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I leave next Tuesday for Minneapolis. I received my itinerary yesterday. I am flying out of Vancouver at 6pm bound for San Francisco, layover, then to Las Vegas, layover, then to Minneapolis. I love flying and airports, so I don’t mind the 9 hour trip there or the 12 hour flight back. Incase I didn’t already make a note of it in this blog, our crew got a contract to build two stores within Sam Goody’s locations in Deptford, New Jersey and Bloomington, Minnesota. The stores we are building within the Sam Goody record stores are small versions of Bang-On stores. The design is pretty rad and they have been fun to put together. I spent an entire day fixing up the vinyl sticker “bacteria” design walls that enrobe each store. It was reminiscent of stencil cutting and I was really good at it.

So, flying around is fun. And staying at the Marriott in Minneapolis. Hitting up Camp Snoopy, the world’s largest indoor amusement park as well. Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts was born in Minneapolis.

Our crew is also building a new Cherry Bomb, vintage clothing store on Granville between Robson and Smithe, below the current Cherry Bomb and where the old “Corner Market” used to be. Apparently the guy who owned the shop got busted running a child porn biz out of the back room and was forced to shut down the store. I personally had to gut that back room and it was creepy to say the least. I spent the day today ripping down the decrepit drywall that covered the ceiling to uncover the original celing treatment from when the building was conceived in the 20’s. Yellow stamped tin patterned ceiling tiles and moulded tin crown moulding. It looks really good and will be perfect for the new establishment going in.

I also spent a good part of the day up to my ass in rat shit to expose the bare solid-tree beams in the place. my hammer would rip off a slat holding up some sheeting and an entire rat’s nest would fall everywhere, some i would inhale even through my mask, and the rest would hang around in the air and settle on me and whoever else was around. Those animals shit an incredible amount, and wthout discretion, just wherever they feel like it. My coworker, Ben and I have been competing all week on a corpse count. He found the first, a fully-intact mummified rat carcass in the heating duct. the body measured well over 8 inches not including the tail, which doubled it’s length. In it’s hay-day that rat could have given most cats a run for their money. My entry in to the competition came with the skelton of the back half of a rat, and today I added two very dead mice to the collection. We crucified all the bodies to the wall on either side of a line drawn to mark Ben’s score and my score. Ben wins by weight, but i win my number.

I want to rant about my current stance on alcoholism and addiction on here, but I have been talking about it so much the past few days with people that I need to give it a rest.

Going to as few meetings as I can the past few days and I feel great. The meetings I regularly go to haven’t been doing it for me the past few weeks, so I decided to cut back my involvement with them for this week and see how I feel. Like i said, I feel great.

Yours truly,
00000000

quoted from an email sent to a friend of mine:

“I don’t think I interact with females very well. I have what i think could be thought of as a complex where I need attention (communicative, emotional, physical or sexual) from women and when I get it it’s okay, but if i don’t get it then i suddenly mount a resentment towards them for not providing me with that. if i sense a lack of attention, I grow resentful and act out childishly with a “i’ll hurt you before you can hurt me” atttitude.

I am really not proud of this behavior and I really dislike this part of myself. I’d like to know how to change. Over time the reaction has remained as a reliable defect. My efforts to change it have not worked. I am curious as to how I can change this behavior and hope to have deep, healthy relationships with women without manipulating and hurting them and as a result never feeling satisfied in the relationship.

I don’t really know why i’m telling you this, other than to try to stimulate some sort of intellectual conversation that may deepen our relationship. however, i can see how you being female and me discussing my female complexities with you could make you uncomfortable. if this is the case, i’m sorry.”

i’m actually quite happy right now.
i can imagine that there is an underlying depression beneath this happiness.
but i think it’s just my imagination.

I think cause i have to
I’m trying to find a way out
Sick of being unhappy
controlled by pain and fear
forces uncontrollable.

I’m gonna find a way
it may not be original
i may not be the first
i know i won’t stop looking
why can’t i just settle

I’ll precede this post by saying that I think questionaires are boring to read. But I like doing them. Mostly for record keeping, i think.

10 Favorites…
Favorite Color: the orange light of a setting sun cast on everythinbreaking through clouds of a rainy sky and the grey of the sky that encases the orange.

Favorite Food: Pasta of all varieties, Panago chicken club pizza, fuckin rare steak

Favorite Band: Aphex Twin (not really a “band”)

Favorite Movie: Apocalypse Now or Clockwork Orange

Favorite Sport: Ultimate – haven’t played in years

Favorite Season: Summer

Favorite Day Of the Week: Saturday

Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Rollo

9 Currents…
Current Mood: depressive and inquisitive

Current Taste: cigarettes

Current Clothes: nothing but mint green hospital pants

Current Computer: PowerBook G4 (15″)

Current Finger/Tonail polish: none

Current Time: 12:19am

Current Surroundings: hella messy desk, looking out my window at a rainy brick wall.

Current Annoyance(s): people who say “exetra” instead of et-cetera, “expresso”, “expecially”, “excapades”

8 Firsts…

1. First Best Friend: Matthew Said, 7 years old
2. First Screen Name: Dr. Who on KangaChat circa 1992
3. First Pet: Suki, the Basenji
5. First Piercing: left eyebrow, age 13
6. First Crush: Laura Brooke, grade 7
7. First Music: Ace of Base’s “The Sign”, Soundtrack to Rainman
8. First time: Annie Wright, 16

7 Lasts

1. Last Cry: the last time i got high, 8 months ago
2. Last Drink: Grande med roast in a Venti cup
3. Last Car ride: driving home from a birthday party, 3 hours ago.
4. Last Text Message: To Breanna “but you’ve never experienced it”
5. Last Movie Seen: Prozac Nation. horrible movie.
6. Last Phone call: Jeff Dircks
7. Last CD Played: Aphex Twin, Words & Music

6 have You Ever….

1. Have You Ever Dated One Of Your Best Friends: yes
2. Have You Ever Broken the Law: yes, that’s easy to do
3. Have You Ever Been Arrested: yes
4. Have You Ever Skinny Dipped: yes
5. Have You Ever Been on TV: no
6. Have You Ever Kissed Someone You Didn’t Know: no

5 Things….
You Did Last Night:
1. wrote
2. made pasta
3. went to a meeting
4. left the meeting at half-time
5. watched Prozac Nation with Laure

4 Places You’ve Been Last…home doesn’t count
1. my work’s warehouse
2. Alano Club
3. Rob’s house
4. Breanna’s house

3 People you can tell anything to
1. Jeff
2. Anna
3. my blog

2 Choices…
1. night or day: Night
2. shakespeare or salinger: shakespeare

1 Person You’d Do Anything For:
1. –

The next five posts were written at once, as one post. I decided to break it up in to sections for the sake of being more readable, but if you are so inclined they read right through. Thanks for reading, without you I would write anyway.

Looking at my posts from the weekend, it occured to me that there are a lot of people that probably think I’m insane. Not in the stupid AA “definition” of insane (repeating the same mistakes twice), but I mean the actual definition of insane: inflicted with a persistent mental disorder or derangement. The thing is about mental disorders as far as I can tell is that there is no way for one who is inflicted with such a disorder to know what a proper mental order is, or what sanity is. So, I am lost.

I have met few people who can understand my condition who do not associate themselves with the disease model of addiction and alcoholism.

I think it’s absolutely absurd that I am an alcoholic. I mean, I am not at the point of doubting it. I still see it as a fact about myself. But when I write it out, or say it outloud to another person who is not an alcoholic, like someone from my past, or a border cop, or someone else’s parents, I feel evil. I feel defective. I feel like the stereotypical drunk redneck with a shotgun and overalls who beats his son and molests his daughter. I’m pretty okay with associating myself as a drug addict. I know that when I put any drug in my body I have a profound reaction to it and I really like the feeling it produces. I like it so much that with ensured resources I have and would pursue staying high.

What caused me to make the decision to stop was where I found myself after several years of daily using with brief intervals of sobriety. After each interval of sobriety I went back to using just as I had before. I do believe it was progressive, that the end result was always worse as time went on. So, my decision to stop. My decision to stop was made at a point when I had been smoking meth all day everyday for about two months. I had gone over a year using meth everyday when I was first introduced to it, but, as I mentioned, this condition of using was progressive, so I reached the same point in less time as time went on. The ‘point’ was, in a word, despair. The dope wasn’t giving me the effect I required to feel okay. My mind and body had adapted to the influx of chemicals and built up a tolerance. I felt outcast from society. I felt alone, on the outside of my life, watching a junkie kill himself slowly. I had only the people I was using with, my girlfriend at the time, and my dealer. I was in school, studying web design and could not manage my time to complete assigments and exams. Drugs were my only priority. My day was overtaken by an obsessively concious attention to satisfying my need for more dope to satisfy the craving. The craving, maybe I should describe as best as I can in hindsight. I felt comfortable whenever I had dope on my immediate person. If it was at home, I was okay with the fact that I had a stash, but could never commit to anything that would impede my ability to fill a bowl and smoke myself back up. When I was amped on dope I was totally self-consumed. Anything extraneous to myself didn’t matter. I was like a giant that could only see his own self and was unaware of the villages and people below him. My plans, my priorities became the only thing important and I was consumed by the present moment. The past, the future were not relevant in the slightest. Sometimes, if I my body became tired, which usually only happened after atleast 30 hours without sleep, I could sit still on a couch, my pipe close by,and remain still unaware of time or space or thoughts or anything else. Just stoned. Music and tv were particularly interesting in these times. The craving was always based in my mind, not my body. My body always felt ready to go, and was hard to slow down, even after several days awake. My mind was what demanded more dope. The more dope I took in, the longer I went without sleep, food, or blinking. The longer I went without satisfying these basic needs the worse I felt, which required more dope. My mind would be affected greatly from the lack of sleep and food which felt like my brain was mush by the end of day two. I would sit at home and smoke more and more dope until my mouth was dry and tasted like chemicals trying to reactivate my brain to make some sense of my situation, to try to find some motivation to do anything other than sitting around trying to get high. When this became monotonous, I could see the futility of my efforts. As the dope lost it’s effect, reality would come crashing in and I would get intense observations of the devesation I was causing in my own life and the lives of those who loved me. Depression would set in as a heavy undertone to everything. The world seemed rainy and black. This was a place without sleep and without the ability to sleep to make it go away and the inability to put the pipe down to make sleep possible. Eventually I would pass out and wake up at a time unpredictable to me. If I had dope, I would immediately get high again to start my self up and start my day. If I didn’t have dope, the question would arrise as to whether to get more. This was a very difficult decision to resist giving in to. The prospect of life without dope at this time of total dysfunction and morning grogginess was grim. Even if I could wait out the compulsion to get more for a few hours or even a few days, life soon seemed dull and boring without the chaos and raw energy of another blast.

That’s the craving and scenario as best as I can describe it.

As for being an alcoholic. I go with the association because I have chosen to see alcohol and meth as identical in the addiction one can have to each. From the way I’ve heard alcoholics talk about their drinking, I used the same way they drank and felt similar despair in the darkness of my using as they did in their drinking.

Alcohol was never really a particular obsession of mine. I hated it’s effect for the most part. I was never a good drinker. I puked everytime, and could never control the speed at which I drank. I drank beer and liqour like water, so I would get drunk too fast and totally bypass the cusp at which the delicate effect of booze is most appealing. Meth was more attractive to me.

I think if there was no drugs in my situation when I got in to them I would have learned to drink and really become addicted to the effect of alcohol. However, that was not the case.

My problem with dealing with life lies in this…
Drugs are really an attraction to me. I liked their effects. At least, it seems to my sober mind that I like their effects. My problem is trying to stay sober. Getting sober was a decision I made and had made many times before that. Staying sober is the hard part for me. Reason doesn’t work on it sometimes. Sometimes, all the reasons in the world can’t stop the overpowering desire to get high. I fear that desire. I fear it because it means loss of so much to me that I’ve built up again this last 7 months sober. But even fear doesn’t work. Sometimes fear will do the opposite and drive me towards dope even stronger. So this is my problem: Complete lack of control over when I will use again. That is my problem.