a blog really

Sad songs, empty bottles and lonely nights. That would just about sum up five years of my life.

It takes a long time to realize just how self-destructive behavior is. Especially when you don’t want to listen. It also takes a long time when very few people do anything but enable. But there is no blame but upon oneself for these matters of the heart/soul/mind.

So easy it became to get off work, drive to the grocery and pick up a 12-pack of beer. Get home, open first beer and not stop until they were all gone. Many times, this was not enough, so loud music became part of the equation. Amazingly enough, only once were the cops called on me during that time of my life.

Sitting on the stoop, drinking in the middle of the early morning afternoons on Sunday was always fun too. The stares of folks who don’t know you and you don’t know them in a small southern town are amazing. They also don’t hurt as much as those who cast the stares seem to want them too. Maybe they were all just jealous. Me, sitting at home, reading, writing and drinking the day away. Meanwhile, they were off to church to listen to someone tell them they can’t be perfect, they have to try to be, however.

If I’d been a painter, I could have painted some great portraits and landscapes of those folks.

Going on little walks in my little town while a little besotted was another past time of that time in my life. Being in a tourist spot -- for the elderly and soon to be retired -- made for more stares and points.

I wasn’t so much drunk then, but peacefully buzzed. Blotto was saved for Tuesday nights when the gang got together. In all those years, I only remember one time when someone asked how I was doing after my dramatic fall. And that person wasn’t even a close friend, just someone who’d read something I wrote about it and felt kind of bad about it. Pretty close to an exact representation of the conversation there. At least for his side.

Drinking became my way of staying alive. There were plenty of days when I forgot to eat. But never forgot to get some beer on the way home. I know that many of my health problems today stem from those binges of sorrow. Some of my best, and worst, words flowed those days nights. I do miss it sometimes, the way the emotions filled up pages of stories. Pages of raw energy and passion. Short poems that actually said something about my state of mind.

I don’t drink much anymore, except when I go out with friends. There are some that I still get drunk with, but they are few and far between. I’d say most of them don’t drink much anymore either. Kids, jobs, real life has interrupted for them.

It can start to feel a bit like a gerbil in a cage, jumping up into the wheel and just running, running, running. But always ending up in the same fucking cage, just winded.

There are times I think that ending up a cliché isn’t so bad. Or that it was inevitable with the way I lived my life. The way I never thought things through before doing them. Spontaneity used to be a godsend. Now, it rarely shows it’s face. Yet, I face the consequences of it still. Another unintended but predictable situation.

Once, I was lucky enough to get eight sessions of free therapy. And while the lady didn’t get to even the edge, let alone the heart of what was fucking my life up until the last 15 minutes of the last session, it did me good. I wish I could go back to therapy, surely with a better therapist, but talking about it helps. Just like writing about it helps.

And just like it took eight hours of struggle to just scratch off the first layer of salt from the windshield around my heart with a therapist, it’s taking me 1,000s upon 1,000s of starts and stops of writing to get to whatever it is that haunts me.

I can say this, sometimes when you take a stand in your mind, and then go through with whatever it was that you took a stand on, it can be the wrong decision just as much as the right decision. Even if, so many years later, you still don’t know if it was the right one or the wrong one. Chances are, you won’t ever know. That would suck, of course. But would it suck anymore than dwelling on it? Year after fucking year? Lost opportunities and chances not taken?

Hell no.

And yet, I sit here and type endlessly about the same things. The same ghosts in my head that keep me from chasing the right things, even if it’s going to end wrong.