GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #785: NOSTALGIA FOR AN AGE THAT NEVER EXISTED

 Even though the song isn't really about the topic tonight, the title is apropos, so you might as well read this while listening to this.

As some of you might know, back in January 2020, I went to the ER suffering from another bout of pancreatitis, and they decided to hold onto me. While I was there I went into severe alcohol withdrawal, so they wound up keeping me for a couple of weeks while it ran its course through my system. I can't remember if I went into my hallucinations here before. When I went back to look I didn't find anything. Unless I wrote about it later.

Regardless, not too long ago I started feeling nostalgia for one of those hallucinations. I didn't know that was possible, but a few people told me that they were familiar with the sensation. It was the one in which I went to the middle of a wide open field, to a burger stand made entirely of plastic on the outside, including a bench where a plastic milkman sat. I got the feeling that I sat on that bench all the time when I was a kid. In the hallucination, I sat there again, and then I went inside, where it looked kind of like a neighborhood bar.

It was the last of my hallucinations before I came back to myself in my hospital room. When I came out of it, that hallucination made me feel like I'd rediscovered a forgotten piece of my childhood. It had been so vivid that I asked my grandmother about it when I got home. Because I could swear that me, her, Gramps and my cousin, Erik, used to walk there from the house we lived in back then. She was still a few months away from dementia, so her memory was still good. She had no recollection of this place.

It bothered me for a while because the memory of going there as a child was so real. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe it really was just a hallucination. Because this open field never existed. I reasoned that if it was within walking distance of that house, I'd remember where it was because I live maybe two blocks from there today. And there is nowhere that place could have been.

So I let it go until a few months ago when I remembered the hallucination, in particular the plastic milkman on the bench, and I felt nostalgia for it. Having nostalgia for something that never existed is a very weird feeling for me. I'm not given to nostalgia often these days, but to feel it for something I made up during alcohol withdrawal is just too fucking weird for me.

And then, last week, I dreamed of that place again. AND I FINALLY KNOW WHY I FELT LIKE THIS PLACE ACTUALLY EXISTED.

I may have talked about my dream world before. It's a close approximation of my neighborhood, but depending on the dream I'm having it can be very different. I went to that dream world where I found this burger stand again. I sat on the bench with the plastic milkman. I went inside and ordered food that I didn't get to eat because I woke up too soon.

And when I woke up I remembered where I'd known this place before. I'd dreamed about it when I was a child. The wide open field was on the opposite side of the train tracks. There's a neighborhood back there, but in my dream world there's just that field. And that burger stand. And I used to dream about it all the time back then. Weird that my mom never went with us, though. Or Erik's mom, for that matter. But we went there a lot, and then I grew up and forgot about this recurring dream until the alcohol withdrawal brought me back.

It took me almost four years to figure that out. I'm usually a lot quicker on the uptake, but the human brain is a strange place. I had a few other hallucinations, one of which I know for a fact came from my childhood. It makes me wonder about the others and where they might have come from.

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OK, as I'm sure you suspected, this is the last GF column of the year. I usually take my writing vacation starting with Thanksgiving week, during which time I lay off writing so much. I have a few things to work on, but I'm not going to bust my ass over it. It's mostly editing stuff, anyway. I have one more newsletter for Sunday, and that'll be it from me for the rest of 2023. Unless I have news to share, and I might. If you follow the newsletter, you'll know why.

All right. I still have plenty of GF ideas for when I return, and I'm sure I'll have even more by then. I think I got to everything time sensitive. For now, at least. Anyway, I'll be back in January unless the universe pulls a Donnie Darko on me while I'm in bed. Until then, please remember to . . .

And party on, dudes!

GOONIGHT, FUCKERS #500: HOW I BECAME AN ALCOHOLIC (AND MY PLANS FOR THE FUTURE)

 Five motherfucking hundred. That's a lot of columns. Usually I talk about Gramps or something important from my past (or simply the past) for these big numbers, but I decided to go with something else this time. Since I got out of detox, this subject has been on my mind.

Quick note: I cheated a little. I knew this was going to be long, and I was going to be super high when I'm supposed to be writing this, so I chipped away at it over the weekend. I shouldn't break my GF rules, but this one can't be avoided.

When you're in the hospital for alcohol related health issues, they always send a shrink to talk to you about it. I've had a few interesting people talk to me. For example, there was one woman who bought my books so she could get into my head. It didn't work out, but I appreciated the thought. There was the super Italian guy named Sonny (no shit) who cursed up a storm and agreed with me that AA is not the way to go. He's the one who got me into detox, by the way.

And then there was this one older woman who seemed like she might have been a dream. I don't know what it was. She had an ephemeral quality to her. Or maybe it was the fact that I was on Dilaudid at the time. But she asked me a question no one up to that point had asked me. How did I become an alcoholic?

I know exactly how that happened. You may or may not believe this, but I didn't start drinking as an adult until I turned 21. When I was a kid and we ran out of Coke, Mom would give me beer instead, but it wasn't my decision until 21. I started out as a social drinker who sometimes got crazy at house parties. I didn't otherwise drink to excess very often. I drank on Fridays and Saturdays for the most part. Then came the period in my life where we all went out to a different bar each night, but I wasn't out of control. Not yet.

Fast forward to my thirties, when I developed a sudden and horrible pain in my head. These headaches were ruthless. I was in constant pain every waking moment of my life, and I went to doctors who had no idea what was wrong with me. I probably got blasted with enough radiation to make Chernobyl nervous. No solutions.

I did figure out that alcohol did an excellent job of dulling the pain. Whiskey, specifically. As soon as I got home from work I'd plug a handle into my mouth and glug it down every night of the week. This went on for a while until a doctor got the bright idea to send me to a dentist.

Turns out, I had a chipped molar. It was so bad the nerve was exposed, and that had caused all that agony. The dentist filled it in, and it worked for a while, but then it got bad again. I got a root canal, and that helped again. Eventually I lost the tooth, but one thing I did not lose was my everyday habit of drinking copious amounts of whiskey.

That went on for years until 2020, when I went into the hospital for pancreatitis and inadvertently went into alcohol withdrawal for the first time in my life. I think I've written about that here before, so I'll skip past that. Eventually I got back to drinking at a reasonable level, aided with newly-legalized cannabis.

But then I needed to lose another toe. That upped my drinking a bit. Not too bad. But while I was recovering from the toe, my grandmother died, and my drinking skyrocketed. And then my impending homelessness became a reality, and suddenly I was downing a handle of whiskey every night, and when I got up the next morning I started drinking immediately. I tried not to be sober for any moment from that point on.

I knew even then I had to cut back drastically. When I tried, though, I started getting the shakes, and I knew I was physically addicted again. So when the shakes kicked in, I started drinking again to keep the hallucinations at bay.

After a few phone calls with friends, all of them knowing how bad off I was because I was a rambling psycho, I decided to call Sonny to get into detox. An excellent decision. I punched in his phone number, and my finger hovered over the green button. I almost didn't call him. But I did, and now I'm 24 days from my last drink. Almost a month. Holy shit.

Here's the thing I didn't expect: this shit is super easy. Once I got through the physical addiction, the rest has been a breeze. After all the horror stories I've heard--and still continue to hear due to the meetings--I thought I'd relapse again and again and need to go back to detox a few more times and so on and so forth. Sure, I have a crave every once in a while, but I just don't give in to it. It's simple. It's easy.

Now I listen to the stories of other alcoholics, and while I can relate to doing stupid shit and having horrible shit happen to you while being drunk, I can't really identify with all the relapses, etc. Maybe I'm being overconfident. I've thought several times that maybe I'm not a real alcoholic. Because here's the thing. When I was in detox I decided that I was going to drink on my birthday. I was going to get wasted and then I wouldn't have anything else to drink until my next birthday.

Much to my shock, I didn't drink on my birthday. I don't know why. I passed liquor stores on my way to other places that day, but it never occurred to me to go in and get the fifth of Wild Turkey 101 I was planning to get.

So my plans for the future. You're not going to see me at AA meetings, and I'm not going to be going through the steps. I recognize that it works for others, but I can't get past Step Two. I think it's a stupid fucking step for me. I'm an atheist, and while I believe in higher powers, I would never give myself over to them. For example, the ocean is a higher power than I am, but I would never worship it. I would never pray to it. I would never let it take over my life like a higher power is supposed to be. So I'll be skipping the steps. Also, if I went to AA, they would require me to stop taking edibles, and I wouldn't be able to have sex for, what is it? A month? Not that I'm getting laid right now, but if the opportunity arose (so to speak), I'd like to keep that option on the table.

If you're curious, the meetings I go to currently are not AA. They have a few things similar with AA, but they don't require the 12 Steps. Your only obligation is to yourself, to stay away from the booze, and if at all possible, tell stories about yourself that might help others in the group.

Eventually I plan to be a social drinker again. Not anytime soon, mind you. I'm still working out this whole not-drinking thing, and when I make that plunge I want to be confident in my abilities to stick to my plan. That being, if I'm going out to lunch or dinner with a friend or friends, I'll have a couple of Guinnesses. No more smuggling airplane bottles of whiskey into movies. No more drinking at home by myself. No more getting wasted at house parties or bars.

But I do plan to drink to excess on my birthday. And I'm thinking about allowing myself a floating holiday. But that's it.

It will take baby steps. I know I can do it if I put my mind to it. I just have to make sure I'm ready first. And who knows? Maybe I'll change my mind. I'd say 95% of the time I don't think about alcohol until I go to my meetings. I really didn't expect that.

OK, I think I've gone on long enough. Goodnight, you lovely fuckers, you.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #399: DID I DIE?

 There are sometimes that I think I died, and I'm in the afterlife. And what a shitty afterlife that is. For example, I occasionally wonder if I died when I was in the hospital in January 2020 after I lost my job and went on the drinking binge to end all drinking binges, the one when I went in for pancreatitis and wound up getting stuck there for two weeks going through severe alcohol withdrawals. When 2020 kept getting worse and worse, I figured yeah, I'd died in the hospital. This is just some fever dream of the brain. I just have to wait for the electric impulses to end, and I'll be gone for good.

Not too long ago, I was fucked up on pills in an attempt to get some sleep. I hadn't gotten any the previous night, so I needed to make sure I zonked out in the morning. I was in the twilight between high as fuck and actual sleep, and I looked up at the ceiling. There was a golden door there, and I thought, holy shit, I really did die. Now it's time to get out of here.

After I thought about it I realized it was actually something reflected up at my ceiling from the backyard. It looked like a door, but there was no knob or anything. I giggled to myself and sleep finally took me.

It reminded me of when I was in the hospital before the worst of the DT's hit. Whenever I'm in the hospital, for whatever reason, the bed is positioned directly under a reflective light so if I want to look up and see how pathetic I appear, it's nice and easy to do that. I was a lumpen form in a hospital bed, bloated and ugly like how the scandal sheets get pictures of celebrities when they're not looking their best.

But this time I saw an Old West street with horses and tumbleweeds and gunslingers and everything. And there was a very pretty woman who beckoned to me, holding out her hand like she could pull me through the light and into her world. Intellectually, I knew it was a hallucination. But goddam, it was a good one. I wouldn't have minded then and there lifting up a hand to leave this fucking place.

Instead I called for the nurse so I could get my next morphine shot.

How's that for a fuckin' dark GF column. I'm not even in a bad mood right now. It's just something I thought about while eating lunch today. Gotta watch out for those ceiling doors into other worlds . . .