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Please check out my friend's triumph: his first so-called "professional" article in a national magazine. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, Rick Moe in Modern Drummer.

Enjoy!

Headstands and Trusting the Universe

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Head down, hands clasped, top of the head on the floor between the hands. Lift the hips and walk the feet in towards the head. A little further, almost too far, and the legs just rise into the air, seemingly on their own. Straighten the back and breathe.

Recently, I passed an important benchmark in my life. In 2011, after years of sporadic practice, I decided to dedicate myself more intensely to yoga. As part of Lent, I decided I would practice every day for the entire period from Ash Wednesday until Easter. Rather than denying myself something, which I had been wont to do for years, I decided to add something. Enriching rather than reducing, if you will.

Easter came and went, and even over forty short days, I noticed substantial results. My mood was more even, I was better able to cope with work anxiety, I was more socially relaxed, and the day-to-day discipline opened my eyes to what might be possible. So I kept doing it.

A few days ago, I passed 365 days of doing some form of yoga every day. I got on the mat every day for an entire year. Now, some days were more productive than others. There were injuries and the occasional sick day where I was only able to do a few small stretches or a relaxation exercise. Overall, though, I managed to do it everyday, no matter what.

This has had a lot of implications, both for my perception of discipline and what can be accomplished with consistent, focused effort, and for my overall mental health. The thing I noticed this morning, however, was one particular pose that had given me a lot of problems for a long time.

If you know anything about yoga, you probably know about some of the more popular poses: Downward Dog, Cobra, Warrior. One of the most impressive poses, however, is Headstand. Head on the ground, feet in the air, straight back, pillar of strength. Whether it's the inversion, or a natural fear of falling, many people, including myself, seem to be particularly wary of this one. There was a long period where I wondered if I would be able to do it at all.

Through a year's worth of consistent practice, I've gone from complete terror to mighty struggle to enthusiasm with the Headstand pose. It's now become, in many ways, the central focus of my practice. And as with any struggle, it's taught me a few things, the most important of which is trust.

In the beginning of my trying to do Headstand, I would lift myself up by might and main, arms trembling, fear singing in my stomach, legs swaying back and forth as I worked desperately to stay upright. I was terrified of falling, and every time I came out of the pose (fell out, more like, crashing to earth like a cut tree in a logging stand) it was with desperate relief.

Gradually, doing it almost every day, I came to learn some things. Things that, had I been practicing with a teacher, I might have learned quicker (though, given my history with authority figures, perhaps not). I learned that upper body strength is not the best way to do a headstand. Sure, you can lift yourself up, proverbial bootstrap style, wrenching your body into compliance, and keep yourself there through sheer willpower, overcoming your fear every time with brutal, bullying force, but that really isn't the best way to do it.

I found, after many months, that the only way through was to be afraid.

There comes a moment, every time I do Headstand, where I feel the pit of my stomach cry out in terror. I've put my hands down, my fingers interlocked, my head between them. I lift up my hips and walk my legs toward my head, and inevitably there comes the moment. Too far, too much! You're going to fall! You can't balance like this, you're going to break your neck, fall on your back, bust your spine! STOP!

And that is the moment, the exact moment, when the legs simply lift into the air, almost on their own. It isn't effortful, or hard; it is exactly what I am supposed to be doing right then. I engage my core strength, which I have built up over many months of work, and it is not a problem. I am upside down - stable, calm, breathing deeply. Small adjustments are made, but there is no panic, no fear of falling. I am simply doing what needs to be done in the moment to maintain my equilibrium. I am safe, and exactly where I need to be.

I come down the same way, engaging my core muscles and letting my legs come gently to the floor. I rest awhile face down in a fetal position (called "Child's pose"), and then move on to the next pose.

I've come to realize that the best things in my life have come about as a result of that same process. There comes a moment, in every creative endeavor (and I'm talking here not just about writing, or music, but about any action that I've taken in my life where something new is brought into being - whether it's my relationship with my wife, a new friendship, a new job) where the moment feels unsustainable. It seems completely impossible, and the abyss yawns beneath me. Terror rises in my gut, and I know I am doomed.

Suddenly, the moment passes, and I am in a different state, moved, almost effortlessly it seems, into a new way of being, of seeing. There is a natural momentum that assists us, a strength to which we add our strength that is not additive, but exponential. I'm not saying you have to believe in something, in anything. That's up to you. I'm just saying that without a willingness to attempt, to go too far, to possibly fall, that power will not aid us, and our own power is insufficient.

You may think you have committed, but until you've gone too far, you haven't gone far enough.

Part of it is our own fitness, the learning process that has come from failing, finding out what not to do. Another part is simply the way the world works - gravity, angular momentum, balance, inertia. It is, perhaps, mechanical, and can be calculated and simulated on a graph. But when I'm in the middle of it, working in concert with it, it feels nothing short of miraculous. It feels alive, not like I am doing it, or it is being done to me, but like I am a part of something that is more than I am on my own.

My life is changing. I let myself go too far, and find that there is something in me, and in the world, that lifts me up.

The Story of Angry Cat - part 2

When I moved to New York in 1996 in a spasm of ambition and romanticism from which I am only recently recovering, it was to go to school. No cats allowed in the dorms. I dropped her off at my sister’s to live, and didn’t look back for almost seven years.

This does not speak well to my character, I am aware.

In the meantime I graduated from school, got married, moved into a relatively decent apartment, and made enough money to think about taking care of an animal. Which is a good thing, as my sister, and her pets, had had enough. Honey got along with other animals about as well as she got along with people, that is to say, not very, and her continued presence at my sister’s house made trouble for all concerned. Not to mention the behavior problems of having been abandoned by the only person she really even sort of liked in the world. I still feel a stab of guilt when I think of how her very simple kitty brain dealt with knowing that she had a person, even if she only vaguely remembered him, and that he was gone.

After a conversation with my sister where she made it very clear that the cat was coming to live with me no matter what, I had her shipped from Las Vegas to Newark, a trip which, I’m convinced, almost killed her. She was packed into an airplane and flown for hours across the country in dry air. She was dehydrated, terrified, and exhausted when I finally picked her up at the cargo shipping section of the airport.

As I drove with her over the bridge to Newark airport, windows rolled up to block out the stench of the chemical plants, she climbed out of the container, stuck her head in my mouth to smell my breath, settled down on my chest, and began to purr contentedly.

And thus began our real relationship.

Her time away from me, and my time away from her, had given us both an opportunity to grow up a little. To call me a “late-bloomer” emotionally would be an understatement, but I had, in her absence, learned a little bit about putting someone else’s needs above my own. We began to get along, somewhat. She was still loud, and skittish, and touchy, afraid of her own shadow, and in all ways almost the opposite of a cat. But she could also be gruffly affectionate, sweet, and she seemed to have a genuine talent for being a stolid, loving presence when you felt sad. She was opinionated, picky, and had no problem sharing her disdain for whatever it was that had pissed her off today. It was a bit like living with a grumpy little old lady who never left the house, and who would occasionally express her displeasure by peeing in a corner.

I realized what a jerk I’d been for most of her life (not to mention much of mine), and I tried to make up for it by being as kind and gentle to her as I could. I gave her wet food, which she adored. I tried to play with her (which annoyed her) and gave her toys (which mostly confused her), and just generally tried to make her as comfortable as possible.

She was smart, had a huge personality, and was her own cat. I had her for another eight years, through a separation, a catastrophic move, a drug problem, a couple more bouts of religious mania, a divorce, and a remarriage. She started getting slower (but no less obnoxious), in the last year or so.

Then, seemingly overnight, her eye swelled up so that she looked like Popeye. At first, it was cute, and we rubbed it (which she liked), and made fun of her, called her “winky.” Then, we took her to the doctor, and they said, “Oh, that? Yeah, that’s cancer. She’s too old and little to operate on, so your best option is to keep her comfortable.” I’m paraphrasing, of course, as they were actually quite nice.

We pampered her as much that she would allow, and she still yelled and stalked around the house like she owned the place, so we held out hope that it might be an infected tooth. But it never really got better. And then, very quickly, it got much worse. Over the course of a day it went from “a little swollen and not really that uncomfortable” to “really, truly terrible and awful and pitiful to look at, and kind of painful.”

It was time, so we took her back to the doctor. They offered to take a clay impression of her paw, “You know, there’s a lot of kids in this neighborhood, so it’s mostly for them. But you could have it done too!” they hastily reassured us. We declined.

They gave her the first shot, to put her to sleep, and she settled on my lap for a moment, and then, for a moment, it was like she wanted to get down and take a walk, which we talked her out of pretty easily. She then lay down and began breathing deep and slow. The doctor discretely left the room, and we pet her, and cried. Her paws twitched as if she were walking, and we discussed where she might be dreaming she was, and if she was having a good time. Seeing her so relaxed, we seized the opportunity to touch her paws and her belly, and play with her tail, and stroke her fur, in ways that she would have deemed to be entirely inappropriate while she was awake. We laughed a little at the small irony: the only time she was ever really relaxed to be a cat, in the traditional sense, was when she was just about to be nothing at all.

After the doctor came back in, he injected her with a syringe full of purple liquid, and she breathed deeply, and then was still. And that was the end of her.

She was difficult, and ornery, and angry, and almost entirely humorless. I loved her very much, and she saw me through some very difficult times. She is exactly the cat I deserved, and I hope that, in the end, I had learned enough about being alive to be a good owner.

Because that’s really the thing. I needed to learn about being alive to be worth a damn to her. And, like most things in this life, it took me a long time to get it. I’m pretty dumb for being such a smart guy. Mostly it was learning to take things as they are, and trying to remember that others are more important than me. I’m still learning. I hope I’ll have it figured out by the time I see Honey again.

The Story of Angry Cat - part 1

Siamese Dream was released on July 27, 1993, per Wikipedia. I mention this because this was the thing I remember most about the day I got my cat. Not that I don’t remember getting the cat, because I do, very clearly, but I also remember that Honey was a surprise, and that my plan, that day, had been to get a copy (on cassette, no less) of the new Smashing Pumpkins album.

Now, you’d think that that would definatively date the start of my relationship with her, but you’d be mistaken. I’m pretty sure I didn’t buy the album on the day it came out. In fact, I probably bought it several months after it came out, possibly used from Zia Records, which was the record store where almost all my friends worked at one point or another in the nineties. So suffice to say there is some ambiguity about how long I’d had her, how long she was alive, and, really, the exact nature of our relationship. Because nothing about my life at that time, and certainly nothing about that cat, was particularly normal.

My friend Chris lived in a second floor apartment overlooking the Greyhound bus station in downtown Tucson. From one window, to the east, you could see the usual parade of homeless men and women, prostitutes, junkies and runaways that congregate around the no-man’s-land of a bus depot. Out the other window looking north stood the venerable Hotel Congress, with its old brick facade. The club downstairs, a gathering place for a particular type of Tucson denizen that today we’d call “hipsters”, had a certain cache at the time. We’d go back to Chris’s place after a show and people watch out the windows late into the night , observing the hook ups and the fights, checking out the scene and making fun of the crazies and the drunks, both career and amateur.

We were also, at that time, trying very hard to become rock stars. As Bryan Adams said, we had a band and we tried real hard, and while Chris was driven, focused, talented, and optimistic, I was ambivalent, insecure, going through a manic religious phase while simultaneously struggling with a compulsive sexuality, and almost always depressed. Couple this with the fact that we lived in the town that had been “The Next Seattle” for so long that it had become a bit of a joke, and you can see that our plans for world domination weren’t very well thought out. Chris put up with my erratic moods and strange obsessions pretty well, and seemed to look out for me. So when my cat at the time ran away, he was concerned.

Part of his concern stemmed from my already delicate mental state. In 1992, through a combination of excessive intake of hallucinogens and severe depression, I’d decided to drop out of school, and then proceeded to have a bit of a breakdown. I’d only managed to get somewhat back on track through the good graces of my parents, who had agreed to help me get back into school if I lived where they said. Where they said was an RV that they’d parked in a trailer park on the northwest side of town.

It was spartan, to put it mildly: fifteen feet long, ceiling not even high enough for me to stand, baking in the summer, freezing in the winter, and water came in through a garden hose hooked up to the back. To make sure I didn’t get any funny ideas, my parents had installed a set of special, handmade fuses that they had then removed, so there was no chance of me driving it away. It had no phone, so any time I wanted to make a call, I had to use the pay phone at the trailer park office.

On the one hand, it kept me out of the elements and made sure that I had almost literally no distractions from my studies (though I managed to find some anyway). On the other hand it was a singularly dark, depressing, unpleasant place to live, and my already isolating tendencies were exacerbated by distance from my friends and lack of means of contact. I was lonely, raw, and already felt that I had made a hash of my life. So, like you do, I got myself a cat.

Animals are usually smarter than people, and she, seeing the lay of the land, promptly split at the first opportunity, never to be seen again. I couldn’t even tell you her name.

Chris and and his girlfriend, Denise, probably my best friends at the time, were concerned about my precarious emotional climate, especially after the cat ran off. Now, Denise befriended a little old lady who lived down the street from my old place near the University, and when the little old lady’s drug dealer son told her that they had kittens to give away, Denise had seen a perfect opportunity to help a friend. She and Chris picked out a kitten and presented her to me as a present. To circle back around, it was in Chris's small apartment over the Greyhound station that I met the other half of what was to be the longest relationship of my life.

The cat was small. Tiny, in fact. She’d probably been taken from her mother just a little too soon, and she was furious. She pooped in the box they were keeping her in, and she mewed at the top of her little lungs. She had, even then, a considerable voice. I was, to be frank, a little intimidated by this bundle of fur, and it was not a case of love at first sight on either end. I was pretty sure I wasn’t ready to take care of a kitten, and the kitten had a list of demands that in no way included this giant klutz of a man picking her up and trying to (indignity of indignities) pet her. We were both pretty sure that this arrangement could only be temporary.

I had picked up a copy of the new Smashing Pumpkins album earlier that day, and I was much more eager to hear it than I was to nurture this angry new spark of life. On the way home from Chris’s in my friend’s car, I blasted the new record over the protesting yowls of the cat until my friend gently suggested that the excessive noise might be scaring her. I was irritated, but relented, and took her back to the tin can of a trailer that I called "home."

We adjusted poorly to being roommates. She was demanding, slept on no schedule I could discern, attacked me with needle sharp claws and teeth while I slept (under the guise of “playing”), pooped and peed wherever she felt like it (the carpet had to eventually be torn out completely, so thoroughly had she and I managed to destroy it - hey, she wasn’t the only messy one who lived there), and yowled with a relentless, irritating voice that was more screaming baby than cat. In a fit of what could only have been romantic blindness, I had named her “Honey,” after the Van Morrison song “Tupelo Honey,” but her name was, and could only have been, “Cat”.

I, on the other hand, was in and out at all hours, an indifferent (to put it mildly) housekeeper, and kind of a jerk. When she attacked me, I would throw her off the bed, often launching her several feet down the RV. To the list of my transgressions you may also add: getting her high once by blowing marijuana smoke into her ears, not always changing her litter box regularly, and buying the cheapest cat food I could (because I was poor).

On the other hand, she was a bit prickly, herself. When I tried to be affectionate with her, she would only accept certain types of affection. Scratches behind the ear were acceptable, as were pets on her back, but woe betide the fool that attempted to touch her belly or paws. He was lucky to come back with a hand, and it would definitely be bloody. She was, as they say, feisty.

We just didn’t know how to get along.

Not that she got along with anybody, really. Her relationship with my girlfriend at the time was problematic. After taking a nap on my bed (always a difficult prospect - the full sized bed took up the entire back third of the RV), my girlfriend woke me up in irritation.

“She sat on my head,” she said, indignantly.

“The cat?”

“The cat sat on my head!” It was no nice move either. This was the action of a jealous woman, who showed her contempt for her rival in the only way she knew how. The fact that, when we were alone, she usually avoided me, meant nothing. It wasn’t that she wanted me all to herself, as much as she didn’t want anyone else to have me.

We existed in this state for years, living around each other and trying to let the other one be. She didn’t seem to like me much, and I was too self-absorbed to really be much good to anyone. But everything was going to change - I had decided to become... an ACTOR.

Come back tomorrow for Part II - Angry Cat Boogaloo

Wild Geese - by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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.