I'm incomplete without my stupid little notes app poems. I used to be incomplete without a needle full of dope, but I reverted to writing when I got sober probably because I’ve been loving this shit since well before I was fully grown. I was penning numerous awful and derivative poems on LiveJournal when I was 14 years old. Imagining myself without a blue light blaring screen to enter keystrokes into is like imagining Bukowski without a blue '67 Volks. It’s like imagining the ostentatious Hunter S. Thompson without a hit of acid dissolving on his tongue behind the mouthpiece of a baroque cigarette holder. It’s like visualizing Thoreau without the precious solitude he lauded as he wistfully wandered around the eponymous Walden Pond while pondering our place in the ecology of the forest. Or if we even had one. Perhaps a more appropriate roster of indispensables would be the writing instruments available in the era they’re from. It’s my good fortune that the parchment of my time is a document on the monitor of my laptop. That's because if I did not have the option to cut, copy, and paste everything I punch up, I'd be spending most of my time correcting simple mistakes—just being honest. And I am not dropping 144 dollars a year on Grammarly Premium while I'm still under the influence of my indigent and starving artist economics, so do not get me started. At 18 months old I took up the role of my own pedagogue and taught myself to read all the letters of the alphabet, so it's safe to say my aptitude was apparent at a stage not far past post-embryonic. There seem to be certain abilities and gifts that are given to us as guideposts to the godhead of the One Consciousness along with the option to foster them or brush them off. Certain prodigious talents, when properly practiced, can transform their ability to perform their particular art well enough to become a conduit for the constant Creative Initiative of God. Or they can fall down a hole of fucking it all off not unlike the one I crawled out of. The specific creative activities that put someone into a transcendental state while they’re hammering away at it often become a large part of who they believe they are regardless of whether or not it’s false. Once you combine your concept of self with your actualized natural ability, one without the other seems lesser for it conceptually. In my case, that skill is rappy-tap-tapping on the keyboard of a smartphone or a laptop. I use an iPhone or a MacBook Pro like a transducer to pour my soul out into a long-term digital heartprint that’s well into the process of becoming my epitaph when I'm gone. They're just some regular old Apple products—AKA shameful monuments to the factory worker exploitation lining technocrats’ pockets—otherwise.
For reasons that remain a mystery to me, I need to write things down. Type it out. It helps me to feel a connection to the Source of Consciousness. I've found that nothing short of hard drugs will even begin to take the edge off of being disconnected from it, and even that can only be a temporary salve. Opioid addiction will efficiently obscure your core wounds, but while it’s accomplishing that it’s concurrently digging its meathooks into your heart. That’s how I spent 18 years of my life because I was a self-hating coward. I feel like a dinosaur in this regard because pressing pause on your destiny with a Percocet problem that progresses into shooting up tar and surviving it for almost a couple of decades is a thing of the past. We’ve opened Pandora’s box on Fentanyl and all its analogs, and here we all are. Except some of us aren’t, because they took the wrong shit at the wrong party. It’s obvious that longevity is not what being a hard drug abuser is about, but in 2022 any soft or moderate drug you take might have a fatal overdose waiting for you on the other side. I had a fentanyl overdose in 2015 while sitting in my car in a CVS parking lot off Carrolton and St. Charles and thankfully I survived. Everyone who wants to party has to carry around Narcan in their purse or their pockets all the time. It's become fairly sketchy to just be a regular young adult who recreationally uses drugs, much less someone so strung out they need a hit to pry their body off the bed in the wee hours of the morning when they wake up in withdrawal. Dealing with the daily dope sweat and the ever-present threat of instant death isn't the half of it when it comes to the misery of being strung out, honestly. The amount of suffering that goes into surviving years of opioid addiction produces such a piss-poor quality of life that the norm becomes always being at least some level of suicidal. You become antagonistic at worst and apathetic at best towards your survival. In the 00s and 90s, it was the most common thing in the world for a hapless redneck like myself to get their soul sucked dry by oxy addiction provided by Purdue Pharmaceutical.
For addicts who are as bad off as I was (hopelessly addicted to shooting up hard drugs and hard-headed as a motherfucker), I'm not aware of many ways to stop getting fucked up. In my case, it was being brought so close to death that I had some sort of transcendental experience that opened my third eye—but just shy of the proximity that would've made me physically die. I know there are methods to achieve sobriety outside of the 12 steps developed by Alcoholics Anonymous, but I have no idea what they’re like. They probably have varying degrees of merit, but I don't know which ones are worth the average addict’s time. I can't speak to the efficacy of anything like a shaman-guided ayahuasca trip in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, for example. Not that I'm against people trying it, or anything else if it will have some lasting benefit. I don’t care about what path an addict or alcoholic takes to rid themselves of their unresolved trauma and toxic resentments. I don’t even expect any of us to do the work to recover, no offense. I’m a junkie degenerate myself, so I have the pass to be brutally honest. What I expect addicts to do is be selfish assholes until we die, or life forces us to work through it.
I can speak to how the 12 steps did the lion’s share of transforming my perspective on life and freeing me from addiction. I also have a small amount of experience successfully using LSD as a tool of recovery, but that’s a pretty old AA tradition. Bill Wilson was tripping on acid four years before Timothy Leary got his hands on some. The first out of two times I've taken LSD since I quit everything, I was around two or three years into recovery. I was also on the wrong end of a pandemic and in the midst of nationwide riots, looting, and general property destruction. Oddly enough, in comparison to what I had going subconsciously, all the outside calamity almost wasn’t even bothersome. My trauma drove me to isolate myself, so that made quarantine feel practically comfortable. Wearing a mask all the time meant I could leave my gloom face on in public. I was happy to never have to interact with people in my daily life—even though deep down I knew it wasn’t right—and happier to march against some racist cops and a failure of a government. Even if certain aspects like the isolation were maladaptive, I didn’t realize that until the quarantine taught me, because it brought to light the extent to which my behavior was dictated by my trauma responses. It turned out the extent was a lot. Regardless, that still wasn’t even my main problem. The trauma was one thing, but there was this mild, but consistent depression that had persisted intermittently throughout my entire recovery process. There was this omnipresent feeling of having to walk through water to get anything accomplished. I had maybe two or three errands worth of effort in me a day at my best. I had no spoons in my silverware drawer if you follow me. I was resistant to the idea of any kind of medication, so when an internet friend offered to send me five hits of acid as a token of gratitude for a fifty-dollar donation to a Black Lives Matter organization they were promoting on Instagram I decided to accept. The story of the trip is another subject entirely, but suffice to say that I attempted to use psychedelics to address some specific emotional issues instead of just seeing them as another opportunity to trip balls. The peak of the experience was terrifying, but overall I discovered it was an entirely different experience that was quite positive. It left me feeling compassionate towards humankind and very connected, even if I was a little depressed for a while after experiencing ego death.
People get quite touchy about this topic—sometimes at a level that is bordering on psychotic—so I want to offer a disclaimer before anyone’s britches get to burning over a personal story I’m telling. I'm not suggesting anyone with a drug or alcohol problem follow my lead with either the 12-step shit or the psychedelics. I’m only telling the tale of how I was stuck in my slippery snake pit of suicidal self-destruction, and what I did to claw my way out of that personal hell. I'm freely sharing some of what I was shown how to do by a wise old-timer from the Mississippi Delta. My sponsor's name was Bub, and his sobriety was older than I was. He taught me some things about being a decent human being that I probably should have picked up in elementary. He also taught me that my problem wasn't even hard drugs or alcohol. When he first posited the prospect of me being the architect of my own misery that seemed like a bizarre proposition. It was totally accurate, I just couldn’t see it because my vision was cloudy. He told me substance abuse is a symptom of a type of soul sickness. He took me through the 12 steps, and after all that internal work I was different.
Step 11 suggested meditation, so I looked into it. After I started practicing the changes in my perception were subtle, but positive. Additionally, it mysteriously deposits little bits of knowledge into my skull about the nature of reality now and again. If you spend enough time away from the analytical thinking mind, you’re likely to come in contact with the seat of all consciousness. It's beyond space and time; beyond right and wrong. It's where all creative energy is born. It's where these words you're reading came from. It's the source of the ebb and flow of the entire cosmos, and after a goddamn lifetime of unnecessary hardship, I finally realized that a connection to that Great Lightbulb is indispensable for any kind of lasting peace in my heart. I believe that our overarching connection to consciousness at large is inherent to our well-being as a small part of it all. And for myself, if I stray away from it for too long, I have a tendency to stick a needle in my arm.
The reality of the damage they’ve wrought is hidden from all the addicts still on a trauma-ridden path reminiscent of the one I was on. A drug addict is an extreme version of the perennially dissatisfied customer capitalist society fosters in all of us. Discontentment is the energy evil empires run on. The object of desire doesn't have to be Adderall— it could be shoplifting, sex, or serial monogamy. The materialism enthusiast that has bought the big lie is just another mark for the economy. The type of person to need a logo for self-confidence ends up being owned by their own objects. TikTok starlets get played by seeking titillation through repeatedly engaging in escapism and always finding it's not enough to make them feel like they exist or even want to. I just shrug it off, because what else am I supposed to do? Opioid addicts would rather devolve into a goblin than face that knot in their throat that was there before they even started. I empathize, obviously. I was a using junkie running from their past most of my life, that’s how I know they walk a withering path that’s actually just an alley littered with dead dreams, dirty insulin syringes, and empty liquor bottles. Heroin addicts are one of the more outlandish types of existential pain relief seekers because the havoc their addictions wreak is so ostensibly awful. If junkies sustain their street opioid-dependent state long enough they eventually become hollow pockmarked sycophants of the false idols of psychoactive toxins. I've been an acolyte for brown powder; I know what it feels like, and what it's all about. I was a suicidal cosmic nihilist knocking on death's bedroom window and looking for a fuck when I walked into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous—and I've seen others tell much worse stories—so regardless of the darkness before the dawn I know you can recover from some pretty awful places that most people would write you off from.
Having done the 12 steps myself, I can report that they were a solid entry point into my journey of generating a sense of contentment that isn't contingent upon the circumstances of my life. They helped me to start looking within for the lack I'd always externalized. They continue to work for me, though that claim comes with the obvious caveat that they're utilized properly and often. As far as taking other people's inventory, I’m not a recovery Nazi. If you achieve the same result through some other system of self-discovery, I'll be the first one to cheer you on. The only thing I'd like to impress upon you is this: If you want to sober up for any appreciable length of time, you're going to need to make some kind of decision to look inside yourself with a fearlessness that's the antithesis of your entire hedonistic persona thus far. Any method that doesn't include a healthy dose of that is unlikely to stand the test of time. One thing I've learned about emotional suffering is that when it hurts really bad, what you don't do is think about it. You just watch the pain take over your body like some kind of cancer. No matter how boring or uncomfortable it gets, ask it why it's there and stay with that motherfucker until you get an answer. You have to have the tenacity of me when I watched entire seasons of Rock of Love with Brett Michaels just to confirm whether or not he's bald under that goofy ass combo of a cowboy hat and bandanna.
Once I sobered up, my head became less cloudy, but every gift in this dimension is also a curse—it's fucking obnoxious. Expelling that noxious narcotic fog revealed the mountaintops of all the trauma I'd spent my entire adult life trying to stuff deep down inside my subconscious. It's fairly excruciating as a newcomer in recovery because your whole psyche feels like an exposed nerve that a slight breeze would easily set off. But eventually, you come to terms with the concept of making the lifestyle choice of no longer running from your problems. Recovery is a lifelong process but it's one of the few pursuits in life I've found that doesn't stop producing rewards. It's less about pleasure and more about feeling sturdy and strong like a mountain. You'll grow to like being stoic after you readily weather a couple of storms that once would have Big Bad Wolfed that ass and blown the straw house of your peace of mind down. After a little practice, facing the good, bad, and the ugly makes the pain of it all much more bearable than when you were running away somehow. I'm not entirely sure how it works, only that effect it's had on me over the last 4 years is profound.
It's different for everyone how much suffering has to go down before you stop trying to run and hide, and break on through to the other side of long-term sobriety. A lot of people die before they can give it all up. All I know is in 2018 I'd had enough. I'd paid all my fucking dues, and I was done. Even though the idea of me having paid all my dues before I would lose parts of my skeleton to the fallout from alcohol abuse is a fucking joke, that isn’t the point. I’m indicating I was ready to endure literally anything, even death, rather than another step in the same direction I was going. One of the fruits of that excruciating inward journey was the eruption of my creative fountain. After about 6 months, I was having ideas for things like poems, memes, and any kind of phone-accessible digital art. The ideas were flowing nonstop. Eventually, I had to start an Instagram page to keep up with them all. The dopamine feedback loop Instagram established in my mind influenced me to value validation from a digital audience by locking on to my amygdala like a gold-digger on a rich widower at a fundraising gala. Now I'm fucking addicted to garnering little cartoon hearts by tapping away on a small rectangular object, but that's another topic.
Fucking poetry man, striking truth square on the jaw at every turn of phrase. Thank you for putting your gifts out here, can’t get enough.
Yes. Keep writing, please.