dream - o52525: gift from out of time

A day trip back home.  The old homestead has been bulldozed, dust still settling.  None of the libraries have survived.  My grandparents' house, altogether gone.  The tiny pond, filled in; the towering magnolias in the front yard, vanished, the bases of their stumps scorched out of the earth.  Back at the campo sancto, the family land, there's some vestiges of the past-- the quonset hut I helped my parents erect remains due to the concrete foundations, but the wooden ends of the vast, corrugated steel drum have been burnt out.

Despite these minor erasures, the land itself is rich, verdant, flowering.  I note the freshly turned clay at the edges of our old dirt roads, the evidence that the bulldozers have been here, too.  The barn still stands, but it's completely vacant & coalblack within.  The clean, subtle sweet scent of dogwood, clustered by the rotted pens to either side, their bleached paper blossoms with punched-tab leaves trembling in the breeze.  The land has never seemed so vacant, nor at ease.

In what remains of the trailer, some piles of old books.  The front porch remains level, but the interior of the trailer is as buckled by collapse as the last time I saw it, fetid with the scent of black mold, my mother's collection of vinyl fallen forward into the pit in the floor, every gatefold sleeve sick with mildew.  I remain on the porch, at the threshold, uncertain.  Turning to the Bally 'Old Chicago' pinball machine to the left of the washer & dryer, I thumb through the books stacked on the glass.  The top volume is a collection of E.C. Segar's non-Popeye cartooning, something I've never seen before.  Tucking it underneath my arm, I step off the porch...

Tempus fugit, and I'm seating myself at a table with Rob James, mom's best friend from Anniston high school.  His Lennon frames glint as he nods hi, and he peers with interest at the threadbare canvas cover of the Segar book as I slide it over.  A forgotten part of mom's collection, it seems.  We both appreciate the clean bubbly arcs of Segar's pen, the pages upon pages of warmup sketches & practice lines, and I ask him if he likes it.  He says he does, so I say, "Merry Christmas."  Rob looks good, not the slightest indication of M.S.; no tremors, no hesitancy in his hands; and he smiles with genuine affection, the radiance of his appreciation sweeping in an upward arc from the art on the page to my adult stranger's face, like a sunset in reverse.  "Thank you," he says.

I do not tell him he's welcome, for the dead are always welcome here.

on alcohol

I'm capable of not drinking.  A lot of the world isn't.  I have enjoyed alcohol, within limits.  Most of the world cannot limit itself.  But in the longview?  Alcohol is a waste of money, and it can leave a body & mind feeling wormeaten, AND it's a convenient means of self-deception for most of mankind.

I haven't had a drink in over three years.  It's good.  I haven't had a single craving for one since the accident.  That's baller.  No hangovers, no dumb social obligations that require self-medicating to tolerate, no bouts of doubt or anxiety or fuzzy memories.  No hassles, is what I am saying.

Of course there's a downside.  Friends who don't understand sobriety don't want to hang.  New people who don't understand me react to my sobriety as though I'm in A.A.  Since most of north american society uses alcohol in one form or another I feel less welcome-- in fact I feel like avoiding booze, and people who partake of it, altogether, because alcohol's a convenient excuse for bad & imbalanced behavior.

Ever listen to a couple of drunks discover a punchline?  One person says something, the other rejoins, everybody busts out laughing, then the punchline gets repeated and the laughter redoubles.  Which is great!  Laughter is balm.  But then...  The punchline becomes a slurred mantra as the laughter becomes soggier, and after a few more iterations of The Funny Thing it's like listening to five year olds juked on sugar repeating knock-knock jokes as they improvise percussion instruments from cookware.

All of which makes me sound like an unfun, judgy fuck.  I'll allow it.  I'm not fun at parties anymore.  I probably wasn't to begin with.  But so what?  Most parties aren't that great, and people-- don't get me started on people.  About the sole benefit alcohol has for me, now, aside from sterilizing wounds, is providing an easy read on who & who won't be a good friend.  If someone insists on showing you around a new town and their idea of taking you on a tour of the city is a barcrawl, well...  It's revealing.

There are good drugs & there are bad drugs & there are drugs that aren't for me.  And booze is two out of three where I'm concerned.  If I have any regrets about ever partaking, it's that I wasted time & misled myself.  Most friendships turned out to be acquaintances once alcohol was subtracted from them.  So it goes.

Self-control was the only way someone with my history could survive as a bar employee for a solid decade.  I learned how to become a better artist over those years, owing to the fact that I was the token gay sober man on staff.  Of course I was also closeted and privately miserable and endlessly crusing midtown and never acting on any of it.  So there's self-control & then there's mental illness.  Either way, I would go 3 years at a stretch without having a drink.

I also was the token non-smoker.  Which is a whole other subject-- but then it isn't, either, because what I'm talking about is addiction, and the EASE of suborning oneself to an addictive pattern of behavior.  Smoking was (is) a ritual, for me, as an artist; smoking had become part of my creative process.

The trick, if there is one, is at the outset I told myself the day I stopped enjoying it, I would drop it.  I smoked from 17 (first cigarette) to 26.  In the last three years I had discovered the addiction and was wrestling to quit.  Moderation was not a thing I did.  I had survived murder attempts and near-fatal accidents and backwoods surgery and being a gay teen runaway, so I was smoking and drinking like I had something to prove to death.  I was at two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day on bad days.  And there I was, making myself walk five plus blocks in hothouse weather to buy a pack of not-inexpensive, somewhat difficult to find smokes, only to light one, take a drag, stub it out, then throw the pack over a random fence on the way home.  To make myself quit.

You might infer from the previous paragraph that I was an alcoholic during that time period.  No.  I was simply given to excess.  I didn't have my first hangover until some red box wine at 23.  First blackout, gin, 23, sealed the deal.  None of any of that, I said to myself.  And the idiots in my life who couldn't make that decision, I became less forgiving of.

If you're going to let the drugs make the choices for you you're not "out of control":  You're abdicating control.  You're making excuses.  I became as unsympathetic to myself on this subject as I did towards others.  I did not want to become a deadass loser.  So the bad habits weren't allowed to take up residence.  I became my own project; I wanted to be less angry.  I wanted to feel relief from stress.  So I began to excise the problems from my diet altogether:  cutting out alcohol, caffeine, nicotine...

One day, despairing at the possibility I might not have the willpower to quit cigarettes, I discovered I did.  I'm going to say something maddening, now.  Some made-up wannabe zazen gibberish, but it's 100% true:

I stopped Wanting To Quit.

& the desire vanished.

Lo, I was quit.  If I was feeling stress, I would dream about relapsing, and my response would be "Well shit now I have to quit all over".  Of course I'd say fuck it and smoke the dream fag anyhow.  But it was a decade between cigarettes, and when I did smoke, it was to see if the desire was still there, because covid-19 had made landfall.  Why the fuck not?

Of course I found a substitute.  We are talking about addiction, after all.

Smoking was hardest to walk away from because of the ritual.  The ritual of smoking pot replaced cigarettes & briefly became more cost-effective a form of stress and pain management than anything I'd heretofore known in my life.  But the difficulty of access to marijuana, the furtive illegality of it, the frustrating parade of dealers & hustlers & slow motion losers, made weed less desirable.  Being around weed also meant being around drunks, and by this point in our little jeremiad you may have inferred I was sick of my job babysitting drunks and telling people to take their drinks off the felt and fucko bazoo me boyo by the time I finally turned in my two weeks notice I was DONE being around alcohol.

But that's like hating guns, in America, isn't it?  One cannot live utterly shut of it.  It's a thing that's always going to be in society.  It's in every grocery store on every block in Chi.  Catholics like a drink!  And so does everybody else.  It's on every billboard train and magazine.  It's as American as applejack.  It's also bone stupid boring and gross despite being (don't get me wrong) a terribly fascinating SUBJECT in terms of its history & utility & the endless innovations Alcohol has resulted in.  The science?  Magnificent stuff.

But fuckoff with booze.

No-where in here have I mentioned my father's part in my mental math on the subject of alcohol.  Not really.  So, a closing anecdote.

My father was not an alcoholic.  Not initially. He was, however, the first male on his side of the family to develop a taste for the stuff, after I ran away.  He was not a drinker when he was beating or strangling or drowning me.  But he was a drinker by the time he got to beating his wife, and a for sure alcoholic after his son & wife had both abandoned him.  He'd built a chicken wire enclosure with a circumference of twelve feet out back of the greenhouse so when he was done downing a can of cheap beer by the stove, he could just chuck it out the back door.  By the time I returned home, in 2007, that fenced-in circle was a literal mountain of beer cans taller than I am.

My mother needed a divorce so she could move on with her life.  The only way that could happen was if I lied through my teeth to my former abuser and tell him I loved him & forgave him.  So I lied, and I helped him clean up the farm some.  I helped him bag up & relocate the mountain of beer cans, and at the bottom of the pile, beneath it all, we discovered the misplaced front bumper of the bus that was rusting in the pasture by the surplus military command center rigs he'd bought...

(You know, those wheel sets they attach to a cargo container so it can be towed like a mobile home? Yeah. He'd just bought some on a whim, to go along with the bulldozers and the machine lathe and all the other toys.)

"So that's where the bumper went," he harrumphed as I bagged up several year's worth of stale-ass beer cans, contemplating how this white trash mad scientist had filled our ancestral barn with rotting electronics.  How he had turned from the 70smonster who deformed my childhood into a pathetic old broken-down horder with an affinity for shitty watered-down american lager.

My diminished monster told me he was planning to build a new house out of bud light cans and old tires, maybe, one day.

That was my thanksgiving, in 2007.

This year?  This year was pretty good.

Happy holidays!

dream - 1o1424: up the road

Up the road from the campo sancto.  In the unpainted concrete basement of my great-grandfather's house.  I've dropped a small, red-glazed ceramic pipe, and it bounces down an unfamiliar stair, off the landing and into a sandpit below.  Going to collect it I encounter the recent, marvelous tables my grandfather has been crafting.  The top of the largest is a cross-section of pine, at least five feet across and three-quarters of a foot thick; the round still has the bark on, shiny beneath the saplike coat of finish.

Retrieving the pipe from the sandpit beneath the stair I go back up to the top landing and find granddad knelt there, woodworking, shirtless & panting as he planes the surface of the table level.  His sister and wife watching with skepticism.  Keeling forward, his fingers dig into his chest, and I experience a shock of recognition.  How much like my father he looks, his hair not yet gone completely gray.  A.E. straightens up and lurches off for a nitroglycerin pill, dismissively irritable with everyone for carrying on and making a meal of things.  "Been this way ever since the operation," his voice a bass murmur.  I feel ashamed-- not for my concern, but for what he would call my effeminacy.

I descend to the basement again, going from vacant storeroom to vacant storeroom.  No electricity.  The rooms faintly cold, accruing damp.  The dark resists my eyes, the details of blank concrete the blurry forest green of retinal afterburn.  Remembering that my aunt is dead.  The house did not long survive her.

* * * * *

After an hour of dicking around with every search engine I could find, asked Siegfried to help me check on my grandparents.

A.E. died in 2022.  Mary died shortly thereafter.

Guess now I know.

dream - 1oo824 - memory as abandoned house or forsaken home

Two iterations of the same dream, today, both about the ancestral hearth by the highway.

The house built & moved to the county line by teams of horses, back when Anniston changed from being 'Anne's Town'.  My great-grandfather was raised in that house, and he brought his own kids up there.  After my parents tried & failed to escape Alabama by moving to Indiana--  never got an explanation for that one --they came right back to the heart of their misery on the outskirts of Anniston. So that was where I was raised, with a hand at my throat and a belt on my back, in a house that was once property of a klan member.  As a kid I claimed to have seen great-granddad's ghost in the hallway.  (I'm fairly certain that was a lie.  I would remember a ghost.  Any ghost.)  I don't dream about the house often.  The last time I saw it intact, a hobo had broken in and established his bedroll where my parents' bedroom had been; he'd used cheap pornography to spark a fire which charred a skull-sized hole clean through the century-old hardwood floor.  The place has been bulldozed in the decades since.

Anyway, the dreams were these:

[1]  Living with Sig, financially stranded in Alabama, homesteading in the abandoned remains of the campo sancto.  His hair's bleached, badly, and he looks perfectly miserable here.  I was trying to figure out how to bridge a treacherous gap in the front porch when I heard him cry out.  Raced to the kitchen to discover him on the verge of tears, his glasses broken and us too poor to replace them.  The look on his face sunders my heart, and the shock sends me halfway up for air, to consciousness, where I strain, eyes open, to focus on my lover's features on the pillow beside me.  But I can't, because sleep paralysis, so what I see never coheres into anything more sensible than a riot of improperly configured flesh, and the vision appalls me so that I begin groaning & shouting for help.  Sig shakes me, trying to wake me...

[2]  But I am not shaken free of the trap of memory, and so I am again lost in trying to reconfigure the space.  The players have changed-- forgotten faces, none quite as sober as I --but the problems are little different; the kitchen has to be rearranged, the stove needs to be moved, but the floors aren't load bearing and the fixtures are all too fuckin' fixed for me to shift appliances from where they're stationed.  I'm in tears trying to figure it all out, even though the problems are mundane as hell.  The sleep paralysis doesn't set in this time and I wake normally.  I lay there, blinking through the minutes spent thinking about nothing real, and turn to make sure I'm seeing Siegfried's face as it should be.  Sensing I'm conscious his eyes shift beneath his lids and he opens them on me.  "What was the nightmare," he asks, and I try not to answer.  "Sorry my head's a such a damned haunted house."