420 Summit

Gettin' grouchy

I damn near broke a desk, pounding my fist in frustration, over a silly little ad. All I wanted to do was research a host on a popular forum and I simply could not search for it. Each time I would click the search box that stupid little ad would fly open. I’d click to close, try again and it would fly open again. It made me fucking nuts. A little ad on the web should not make me this angry. And I was angry.

I couldn’t do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it.

Eventually, I had to step away and take a good look at what was really going on — what it boils down to is: I want to use. Something. Anything. Just so long as there is plenty of it.

I spend mornings cleaning up a local park before the day camp kids arrive and it is far from unusual to find remnants of the previous nights activities. Baggie corners, syringes, used condoms, filthy clothing, whatever. It’s why we clean it. Today I found a little bit of weed. I picked up the baggie and tossed it in the trash. Then I figured some kid might see it and took it back out for later “disposal”. Oddly enough, I failed to mention my discovery to any of the other people with me. So, now I have weed.

In retrospect, not a great plan for someone who has absolutely no business having any drug anywhere near him.

I bullied a stranger in the street. Some guy asked me for a cigarette — a harmless little tweaker — so I handed him my pack. Then he asked if he could take a few. I said no. He whined and I gave him a hard time. A really hard time. I’m ready to fight this guy over a few cigarettes when I should have given him the whole damn pack. It would have made his day and saved my lungs some wear and tear. I’ll be buying more soon enough.

I turned my phone off, so I could “work” in peace. Actually, I turned my phone off so nobody could ask me for anything and I could ignore my responsibilities. Or, God forbid, ask how I was.

I spilled coffee on the floor in a public space and rather than cleaning it up, I glanced over at the maintenance guy and told myself that he gets paid to do it. Let him do his job and clean up after me.

These are all little things, but they add up into a big pile of shit. My actions reflect my attitude and this constant vigilance thing is no joke. Now, I have to humble myself — I’ve started by ratting myself out — and ask for help. Unfortunately, humility isn’t one of my strong suits.

No, I didn’t smoke the weed. I wanted to, but flushed it away before I could talk myself into it.

3 days ago

No nukes!

I celebrate six months of sobriety tomorrow.

This may not seem like a long time, but as far as I’m concerned it may as well be sixty years. Three decades of bad habits are not easily broken and I’m pretty damn proud of myself. In this six months I have lost my mother. I have lost my son. I have lost my home, my friends and my livelihood.

It has not been a great year.

I have also lost my fear.

I am no longer afraid. I’ll deal with what life brings and I’ll deal with it like an adult, just like the rest of the world has been doing, around me, my whole life.

This is scary as hell, but at least I’m not bored.

Totally unrelated, but when did volunteer work start to pay?

I’ve been cleaning up a park every morning. A real shithole of a park in the heart of the ‘hood. Every morning, before the day camp starts, we go in and scoop up the broken glass, syringes and drug baggies. It takes, maybe, at the most, an hour.

Recently, they have been asking what I want.

Breakfast? Money? Beer?

I don’t want anything. That’s why I volunteered. I don’t do this because I’m a nice guy with nothing but time on my hands (true, but irrelevant) but because I lived around the corner and always regretted the fact that my kids couldn’t play in the park. It’s simple, I give an hour a day and dozens of kids don’t spend the day stepping over dirty needles and fiddling with cornerless baggies.

Anyway, a wee deposit in the old karma bank never hurts. I feel good about Al and that’s worth more than a few eggs — even if they throw in some bacon and twenty bucks.

14 days ago

A Good Man

A little while back I was at the corner store buying something or other — I was drinking hard at the time so it could have been damn near anything — and noticed a homeless dude lurking near the entrance. This guy wasn’t one of the borderline; maybe homeless, maybe mentally ill or maybe just really dirty. He could have been in a movie. Mismatched gloves, three coats and the hem of a second pair of jeans sticking out from beneath the first over a pair of worn boots held together with duct tape.

I am not without empathy but there are just too many people in need and I dread the inevitable, “Got any change, a cigarette, an extra pair of socks, scrap metal?”

Click image to enlarge.

But he didn’t ask for anything. He just nodded a good morning and smiled. I bought whatever it was I was buying and got a couple of dollar scratch-off tickets. I ended up giving him one on my way out — just because he didn’t ask.

I headed up the block towards the park, which is a park only by the loosest definition. This is not a place children place. Jerry Burell park is more a twenty-four seven flea market of vice. You can buy anything there: drugs, guns, women, men who want you to think they are women. You can rent a stolen car for a small rock or buy an iPod for a few more. There are swings but they don’t have seats. There is a water fountain that the city won’t replace because, as they put it, water fountains are expensive and they never last more than a few days. There is a shack that may, or may not, have bathrooms in it. Nobody knows since the door hasn’t been opened in a decade and is actually welded shut. The ground, under the slide is littered with little square baggies — each representing a missed school lunch, an unpaid utility bill or a victim. All the baggies are torn on one side and inside out. A wasted day, or life, is of little consequence but God forbid the most minuscule particle of dope should go to waste.

This is a park I like to avoid. Three daylight shootings in less than a year tend to get my attention and it isn’t as though our local gangbangers are particularly good shots. Although I lived on the block and was fairly well known, liked even, I see no reason to tempt fate. So the last thing I want to hear, passing the ‘pavilion’, are rapid footsteps coming up behind me. It makes me nervous.

Seeing it was my homeless buddy, I relaxed a little. I figured I could handle someone who hadn’t eaten more than a Little Debbie or two or slept for more than a few hours at a stretch in a week. Nonetheless, I checked his hands but only saw paper. As it turns out, the lottery ticket had hit for twenty bucks and he wanted to give me half.

Looking back, with somewhat clearer vision, it dawns on me that I want what this guy, someone that people cross the street to avoid or step over without a thought had. Integrity.

And no, I didn’t take the money but sure wished I had when I ran out of booze a few hours later.

78 days ago

Ten Years After

Raymond Carver was sober for the last ten years of his life.

Gravy
No other word will do. For that’s what is was. Gravy
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

79 days ago

Blech

For a brief period of time, say about twenty minutes, I decided that I would use this site to chronicle my recovery. I could help others, while helping myself. Maybe even save a life or, at the very least, impress the hell out of my primary counselor. I could sit here behind my keyboard, buried, like any good doper in overflowing ashtrays, half drunk cups of coffee and Leonard Cohen cd’s — it’s not unheard of for there to be a cigarette floating in a Dunkin Donuts cup on a Leonard Cohen cd — and dispense pearls of wisdom overheard between naps in any of the dozen or so meetings I attend every week.

That’s not gonna happen.

Between therapy, meetings and hanging out with my new sober buddies I do not lack for outlets. There is even a chance that some of these people are actually interested. However, recovery is a lot like addiction. You either have it or you don’t and f you don’t, you don’t care. If you do, you probably want to read about it here as much as I want to write about it.

Anyway, it’s not like there is a shortage of these things. A Google search for “alcoholic blogs” returns hundreds mixed in among an equal number of cocktail recipe sites. In all honesty, the mixology sites are much more interesting and even offer useful information — more than I can say about the sappy gibberish on the others.

I have a better idea. I’m going to start a site, rehab-reviews or something, were we can rate the various rehabilitation facilities popping up everywhere. Something for addicts, by addicts where we can discuss the important stuff: male to female ratios, smoking policies, food. You know, the little details that separate rehab from prison.

It’s those details that matter. Any rehab can educate you, as if it matters what receptor does what, and every aftercare plan is the same in the end — don’t use and go to meetings.

Since in the end it’s all the same, why not make the journey as comfortable as possible? I figure we’ll use little martini glasses instead of stars for the ratings. The clinicians will love it.

90 days ago

We admitted...

They — I’m not sure who exactly “they” are, but there sure are a lot of them — say that we should write about what we know.

It has dawned on me that I don’t know half as much as I thought I did. What I do know is how to drink and drug. One of the many things I don’t know is how to live a substance free life — but I’m learning and you get to watch.

They say that we should practice rigorous honesty in all our affairs.

Addict that I am, I figure if telling a small group is a good thing, then telling the entire Internet is a better thing.

Just not today. But soon.

115 days ago