666 Days on the Kick

Dec. 18 2021

Oct. 15 2023

666 days

I've been waiting for this day for at least three months. I didn’t set out to think of it as a milestone. It was only a novelty. When my hetero life mate recently reached his 666th blog, I thought, “I wonder how long until I have 666 days off dope? That was a long time ago, but I didn’t forget that it was today. Even if I had, I’d have been reminded by another friend of mine who recently reached his own 666 milestone for…something. I can’t remember what it was.

 What’s the difference between today and me on day 50? Quite a bit. I don’t wake up in hell anymore. Sure, my leg is fucked up, I lurch for a couple of hours and have to stretch all day just to walk like a very well-coordinated wind-up toy. However, I used to fear needing a cane on the best days and a wheelchair on the worst; now I…well, a cane may very well be in my future, but it isn’t near anymore. 

My mental state is no longer tied up in street-bred schizophrenia. Ice, H, K2, those drugs will drive you far beyond bat country. I conducted myself a bit better than some (and far better than others) while I was outside, but some of the woo-woo shit I was thinking during my viaduct tenure is embarrassing to me now. Bit cliché, but oh well. Most of my friends think I was very interesting back then. I’m sure I was. Lunatics are very entertaining. I can’t remember half the shit I did. My brain, thanks to the drugs, was wired backwards. Or at least that’s what it felt like. After a time of Stop/Focus exercises, my mind is fairly clear now…at least as clear as it can get when you have medicine-resistant (this is what they’re calling it now, I still say the fucking things flat out don’t work) bi-polar. 

 (If anti-depressants work for you, count yourself lucky. I won’t say it’s impossible that they work for some. But they don’t help me at all. I gain weight, get depressed. Fuck that.)

The plan I set before myself 2 years ago is coming to fruit, I mentioned that before. When I sat down and told myself I could fix everything in five years, I didn’t believe it. Hell, it took me four months to quit dope after I came to said realization…I knew that quitting was step one, and we all know how step one goes when you’re an addict. Anyway, I’m not frizzle-fried anymore.

I wrote a book while I was recovering and did about 90% of the craft editing on it. I will begin querying for a stipend next month—if I score that…kind of self-explanatory, how awesome that would be. I don’t want to follow that line of thought too far right now. Projections hurt the laws of attraction as much as they help when they become pathological overthinking (a redundancy in terms, ah, repeat). But that’s a conversation for later. And I have done about 60 of these TTs in the past year. People actually read these fucking things, which comes as a bit of a surprise…but it’s a nice surprise. 

I think I’ve said everything I know to say about this process in past posts. Or at least my brain isn’t giving me anything I didn’t say before. 666 days on a surprisingly banal yet oxymoronically exciting journey out of leviathan’s bowels. And I’ve not hit the bodegas. I’ve not employed any of my, uh…shall we say egregious skills…I, being the only thing in the fucking universe that can stop me from scoring, have stopped myself for almost two years now. I’m not sure how, but I keep doing it. I’m sure my leg helps, but…shit…I walked around Houston and Reno on this fucker, scoring to kill the pain, and just kept moving…there were days when I limped two or three miles in the pursuit, knowing that as soon as the hit kicked in all the pain would go away. I’d shuffle three hours to make it from one end of the hood to the next, delirious…ye gods man…the horror. The horror keeps me from going back. I’ll try for 1000 days now. Maybe I should just call it three years so recovery doesn’t sound like it’s my baby. Fuckin’ Eraserhead if it was.