“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.

Photo by Mihai Vlasceanu on Pexels

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.

Listen to Scrap by L7:

Photo from Pixabay

Photo by Dennis Steinauer

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.”

1. I woke up in my car countless mornings—on city streets, major commuting thoroughfares, and leafy suburban lanes. Sometimes even on work days.
2. I got separated from my group on the fourth of July in DC and wandered around trashed for eight hours all by myself.
3. My friends and I walked out on a huge bar tab because we forgot to pay.
4. 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.
5. My friend Mike said something mildly insulting, so I smashed his passenger-side window with my beer bottle.
6. I gratified the dining room in my rental house with black spray paint.
7. I mummy-wrapped my head with duct-tape.
8. I insulted a big, muscular biker, called him a redneck, and then fell backwards over his parked motorcycle knocking it to the ground.
9. I passed out on a highway on-ramp while hitchhiking to my girlfriend’s college
10. 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:

1. Passing out candy on Halloween
2. The night before Thanksgiving
3. Thanksgiving day
4. Setting up the Christmas tree
5. Christmas day
6. New years eve
7. After a hike
8. After mountain biking
9. While grilling meat
10. 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.

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.