Kratom, PAWS, and learning to walk again

“Ah, another mistress.” - Dale Pendell on kratom, Pharmako/Gnosis

Are you: depressed? lonely? easily frustrated? anxious? Like, all the time? and sometimes you worry that nobody likes you? And that your fondest dreams are just ridiculous castles built on improbable clouds and that God thinks you’re kind of a joke for even wanting anything more than what you’ve got, and why aren’t you content with what you have anyway, huh? What’s wrong with you, for the love of Christ?

Well, have I got something for you.

My apartment in 2003 with my then-wife Stephanie was an old, poorly maintained, huge, and above all cheap apartment far out in Queens. We moved in together there out of economic necessity, and the sheer gravitational pull of our mutual sloth kept us there for almost 10 years. It was a pleasant apartment, in a beautiful neighborhood, and we kept a revolving door of roommates in the various extra bedrooms to keep the rent extra cheap, but the place was a bit of a death trap. Leaky ceilings in a third floor apartment (the floor above didn’t have leaks), plumbing put together by stoned day laborers (evidence of their recreational pharmaceuticals littered the bathroom after they were gone) and a general lackadaisical response time to any emergency from the management all detracted from the quality of life. The heat and hot water went out on a regular basis, but we heated water on the stove and wrapped our selves in layer upon layer of blanket and reminded each other of the ridiculously cheap rent. When Stephanie moved in in 1998, the rent was $1,000 for a three bedroom, two bath. By the time I left in 2008, it was all the way up to $1,500. Total. So we put up with a lot of crap, including a thick, black mold in the walls and ceiling of the bathroom that didn’t go away no matter how we scrubbed or disinfected.

After the unpleasantness downtown on 9/11, both Stephanie and I began to get sinus infections and bronchitis on a regular basis, about every three months or so. As we had both been in Manhattan on that fateful day in September, we chalked up our disease to all the dead people dust and chemical detritus in the air from two falling buildings, when really we probably should have looked a little closer to home. Like the aforementioned black mold.

After a particularly bad bout of sinusitis which morphed into bronchitis and left us up all night coughing and hacking and wheezing, the doctor prescribed Stephanie a bottle of Tylenol-3 with codeine. This stuff is over the counter in Canada, so benign do they believe it to be. But after miserable nights of no sleep, popping two of these and actually being able to sleep an entire night through felt miraculous. I remember thinking, as I lay there, blissfully suspended between consciousness and sleep, that this must be what it felt like to sleep like the elves do (nerd alert: condition red),

Only Legolas still stepped as lightly as ever, his feet hardly seeming to press the grass, leaving no footprints as he passed; but in the waybread of the elves he found all the sustenance that he needed, and he could sleep, if sleep it could be called by Men,resting his mind in the strange places of elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world.

It just felt so good. Like all of my cares were soothed, like all of my worries were gone. Like I’d been holding my breath my entire life, and only now was I able to, finally, let it go. I lay in bed, feeling actually content for the first time in ages.

That should have been my first sign. If you have to take a substance just to feel normal, that is a very bad sign indeed. You should probably run, not walk, away.

What followed was several months of taking all the codeine, then furtively stealing pain pills from Stephanie, and then drinking codeine cough syrup, finally portioning out my little stash until it was gone. It only takes a few months to really get a good jones going. By the time February of the following year rolled around, my stash was gone, I’d stolen and taken any painkillers Stephanie had, and the doctor was on to me, refusing (gently) to prescribe me any more. I had to, as the cool kids say, kick.

We spent some time up in New Hampshire at a friends house, my wife and my friend enjoying the snow, and me shaking and dealing with flu-like sypmtoms, all the while hating myself harder than I ever had before. And then, it was over. I felt if not awesome, at least no longer like death.

Understand, I wasn’t turned off to drugs. I didn’t think drugs were bad. I loved drugs, I just figured I’d done the wrong ones for me. So I got back on line and started exploring, as I still hoped to find God in a pill, and in the course of my research, came across a plant called kratom.

Kratom is a tree, mitragyna speciosa, that grows primarily in Indonesia. It’s pretty big, up to 30 feet tall and 15 feet wide, but the tree isn’t what we want, or rather, we only want part of the tree. Just the leaves. Descriptions of the plant’s effects sounded, shall we say, familiar.

“Kratom is one of the most effective and pleasurable psychoactive herbs available,” read the guide. “At strong doses (16-25 grams) the effects are profoundly euphoric and immensely pleasurable. Typically people describe the effects as dreamy, ecstatic, and blissful.”

Yep. Sign me up. Plus, it was natural! What could possibly go wrong! I got my batch of green, fuzzy, foul-smelling powder in the mail, mixed it up with soy milk and drank it down. It tasted terrible, possibly one of the worst things I’ve ever tasted. My gorge rises even to this day, two and a half years after taking my last kratom, thinking of the gag-inducing bitterness of the stuff. But once I’d choked it down, I sat back to wait for the effects.

And it was perfect. A warmth spread in my stomach and chest, and it was like being cradled in gentle arms. A loving hug from the inside. Music was wonderful, TV was interesting. Just sitting was fantastic. Reading became a little difficult, but who needed to imagine things anyway? This was what I had been looking for. Opiates like Percocet and codeine were only a few steps off of heroin, and everybody knew that shit was bad for you. But this, this was a terrible tasting, great feeling, all-natural high. I told everybody about it, I was so thrilled. It got rid of my colds, and it took care of my social anxiety. I took it in lieu of drinking and went to parties where I had meaningful, in-depth conversations with one or two people all night. I became such a convert, I even told my straight-laced folks about it, since my mom was on massive amounts of narcotics anyway due to an auto-immune condition. I figured she might as well get on the natural stuff. It was mellowing, but stimulating at the same time, like taking a handful of pills and chasing it with a redbull. It made me chatty, and relaxed, and warm, and calm. I loved it.

It was a strange thing to realize that, inside, as often as I’d felt loved, or helped by a benevolent universe, or blessed, or accomplished, or proud, or even satisfied and content, I had almost never felt warm. Or safe. Or secure. Can you imagine what it must have been like to finally feel like someone took that anxious ache that was so much a part of you that you barely even knew there was another way to feel, and just made it vanish? As Burroughs, the junkie par excellence was fond of saying, “Wouldn’t you?” Yes you would. Gladly.

It eased boredom, it chased away anxiety, it killed fear, it made the mundane interesting, the dull charming and all that day-to-day stuff ultimately not even important. Ignorable. My housekeeping skills decreased from low to none. Clean what? Why?

Since, apparently a couple of idiots in Bali or wherever had managed to get themselves addicted to the stuff (and apparently the guys over in Australia, Myanmar, and Singapore thought it was dangerous enough to warrant making it illegal) I decided to take some precautions. I made rules for myself. Never two days in a row, and never more than twice a week. I’m great at prescriptions like that. Rules that are hard and fast and require no thought I can do. It’s when I start trying to make decisions that I get into trouble. I figured this way, I’d be absolutely safe, no problem. If you’ve ever heard of “chipping” in the context of heroin, that’s basically what I did. I set up rules, and then stuck to them, and set up a nice tidy routine for myself.

I took it every week, twice a week, for five years.

In 2008 into 2009, things started to get a little choppy. I was having trouble concentrating at work. People began to comment that I was, maybe, possibly, using just a little too much of that stuff? You think maybe, Scott? and they worried a little. And I was having trouble being sociable, and I was having trouble concentrating at work (where I would periodically use kratom, not often, just to, you know, alleviate the boredom of an unchallenging job that might have been more challenging had I bothered to show up mentally at all), and maybe I was having problems concentrating on my art, and the anxiety came back, harder this time, social and otherwise, and then I was having trouble with my sex life, and then I realized, I was kinda messed up.

So I quit. What, like it was hard? Rules are easy. Do this, don’t do that. There were a couple of tough weeks where I felt pretty bad, physically. Tired, on edge, achey. No big deal.

It was when the physical symptoms dissipated that I realized that I was in a lot more trouble than I originally thought. All the problems that I’d been having before, concentration, mood swings, anxiety, all of that came back, and now there was no magic powder, no relief valve to turn to when I wanted to shut it all off. Not only that, but my former blissful apathy had become horrible, gut-churning, aching, despairing apathy. I had no enthusiasm for anything. Projects were impossible, problems were insurmountable, nothing made sense or seemed like any fun at all. I was a mess. And I was pretty sure that it was never, ever going to end. I had damaged myself permanently, and now it was merely a long haul to the grave.
About a year and a half into this, I was reading an interview with a formerly drug-addicted rock star, and he mentioned something called Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome, or PAWS, which is kind of a cute name for something that makes you want to kill yourself really hard. I did a little research and found out that after you go through withdrawal, you start to manifest other symptoms. Like what? Oh, like:

• Mood swings
• Anxiety
• Irritability
• Tiredness
• Variable energy
• Low enthusiasm
• Variable concentration
• Disturbed sleep

Yeah, that was me. And the kicker? The research I read told me that all of this delicious horror would last about two years. Two years!

So here we are, 2011. And I’m starting, just, to feel like a human goddamn being again. I sometimes wonder if something has changed. If I permanently damaged myself in my little flirtation with darkness. I have to assume, since I’m writing again, since I feel slightly less crippled, since I feel like I can handle the problems life throws at me, that I’m getting better. It was a long, horrible road, but I’m still walking, and the scenery seems to be getting nicer. It’s not all uphill, anymore, and there sometimes feels like there’s a wind at my back, sun on my shoulders.

I still want to do drugs, of course. All the time. But not quite as much, and not quite as often. So maybe there’s some hope. I do yoga. I meditate. I go for walks. I write. I’m here. Things don’t feel empty and meaningless. I am learning how to have friends again. I can see beauty and not have it stab my heart. I can pray and not feel like I’m fighting for my life. I get up in the morning, go to work, write my words, love Katie, try to be a good person, fail sometimes, get up, try again.

Update: Please find a follow up post to this one here.

Review of The Last Werewolf

Fantasy and Science Fiction writers have a fascination with extinction. Witness Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn as the exemplar of the type: a lone individual, last of a dying breed, struggling against the inevitable final darkness in an uncaring world. There’s an element of pathos and glamour that surrounds characters like this that makes for a poignant read, and the longing for a past full of joy and possibility is an emotion to which many can relate. Nothing in this world is made to last, and we are all on a long march to the grave, alas.

Glen Duncan’s book The Last Werewolf takes these emotions and adds to them the salt of blasphemy, sex, and a love of life coupled with a world-weariness that creates a great new addition to the genre. Imagine a vampire book with the pretension removed and the animal blood-lust turned up to eleven, all narrated in a voice that drops off-hand jewels of prose a dozen to a page. Jacob discovers that he is the last werewolf on earth after all his fellow shape-shifters have been hunted down and killed by the para-military group WOCOP (the World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomenon). The head of WOCOP has vowed to kill Jacob himself, and despite Jacob’s ennui after 200 years of life, there begins a desperate chase with shifting identities, secret assignations, and fight scenes worthy of Jason Bourne.

Werewolf has an exciting, involving plot, but the real treat in this book is the prose. Glen Duncan creates a likable, wise, and profane mass-murderer in his werewolf, who genuinely grapples with his existentialism and lack of faith. “You love life because life’s all there is. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment,” one character says to Jacob, and that really seems to be the main message of the book - God or no, we make our own beauty and meaning in this life in which we are all born to die. But to accuse The Last Werewolf of being a “message” book does it a disservice. This is a great fantasy/action-adventure/thriller, with some well-thought out philosophical underpinnings that give it that much more depth for those who want it. Highly recommended.

The Heart of Magic and my new project.

New York City is a very special place. I remember the first time I ever felt its spell, one night back in 1997, sitting in a dark cafe on the Upper West Side with the first girl I'd ever truly loved who loved me back, watching the snow come down in giant flakes on the streets and cars outside. The fact that the love affair went south does nothing to diminish the memory. New York became, for me, a place of rough magic, bloody and grounded and friendly and terrifying all at once.

It seemed to have its own spirit, its own desires and preferences, a sense of itself and its purpose. I could, sometimes, when I was on the right track, feel myself fitting into the flow of it the way a swimmer in a river might feel his speed increase when he swam with the current, but I still wasn't ready. I moved far out into Queens, to the Shire, and hobbit-ized myself as best I could. I learned to love good food and quiet company and simple pleasures. But I became addicted to ease and pleasure, and I diminished myself, ransoming my future for an easy present, not counting the interest I would have to pay on the debt, both financial and spiritual.

And then I fell in love, and I went into the world of men and tried to grow taller. I found that it was tough to get big after you've made yourself small. I wasn't ready for Crown Heights and entrances covered in blood, I wasn't ready for hostility and racism (my own and that of others), and I certainly wasn't ready for bedbugs and poverty (again, my own and that of others). I won't say Crown Heights was Mordor, but it was a lot harsher than I was ready for. I also stopped using drugs, and all my problems came back, with interest.

Finally, I moved to Park Slope, to Rivendell, to heal and to find myself again. Over the past few years I've found some peace, some quiet, some equilibrium. And I've once again been able to find my love of the City. But I have found that the City has changed. Manhattan has smoothed some of its rough edges. It's gotten a face lift, and though it's prettier, it's not as mobile and emotionally expressive as it once was. That's OK, I guess. It happens. Everybody makes choices, and botox works for some. I'm not crazy about it, but I understand the impulse. You have to decide where your priorities lie.

But in Brooklyn, my new, adopted home? I've found there's still some life here yet. History has yet to be paved over (though they're trying), and the immigrants and those that don't quite fit in still have a place. I have my base to walk from, my home, my stronghold to retreat to, because I am still sometimes thin skinned, but I can walk through Brooklyn, and find that it is still a little dangerous, a little scary, a little bloody and grounded and unwilling to take shit. And magical.

Magical. When I first lived in Manhattan, I had a revelation that Central Park was the green emerald heart of the island. It had been contained, sure, hemmed in on all sides and cut off by the sky-scrapers at its corners and perimeter, but it still kept the whole thing alive. Without it, Manhattan would be a husk, a shell of concrete and steel supported by nothing and supporting nothing of value or worth. A small jewel at the center, however man made and natural in its artifice, created a context for all that structure.

So it is with Brooklyn, but in Brooklyn, it's not just the parks, its the neighborhoods, and the people that make them up. Brooklyn, even as it undergoes the same gentrification and homogenization that Manhattan underwent in the 20th century, still maintains a connection to something. Let's call it magic.

And so, I'm writing a book. I'm writing about Brooklyn as the last stronghold of Magic in the City of New York. I'm writing about architecture that supplements or diminishes the magic that naturally exists in a place, and the good and bad angels of geography that shape the history of that place. I'm writing about the decisions of otherwise good men that inadvertently shape the lives of the people who live under their care for evil, and about evil men who try to hide their malevolent intent behind laws and bribes and official violence. I'm writing about a secret history of Brooklyn beneath the world that we experience every day, a history that includes the immigrants that came here, bringing their ghosts and spirits and magics with them that interacted with Brooklyn to make something new, something humble and strong and broken and healing and tough.

That's what's coming. I hope I'm worthy to tell the tale.

Books in my room on the "Read or get off the Pot" list

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Love and Will - Rollo May
Screams from the Balcony - C. Bukowski
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet - Reif Larsen
Supergods - Grant Morrison
A Garden of Pomegranates - Israel Regardie
The Conference of Birds - Attar
Ocean of Sound - David Toop
The Shack - Young (given to me by my parents - do I need more Christian thriller novels in my life?)
The Physics of Superheros - James Kakalios
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005
How to Enjoy your Wine - Hugo Johnson

All these are going on the list. I'm making a Google Docs list which will include all these books, and cross them off as I am done with them. Gotta get 'em all!

#bookbrag and straightening things out

Recently, a friend of mine lamented her increasingly large "to-read" pile. She had, sad to say, developed a rather substantial Amazon.com habit and had purchased far more books than she had capacity to read in a short amount of time.

Leaving aside her shopping habits, I told her that, in order to get through the books she should make a list. I am very fond of lists, myself. They always help me focus, and given that I am a bit addled in my head when it comes to getting things done, I like to refer back to lists to keep me honest and on track. This is all part of, even this late in life, figuring out how the hell to deal with my rampant inattentiveness. So she put together a list of all the books that she had that she hadn't yet read, and began plowing through them, marking them off the list as she finished them. Excellent solution, and all's right with the world, right?

Not so fast.

I started looking around my own, rather impressive collection (oooh, new hashtag: #bookbrag), and found that there were many, many books in my own collection that I had yet to get around to reading. Now, I may be a hypocrite, but I am not a hypocrite! If she could do it, so could I. So I began making a mental list of all the books in my collection that, either through lack of interest, or through fear (yes you CAN be afraid of books. Shut up.) I had yet to read. And there were... a few. A lot. Like, more than 30.

So in the interest of not being that guy, I have begun a project. I will read all of the remaining books in my collection. If, by the time my birthday rolls around in 2012, I have NOT read these books I must get rid of them. That's it. No excuses. I've got to start somewhere. If I don't read these books then I obviously don't want to read these books and I shouldn't keep them in my collection, because they're just taking up space.

And some of these books are awesome! There's V by Pynchon, a couple of books by Calasso, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, The Golden Bough, some books on Shamanism, and a whole bunch more. I'll publish a full list soon.

In other news, the other major project in my life (the new book I'm writing) has taken a major turn for the organized, and I feel more excited about it than ever. I've outlined the book I'm writing and now large chunks of it seem to be fitting into place. It may not be as digressive as originally planned (or it may - now that I know the structure I can write in circles and always know where I'm ultimately headed) but it has legs, a sense of purpose, a backbone.

I'm pretty excited. Now to write the damn thing.

I think I need to stop drinking Yerba Mate

I'm starting to find that, when I drink mate, I fall asleep. What the heck is that about? Like, narcoleptic. I can barely keep my eyes open at work (not that they're challenging me so severely that I need to actually remain awake).

Also, apparently mate can give you cancer! Hooray!

I started drinking the stuff more heavily when I stopped using kratom, which now that I think about it, I really should write about. Fun stuff.

I keep forgetting to write about it, and then remembering. Well, not today.

Things that are fascinating me: The new season of Ultimate Fighter, The book I'm writing about Brooklyn wizards, and my Kindle. That is all.

keep up appearances

The writing proceeds apace. I'm starting to see a shape to the book and, even though I don't know how it ends, I see HOW it ends, if that makes sense. The mechanics, the motivations, the why's of these characters that can make certain events occur, and conclude. It's interesting. I keep coming to these moments where I don't know what's next, and then, startlingly, I know. I see it. I tell a friend of mine about what's happening, and I say, "Well, apparently, this is happening." and I sound a little nonplussed, because, honestly, I have a general idea, but these characters surprise me.

And here I am. Writing more. It seems I can't help it. Once I get started, I can't really stop.

In totally unrelated news, one of my favorite authors, John Crowley (though, seriously, Livejournal?) has an article at Laphams Quarterly about fiction and the future. In addition to being an excellent read by one of the more interesting minds out there, it's also an insight into the process that, if I'm guessing correctly, informed the creation of Engine Summer. He's got some ideas about how writers predict the future in their work, and he brings up something I've always found fascinating, especially as it relates to science fiction.

When I was growing up, watching science fiction movies and TV shows and reading science fiction books, I always noticed how the future worlds these works created were always extrapolations of the present. Logan's Run saw the future as polyester and plastic and curvilinear surfaces. The Tomorrow People was all brutalist architecture and the depression of 1970's Great Britain. Star Trek looked like a 60's hipster's idea of the future, etc. etc. Crowley came up with an alternate method - figure out where things are going and posit the opposite trend.

Really, he says it much better than I ever could, but it all made me think of Frank Herbert's ideas on prescience in Dune. Herbert thought that any prescient vision automatically set into motion the circumstances under which it would come to pass. Well, we've obviously disproven that time and again, and it's comforting to think that, not only is the future stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine. That actually gives me hope. It's easy to imagine the ways that our mistakes and stupidities screw up the future, but I take some comfort in the fact that the future will be screwed up in vastly different and more interesting ways.