Me, posturing with my comment, trying to seem smart on a smart person’s blog:
The detritus from abandoned blogs and terminated online relationships makes my last 12 years hard to revisit. I felt like some of those bloggers were among my best friends until one day they disappeared for good. I often think about looking them up, but I realize that because they vanished, they may want to stay lost. I wonder who will mourn when I log off for good.
Bill wrote about a disappeared blogger. About reaching out and receiving a disappointing reply. He wrote about other stuff too, but the lost friend part hit home. It made me want to respond. The attrition is endless. They leave for Substack. They become bored. Their muse takes flight. They birth a baby. They lose their voice. They get a life. Whatever. They vanish. Usually, it takes time. They write less. They read less. They take a break. They return months later promising to do better and then evaporate entirely.
I miss them. Do they miss me? My early days of writing featured vulnerability—newfound sobriety, growing insight into my Tourette, my OCD, my anxiety and depression. I cut myself open and spilled out prose. Those I read did the same. We built a community of injured souls. We understood and supported one another. I’m not sure how I would have succeeded without them.
One by one, they disappear. At first, I usually don’t notice. One day I think, “Huh, when was the last time Robyn commented on a post. When was the last time she liked one.” I check her blog and see she hasn’t written in weeks. She never posted again.
In time, others took her place, but they fell away as well. And then more. My desire to look them up—cyberstalk them, google their email and drop them a line—comes in waves. A strong one now, obviously, writing these thoughts. I once met up with Robyn at a trail race. We had so much in common. The running, of course, and punk music. Social anxiety. Autism—her son (definitely) and me (possibly). Plus, Gettysburg, her husband is a history nut.
She told me her family once took a photo outside the library where I work. She tried to guess which window was mine. She didn’t come in, social anxiety and all. The time we met was awkward. We tried to talk while we ran. Our paces mismatched. Me, out of breath, Robyn, itching to run ahead. Coffee would have worked better, assuming a pair of social misfits can hold a conversation.
One day I’ll quit blogging. I won’t fade away like most. I’ll drop out cold turkey. White knuckles, like I did with alcohol. To others, it will seem abrupt, but I’m sure I’ll have agonized over the decision for months. Will you notice? Will you reach out? Ask if I’m all right? Tell me what I meant to you… if anything? Blogging, I think, is dying. Different media, newer media is taking over. I suspect each of us will bail eventually. Find different hobbies, different ways to express ourselves. Or not. Possibly some of us will simply mourn one more lost bit of our lives.
We finished the class with standing sprints to Bring Me to Life by Evanescence, a five-minute climb to 4 Non Blondes’ What’s Up, and cooled-down to The Jam’s That’s Entertainment. As the opening bars to Beck’s Loser filled the room, the spinners slowed their pedals to a stop, dropped their heels, and stretched their calf muscles. I turned the music down to a conversational level and said, “This is my favorite song lyric right now.”
Beck sang out: In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey.
“Wait, what did he say?”
“In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey. That’s how I feel every day of my life.” No one asked me what I meant. The night before, I posted the lyric on my Facebook page to honor the start of Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month. My theme this year—Tourette Syndrome: So much more than tics. It’s the tics that get all the attention. Those unwanted movements and vocalizations are displayed with either respect or ridicule all over social media—the people who jerk, the people who cuss, the people who whistle, blink and bark.
Yes, the tics are obviously an issue. I disturb the people within earshot with my grunting. I cause people to look away with my long, dramatic, face-scrunching blinks. I’m sure people wonder why I jerk and torque my body as I walk down the street. Scratch my arm until it bleeds. Blow air across my eyes. Lick my lips, wipe them off. Lick my lips, wipe them off. A thousand times a day. The tics are the visible symptom, but there’s so much more. It’s the rest that derails me.
I loaded my Facebook post with hashtags, the disorders that accompany Tourette: #OCD #ADHD #ASD #Anxiety #Insecurity, and the takeaway I want people to grasp: #NotAJoke #NotAPunchline #ItsABigFuckingDeal, and the reason for my post #TouretteAwareness. I considered using #Embarrassment, but it seemed pathetic. But if I’m honest, embarrassment is the biggest one. I’m embarrassed by my tics.
“What are you working on?” Susan peeked over from her side of the couch as I created an image of my Beck quote with my tagline ‘So much more than tics’ beneath it.
“A Facebook meme for Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month.” A five-minute debate over the proper meaning of ‘meme’ sprung up, and then she volunteered to take over using Canva, the graphic design tool she uses to market her business.
“PowerPoint is fine. Plus, I’m basically done.” A true statement, but I also knew if I let Susan take over, she would advocate against the Beck quote. I already know this approach is weird and oblique. I want people to have to think about it. I want them to arrive at their own understanding of the alienation I feel because of Tourette. I don’t want to hold their hands and lead them through the maze of my mind, even if they never get it. Which is good; I don’t think anybody got it.
My Facebook following is laughable. Of my one hundred or so friends, I suspect sixty or seventy have unfollowed me, bored with my bitchy anti-Trump sentiments, my weekly spin playlists, and my reshares of silly running memes (at least those are actual memes). Only eight people liked my post. Not much of an impact for Tourette Syndrome awareness. I have no idea how many people read it and didn’t like it, or simply didn’t understand. No one commented, no one asked for clarification.
I considered using my pulpit at the front of the spin room to discuss Tourette Awareness Month, and why the chimpanzee quote is significant to me, but it seemed inappropriate. I worried that the Y might get pissed at me for going off script. So, I’m telling you instead.
The fact that the song title is Loser isn’t lost on me. My disgust with Tourette Syndrome is well documented. I spend untold hours bemoaning my ‘loser’ status, feeling sorry for myself, feeling different from everyone else. This is an area I’m trying to improve, trying to transcend. I’ve made progress, but I’m a work in process.
Take a few minutes to listen to Loser. It’s a great and unique song, unlike anything else recorded (lyrics below).
LOSER
In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey Butane in my veins and I’m out to cut the junkie With the plastic eyeballs, spray-paint the vegetables Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose
Kill the headlights and put it in neutral Stock car flamin’ with a loser and the cruise control Baby’s in Reno with the vitamin D Got a couple of couches, sleep on the love-seat
Someone came in sayin’ I’m insane to complain About a shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt Don’t believe everything that you breathe You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve So shave your face with some mace in the dark Savin’ all your food stamps and burnin’ down the trailer park Yo, cut it
Soy un perdedor I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me? (Double-barrel buckshot) Soy un perdedor I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?
Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber ‘Cause one’s got a weasel and the other’s got a flag One’s on the pole, shove the other in a bag With the rerun shows and the cocaine nose-job
The daytime crap of the folksinger slob He hung himself with a guitar string A slab of turkey-neck and it’s hanging from a pigeon wing You can’t write if you can’t relate Trade the cash for the beef for the body for the hate And my time is a piece of wax falling on a termite That’s choking on the splinters
Soy un perdedor I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me? (Get crazy with the cheeze whiz) Soy un perdedor I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me? (Drive-by body pierce) Yo, bring it on down
Soy un perdedor I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me? (I can’t believe you) Soy un perdedor I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?
Soy un perdedor I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me? (Sprechen Sie deutsch, baby?) Soy un perdedor I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me? (Know what I’m sayin’?)
Reunited, and it feels so good Reunited, ’cause we understood There’s one perfect fit And sugar, this one is it We both are so excited ‘Cause we’re reunited, hey, hey
Reunited, a Peaches and Herb song from my high school years. So distant from the music I preferred—Springsteen, Beatles, Thorogood, CSNY, the Stones, and of course the breaking new wave bands—but in the seventies, in the car, you listened to the radio. You listened to whatever they played. I never liked Reunited, I still don’t, but here it is, in my brain on repeat.
My high school reunion approaches. Easily the most hyped since my twentieth. Maybe more. I’m not sure why, this is my forty-fifth. It lacks the cachet of a milestone. Seems to me that four decades later, celebrations should be ten years apart. Yes, forty-five years is a long time, I haven’t seen any of these people since 2000, but c’mon guys, shouldn’t we wait until fifty?
Anyway, I’m not going.
Oooh, I think I heard your groan from here! Yes, call me a buzzkill. A loser. A party-pooper. I’m all those things and more. And I’m even curious to see who those people from high school turned into. But I won’t pay the price. I’m not talking about the price of the event, although at $150 for dinner, that seems a little steep, especially for a nondrinker who can’t milk the open bar to get his money’s worth. I’m talking about the agony of the evening.
A few months ago, a guy named Richard emailed me out of the blue. He graduated with me, he said, did I remember him? I don’t. He was out for dinner with high school friends and my name came up. He decided to look me up. This has happened many times over the years. As a prolific blogger and regularly published columnist with a somewhat unique last name, I must be just about the easiest person to find on the internet. Richard lives about an hour away from me. Did I want to get together for drinks? I don’t.
Last month Steve emailed me. He found a tribute I wrote about a high school friend who died of ALS. Same questions as Richard, do I remember him? Do I want to get together, maybe at the reunion? Nope and nope.
Before you assume I was one of those super popular high school kids that everyone revered even though I didn’t take the time to learn anyone’s name, let me assure you, that wasn’t me. I dwelled far left-of-center on the high school popularity bell-curve. If I didn’t know someone, it’s because I assumed they had no interest in meeting me, so I never spoke with them. It’s also possible that my memories of the people I sort of knew in high school were lost in a 1995 bicycle crash that damaged my brain in ways I’m still discovering.
A few days ago, my brother texted me. “I gave your email address to Josh Casson so he could contact you about your reunion. I don’t want you to be surprised when he shows up in your inbox.” Sigh. I’m getting tired of turning people down. I wonder what they think. That I’m bitter about my high school experience, and I haven’t gotten over it? That I didn’t like them forty-five years ago, and I still don’t like them now? That my life turned out badly, and I’m embarrassed to show up? Is that last one so off the mark?
In my email exchange with Steve (the one I don’t know), I wrote: I had sort of dismissed the idea of going to the reunion, crowds and small talk aren’t really my thing. I’m sober and have symptomatic Tourette Syndrome (doubly so when anxious) so it seems like a hard night. TMI? He found me through my blog. It’s likely he already knew this.
Someone giving advice in the comments section will say, “Just go and be yourself. Who cares what those people think?” I called it agony earlier. Hyperbolic, possibly, but for those who suffer from social anxiety, mingling is miserable. And while I’ve grown more comfortable with my Tourette tics over the past few years, the thought of putting them on display in front of one hundred people already in full judgement mode seems too much to bear.
No, I’ll skip this one. Especially since I know we’ll have another reunion in just five short years: The big 5-0. I’ll make that one a priority. And after dinner, when the dancing starts, I’ll ask the DJ to play Reunited. Sorry, just kidding. Instead, I’ll request Call Me by the Blondie—the smash hit recording of my senior year from a band I still listen to today.
“Mmmm.” A dozen voices in unison. Heads nod, claps splatter, polite, but well intentioned. “Wooo, Jenny!” One guy does the snapping thing. By the third reader, I begin to anticipate the Mmmm, an exclamation of knowing approval. After every poem: Mmmm. By coincidence, this happened a couple of weeks ago during an interview. A strong candidate, great experience, but my brain hung up on her Mmmm. For every question we asked: “Mmmm, good question… Mmmm, let me see…” I missed her answers. I obsessed over the Mmmm.
Tonight, the Mmmm is deserved. The poems are great. Every one of them. The reading continues, my heart sinks. I’m out of my league. These guys can write! Happy I brought nothing to share. Mmmm, nods, clap, clap, clap.
~ ~ ~
This visit, for me, was years in the making. A night at a poetry event two decades old. The first Friday of every month, shops up and down the strip serve cheap chardonnay and cubed cheese in a communitywide effort to attract shoppers. People browse, drink, then move to the next store. We skipped that scene, went straight to the Ragged Edge. We bought our drinks, jasmine lime green tea for Susan, a decaf black eye for me.
Black eye: a cup of coffee laced with two shots of espresso. Baristas sometimes give me that look. ‘What’s the point of decaf espresso?’ I say fuck you, just give me my coffee, but silently, in my head. The girl behind the counter didn’t blink an eye. She only charged me for one shot.
I appreciate the coffee shop’s name. Ragged Edge, a clear visual to illustrate the effects of over-caffeination. When I was young and idealistic and abused caffeine for sport, I hoped to open a coffee joint called Jitters with flickering neon sign. An ode to being wired. This predated triple caramel macchiatos and skinny chai lattes. Shops served brewed coffee and espresso. But I never got beyond the name and couldn’t have ridden the coming specialty drink wave, anyway.
They packed them in at the Ragged Edge. Susan and I grabbed the last seats, two thirds of a couch not facing the stage, my head twisted ninety degrees for two hours. Mmmm. Clap, clap-clap, clap. Twice last year I printed a poem on Friday afternoon and stuck it in my pocket. By dinner time I chickened out. As nervous and embarrassed to tell Susan my plan as I was to stand on the stage and read.
I told Katy, one of the organizers, over and over, “Yeah, I’ll need to get in there some month to read.” Years ago, I asked if people ever snuck in prose. “What would happen if I showed up with a flash piece?”
She frowned, “I wouldn’t do that.” And I never did.
As the reading let out, Amy and Dave, friends we arrived with, insisted I should participate, that I could hold my own. Susan agreed. When we got home, I read the poems on my blog. I think I’m right. The First Friday crowd inhabits a higher level, but now I’ve got something to shoot for.
“I will stop the war in one day.” How many times did he say it? How many times was it repeated by his followers, his minions? “Only Trump can stop the war.”
So, what’s my problem? Why get hung up on this specific lie? So many others:
I’ll reduce grocery prices.
And gas prices.
Mexico will pay for the wall.
Ukraine started the war.
I won the 2020 election.
On and on. The list is endless.
Trump is the “dealmaker.” The king-negotiator. No one can squeeze more blood from a turnip. Trump’s ground-breaking deal: Putin gets to keep all the land he stole.
That’s it? That’s what Trump boasted about? That’s his plan to stop the war? Any asshole could have come up with that. But only one did. Breaking news: Trump says Putin doesn’t seem to want peace! And why would he? If he gets to keep what he’s grabbed, why not keep grabbing?
Note: My mother-in-law and her parents emigrated from Ukraine to America at the end of WWII along with about 400,000 other ‘displaced’ Europeans.
As a kid, I read the cereal box while I ate breakfast. No, I’m not the only one. My brothers did this too, and on TV, characters on sit-coms and commercials would sometimes be shown reading the box. I think it was a thing. Sugary cereals often had content printed on the box to distract the diner. Mind puzzles, mazes, jokes, crap to buy. After I memorized the back of the box, I moved on to the ingredients list, wondering why we needed dyes and unpronounceable chemicals in my Trix. Finally, I read the nutritional chart—the reading material becoming less and less interesting as breakfast wound down. Do people still do this? Now, I play Connections or read blogs while I eat breakfast. I exhaust the news while drinking my coffee.
Old habits die hard. As I brushed my teeth last night, I occupied my mind by reading the back of the Q-Tips box. Q-Tips offered four illustrated uses for their product. Beauty—a photo of a woman removing eyeliner; First Aid and Baby Care—um, I think someone was tickling a baby’s foot with a Q-Tip; Home & Electronics—apparently here, you’re supposed to deconstruct your car stereo speakers and use a Q-Tip to poke at your tweeter; Arts & Crafts—why waste money on paintbrushes when you have a box of five-hundred Q-Tips?
What happened to cleaning ears? I googled: What percent of the population uses Q-Tips to clean their ears? I don’t think many definitive studies have addressed this question, but the number that kept popping up is sixty-eight percent. Sixty-eight percent of the population use Q-Tips to clean their ears even though for decades, doctors, and even the various manufacturers of Q-Tips, have cautioned against inserting a stick into your ear.
Personally, I use Q-Tips daily. If I don’t, the tips of my hearing aids get gunked up with the crap that lines my ear canals after I exercise. Plus, I think I’m addicted. I need my daily fix of ear scraping. In college, my friends and I walked to 7-Eleven one night to buy hot dogs, three for a buck, at the end of a party night. As we dressed our dogs with every single condiment offered, the clerk eyed us while he dug in his ear with the pocket-clip-end of a Bic Round Stick pen cap. Walking home, we trashed him as uncouth and ignorant, but the whole time I thought, that’s brilliant, I can’t wait to give that a try.
Without ear cleaning, Q-Tips would have gone out of business decades ago.
Lying in bed last night, I tried to think of another product that exists solely because people use it incorrectly. I immediately dismissed regulated medications from my list because so many are used off label—the most obvious and current being Ozempic. I settled on inhalants. In my preferred musical genre, punk rock, many songs sing the praises of inhaling chemicals as an intoxicant. Carbona Cleaning Products famously sued the Ramones in the seventies for suggesting that inhaling Carbona produced a superior high than sniffing airplane glue.
As a teen, I delved into this myself. Each bus tub of dough that rose on the prep shelves at the pizza joint where I worked contained a twenty second buzz. When you dug your hands into the center of the dough and made a small opening, the gas that escaped, if inhaled, left you dizzy and giggling. We called these dough-hits. Even though the managers complained that dough-hits ruined the dough, most days, most tubs got hit.
And eighties metalcore pioneers L7 sing a song about “Scrap,” a skinhead who lives to get high on spray paint fumes.
I met a skinhead named Scrap He lived in my friend’s garage Every day, he’s shaking that spray paint can And comes out seeing stars
Grab a paper bag like an oxygen mask Until your mind starts to gel ‘Cause the ball in the can has a crazy beat The funky, dying brain cell
On a summer day about five years ago, I asked my kids, aged fourteen and seventeen, to clean and repaint the heavy, steel ‘bouncy-chairs’ that reside on our patio. Midday, they called me at work. “Walmart wouldn’t let us buy spray paint. We’re not old enough.” My immediate thought was a crack down on vandalism, but then I remembered my Scrap lyrics. If teenagers buy spray paint, it’s clearly to get high.
Scrap is a song I’ve returned to repeatedly over the past forty years. The clever lyrics compare the high from huffing paint fumes to the supposedly mindless adherence to charismatic Christianity.
Well, he met some Christians from hell Who said, “Let’s go to Vegas, man” So he packed up his leather and his red beret Into that big, bad Christian van
Use revival meetings like an oxygen tent ‘Til your mind starts to gel ‘Cause the preacher thumps the bible with a crazy beat The funky, dying brain cell
For me, song lyrics are often unintelligible. I always sang along offering my best approximation of what I thought a band said. As a child, Elton John’s fictional rock star “Benny” had electric boobs and a motor scooter. AC/DC sang about dirty deeds and the dunder chief—whoever TF that was. Deep Purple’s woman was a T.K.O. She makes me sick! When L7 told me that Scrap dug atallic coal baluka John, I had no clue what they were talking about. I didn’t twist the line into a cute phrase, I just mumbled along hoping that no one questioned my rendition.
Almost all lyrics are now on the internet. Ten or fifteen years ago, I checked out the lyrics to Scrap.
Well, he came back to the garage But the garage, it wasn’t there And he dug metallic gold more than Luke and John Now he’s growing his hair
Huh! What’s metallic gold? More internet research. Ah, gold spray paint. The kids on the web think gold gives the best high. So, Q-Tips and metallic gold spray paint. Keep your eyes open. If the person in line in front of you at Walmart has either of those, an intervention might be in order.
Darrin and I bantered about alcohol, as people often do. We joked about sneaking a flask into an inappropriate venue—not sure I can remember which one, maybe the book sale we’re both working in July. Sarcasm, not seriousness. Guy talk. Tribe talk. Then I fessed up. “I’m nine years sober.” Nine years dry, really, but I’ll explain what I mean by that later. I told Darrin some of my story, the reason why I’m dry.
“Oh man,” he said, “you should come and speak at Al-Anon*. This is good stuff to hear from the addict’s perspective.” I said I would. This is what I told them.
~ ~ ~
Part 1—Establishing my cred: I was a drunk. From the day I first stepped on my college campus until I met my wife fourteen years later, I was a drunk. Don’t let me mislead you, I was a partier in high school too, but in college, I went pro.
I have countless stories of ridiculous things I did. I used to see them as funny, edgy stories. Reckless adventures to be proud of. Now I see them as poor self-esteem, thinly guised self-harm, or maybe even a death wish. I’ll give some examples, but I picked short, simple stories. The longer ones end with me being mugged, or waking up naked on the basement floor, or permanently scaring away good friends with embarrassing behavior. We could call this my top ten, but really, it’s just ten, any ten. Given a bit of time, I could come up with dozens more.
Let’s call this “Ten stupid things I did drunk.”
I woke up in my car countless mornings—on city streets, major commuting thoroughfares, and leafy suburban lanes. Sometimes even on work days.
I got separated from my group on the fourth of July in DC and wandered around trashed for eight hours all by myself.
My friends and I walked out on a huge bar tab because we forgot to pay.
I went to a bar with the change jar from the top of my dresser because my bank account was empty and my credit card was maxed.
My friend Mike said something mildly insulting, so I smashed his passenger-side window with my beer bottle.
I gratified the dining room in my rental house with black spray paint.
I mummy-wrapped my head with duct-tape.
I insulted a big, muscular biker, called him a redneck, and then fell backwards over his parked motorcycle knocking it to the ground.
I passed out on a highway on-ramp while hitchhiking to my girlfriend’s college
I surfed down a wooden staircase on a bathroom scale.
Do you wonder why no one intervened? No one sat me down and said “Jeff, you have a problem. You need to stop drinking so much.” The day after the bathroom scale incident my brother chastised me: You know, you don’t always need to be the drunkest person in the room. But it was a half-hearted attempt, and for the most part, people laughed along at my escapades.
Thank God I found Susan. We met a couple of weeks after I returned home from a 4,600 mile bicycle trip around the United States. Given the constant exercise, my drinking calmed down a bit over that summer. I drank daily, of course, three to six beers per day—often warm beer—but with only one blackout bender across the course of the summer.
Susan was (and is) a light drinker. When we went out to parties, she would scale up to drink two or three beers, while I plowed through my usual six to nine or more. A few weeks into dating, I stepped off a curb and fell face first into a traffic lane on Connecticut Avenue in DC. Fortunately, no cars approached. Susan told me in clear terms that she wasn’t interested in dating a sloppy drunk. I decided to scale back my drinking. This was 1994, I was thirty-two years old. I had been a daily drinker with weekly blackouts for fourteen years.
Scaling back took years. I want to say I got my act together quickly. And things certainly improved, but not enough to avoid the hangovers, which continued for years and were a constant reminder that I still had a serious problem. Two memorable ones:
Four years after meeting Susan, I stood up a work-client I was supposed entertain at my company’s skybox at Redskins Park. I was too hungover to leave home. I not sure I ever recovered from that one with my boss.
Eight years after meeting Susan, I pulled to the side of the road, opened my car door and vomited into the street. We were on our way to a late afternoon cookout. I was still hungover from the night before. My new baby was in the car.
So, scaling back was a long, slow transition.
Part 2—Banging my head against a wall
Through the combination of parenting young children and willpower, I gave up drunkenness. From 2003 until 2016, I controlled my drinking. Control is the operative word. My desire and my nature were to overdrink—to slip passed buzzed into a slightly stuporous state. But I didn’t allow it. I limited myself to three drinks per night. Maybe an extra on Friday and Saturday. I delayed my drinks, usually red wine, until my kids were in bed. I wanted to savor my experience.
As boxed wines proliferated and became better, I switched from bottles to save money. it got harder to track my intake. I felt an urge to top off whenever I passed through the kitchen. My consumption crept back up. Others noticed.
My son, maybe seven, learned in school that anything more than one is problem drinking. “Don’t get another dad, you’ve already had three.”
My wife: “How fast did you go through that box of wine anyway?”
Two glasses of red wine daily offer health benefits. Everyone knows that. At least we did fifteen years ago. Those two glasses became my target. My medicine. My guarantee that I was doing my part to boost my immune system, reduce my cholesterol and blood pressure, even though none of these metrics were really all that great. I knew I wasn’t addicted. I took my son to scout camp every summer for three days. Proof that I could go alcohol-free without detox.
Sometimes my consumption would creep up, an extra glass, but after a couple of weeks or months, I always returned to my two-glass target. I spent years trying to maximize my allowable daily allotment.
Trying to take the two-glass recommendation seriously, I filled a measuring cup with ten ounces of wine. I called it my measure. I broke it up every way imaginable—two equal portions, three tiny portions. A large glass, then a small glass, or the small glass first. It was never enough wine. As soon as I finished, I mourned. By mid-morning the next day, I craved my daily measure. I thought about it all day. After dinner, I cracked a book, poured my ten ounces, I sipped and read. And then it was gone. Back to mourning. Counting the hours until my next drink with a nonstop internal dialogue, looking for excuses to cheat.
I gave up drinking during the week. I thought if I broke the habit of nightly drinking, I’d feel better, it would be easier. It wasn’t. Instead of counting hours until my next drink, I counted days. My cheat days increased. Sunday is still the weekend. Thursday is close enough. Tuesday, a reward.
In January 2016, I quit. I couldn’t stand it anymore. The internal voices exhausted me. Alcohol was all I thought about. When’s my next drink. How much more do I have left to drink tonight. Ugh, no more tonight, cut off until tomorrow, cut off until Friday.
Part 3—My bitter pill: On my last day, a friend came over for Sunday night drinks. I opened a cheap bottle of red knowing these were my last drinks. I had two expensive and highly rated bottles in the cabinet, a pinot noir and a malbec. I didn’t want to open them because I knew I wouldn’t finish them. My wife and friend were drinking white. The wine I opened was terrible. One of the worst I can remember. My last two glasses of wine sucked.
Every sober alcoholic has a date. Except me. Two or three weeks after I quit, I was so frazzled, I couldn’t remember if it had been two weeks or three. My date is either January 10 or January 17. I’ll never know. I drank bottle after bottle of club soda over ice with a lime wedge. At least it looked like a drink. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t concentrate. All I could think, over and over, was “the rest of my life!” I went to bed early to escape the sadness.
It took five years to go away. All of it wasn’t bad, but much of it was. It hit me in waves at obvious times and at random times. The feeling of loss lingered. Those occasions I always drank now felt hollow. Top ten times I crave(d) alcohol:
Passing out candy on Halloween
The night before Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving day
Setting up the Christmas tree
Christmas day
New years eve
After a hike
After mountain biking
While grilling meat
Out at a restaurant
Being a nondrinker is a bitter pill to swallow. “Drinker’ was an identity I embraced. An example is my conversation with Darrin. The one that launched this whole event for me. Alcohol is something we bonded easily over. It’s a quick way to understand each other. Short-hand. Membership in a club.
I’m not comfortable using the word sober. Sober suggests not-drunk, and I haven’t been properly drunk in decades. I use the word Dry instead. Was I an addict? Someone drinking ten ounces of wine a night doesn’t have a physical addiction. But I clearly had and emotional one. Which is worse? I’m not sure, but my detox period lasted five years, and it was brutal. I let all my friendships evaporate. Acute depression popped up again and again. But over time it faded away.
Part 4—Cured: I don’t miss it except in an abstract, unrealistic way. Like thinking when I was a drunk, I had friends. Life was a party. My confidence soared. I was a leader. “Beer goggles,” a therapist once said. “You see those days through blurry vision.” I know she’s right.
I have no desire to drink now. In fact, I hate being around people showing the slightest signs of intoxication. When I hear their voice thicken, it puts me on edge. I remember when my voice sounded like that. Another thirty-minutes, and they’ll be slurring. I’m embarrassed by the spectacle I must have been.
People suggest that if the draw is gone, I can resume drinking. I broke my habit. My addiction is past. I’m cured. Never. Those blackout-drunk fourteen years are ugly days to remember.
Giving up alcohol is the hardest thing I ever did. It took me seventeen years from the time I met Susan until I was free from the clutches of alcohol. In all, alcohol influenced and controlled thirty-two years of my life. I’ll never give it a chance to grab hold of me again.
*Al-Anon: a mutual support program for people whose lives have been affected by someone else’s drinking.
Note: This is written in a passive voice. Because this is meant to be spoken, I believe people will digest it more easily than my usual tight, aggressive phrasing.
Image from Say Anything… used in accordance with fair use laws for academic analysis
I got out of the shower, threw on some clothes and found Susan in the kitchen brewing coffee. The question burned a hole down to my soul. “If Lloyd Dobler is so cool, why does he play that lame-ass song on his boombox?” Susan knew this reference, do you? John Cusack in the movie Say Anything… stands on Diane Court’s (Ione Skye) lawn, tape deck held above his head, and blasts out In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel. This might be THE iconic scene, the crown jewel of the eighties Brat Pack romance memories. An image immediately recognizable by anyone born between 1960 and 1985. And it’s ruined by the blandest song imaginable.
Actual Lyrics from In Your Eyes:
In your eyes In your eyes In your eyes In your eyes (in your eyes) In your eyes In your eyes (in your eyes) In your eyes (in your eyes)
Okay, I might have cherry-picked those lyrics from the closing bars of the song, but seriously, they use the phrase thirty-one times in the song. Repetitive. Dull. Annoying.
The rest of the music in that movie has an edge. The soundtrack offers a round-up of eighties alternative bands that scream cool: Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Replacements, Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden and Fishbone. Other John Cusack films follow suit. Grosse Point Blank features recurrent soundtrack appearances from the Clash, the Specials, the Pixies, the Jam, and the Violent Femmes. Sort of a who’s who of my Spotify playlist.
In 1989, this music was fringe. In my rural town, it’s still fringe. It’s outside the mainstream, unfamiliar, banished from commercial radio, not pop or country or classic rock, but undeniably hip. People like me, and I suppose the Lloyd Doblers and John Cusacks of the world, think: if everyone could just hear this music, they’d be hooked.
Just like his music, Lloyd Dobler has edge. He’s an outsider looking in, trying to fight conformity in his corner of the world. As a recent high school graduate, when asked what his future plans entail, he replies:
“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”
He’s the anti-capitalist, a backlash against Reagan’s America.
As a thirty-five-year-old, I played a bar game with friends. We each needed to make a case for which actor would play us in a movie about our life. Naturally, I selected John Cusack. We’re about the same age, the same build, we identify as off-beat outsiders, and we seemingly possess identical taste in music. Same-same, twinsies, why wouldn’t he play me.
And this brings me back to my point. Did Cusack have any creative control in Say Anything…? If so, why did he film such an important scene with THAT song? I wouldn’t have used that song. I would have chosen from hundreds of better, more interesting, livelier eighties love songs. A handful of suggestions off the top of my head:
Obsession by Animotion Love is a Battlefield by Pat Benatar Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper When Doves Cry by Prince Almost anything by the Cure
Susan responded to my post-shower question: “The chicks dig it.” OK, she didn’t say “the chicks dig it,” that’s something I would say. She said something along the lines of “people love that song.” So Cusack green-lit In Your Eyes because it’s a crowd-pleaser, something for the masses, even though it’s a song Lloyd Dobler would never listen to. I’m going to name this phenomenon the Dobler Effect—when someone prefers fringe music but blanderizes their musical taste to accommodate the people around them.
Yes, this is a play on words, a nod to the Doppler Effect. Doppler Effect (n): the change in the frequency of a wave in relation to an observer who is moving relative to the source of the wave. Did that make any sense? It’s just a complicated way of describing something we already innately know. Think of a British ambulance. As the ambulance approaches, the neee-nuuu neee-nuuu pitch becomes higher and higher. After the ambulance passes, it gets lower and lower.
In each of these effects—Dobler and Doppler—a person’s perspective impacts the way they hear the sound. Susan points this out frequently. While listening to the same song, we hear very different music. I hear an intricate guitar solo in the random feedback of the Dream Syndicate. I conjure a melody in the jangly, atonal stummings of the Gang of Four. I pick up crooning in Johnny Lydon’s grating voice. I find solace and relaxation in the scraping guitars and screamed lyrics of Sonic Youth. Someone else considers In Your Eyes symphonic. I want to yawn.
Is it my neurodiversity? My rebellious nature? The fact that I was raised by a man who listened to Herb Albert and the Tiajuana Brass? I’m not sure, but I think genetics play a role. I can almost discern a member of my tribe just by looking at them.
It doesn’t surprise me that Lloyd Dobler woos Diane Court with a boring hit single. I do this all the time. As I create the playlists for the indoor cycle (spin) classes I instruct, I make sure I include four or five accessible songs, the crowd pleasers. Not boring songs, certainly, but songs everybody knows and likes. When someone walks away from my class thinking “what the hell was that,” I also want them thinking “oh, right, he played X, Y and Z, too.” We all do this, I think, those of us outside mainstream music. I have separate playlists in Spotify to play when I’m around other people. My principal playlist, Radio Jeff, is just for me. No one else would tolerate it.
I suspect the Dobler Effect and its non-musical cousins are familiar to most of us. We constantly make concessions to ease the discomfort of those around us. We drive slower for our spouse. We cook simpler meals for our kids. We dress in ways our boss deems appropriate. I’m sure each of us has an area where we naturally bend the norms of society. What’s telling is how we deal with that desire. Do we steadfastly plow ahead, refusing to give in, or do we recognize that compromise is necessary for civil society. Hopefully the latter, but Christ, In Your Eyes? C’mon Lloyd, you can do better than that.
Below is a recent spin playlist, one of my most accessible, actually. Constructing this mix was what got me thinking about the Dobler Effect and music-for-the-masses in the first place. Yes, this is what I consider music-for-the-masses.
Last weekend I bought new hearing aids. Well, I bought them weeks ago, but I had to wait for this past weekend for them to arrive. This is my third pair. I started wearing them eight years ago, and each pair died in exactly four years. Since 2017, I’ve dropped six thousand dollars trying to hear the people around me speak.
As an added annoyance, I buy my hearing aids from Costco. It’s a fifty-minute drive from my house, and I need to purchase a special annual membership to even enter the building. I typically go on the weekend. Every visit, it’s a sea of oversized SUVs jockeying for parking spaces or just trying to get the hell out of the massive traffic jam of a parking lot. It’s a hassle, but each time I buy new hearing aids, Consumer Reports ranks Costco’s models as the best, the cheapest, with the best customer service. In contrast, my father’s last pair, bought from the boutique hearing center Miracle Ear, cost over seven thousand dollars.
It’s been four years since I bought a Costco membership.
Sales lady: “You can buy a Gold Membership for sixty-five dollars, or you can buy a Platinum Membership for one-hundred thirty-five dollars.
Me: “I’ll buy the Gold.”
“Wait, with the Platinum Membership, you get two-percent cash back on purchases up to twenty-five-hundred dollars. Since you’re buying a big-ticket item, you’ll actually save money with the Platinum.”
I pulled out my phone and punched numbers into the calculator app. “Two percent of twenty-five-hundred is fifty dollars. I’ll still lose money.” The sales lady gave me a smile that seemed to say Thank you for figuring that out, I feel horrible about ripping off people all day, all week, all year.
The woman who fitted my hearing aids warned me that they would take a few weeks to get used to. She got that right. It’s so much easier now to hear and distinguish voices, but where my hearing aids really excel is picking up clatter.
Clatter (n): a continuous rattling sound as of hard objects falling or striking each other.
When I was a teenager, I frequently came home from my nighttime restaurant job stoned. My parents slept lightly, and some nights, they got out of bed to check on me as I settled down for a snack and some late-night TV. I had to hold it together for those few minutes of conversation so they wouldn’t figure out I was high. I quickly learned it was best not to wake them. I crept around the kitchen, silently fixing my snack, every tiny noise—the microwave closing, the metal ice cream scoop set into the sink—sounded like a bomb exploding.
My new hearing aids remind me of this. In the morning, as I make my lunch before heading off to work, I grab a bag of pretzel sticks from the pantry and wrestle to open the bag for the first time. The stiff plastic, designed to tear all the way down the side of the bag and spill out half the pretzels at some point before I finish eating the contents, crackles so loudly (in my hearing aids) you would think I had a clothes dryer in my kitchen spinning a case of broken beer bottles.
When I fetch a scoopful of ice from my freezer and dump it into my water glass, I’m reminded of the Coca Cola commercial that plays at one-hundred decibels through the Dolby Surround Sound® system at my movie theater. The cat chomping his kibble, water running in the sink, the creaks and snaps of hardwood floors, the air escaping a fresh bottle of club soda, each of these causes such a racket that I wince. The volume of these sounds is almost comical, like something you’d see in a campy horror movie where the teenagers need to keep quiet to save their own lives.
I’m supposed to get used to this over the next couple of weeks. My brain will somehow quiet these sounds so they aren’t so prominent, so painful to my ears. While I want to say that’s impossible to believe, I remember visiting Susan’s grandparents when we first started dating. I woke up five times each night with passing trains. Nothing is so clatter-some as train wheels on train tracks at three in the morning. I commented to her grandmother that she must be exhausted all the time from interrupted sleep. She said, “Oh, I don’t hear those trains anymore. I haven’t heard them for years.”
Maybe we all ‘hear’ this clatter all the time, but our brains have learned to selectively adjust the volume to make it less disruptive. Maybe as an intoxicated teen, I heard those sounds at their actual level because I gave them my full attention (and because I was paranoid and high). Now, my hearing aids include all sorts of phone-app activated settings to filter out background noise. I suppose this would be a simple short-term solution, but my brain won’t learn anything that way. I’ll endure the clatter until it magically goes away.
~ ~ ~
A Bonus Post?
A couple days ago, I stressed about not blogging in over two weeks. Awake at two a.m., after banishing my cat from my bedroom before he started his wee-hours-of-the-morning routine of poking my elbow with a claw and then hiding under the bed, I conjured this potential mini blog post, thinking it was funny, thinking I was clever.
English is Weird: My feed’s gone stale, my blog seems dead, so here’s a verse for you to read.
I thought I touched a universal nerve about homophones requiring context to pronounce the words correctly, and what happens when dual contexts conflict? The next day, I realized how stupid this was. I wrote it down but kept it to myself. Until now.
Who broke the story? I can’t figure that out, but all the major players reported it: People, USAToday, E! Online, even the New York Post. I read about it first on Newser. Read Less, Know More: that’s their tag line—and everyone’s goal. “Loch Ness Centre Reports ‘Captivating’ Sighting.”
This sighting is the first of the year and deemed credible so far. Since they are obviously about to solve the mystery, I decided to spill my knowledge while I can still get the credit. I know the truth of the Loch Ness monster. And Bigfoot, and Mothman, and even the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp. It’s the secret of all the Cryptids.
Psst: They don’t live here!
Do you know this word? Cryptids, a term derived from the Greek ‘krypto’ meaning hidden, refer to animals or beings whose existence is suggested but not proven scientifically.1
Countless sources offer lists online, including Wikipedia. Most of those lists cover many of the same creatures, but they often branch out into specific local lore. Seemingly every region of the world has its own Cryptid. Any place there’s a swamp, there’s a Cryptid. The same goes for larger lakes all around the world. My wife grew up in Eerie, Pennsylvania. When I asked her if there is an Eerie lake-monster, she didn’t know. But a quick search online brought me to a documentary about Bessie, a sea creature first documented in 1817.
Someone first reported seeing the Loch Ness monster in the sixth century AD. Since then, almost twelve-hundred sightings have been logged. Those can’t all be hoaxes, right? Biologists point out that there can’t be just one Loch Ness monster. Nothing lives fifteen-hundred years. A sustainable community is required to continue breeding. Regardless, starting sixty years ago, repeated sonar studies of Loch Ness have proven that a pod of sea serpents isn’t lurking beneath the surface. It’s a conundrum, a puzzle.
I consider the book The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter as sort of a “Multiverse for Beginners” course. It describes in an orderly fashion, the basics of multiverse theory. The multiverse in The Long Earth is a series of parallel Earths where each world differs from its closest multiverse neighbor in subtle ways. Humans in the story learn to ‘step’ between these worlds. The ‘further’ they stray from their own Earth, they encounter greater differences. The trees, barely different in the next world, become unrecognizable several steps away. It’s a compelling model. Possibly it’s real?
Our Cryptids, perhaps, live on parallel Earths near our own universe, but far enough away for evolutionary deviations. If these Cryptids know the secret to stepping between worlds, nothing stops them from traveling through four dimensions. When Loch Ness becomes overfished on their world, they can step into the next world—our world—in search of food. Bigfoots could step in for a break because our world is cooler (or hotter) than many others. Mongolian Death Worms come to our Earth to do whatever it is that Mongolian Death Worms like to do, only slightly differently.
These creatures remain elusive after so many centuries because they only pop in for short periods to eat or relax. They leave just as quickly. The sighting this year at Loch Ness is simply a case of the right place at the right time. People might stare at the lake for the next five months and see nothing at all, because there’s nothing there.
Now that I’ve shared my secret with the world, everyone can stop searching. The Cryptids aren’t here. Until they are. And then they’re not.
