It's Wiscpunk You Idiot

10 October 2007 –

It’s 9:13 p.m., and I just put in a dip that I wasn’t really even craving, just to stave off a potential craving later. I’m dipping less and less now, generally twice a day at work and once in the evening. I dipped a great deal more when I was smoking cigarettes. I am willing to be free of tobacco altogether now, and I no longer see that eventuality as something to dread. Those sorts of feelings come and go. I wanted a cigarette badly a few days ago. Hell, a shot of bourbon, dank nugs and some heroin sounded good at that time. That passes. In the eighteen months since I stopped drinking and doing drugs those instances have been truly rare for me. I haven’t given it much thought; I’ve always had something to do that occupied my attention and kept me focused, even if that something was one of the transient impulses that lead nowhere and spring from that same inner well of compulsion that drove my earlier, more self-destructive, choices.

All is well. All was well also when I was feeling miserable. Giving “all” my stamp of approval when the mood strikes seems a bit superfluous, actually. Perhaps I shouldn’t arrogate that sort of authority for making value judgments to my unaided mind.

My walks these past two days have become a bit more energetic, strident even. The follow-up appointments with both my doctors loom large next Wednesday, as if I should be preparing a defense. For what? To prove that I’m being a good boy now? Not quite. I simply use that as a benchmark moment, one of many to follow hopefully, against which I can measure some increment of progress towards a longer-term goal. I suppose I want to buttress my current determination with the approval and encouragement of my doctors for what I’ve been doing so far. There is less my old need for a pat on the head inherent in that so much as just plain nagging fears and doubts I have about my strength of character and ability to follow through in a stepwise, measured process toward an end. I mean, the rubber kinda hits the road here, Pancho. I may not be a new creature, but the building of some new creation is largely in my own hands and no one else’s. Trite as it may sound, this really is no dress rehearsal. I am forty-four years old, and it is likely twenty years past the time when I should be safeguarding my health against the infirmities of old age. So whether in indolence or haste, the walks will continue, I hope, for some time to come.

Cody is taking me to the State Fair tomorrow after work. We were supposed to go to a movie, but he had previously promised a friend he would go with him to the fair, and I’m tagging along. It is something of an attenuation to what I had envisioned as a date, but perhaps that is a good thing. We could use some buffers in our relations at this point. They are at best strained, despite both our protests that we still love each other very much. I assume he is still dating the DJ at the bar where he is now working, and I am, for all intents and purposes, single and available, even if I have not been aggressively so. It’s not like I haven’t had enough on my plate to consider lately. My recent circumstances have put an ice-pack on that fevered dream. It is still there, but I cannot afford to lose myself in it at the moment. Neither one of us misses the relationship we had, or at least what it was becoming, but I do miss him a great deal.

I’ve never had spectacular success with relationships – how do you measure that, exactly – and he’s never done relationships at all. I’ll opt for counseling when things even out for me and that becomes available. I’m open to the idea, whether or not he and I achieve any kind of reconciliation. There are obviously some kinks in my psyche that need ironing out, independent of whatever he brought to the relationship. I keep hearing an unwritten country song in my head this evening with a line to the effect of “too afraid of a broken heart to ever fall in love”. I’m sure it’s already been written. I love him very much and care a great deal about him. That, I know, is genuine. It will be nice to spend time with him, and I do not intend to use the opportunity for anything other than just that.

I’ve noticed something on my evening walks, and during my walks after lunch during the work day as well. I smell things. I smell the Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood. I smell the Thai restaurant. I smell the coffee house. I smell everything. I imagine smells. There is a great variety of things that I used to eat with impunity that I simply no longer consider as viable options. It occurred to me last night as I was walking that I can now enjoy not only the memories of those foods and the experiences I associate with them; I can also simply enjoy the aromas themselves. I’ve read many times that a great deal of what we taste is experienced through our sense of smell. There is no reason I cannot enjoy those sensations just as much now, simply because I no longer fill my gut, and consequently my arteries, with the bulk of material that carries that matter into the rest of my body – and out again into the Trinity River.

I had a great deal of fun drinking and doing drugs over many years. I hung off the precipice by my very fingernails, such as they are, and lived intensely while I was dying incrementally. I swam in the muck and celebrated a good portion of it. I do not regret much of that, but I know that it is something I can never do successfully again, and never really did successfully in the past. How do you define success at something like that, anyway? The point is that those things I can enjoy now in my mind are like the best hit of weed I ever took, the best drink of straight bourbon in an air-conditioned bar when everything was perfect. Those moments rarely ever existed anywhere other than in my self-deceived imagination, but for me they were Platonic ideals that were as real and continuous as the creak of the chair I sit in at this moment. I can taste them, and I can feel their effects right now. And why not? What is the use of a rich interior life, a vivid imagination and a well of experience from which to draw if not to drink deeply for the rest of my days? I not only have the hard lessons of a life characterized by bouts of conspicuous consumption. I also have the thick residue of my difficulties from which I may mine those moments that, for me, represented real joys. The other benefit I gain is that my experience makes me uniquely useful in some other ways, and that is something that only comes with continuous sobriety and continuous cheerful labor and service. But that is for another day’s reflection.