#264.5: A War of Seven Evensongs

dog and/or horse track

It's funny, and I can't recall ever having talked about it at length – sometimes my voice is nearly breaking for the normal reasons, but sometimes, and I'd say like 70/30 if I've been talking for a really long time, it's something that heroin and withdrawal did to my brain. Everything is like that now: if I stand too long, I start to lose my knees and I have to lurch toward a wall; getting up from any chair is a hazardous proposition; if I try to carry too much stuff, some electrical arc will shriek down one of my arms and make me throw half the shit across the room. It's pretty covariant with fatigue and pain, in every case, and unfortunately I am always in pain, and the few worthwhile things I can still do are dead-certain sources of both pain and fatigue, so I have to ration out the times I can afford to be useless after doing something real. I would work SO much more, on SO many more things, if I could physically do it. That's the most frustrating post-junkie shit – any records of mine you can find online were made in 2 weeks or less. 3 of the 4 books I've had published were written, collectively, in 8 months and 4 days. That's how I lived from my late teens to 35, every day: work like a fucking demon, be in awful pain by evening, fill my brain with artificial pain-reduction till 5 a.m., wake up at noon, do it again. I was what JJ Redick, in basketball terms, would call a sicko, fuckin' always RED LIGHT ON, and along the way, as much homemade chemistry as you can find to separate the pain from KEEPING THE LIGHT ON. And I'm that way still, 108%, on the mental level, but the 2 effective pain relievers I've ever found are no longer on the menu: heroin, well, it's heroin, and alcoholism because I got really fucking disgusted with the person it turned me into when I was 20-23, partly because I was not aware that "getting drunk," to other people, did not mean what it meant to me, and I was not so much "getting drunk" as going into full-on dissociative psychosis that could get very scary for other people, and I didn't want to scare other people anymore – so I quit for most of a decade, and then the pain got so bad, even with the heroin, that I couldn't take it, so I resolved that IF I was going to drink, I would never do it around anybody else, and that's what I did, 5 or 6 stints over the years, alone in the dark, with 5 or 6 withdrawals, and though alcohol withdrawal is a joke compared to smack (and not a joke at all when it's your first), there's an odd quirk to it: opioids, benzos, and alcohol are the Holy Trinity of withdrawals, they're the ones that destroy the most people, and I believe I speak from a rare vantage of expertise as one of the few living humans who's done all 3, and 2 of them several times, when I say that serious opioid withdrawal is beyond anything you can possibly imagine, no matter what else you been through; benzo withdrawal is horrible, it is months of lost memory and sick chill crawling into your bones, but I'd rather do it 3 more times than ever go thru opiates again; and alcohol SEEMS like nothing much, compared to those – usually you have one day where you feel like shit and don't know why, one day where you think "Oh NOW I know why" and you have a conversation with the Devil, and by day 3, it's improving. But opiate withdrawal, incomparably the worst, cannot actually kill you by itself – it makes a lot of people commit suicide, I certainly wanted to die for every moment of 60 days, some people can get fatally malnourished because you will shit and/or vomit everything you've ever ingested, AND, this is very important, if you try to take Suboxone, Narcan, anything with naloxone in it, while you've still got opiates in you, it causes a condition called "precipitated withdrawal," in which, without hospital-level medical oversight, most people shit and vomit themselves to death. I had 2 different doctors try to put me on Suboxone while I most certainly had junk in my system, and I said no, because I've known too many "ex-" junkies who aren't "ex-" anything, they're just junkies for Suboxone. If I hadn't turned that down, for entirely personal reasons, I would've died in June 2022. But still: you do not die, not strictly speaking, of quitting junk. Whereas quitting benzos and liquor, though the kick is nowhere near as bad, CAN kill you by itself. And I was not aware, until recent years, that the more times you drink and then quit drinking, the more hypersensitive your liver and kidneys get to alcohol, so you don't even really get drunk, you just get sick. And the final stage of this, after multiple withdrawals, is that your selfsame liver and kidneys just turn off, they've had it with your bullshit – and I can't remember exactly when I met my current good "doctor," because she's not actually a doctor, and this is important: TALK TO NURSES, PSYCHIATRIC NURSES, NURSES IN WHATEVER SPECIALTY, BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING, AND DOCTORS FUCKING DON'T – but anyway, whenever that was, sometime in the last couple years, she went through my history and bloodwork and such and said, without my telling her, "You've drunk a lot and then quit a lot, right?," and I said, "Yeah, how do you know?," and she said, "I can tell you from the bloodwork that if you do that again, you're going to die." Which was funny, as I told her, because I had recently had like a 2-week stint of drinking, and when I quit, knowing how it would go, I could actually feel that I was in the presence of Death. Not in a gothic high-drama way, just Death sitting across the table, waiting like a loan applicant, checking whether this was my night or I had maybe one more, and next time I'd head out on His town with Him. It was a really distinct feeling, not like anything I've encountered, not really even a form of suffering – I felt like shit, but not because of Death. And I told the psych nurse, and she said, "It's probably occurred to you that if you have a whole new feeling at 35, you should pay attention," and I said, "Yes." ... But as to the original point – please don't feel bad about "bringing this up," you didn't, and even if you had, I wouldn't really care. I'm not ashamed of having, what, 5 things in the world that are still worth breaking my voice for, and I'm not really "ashamed" of all the other shit, either. It just occurred to me that I haven't ever said this before, at least not that I remember.

In dulci jubilo, I think the Pearsall version

I'm going to to be thinking about this passage for a long long time. Have a good one, Michael, much love <3

Pollen V-for-Victory on the lamps, bruv. And I just learned, looking it up to make sure I actually got the Liturgical Hours right, that "compline" – which I have never known the right way to say, KAHM-plyne or kahm-PLEE-neh – is, in fact, a word without correction pronunciation, because it was Latin "completus," which makes more sense, and nobody knows where "-pline" came from

Bruh I got CALVES. Always have, never known why, doesn't seem to change along with anything else. If I lived when those dickheads Washington and Jefferson were hanging around, and the manliest thing you could do was wear knee breeches and nearly-transparent hose to show how tuff your calves were (not a joke, that's really why they dressed that way), I would've been the first – and last – President of the United States

brothers, Mashallah <3 <3 <3

I don't usually judge things by relating to them, but Amalfitano is one of the 2 or 3 written characters who makes me say "Fuck, that's me in a different life"

Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis by Tom Waits