, like, planting a tree or installing solar panels or something.
I am firmly in “pick up trash/recycle/be nice to nature” territory
at this juncture in my personal eco-activism.
Hopefully, I will level-up in time.
5) Do one thing each day that feels good to you but doesn’t HURT you.
This can be tricky. Like I really fucking enjoy cheese, and while I’m not currently full on vegan, I do believe in the anti-inflammatory diet SCIENCE and its relationship to cancer. So cheese might feel good to me, but is it good for me? Or is it actively hurting me?
If I really want cheese. Like I can’t stand it, I need cheese in my face,
I will allow myself to eat some damn cheese. And sometimes it’s not cheese:
sometimes it’s the same Grateful Dead song over and over or a scented candle or a stupid movie or some cannabis. It just can’t be, for me, alcohol. Ever. (It also can’t be meth, heroin, cocaine, etc — but I am hoping that if you know me you would assume I’m not out here in Tucson doing meth.)
I want to put “sleep” on this list, but sleep is a real struggle for me right now. This was another reason I liked to drink specifically, exclusively, at night.
I loathe the night time and sleep is really hard to achieve.
Booze was great because I ALWAYS slept when I drank.
Didn’t need a pill. Didn’t need meditation or an AA meeting
or Tylenol PM — I could just kill my feelings or at the very least turn the volume down so low that I could feel them without bursting my eardrums — and kill my insomnia with a few glasses of whatever I was having that evening.
Usually beer. How I loved beer.
Beer did not love me back.
Vision update: I can see out of about 60% of my left eye
(the right eye is, for now, fingers crossed, healthy and safe).
Blurry, but colors and shapes and (vaguely) text if the text is large
(18 point font on the computer, 20 to be really comfortable).
My eye appears — to the eyes of others — to be perfectly normal.
One wouldn’t know that less than two weeks ago
I had my eyeball sliced open.
Just kidding.
I don’t think they, at any point, “sliced” my eyeball “open.”
I think it was more like lasers and needles and shit.
Tomorrow, I see my new favorite Dr. — my eyeball surgeon, Dr. W —
for a follow-up on my eye. I am hoping he says I can go to Flagstaff by May
or sooner. I really need to say goodbye in person.
I need to drive up and be able to drive away
and know I said a proper goodbye.
Goodbyes are thrilling and also extremely scary.
Just recently, I was telling a friend that when I first moved to Arizona
I would weep — just fucking WEEP — every time I saw
what I called a
“beige mountain.”
I would get so sad when I was in the desert — the low desert, I mean.
Like where I am now (and weirdly loving it all of the fucking sudden) — Sonoran shit used to depress the fuck out of me because it reminded me
how very FAR AWAY I was from everything I had ever known for my first
38 years of life.
I had no idea that I was supposed to be here.
In Tucson, I mean.
I was supposed to be in Tucson for some reason.
I feel that in my soul.
Flagstaff was a bridge to bring me to Tucson.
I don’t know why (I have my guesses), but maybe,
with a little openness and luck, I’ll figure it out.
This Medium is getting me through these dog days of the pandemic, I swear.
