This Action Can't Be Undone!
I am sitting in my room practicing the art of not drinking. It's kind of like a chore. Something that takes focus and mindfulness and requires effort.
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My 3 AM playground
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I just got back from the store, where I only bought a nicotine vape.
I decided to just not get "the first beer of the night" as the sun was going down; to just say "no."
This is a decision that I am capable of making when I'm sober.
The deliberations over whether or not to get a second beer are something that I cannot put in the hands of myself with one beer already in me. I have learned to not trust that guy as far as I can throw him.
Admittedly, I have a strong urge to try to drink the memory of yesterday off my mind. To become insensitive to the feelings of guilt and shame that I have over what a waste of time and money and energy and brain cells that was occasioned.
I don't even want to blog about it.
This is due to something that the Alcoholics Anonymous folks surely have a term for -when you wake up hung over and loathing yourself so much in the morning that you just want to drink it all into oblivion. To buttress yourself in preparation to go out and face a world that you may have made a fool of yourself in the previous day.
There was an empty bottle of Smirnov "Screwdriver" concoction laying on a chair right by my bed. That must have been the second one of them that I had, which I was still working on when I got back in after a long slow bike ride that I had taken at about 3 AM.
The ride took me a couple times around a giant loop, probably a mile in length.
On one end was the Shell station. That was my first stop, for a 24 ounce can of Dos Equis beer.
With that in hand, I lazily rode along the sidewalk that cuts through an elongated park, which is the "neutral ground" between the two lanes of what, for the time being is named, Jeff Davis Street.
I passed the statue of some guy which is either made from a greenish-black metal or from copper that hasn't been polished in ages. He stands there, holding something that looks like a document, wearing a vivid white cap of pigeon shit which runs down and obliterates his face.
The guy, most certainly, never owned a slave or was ever overheard to utter anything even remotely racist, because there he is, still standing. It may even be the statue of a black man, hence the color of the metal used.
Not so for the next display, about 200 feet further along on that street which there has been talk about renaming from Jeff Davis Street to...I don't know...BLM Boulevard?
That statue is now an effigy of a man with his face planted in the mud, with "BLM" spray-painted on the recently exposed base. It could be a statue of the football great Knute Rockney, depicting him diving head first into the end zone to win the 1924 championship, perhaps.
Pedaling and sipping Dos Equis I went, trying to do some soul searching and noticing that mine was the only one in sight.
There was no traffic on the offensively named street, nobody jogging or walking dogs; no kids playing on the swing set/slide/tunnel Jungle Gym contraption (at three in the morning) which was the next thing I passed before the volley ball net and then; another toppled statue.
I rode all the way down to Bayou St. John, where I once used to shoot videos of myself playing outdoors, reminding me of how much the dynamics of my life have been altered over the past few weeks of debauchery.
As I was preparing to loop back in the other direction, the Dos Equis had run out and, too embarrassed to go back to the Shell for another one, I went into the Ideal store and got the first Smirnov Screwdriver at 3 bucks for a 24 ounce bottle.
The stuff is pretty delicious, as it has real orange juice in it, and, where else is a lush going to get his daily dose of vitamin C?
By then, I was just trying to knock myself out, I believe. Something like suicide lite. I wanted to wobble into my apartment and flop onto the bed and then wake up with no memory of the day I was living; that would have been nice.
But the eeriness of being the only person on earth apparently and the stillness that had fallen upon the whole city made for what should have been a very pleasurable ride, and so I made the conscious decision to be happy. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said something like that people are about as happy as they choose to be.
The Smirnov was almost gone by the time my snail's pace had brought me back to the Shell station that I was still too embarrassed to go back into, so I went across the street to The Brown Derby and got another one, and a Zebra Cake to give to the lady security guard at the front desk of Sacred Heart -a Zebra Cake that is now sitting on top of my refrigerator because, after I got back, I forgot I had it, and walked right past her.
I'm normally not so shy about going into the same store 4 times a night, even though I know it makes me look like I have a problem of some sort, but I was feeling the paranoia and low self esteem of coming down off a hit of crack, which my sangria drinking self had been kind of tricked into getting.
My "friend" Bobby in Building C is living proof of the adage "There's always someone worse off than you" and, while I was riding back from The Fresh Market with a pork roast and a bottle of sangria, which I was enjoying, while telling myself that "this has got to stop soon" he was struggling with his own demons, telling them the same thing.
I got back home and put the pork roast in the oven, then continued sipping the sangria and, about the time I began to smell the meat cooking, decided that I was going to try to get some of the weed that Bobby usually has. I even thought that, going back to being a pot smoking musician and kratom sipping blogger would be a welcome change from being an alcohol drinking good for nothing.
So, I knocked on Bobby's door and he let me in and I gave him a sip of sangria and then asked him if he had any weed he could sell me. I envisioned maybe getting a guitar solo recorded or something. I have a few hours of my own music that needs to be catalogued and eventually worked on, with some pieces needing guitar solos, and others having instrumental sections that were well played and can be repeated in order to replace the not so well played sections. I figured I could still be productive after a bottle of sangria and a bowl of weed.
Bobby was out of weed. This should have been a red flag. Another flag should have been the fact that he was watching free over-the-air TV, rather than one of the 555 or so channels that he used to pay 89 bucks a month to get. These clues were not as blatant as if he were sitting there in the dark, using a candle to go to the bathroom, type of thing, but they were there.
"How much are you looking to get?" he asked.
"20 bucks, I guess; but I don't want any of that "fire" or that "gas" that comes at 20 bucks a gram, I prefer Reggie" I told him. Reggie is a nickname for "regular" weed -nothing wrong with that, it's what stoners have been smoking since the sixties, before all of this "medicinal grade" genetically altered super weed came along in the past ten years.
Bobby grabbed his phone and called a guy. "Twenty," he told him.
I looked like we were in luck because the guy said he was just five minutes away.
We went outside the building, with me just about having drained the sangria bottle.
Around the corner we walked, and there was the crack dealer guy, in his brown truck. Bobby had done a bait and switch kind of thing on me.
My first impulse was to feel a bit of outrage over what Bobby had pulled.
I was about to tell the guy to forget it, that I had been trying to get weed and there had been a misunderstanding.
This would have been confrontational, but certainly would have been the right thing to do. It would have been one of those "sometimes you just have to put your foot down" situations.
Sure the dealer would be mad at Bobby because he'd had to waste his time and gas to drive over for nothing. But, whose fault would that have been? It might taint his relationship with Bobby, and make it harder for him to get the guy to show up next time, like the boy who cried "wolf."
And Bobby probably would have been ready to cry, and maybe even begged me to get the dope, promising to pay me back, whatever.
The fact that he had done the bait and switch type thing was an indicator of just how messed up on the stuff he must have been getting over the past weeks, and where the money that didn't go to the cable company, or his weed guy, had gone -while I had been kicking myself over the 4 dollar bottles of wine...
There's always someone worse off than you...care to join him?
If I hadn't drank a whole bottle of sangria, I most certainly would have chastised Bobby and told the guy in the brown truck "I'm sorry you had to drive over here for nothing, but I was just trying to get a little bit of bud to smoke.
So, the 4 dollars I was kicking myself over spending on the sangria became marginalized as I handed the guy 20 bucks and then had to race to keep up with Bobby as he made a bee-line for wherever he keeps his pipe.
And the 4 dollars is just the tip of the iceberg; the real cost comes with me acquiring the "What the hell, maybe just this once" attitude that sits at the bottom of the sangria bottle.
And Bobby knew this, and was banking on it. He had actually given me ample time to gulp the thing down before asking me "So how much "weed" are you looking for?" before he made the call to the guy.
When I say Bobby I am, of course, referring to the demon that was possessing Bobby's body.
Bobby was doing the Leslie Thompson thing of not really listening to what I was saying as I sipped sangria and talked about things.
Thompson used to walk along side of me and mechanically interject "Really?" after just about everything I said. All of his CPU power was at work on the problem of "how can I get alcohol into me?" So, he wouldn't be able to "really" pay attention to whatever I was saying. I caught on to this one chilly morning when we were walking along and we came around the corner to have the just risen sun shining in our faces. Hopeful that it would then start warming up, I said "Cool, the sun is up!"
To which Thompson actually rejoined: "Really?"
That pissed me off and I hated him at that point.
"Yeah, Leslie, that big bright thing in the sky right in front of us, that's the sun! (you moron).
And so, Bobby, with all of his CPU power at work on the problem: "How can I get more crack?" was doing his own version of that. If he gleaned that I had just made made an assertion with what he was only one quarter listening to, he would say: "Absolutely," or "You're right, Daniel; 100% right."
And then, once his epiphany came, he came back to earth, ready to grab his phone and ask me how much "weed" I was trying to get.
That kind of behavior should be punished, not rewarded.
It was actually the same ploy. Leslie knew that I was an alcoholic; I just wasn't as bad as him; who wanted whiskey at six in the morning. I started drinking when the sun went down. But, Leslie knew I had made money the night before, because I had counted it at his place, where I was crashing for a while, until he became "really" annoying.
He became my shadow, after I went out before sunup to get an energy drink and maybe cigarettes or whatever.
He matched me step for step, interjecting things like "M & M Store is open now" which, I guess, he figured would send me into a headlong dash for the place and a breakfast of cheap whiskey.
I thought that he was going to just follow me around all day until such a point that I broke down and started drinking. He was the one who busked with me a few times, playing harmonica, and who looked in the tip basket and said something like: "How much we got; what can we get?" with the implication that it was all going to be spent on booze; if we had just enough for a gallon of whiskey, then whew, we just made; with a few cents to spare, yes, success! No food, cigarettes, energy drinks, guitar strings, or even toilet paper -those things can all be worked out somehow, now that the main issue had been addressed.
Funny how my disdain for Leslie Thompson has awakened from a long slumber now that I am wrestling with the demon of alcohol again. It's kind of like how I start cussing out beggars and skeezers as soon as my money starts running low. Rather than politely tell them I was broke, I would be more prone to angrily say: "I don't have shit for you! Beg off!"
Even an amateur psychologist would probably say that I'm "projecting" their situation upon myself; fearful that I might ever have to beg, and that their mendicancy might be contagious. Or maybe making them the scapegoats over my financial woes.
A similar thing happened in St. Augustine, Florida during the great Obama recession of 2009, when business after business were going under, with "for lease" signs in more windows than "Open" signs.
As soon as certain stores began to flounder, as a precursor to their open signs being replaced by for lease ones, they would often come out and angrily decry whatever busker was playing in front of the place, as if the homeless busker is an apparition in the style of Dicken's ghosts of Christmas' past and present, hovering in front of the place, getting money thrown into their baskets, as a taunt to them and a harbinger of their impending inclusion among the ranks of the homeless.
They would lash out. Even Mr. Joejangles, the one man band, who was a delight to children and often had large groups of them around him was run off by the owners of a store that made (wait for it.....) toys; out of wood.
"I guess she was jealous because my crate was half full of money, and they're in the middle of a going out of business sale..." said Mr. J. He figured that they would want him there, because all the children had to do was look 50 feet to their left to see wooden toys on display and for sale.
But, deleting this blog would be something like wiping a large part of myself out of existence. It might be a positive move towards living in the present moment and subverting my ego.
There is the double edged sword of the fact that, should I start to live a life that I'm ashamed of, then the blog will become less and less of a diary (but maybe I could just focus upon telling stories from the past).
There is thus, an issue of accountability. If I know that I am going to have to blog about my life, then that might be enough to keep me from engaging in certain sins. If I thought that I could never post about smoking a hit of crack, then this page would be blank, and another day would go by without a post.
And there is the Alex In California effect.
Alex in California used to be a steady reader of this blog, and would generally make useful comments. But, having such a steady reader soon led to my blogging sometimes feeling like writing to a pen pal. Or, to having an imaginary Alex looking over my shoulder as I type.
And, the guy started to hit the bottle himself and became a cantankerous, cynical and just plain negative presence. I even thought about blocking him using that particular function in Blogger; but ultimately decided to set a goal of getting a positive comment from him as a way to motivate myself.
This would work if I were to continue to study my Tommy Emmanuel guitar method book and say, a year from now be able to play a Chet Atkins piece pretty well. I might get a "wow, I'm impressed dude" out of him.
But, at some point he pigeon-holed me and continued to make comments like "It's because you're a dirty, smelly crusty bum" even after I had moved into my apartment 2 years prior and take a shower in the morning and put on clean clothes before leaving the house. There has to be another term for that, but it is basically the unwillingness to let a certain impression go of a person.
I thought about starting another anonymous blog, with a nom de plume and a fictitious address, thinking that would free me up to relate stuff at a level that is perhaps more genuine, hiding behind the smokescreen of anonymity. Something about that idea appeals to me. Especially when it comes to writing about people without changing their names to protect their identity, or whatever novelists attest on their page that includes "any resemblance to any person either living or dead is coincidental" type of thing.
Along with racking up 1,388 days without alcohol, I guess I can now close the books on something like 12 years without touching crack, as of the crack of midnight last night.
It was just as I had remembered. Bobby and I each took a hit and I was actually able to dwell in the land of the imagination and sat there daydreaming about outrageous things. But as soon as the hit starts to wear off, it is like a switch is shut off in the brain and there is no point in trying to get high again. Not unless you come down enough to fall asleep for at least a few hours, eat a decent meal and then take another hit.
One of the tricks to it is that I am able to remember how I felt when I was high and kind of relive it to a degree; while with other people it is like waking up from a dream and totally forgetting it along with any pleasant feelings associated with it. It's like I am able to watch a movie and then, at a later time remember it enough to replay it in my mind and enjoy it all over again.
You just have to, ironically, be in the present moment and to realize that once the roller coaster stops, you have to get off. You can think about how fun it was and talk about it; but you can't get back on and ride again.
Another reason I think I was able to go 12 years without smoking any was I kept a spiritual perspective on things, and after I took a hit of some good stuff I would thank God, as per the bible verse which states something like: "In all things give thanks and praise to God." Maybe God was able to take me by the hand and walk me out of the abyss.
Another guy I knew back in 2007 had said "Oh, no that's wrong" after I said something like "Thank you, Jesus" after I blew out a hit. I guess he was trying to hide from God and smoke behind his back and stray from him. He wasn't able to quit for 12 years, and was in pretty bad shape when I encountered him a few years later; deathly looking, as a matter of fact.
The 2007 crack escapades (which started after a guy who I used to get a nickel of weed from every afternoon after I got off work at the labor pool and cashed my check handed me a piece of crack as collateral because he needed me to give him the 5 bucks and then go off somewhere to get the weed and come back.
"Here, this is a ten dollar rock; so you know I'm coming back..."
I waited about 20 minutes while the scene around me became sketchier by the minute with other labor pool employees having already smoked their whole paycheck and become more predatory in nature.
I decided to just keep the ten dollar rock and I went back to my campsite and smoked it in my tent and it was just OK, and I went back to my nickel of weed and bottle of wine the very next day. That lasted for about 2 weeks when something else occurred and some crack fell into my hands.
I then became a 10 dollar a night crackhead; but I knew how to conclude that the roller coaster had stopped and be able to walk it off, get involved in some other activity and forget about it; certainly to forget about even considering hopping on my bike and riding 4 miles to crack town to get more. I had to be up at 5 in the morning and do heavy labor in the hot sun.
But, insidious as the stuff is, it eventually wormed its way into my life and at one point, when I had a job that paid me 380 bucks a week in cash (seventeen twenty dollar rocks, if you're keeping score) I was starting to become and addict.
Well, it's about a quarter to three in the morning and I have managed 24 hours without drinking. I shudder to think of what Bobby is going through over at his place right now. He knows that I still have the lion's share of the unemployment pandemic assistance money on my bank card, and to his credit has not been trying to push more crack on me.
He probably half thought that I was going to knock on his door asking him if we could get more. "Absolutely, certainly, 100%, Daniel, come right on in!"
I could post up a quote here once I find it, out of the book called "Deal" which was written about 4 years ago by Billy Kreutzman, one of the drummers from the Grateful Dead.
He basically derogated heroin and crack as being "unmusical" drugs. This has always been the measuring stick that I use against anything I put in my body.
If it's not helping my music, then out the door it goes. This happens at the subconscious level and I don't even have to make an effort to quit whatever it is.
Pot and LSD, Billy praised as being "musical" drugs.
And I suppose alcohol straddles the fence a bit. I might fall into the category of "deceptively musical" as it makes you think you are playing/sounding better than you really are. Or maybe a little bit is musical, but over a certain limit is unmusical.
I would love to drop acid and record a whole album's worth of material, maybe doing it one weekend at a time the way the Beatles did the song "I Am The Walrus," which, I forget which band member said, was done over 4 consecutive weekends, and on which can be heard the fruits of 4 separate acid trips.
It must be weird and interesting to be adding to tracks that you recorded while tripping, while tripping.
Then, there is the option of recording music as sober as can be with only spring water and apple juice and kale in your system *crickets chirping*
I want to come back and dress this post up a bit, adding headings and photos and maybe the direct quotation from Billy Kreutzman...
But it has been 24 hours and I think I will sneak down to the Shell for just one Smirnov Screwdriver...
I guess tomorrow's post will reveal if that was a smart idea. I want to come back and listen to a folder of "protest songs" that I downloaded, using a list of the top 20 of them, out of last month's Rolling Stone magazine. A left wing anarchist Marxist, brazenly never Trump publication, just as bad as The Atlantic, if I ever read one.
But, I only like Trump because everyone hates him, especially when I am having a bad day and hating everyone.
We have had incredibly despicable politicians in office, going back to at least the second Bush and coming to a boiling point with Hillary Clinton who basically would say whatever she had to say to "the American people" and then would go back to being "crooked Hillary" once the suckers' votes had been counted, and she was in. At least the women were smart enough to not just vote for her indiscriminately because they wanted to see a woman president in their lifetimes; unlike Barrack Hussein Obama, who was voted for, indiscriminately by every black person with the ability to put an X in a box...
Well, I have a date to keep with Ivanovich Smirnov....
