Well I never snorted cake, but I have been to Needles
This morning, my wife posted about a time when she made a joke to a co-worker & the whole thing went over the co-worker’s head, & it was actually fucking funny.
Isn’t that the worst?
When you spontaneously say something
that’s really fucking funny & no one notices?
I hate that.
The whole exchange would be best expressed in screenshot form. So here’s the exchange:
This went on until Jed & I, as we usually do, arrived at a moment of soft mutual agreement on a broader matter: addiction.
I’m not a psych or a doctor nor do I play one in any context, but I have this crazy theory that addiction is a symptom of mental illness &/or trauma.
I don’t really think, at this stage in my ex-drunk life, that my abuse of alcohol had as much to do with a genetic predisposition (though I believe there absolutely is that component for me), but my abuse of alcohol was a classic form of self medicating mental health struggles (anxiety, depression, mostly) that were intensified by trauma.
I don’t know.
I spend a lot of time contemplating my own existence,
& so I’m probably a malignant narcissist, too.
Aren’t all writers?
At least a little bit?
Jed, thoughts on this one?
I did however want to zero in on “a line of cake” & its “line of coke” reference that makes it really fucking funny because how amazingly weird would it be to snort a line of cake?
If you hit me up a few years ago,
I totally would have snorted a line of CAKE
for the right amount of $$. My 20s & 30s
were so financially catastrophic that I really did do
just about everything an American can legally do
to make money in this country. If someone had asked me at, say, thirty
if I’d snort a line of cake for rent?
That would have been a resounding “yes.”
Now? I’d have to sleep on it & check with my oncologist.
Because for a long time I really didn’t care about myself.
What would it matter if I snorted a line of cake
when for much of my 20s I was snorting actual lines of coke
& binge drinking like a lunatic?
This was not good.
This is not to say there were not good times
in my 20s and 30s — on the contrary, I made many, many fond friends &
memories during those decades, but that period of time came with a lot of profound suffering in my body, mind, and soul.
I stopped doing coke at 27.
Here’s why: one morning, at 27, after drinking and using a ton of coke (oh, how I could drink on cocaine) I woke up feeling really bad.
Hungover & serotonin depleted from the cocaine.
Somehow (& this was before I had a cell phone)
I had taken down the name & number of the guy
we had purchased the cocaine from the night before.
& I held the number in my hands and thought about calling him.
“I’ll just buy a little for today,” I reasoned with myself.
“Just a little to make me feel better today.”
“Not much. Just a little. Just a little.”
& though this was long before I thought I was an “actual” alcoholic
& long before I had any sense of spirituality or real hope a voice
in my fucking head said,
Gruber, if you do this, you are
done for.
So I threw his number away.
& never touched the shit again.
Alcohol, of course, was a more complex matter.
Also, no one & I mean no one who’s ever heard that story from me
has replied, “Well, are you sure you were becoming a cokehead?
Do you really think you had a problem with cocaine?”
No one ever replies to this story that way.
Instead they’re like “Thank fucking god you made one right choice
in your twenties.”
But there are still people in my life who will say,
when I discuss my alcoholism,
You weren’t *that* bad.
Or
Are you sure you’re an alcoholic?
Are you sure you ever were an alcoholic?
I’ve been an ex-drunk for 126 days.
My life, since I quit alcohol, has gotten infinitely better.
Like beyond-my-dreams-albeit-different-from-my-expected-dreams
good. & even without alcohol, I still have all my other “shit”:
metastatic breast cancer
Crohn’s
bad eyesight
anxiety
insomnia
depression
my ZERO dollars educator-writer “career” in America . . .
So all the other “tough shit” is still around,
but my life feels, most days, really good & it started feeling
really good almost as soon as I removed alcohol from my life.
Logic & reasoning problems were never my strong suit on standardized tests: SAT, ACT, GRE. I’d get frustrated.
Takes too fucking long.
So I’m not a logic problem person, unless I have a minute,
but I’m just going to draw a wild conclusion from my lifestyle “experiment”
in giving up alcohol and beginning a program of recovery
for the condition of alcoholism:
Alcohol was my main, remaining, problem.
That’s my conclusion. I know it sounds crazy,
but here I am, moving around, going out for brunches,
living the real Ibrance Lady Dream, feeling a helluva lot better
(barring my Ibrance-sick days) than I have felt since I was a teenager.
What else can I conclude but that an addiction to alcohol
and a sickness of the spirit were breaking me?
Alcoholism, like cancer, is progressive.
I am lucky that I never got to the point in my disease where I was drinking all day, every day. I am lucky that I never became physically addicted or arrived at a point in my disease where I actually killed myself.
Or where I began to engage in illegal activities.
I am lucky that I stumbled (quite literally, actually) into
this place. This very moment in my life: the dishwasher is running,
the a.c. is on, my dog is napping, on my stereo Nas is rapping . . .
(rhyme, as always, unintended.)
So when I hear people say “you weren’t that bad,”
I have to roll my eyes a little.
I mean, it would sort of be like telling someone
I’m a cancer patient (which I am) and having them reply,
“You have cancer? Are you sure? You don’t look ravaged by cancer.”
— That’s the point. I don’t want to be ravaged by cancer or alcoholism
or any disease for that matter.
Call me crazy.
Speaking of crazy, have I been in the American West too long?
Am I going too soft? I worry about losing my edge.
I was slinking around Tucson with my shaved head (it’s growing out — small mercies) in flowing cotton pants, sandals, a tank top and two sets of mala beads around my neck yesterday & caught sight of myself in a window reflection & was like “Dude. You look like you’re in a cult.”
What I meant was that I looked like a sober woman in her forties who was sinking her proverbial teeth into Eastern religion & thought as a means of finding sanity in this crazy world. Ergo, some kind of Buddhist/hippie/Earth Mother/androgynous dyke hybrid model?
To drive this home for those who know me “in real life,”
let me put it to you this way:
on that day
I wore
not a single item
of clothing that was
black.
I also did not have a band t-shirt on.
So I’m really changing it up here in the Dirty T.
Gruber 2.0.
Gruber Part II: Return of the Gruber
Revenge of the Grubs
Whatever I ultimately decide to call this period of my life,
this time here in the desert while I still feel well,
while I still look healthy,
while I still have my sobriety,
even on a bad day, this way of life
is better than anything
I ever had before.
