Northward Midget

Tag: depression

  • 72 Hours and Two In a Row

    Second night at AA.  I didn’t talk much this time beyond the obligatory “I’m Quinn and I’m an alcoholic”, “Hi, Bill”, “Thank you, Bill.”

    I gave my number to a good looking guy, my age or (probably) younger.  I am regretting this.  It brings on the kind of anxiety I had when the ex-wife and I gave our number to a “friendly” waiter at Raj Mahal who turned out to be an Amway drone.

    That’s what AA reminds me of– a cult.  Not in the Jonestown sense, but like any group who have cultivated in their mind some shared way of life, but they’ve given up something for it.  They’ve given up their self, their skepticism, their suspicion.  That is not always a good thing.  Most of the time, “surrendering” to a “power” (higher or lower) is a very, very bad thing.    There’s a reason we’re cautious around strangers, and that reason (logic) was borne of countless generations of evolution and experience

    A few people got their “coins” or “badges” or whatever awards they give.  Not as many hot women there tonight, which is probably why I described the guy above as “good looking”.  There is one that’s cute, and she made a cackling crack in response to someone else innocently mentioning “nuts”– that she hadn’t had nuts in a long time.

    I’m not there to date.

    Er, or fuck.

    I wonder if I’d be as “easy” sober.   Probably, and maybe sex-addict support groups would be more entertaining.

    Speaking of entertainment– AA meetings don’t seem to have much.   Some bad jokes are cracked and left to rot in the air of polite chuckles.   Occasionally someone will be a little clever.  Most of the time, it’s like a bad Henry Rollins “spoken word” show.   Well, a worse one, because those are pretty bad.  It’s like church as I remember and revile it from childhood, but instead of one man preaching, it’s the entire congregation testifying and genuflecting to the “Higher Power”, and telling everyone that if they don’t do that, they just ain’t gonna make it.

    There’s no cross-talk.  If someone wants to talk, they gotta jump in right after the “Thank you, Bill” with their “I’mCarlAndI’mAnAlcoholic”, ignore the others whose similar interjection waned into a tired “Hi, Carl” and start going off on their–

    Their stories.   Maybe my rant last night wasn’t as coherent and sublimely intelligent and borderline sexy-crazy as I’d thought it was, but it had to have been different, at least.  Someone must have appreciated.

    I’m not there to practice stand-up, either, so let’s get on with tonight’s bit of words.

    I was held up by the hot guy– I wanted to make the “SOS” meeting.  It was at 7:30 down Main St, a couple miles away.  “SOS” is “Secular Organizations for Sobriety” or “Save Our Selves”.   It’s a support group affiliated with the guys who brought us Skeptical Inquirer– the Center for Inquiry here in Amherst.  In that big list of self-help groups, this was the one I wanted to go to, but the AA was nearer and sooner, and I really just needed to be somewhere besides home wanting to drink.   More on wanting a drink later.

    The SOS meeting was at a Unitarian Universalist church.   The ex-wife and I had went there once for a secular Yule-tide celebration.  It bothered me– maybe more than a “normal” church.   Humanists.  They want “God Lite”.  They believe in the value of every person.  You’ll meet the most credulous skeptics there, and they’ll give you coffee and cookies and nod and smile and relate stories of their own “Higher Powers”.

    So, it’s church.

    SOS isn’t church.  This meeting just happened to be held in one.  The drive and front parking was nigh empty and I couldn’t see any lights inside, so I went around back, did a few donuts in the snow-covered back lot, and decided I might as well go home.

    On the way out, I saw a few of the cars alongside the drive, some with lights on, and I figured someone must be going there for something.  So, I pulled in, went to the door, followed the others to a room smaller than my own living room, took a chair, and in a few minutes we were all just talking, openly, with some cross-talk, but respectful and obliging.

    It started out kinda quiet.   Someone said the ol’ “You could hear a pin drop.”  Right after the full-stop in that statement I blurted, “I just got back from an AA meeting.”

    This was a good crowd of people.   A friendly hipster musician dude seemed to be herding the discussion with a mild hand.  There was a guy who was kind of a cross between Sam Kinison and Ben Stein.  A big guy who’d been through it all.  A guy who looked like a suburban neighbor.  A woman who’d literally drunk herself to death’s threshold– twice.

    This was communion.  This was fellowship– with goodfellas.

    There wasn’t a one of them I didn’t like.  Everyone was open and honest and went straight out with the worst of themselves– because they knew everyone else would understand.  Yeah, we’re all drunks.  We may not be drinking, but we’re all drunks.

    I’m gonna wind this down, because I’m tired– and that’s the point of these meetings and my writings.  Exhaust myself so I don’t have time to think about that existential maw that yawns for me.

    On wanting a drink– in the first half of tonight’s AA, someone asked if anyone in the room wanted a drink right now.  He wasn’t offering one– he just wanted a show of thirsty hands.   I didn’t raise mine.

    I really didn’t want a drink.

    That confused me, then frustrated me.  If I didn’t want a drink, why am I here?  Why am I doing this?  It seemed the answer was because the state was going to make me do it eventually– that drinking isn’t really a problem in itself but an enabler of bad choices.  I wasn’t thinking of going back to drinking– the train of thought was put in motion by not wanting to drink.

    I was just wondering why I was here.  In that room, at first, and then back to “here” as in “life”, and the rest of the meeting had me gritting my teeth with my arms folded and giving in to facial ticks.  Frustration.

    That’s always going to be with me, right?   I keep telling these people– I wasn’t “happy” before I started drinking heavily.  Drinking didn’t destroy my marriage.  Drinking didn’t make me more depressed.   On the contrary– drinking facilitated my being more social.  It gave me a lot of stories.  It made me a lot of friends.  I experienced things I wouldn’t have otherwise.

    It also put me in a mental hospital twice and jail a few times.

    Maybe what I’m asking is, “Am I an alcoholic?”

    Maybe the answer is “Does it matter?”

    Drinking has resulted in some poor decisions that could have cost me my freedom– and still could.  I’ve got two girls who need me, and I can’t risk indulging anything that would lubricate that slide into Hell.

    I’m not going to do it anymore.

     

  • I Suppose I Owe You One

    It’s been a while.  How you doin’?

    It’s been a while longer since I wrote anything of general utility.  Most of my spew has been of a peculiar flavor spawned of my bile.  Give me a break, friends– the strongest urge to write is to pull in those who ken what you pen.

    It’s rare for anyone to truly know you.

    … I’m speaking to a likewise rare audience here.  For the majority of humanity, their 12-piece “Age 2+” puzzle of a psychological composition ain’t so hard to put together, comprehend, snap/tear into double the components, and re-assembled wearing mittens with one’s mind’s eye closed.

    I’m with a good woman.  A foxy woman.

    I’ve got the girls back.  I gave up custody, but it was for their sake, and it was with caveats that made it worth separating that purely contractual issue from the rest of the divorce bullshit.  Truly, if I felt they were in danger with their mother, I’d take them regardless of whatever the Law may have entered into the public record.

    Fuck the Law.

    That’s why I made the deal.  I have no respect or concern for the Law–

    … only for my girls.

    Enough of that.  Life otherwise?   I’ve been at my current job for a year now.  Well, it will have been a year in one minute– and once this is posted.  I was contracted as a “Java developer”.  I hadn’t coded Java since its showcase presentation was an applet of “Duke” doing his jack-hammer “Under Construction” stint and garish water-reflection applets on homepages.

    However, since I am a hacker by nature and by heart and by tripping fingers over the proper mechanical cherry-key-board– I can adapt.  Scored pretty high when asked to do so.  The sadness is that the task to which I was assigned was so vaguely defined as to be impossible to “finish”, so … I’m viewed as a slacker.

    I have a Google Forms record of every day I’ve worked since I started.  I don’t fuck around.  I *want* to work.  I *live* to work.

    I live.

    … which brings us to the status-quo.

    I live.

    Good night, and good luck.

     

  • Bullets For the Curious

    No time right now for a detailed update, so here’s a few of the highlights since my last major life update back near November of 2012.

    0x01: Met a wonderful woman at work.  She wore a poncho one day.  I said, “It’s impossible to be unhappy wearing a poncho.”  It’s a Mighty Boosh reference.   Next day she left an orange juice bottle on my desk wearing a little poncho.  We are still together, despite my sometimes difficult personality.  She’s the best female I’ve ever had in my life, with the exception of the one who brought me into the world and the ones I brought here.

    0x02: Started “vaping”, as per the penultimate (as of this writing) “Digital/Analog Freaky Smoke” entry.  I’ve got 90% lung capacity now. Pretty good for smoking raw zware tobacco for two decades.  No more wheezing at the end of a long exhalation, and no more of that stench you only notice when you stop smoking.

    0x03: Shaved my head.  Kept the goatee and mustache.  Without facial hair, a man ain’t a man.  A bald man without facial hair is demoted all the way to a baby.  Grew the hair back.  Shaved it again, and the current HEAD is bald with beard.

    0x04: Contact with the girls has continued at $50 a week for a two-hour supervised visit.  I contend that the $200 would be better spent directly on the children who want free access to their father.  My opinions do not matter to anyone who makes decisions about my participation in my family.  Namely: lawyers, this police state of ours, and a woman apparently scorned.

    0x05: Continue to see Dr Gandalf.  In March we were both surprised to realize it had been a year since my involuntary hospitalization at the Erie County Medical Centre.  We’ve made a lot of progress.  I’ve made a lot of progress, mostly credited to my new special lady friend.  Needless to say, grieving the loss of ones family is “difficult” — even if that loss is (mostly) figurative.  Maybe worse in this case, since my daughters aren’t “gone” from the world, but simply being kept from me.  They’re not silent in their graves– they live and cry and need their father, yet are restricted to a few hours a month of closely supervised visits that preclude so much as a whisper between us.

    0x06: My oldest daughter turns ten soon.  I’ve missed over a year of the last years of her childhood.  Girl?  She’ll be a woman soon.

    Orders of protection are generally classified as either “stay-away” or “refrain-from”.  The former specifies that a party (the “respondent”) avoid all contact with another party (the “petitioner”) and perhaps other associated parties, such as children under the petitioner’s care.   The latter simply requires the respondent to refrain from some specific behavior.

    If the petitioner is in a state of desperation or urgency (e.g. being contacted by an exish-spouse with undue frequency and in states of inebriation and/or otherwise being a nuisance),  s/he may not know or (understandably) care to learn the difference between these two types of orders.  S/he may ask that the respondent be denied any communication with or access to his or herself and their children.  S/he may have felt this was his or her only recourse, and, if s/he is a “she”, the petition will likely be stamped by a “family” court judge without consideration and “he” will be denied his right to be an active and available father.

    The more you know...
    The more you know…

    If such a bureaucratic miscalculation is made, the petitioner may request that the order be vacated by the  issuing judge of the original or a subsequently amended version of the order.

    If the petitioner still fears some manner of harassment from the respondent, s/he may request the aforementioned “refrain-from” order which, if granted, would result in the arrest of the respondent for contempt of court should s/he “misbehave”.  In cases that do not involve violence, a “refrain-from” order is logically the best and fairest choice.   And, from the perspective of the petitioner, it puts even greater pressure on the respondent to modify his or her behavior, as s/he is still allowed to communicate with the petitioner, but if the petitioner construes any such communication as harassing or otherwise in violation of the order, s/he may call the authorities and have the respondent immediately arrested.

    In the author’s opinion, such risk is worth being allowed access to his or her children.

    Furthermore, assuming those children are in no danger from the respondent and were not exposed to the alleged harassment, a single-party refrain-from order is a more fair and just recourse for a petitioner who may have a legitimate reason to limit their communication and feels compelled to seek legal intervention in the matter.

    0x07: I’m on Wellbutrin ER 300mg/day, Adderall ER 60mg/day, Klonopin 0.5mg/6h as needed, and some residual Provigil.  The Provigil (presumably in conjunction w/the Adderall) gives me the anxiety somethin’ fierce, so it’s rarely used.

    0x08: The divorce continues to crawl along.  An agreement was made that if a professional evaluated me as suitable for unsupervised visitation, it would be done.  The evaluation was made.  It hasn’t been done.  The next court date is in a week.  It will probably be postponed.  Again.

    0x09: Complicating the divorce issues, my place of work shut down last month.  I immediately notified my lawyer of this.  I promptly applied for state assistance, and for a modification of the support order.  Because speaking with the mother of my children would mean my going to jail, I was unable to freely communicate regarding any issues of financial needs.  My modification petition was a blunt request for a “suspension”, since NYS unemployment insurance (“UI”) would barely cover my rent and bare essentials– not counting food as an essential.

    0x0A: Got a job about two weeks later, mostly thanks to a good friend from the old place.  Received a total of one UI check for about $300.  Attended the scheduled support modification hearing after filling out another dozen pages of financial details.  Opposing counsel requested it be rolled into the matrimonial proceedings.  I don’t know what my obligations are now.  My communications with anyone in this debacle has been unreliable, sporadic, downright refused, punished with jail time, costly, necessarily vague, rarely understood or fully addressed– it’s been shite, o my brothers.

    That just about brings y’all up to date.  I suppose I didn’t have to put it in bullet-list form, but I didn’t want to change the title.

    The past year and a half has been, mostly, some kind of a special Hell.   A relationship with a woman triggered it, and a relationship with a better woman has helped turn things around.   In any case, I’m a better man than I was last year.

    If we can’t say, every day, that we’re better than the other-self behind us in the clone-queue of our life, then we might as well be dead.