One Hundred and Twenty Days

In a room

By myself

Looks like I'm here with a guy I judge worse than anyone else.

So I pace

and I pray

And I repeat the mantras that might keep me clean for the day.

- Jason Isbell

The College Town Revisited

There are places I remember

Though some have changed

All these places have their moments

Of lovers and friends I still can recall

Sweet Ann Arbor. How you've shaped my life. 

This week, which annually must be one of the most forgettable chunks of time on the calendar nationwide, found me back in Ann Arbor. My aunt and uncle, both University of Michigan employees, are paying for me to house-sit at their place on the outskirts of Ann Arbor this week, though unbeknownst to them I probably would've done it for free because of what this city means to me.

I took a stroll through the old stomping grounds this evening. Through the diag and under the collegial ivory towers where I sat through poetry discussions and environmental science seminars. Down South University past the pubs looking like warm respites from the winter air, the very pubs that we went to when we were looking to celebrate, looking to get lucky, looking to forget a loss, looking to pass the time for lack of an alternative, or looking for nothing in particular at all. Into the student housing district, where select houses remind me of particular faces, particularly memorable parties, particular bedrooms of girlfriends I used to know.

As I took tally on the years that had passed since I called Ann Arbor home, something profoundly scary occurred to me: nearly four years have passed since I graduated in Michigan Stadium that spring of aught ten. In even more frightening terms, that means that I would be a senior preparing to graduate had I started all over again after graduation. Yikes. 

But I've finally come to peace with that fact. In the four years since graduating, I had a much more difficult time letting go of Ann Arbor and college than most of the people I graduated with did. When I went to law school the Fall after graduating, I was more stuck on the loss of old friends than I was intent on making any new ones. I took the eastbound Amtrak train from Chicago to Ann Arbor on a monthly basis, to visit the girlfriend, to see a football game, to go pretend I was still in college with old roommates who were in fact still in college. Rather than embracing Chicago, I spent a lot of time living in the past, living in the Ann Arbor of yesteryear.

When I moved back to Ann Arbor the following Fall, the monthly attempts to recreate college became an everyday way of life. Devastated by heartbreak, I hung out with a lot of kids who were still in college and took on the drinking habits of a college student accordingly. Try as I might, rekindling college never quite materialized. In retrospect, it was kind of pathetic. While my old roommates from college had all taken the next step, I was drinking cheap vodka with college students, hanging out at college parties, and hitting on sorority girls who were in high school during my own college years. The third post-college year was perhaps the worst of them all; I would often drive to Ann Arbor, physically and mentally decimated from another bout with the booze, just to walk around and wallow in my own self-pity and a serious case of unhealthy nostalgia.

Over the past year I've largely avoided Ann Arbor entirely. I guess it's the same as an ex-girlfriend: in order to get over it you need a clean break. I had to rebuild my life without the prospect of Ann Arbor.

For the first twenty-two years of my life Ann Arbor was the driving force behind my entire existence. The only real goal I had ever had in life was to get into the University of Michigan and earn a degree from the institution from which my beloved sports teams hailed. They say that recently retired professional athletes often have incredibly difficult times adjusting to life after sports, their dreams having been realized and suddenly distant memories. It was much the same way for me. After graduating from Michigan, what was there to do? I didn't have any discernible goals after that. My life's dream had been accomplished. As a result, my life seemed utterly directionless.

As I walked around Ann Arbor tonight, though, it wasn't the past that haunted me. Rather, it was the present and future that primarily occupied my mind. Those college years will always hold a special spot in my heart of memories. But tonight, for the first time, that's all they were: memories. Ann Arbor and the collegiate years I associate with it have finally become a part of my past, and nothing more. 

Snowbound Blues

Dusk falls Friday night as another batch of snow pours from the starwealthy heavens. My dog tugs at the blanket I have buried myself away under for another sedentary weekend. Reluctantly, I emerge from my state of deep couch hibernation and toss him his drool-soaked tennis ball. He smiles a dog's smile. I wonder if he remembers yesterday at all; I wish I knew half as little as my dog.

Four deer prance through the backyard as midnight envelopes the Millwood woods in darkness. I wonder what majestic snowscapes they have seen today. I want to follow them in my wanderlust, wander off to the woods of my youth and disappear for a while. But I'm stuck inside, pining for a country road.

I bury myself in my books: Johnny Cash swallows pills by the mouthful and Jon Krakauer sits at the base of Everest camp, the peak of his dreams and one life-shattering event awaiting him up the mountain. Amphetamines and Everest sure make for a strange literary cocktail for the mind.

Sunday morning dawns bright and colorless. I rub the sand from my eyes and gaze out the window, half-expecting winter's doldrums to have melted away. But of course the trees are draped in white for as far as the eye can see, the frozen black branches drooping with icicles. From deep in the woods I make out the faint cry of the C&O train; I wonder if that old train conductor feels lonely wherever he is going. I turn on the news: another actor found dead with a needle in his arm.

And in my mind I've gone to Carolina.

100

"--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face in The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest's center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irrestistible, and now you see you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around."

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Ninety Days

90 days sober, we meet again.

I don't know, it's strange. If you would have told the collegiate version of myself that in only a couple short years I would voluntarily abstain from alcohol for ninety days, I would have scoffed at the notion - and then I probably would have cranked up the Billy Joel and poured myself another bottom shelf whiskey cola. At the same time, deep down I think I knew the day would come. On some subconscious level I always suspected that I had the soul of an alcoholic; instinctively I knew, too, there was an underlying reason that I connected on an almost spiritual level with the written word of Kerouac, Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, Malcolm Lowry, Frederick Exley, Scott Fitzgerald, et. al. I just didn't know the day would come so soon. But I guess that's the way life goes: things never turn out quite the way you planned.

The popular notion of getting clean suggests that the road is all sunshine and roses; most rehab commercials will tell you as much. Unfortunately that's a painfully inaccurate and incomplete portrait of the reality of putting down the bottle, the blow, a bottle of pills, or whatever your drug of choice happens to be. There's a long and correlatively trying period of post acute withdrawal symptoms, which I've been wrestling with these three months.

There is serenity in bits and pieces, yes. There's peace in knowing I don't need to have a bottle handy on Sunday morning to combat the utter depression wraught by the comedown of another binge. There's relief in that I don't have to suffer through another grueling spin on the haunted merry-go-round of Sunday morning coming down, leveling out in a matter of days, picking up the glass again on Friday, and then visiting the desolate Hell of withdrawal on Sunday while I curse my failures, feeling like a terminally ill shadow of a man straight out of a Van Gogh painting. There's the strange, incomprehensible satisfaction that I do in fact have something in common with the characters within the Kerouac and Hemingway books that adorn my bookshelves - that it wasn't just hero worship after all - which is really just an elaborate way of stating that there's resolution in no longer having to struggle with the issue of whether or not I am an alcoholic.

But there's also boredom by the boatload. There's the nagging knowledge that my friends are out painting the town red, or Up North partying til' dawn (as they are this weekend), or celebrating New Year's Vegas style (as they did a couple weeks ago) while I sip Diet Coke over a movie and ponder what I'm missing out on. There are acute spikes of depression, the monster that visits when the sun goes down. There's lack of identity because for so many years alcohol played a vital role in shaping my identity. There's constant physical lethargy, accompanied by the concern for when I will ever regain enough energy to finally get out and start this sober life and search for that missing identity. There's the anxiety that no woman would ever want to date a boring old teetotaler, which I know is false but fear it anyways perhaps because only a year ago I wouldn't have even considered dating one myself. There's feeling out of place - which is a dangerous feeling in recovery - at some AA meetings amongst the poor souls who have fallen much farther than I and have gone and drowned every last meaningful component of their lives in a perpetual whiskey tumbler. There's the bewitching albeit mostly baseless premonition that I've let those closest to me down. And alas, there's the one thing that haunts me most: the past, that treacherous memory of yesterday, always lurking over my shoulder like a grim reaper of yesteryear, ready to pounce at an unsuspecting moment's notice. There's fear that I will drink again, even if that's an important fear to maintain. And there's unhappiness. And there's pills for the unhappiness that never seem to work.

Self-pity aside, what matters is that today I am 90 days sober. It's the second time I've been 90 days sober in a span of nine months; it was right about this benchmark in the journey during that first go-round that I began to falter. I didn't want to be an alcoholic, thought maybe I merely needed to rearrange the puzzle pieces, convinced myself I wasn't an alcoholic. Whatever the reasoning, I drank again. And I found myself rather rapidly back in alcoholic waters, desperately treading to keep my head above those whiskey-colored waves. Today I don't need that morning shot of vodka to extinguish a bonfire of nerves. Today I don't need to take that five mile walk in a withdrawal-induced fog because it's the only thing short of a pint that would keep the anxiety at bay. Today I don't have to look at the trees along the trails of my childhood and plea to them that my soul feels physically sick - truly sick - as Kerouac did in the Northern California woods amidst a losing battle with the bottle. I needed all those things 90 days ago. I did all those things 90 days ago.

Above all else, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, always Spring life at the close of Winter's gray doldrums, ever a new dawn waiting at the end of even the darkest of nights. I see it in the faces of my role models in this journey called recovery. I see it in Brian McGrattan when he pulls on that Calgary Flames sweater and when he sits down with the Hockey Night in Canada crew afterwards to discuss without hesitation how bad things got during his own bout with alcoholism. I see it in former Drive By Truckers frontman Jason Isbell and in Southeastern, the inspired and forthcoming album he wrote after accepting his own alcoholism and getting clean. I see it in Jordin Tootoo when he steps onto the ice at the Joe, alcohol free, sober for his younger brother who couldn't get sober and took his own life. I see it in the ink on the pages of recovery memoirs, whether it be nameless addicts such as Carolyn Knapp or JR Moehringer or larger-than-life icons such as Stephen King or Johnny Cash or Christopher Kennedy. I see it in the pages of Big Sur, Under the Volcano, and Tough Guy, too - tragic written accounts of losing this battle - because they remind me which direction the other trail leads. Most palpably, I see it in the battle-tested faces of men surrounding me at AA meetings - men who have overcome grave demons to make names for themselves as lawyers and plumbers and everything in between, who have persevered to start healthy families, who have left tragedies greater than I can fathom in the past, who have fought the internal war and emerged victoriously to find happiness, at long last, that ever-elusive thing called happiness.

Tomorrow is 91 days. And I don't want to take that ninety-first day for granted this time.

On this Day in History

January 15th, 2014. Today was a boring day when quite literally nothing happened. I'm tired of those days.

Seasonal Affective Disorder: Mid-Winter Blues

It's the weary look on my dog's face as he stares down subzero temperatures outside the window, loathing the inexorable prospect of having to shit in a blizzard of cold. It's the groan of my old Chevy truck in the pre-dawn morning as it grunts in rusted agony, jaded by too many winters, knowing it is too early for such nonsense and longing for retirement hibernation in some quiet junkyard at last. It's the old familiar feeling of another date gone awry - one that like all the rest before it sounded promising during the correspondence stages but had dulled upon arrival or perhaps even before that; and it's trudging back to my car after a half-hearted goodbye - two lonesome footprints in the snow - when that loathsome familiar thought pops back into my head that maybe I already found my soul mate in life but had gone and thrown it away, leaving everything hereinafter vain, for naught. It's sitting in the dank, cold basement of a church at an AA meeting, the smell of cheap coffee and gasoline-stained dungarees wafting in the air to compose such a sad smell, wondering after all how I found myself here on a Friday night with all these tortured souls and wondering if I look just as beaten down by life as the other worn out faces around the table. It's another Saturday night, bored and restless, reading Kerouac as the weatherman on the television set tells of yet another blizzard about collapse onto the town and relating far too much to Jack's sad prose and his protagonist's longing for something more out of life. It's the thought, frightening and real, that my life has become nothing but a revolving door, that maybe as Springsteen lamented, the glory days have all passed me by. It's the deep longing for a some sort of spark, something to keep me moving forward, something to keep the rust from compiling in my winter-sick soul. It's waiting for something better.