iPhones of the 1860s and other matters

When I use the term Alcoholism,
I am using it in a very specific way these days:
I do not merely mean Alcoholism
as in times when I was actually drinking
or drunk, but Alcoholism as a way of being, a way of operating,
a lens I had put over my entire life in order to — so I thought — cope.

It was a lens smudged with pain
and the rage and resentments that often rise up
from the tarry swamp of pain. There are bones
and ghosts and freaky disembodied porcelain doll heads
in that swamp.

This was one of my favorite movies as a child. Explains a great deal, really. This scene is a pretty good analogy for what drinking felt like to me.

I was a very functional alcoholic.

I’m surely not the first (or only) to posit
that perhaps Alcoholism — and other related diseases —
are a Class issue.
(I am fascinated by Class in America right now,
and that’s where a huge point of focus will rest on my 3rd book
— yes, I’m working on this right now because
I have all this “free time” on my hands . . .
Just kidding.
I have NO free time,
but a few stolen hours in the evening
before I force myself to get in bed and watch stupid movies
or funny television until I can turn down the volume
on my anxiety long enough
for sleep to speak.

You know what’s sad?
I’m a morning person.

I love morning.
Even more now that I do not drink.
And I remember this was true about me as a child, too.
I liked mornings.
Hated evenings.
And in this way,
a mean cycle was born:
I could not sleep in the fear of the night
and so I could not wake properly into
the joy of morning.
Ugh.

This was seriously the first sketch on SNL that made me “feel seen.” This was before “feel seen” was a thing people said constantly.

Speaking of addiction, for readers my age,
DMX died today. He was only fifty.
He was an addict. This comes as no surprise
to anyone who followed his career. I find this trend
of enablers surrounding talents — like Earl Simmons
aka DMX — in order to ride the coattails of their gifts
very disturbing. Like I still wonder who the fuck was giving
Carrie Fischer coke and heroin in London before she died when
Carrie Fischer was very outspoken about her very real, very serious,
very life threatening problem with booze, and coke, and heroin.
Who, that knew Carrie Fischer, would sell her drugs?
I mean, maybe she bought the drugs on the street. Alone.
At night. Like a “run of the mill” addict. But more likely
one of her rich friends gave it to her, or she bought it from
a “friend.” Listen. A “friend” doesn’t fucking sell you coke or
serve you a drink if you’ve told everyone in the world (as Fischer did)
that you have a very real fucking problem with those substances.

(For those not in the know, DMX was a rapper/hip hop artist who enjoyed the peak of his American pop cultural fame in the early 2000s.)

“Party Up” is a song I have loved since it first dropped in 1999.

I was fresh out of undergrad.

I was drinking almost every night.

Some weekends, I was doing cocaine and drinking.
How adorable! (When I think of how young I was,
not much older than my students, I feel sick inside.)

I say this not to put my bare ass in the wind,
but because I have a story about a time in my twenties
when I actually made THE CORRECT choice:

I honestly don’t know how I lived through that awful,
stressful, terrifying decade in my life.
How lost I was in adulthood.
Utterly lost.

I had no business EVEN BEING in adulthood
until I was about twenty-five. And even then
the fact of my adulthood was dubious
at best.

But I remember one morning,
I was twenty-two I think, and I’d been up late
doing cocaine and drinking with friends in Chicago
the night before. No one “made me” do these things.
As an alcoholic, I could not drink or even dabble in cocaine
“like a normal person” — whatever the fuck that even means
when it comes to cocaine. There is no “reasonable use” of
cocaine for an alcoholic (or maybe anyone for that matter)
That’s my opinion heavily informed by real, actual
lived experience.

I woke up hungover and with,
what my sponsor calls, “The cocaine blues.”
I used to call them “The Claptons”
after Eric Clapton’s 70s hit, “Cocaine.”
To the uninitiated, a word of advice:
that shit, and all of its subsidiaries (meth, crack) is the fucking devil.
A scourge. A cancer. A drug that should never be made much less used.
Meth, I would argue, is the atom bomb of man made intoxicants.

But this is about me, not drugs.
(Though it’s sort of about drugs, too.)

Sometimes, when I think about what happened to Charlie Sheen, it makes me very sad. He was a good actor when I was a kid. I think I even had a Tiger Beat poster of him or some shit in my bedroom in the 1980s.

So I woke up that morning in 1999/2000 (pre 9/11, I do remember that)
with the “cocaine blues” — that sharp serotonin drop
with the hangover flopped on top of that.
Mind you, I’m anxious and sad by design.
I don’t even need liquor or coke to feel like
a total maniac. (Ask any student that has sat in
on one of my classes after I’ve had more than three
cups of coffee in the morning and they’ll tell you: I
’m batshit insane when I’m sober as a stone.
Such is my burden
and the burden of a great many
alcoholics.)

That morning in 1999, I somehow still had the number
of the guy we bought the cocaine from the night before.
I must have asked him for his number when I was drunk
and high on the cocaine he sold me. Anyway, I had his number.
And I remember thinking, in my hangover, in my “cocaine blues,”
I could call him.
I could just buy a little.
Just enough
to get me through today.

Because I felt so bad. (And that’s how you get HOOKED:
you feel bad because the drug made you feel bad? Take
more of that drug so you don’t feel bad! Oh, you feel bad
because the drug made you feel bad again? Take the drug
to make yourself feel better. It’s true fucking madness.)

And then I heard another voice that said,
Allison, if you make this call, you will
not survive. You will be addicted
to cocaine until” you die of that
exact
addiction.

I threw his number away.
This was before cell phones.
It really wasn’t that hard.
I kept on drinking for twenty more years,
but never again touched cocaine.

Cocaine is, in the end, not NEARLY as socially acceptable as booze
I mean, it would have been super weird if I was openly snorting 8 balls
at a work event, but it wasn’t at all strange for me to drink a glass or two of wine.

That’s all. A memory.
Of one time in my twenties when I made a good choice.
And everyday since I began AA, I make a good choice
to not drink because if I drink I will surely die.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, being human can be utter shit,
but I am in this really amazing place in my life right now
where I simply do not have to abide shit.

Maybe I never did have to
abide shit. Maybe adults and
“authorities” and systems
simply told me and scared me
into believing the Great American lie:
that if I got shit it was only because I was shit,
that I deserved shit.

That is a lie. .

I was sicker with alcoholism than I was with cancer and I had found myself smack dab in part of America where the healthcare was exceptionally poor and disorganized and I didn’t really give a fuck about that because I didn’t give a fuck about me. I was convinced that I was doomed.

And then we got to Tucson, and I started to feel better.
Stronger. More like the version of me I like better,
but I couldn’t 100% shake the booze-a-hol thing on my own,
so the universe literally knocked my head open
and busted my eyeball and said, “Wake up, Gruber.
You have lots of shit, in this life, left to do.”

I know some people are appalled by how “candidly”
I speak of my alcohol addiction, but trust me,
you will never know even a fraction of the half of that story
because that is part of my story for me to know alone
and let go of alone. As for the rest, I am not ashamed.
Lots of people struggle with addiction — alcoholism
specifically. I am exhausted of feeling shame. Shame
for what? For trying my level best as a human and sometimes
succeeding and sometimes failing? It wasn’t like I was out there
sex trafficking (what’s up, Matt Gaetz!) or inciting insurrection (what’s
up Trump friends and family!) or passing legislation to disenfranchise
Black Americans from being able to easily vote (what’s up, Georgia legislature!) America, shall I go on?

You, America,
not I,
should be ashamed.

Oh, “Game of Thrones.” You were so ridiculous, and I loved you.

Can I tell you something wonderful?
This afternoon was an all school assembly,
and I hosted a poetry workshop where we read
Mary Oliver and wrote poems
and shared them with each other
and talked about each other’s poems
and about Mary Oliver
and life and nature
and death.

My favorite student writers
were mostly in attendance. As was
my dear friend and colleague, Mike.

And then we read Mary Oliver, specifically,
“The Summer Day” which ends with those
crushingly beautiful, devastating lines:
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

Shout out to my friend Eric B. for dropping this gem in my comments recently.

As Mike would say, “Oof.”
But a good “oof.”
You should have heard
the students’ poetry.
Good grief. Such talent.
And the thing is
they’re “ordinary” American kids.
Ordinary American kids who
have been loved well, by at least a few,
adults in their life. Hopefully,
when they look back, they will count
me among one such adult.

On a wholly different note:
I am getting a new iPhone now.
And by “new” I mean an iPhone
from like fifty years ago which will be infinitely better
than my current iPhone model that I think
was first released in the 1890s.

Finally: eyeball update —
I blinked twice this morning
and the remaining bit of the gas bubble evaporated.
My vision is back in my left eye and just as shitty as ever,
if not significantly more so. But shitty vision is better than
NO vision at this juncture, so I am grateful
for my shitty vision.

I have used the word “shit”
in abundance in this post
which leads me to believe
I am perhaps tired.
Goodnight, then.