Beat and Evil Days

Wretched relapse; 7,300 days of being a loser; on being called a ghoul and a navel-gazer.

"Well, I am the shepherd's only son

And I know what a joke I've become;

I have an honest heart, but I have lies on my tongue

I don't know how this started or where it came from

And you have no reason, and I have no proof

But this time I swear, I'm telling the truth..."

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf," by Passenger

In On the Road, Kerouac wrote of the "beat and evil days that befall men in their mid-twenties." For me, they appear to have arrived a little later.

The final phase of my methadone taper has collapsed into a brutal headlock of a fentanyl relapse: I have returned to injecting drugs for the first time in years.

For the past few weeks, I've gotten home from work, shot up, and - having leapt down three or four rungs on the sweetly named Ladder of Consciousness - collapsed, catatonic, until my 4:50 alarm rings to begin the next day.

I haven't felt much, but I must've (should've?) felt trapped, frustrated, spent, forlorn.

Anyway, something along the lines of "It's been rough [insert appropriate human feelings here]."

I know that you guys care about me and that some of you even worry for me. Fear not, for I am a cockroach, and - as the Economist recently noted - shrinkflation has contributed to the United States' drug overdose rate finally falling over the past couple of years (also helpful is the fact that over one million opioid users have already died and are thus unable to further contribute to our dismal public health statistics).

Is the rest of my life going to be like this? On and off of maintenance; in and out of withdrawal and relapse; unable to ever put addiction truly in the rearview?

My mom, who is in some ways the quintessential, hypercompetent female attorney, is not prone to emotional flourish; nevertheless, not too long ago, she expressed in writing - as though it were contractual - that she would give the rest of her life if it meant freeing me from addiction.*

*Keep in mind that I have siblings who are addicts, too.

"I'm the only one who can give their life to end this, mom," I replied grimly.

The other day, I caught a glimpse of a strange, sped-up vision of myself missing a couple of noteworthy teeth, my skin the embalmed texture that drug addicts tend to develop after decades on downers.

My knees went weak at the prospect of what my future holds.

Will I be toothless and homeless, defeated and creedless - at last emptied of the delusional hope that has buoyed me through years that I couldn't have survived without it?

Under the pressure of strokes and seizures, fluctuating thyroid levels and years of severe insomnia and unremitting, toxic stress, will my sanity finally fold?

Or will I become the old guy on the bus, on the way to some inconsequential, subsistence-level job, eagerly talking to anyone who will listen about the amazing adventures that he's had, the important people who he's known, the meaningful work that he has done?

I've been somebody! I will insist.

Few, if any, will believe me. Eventually, I will have trouble believing myself.

What fresh track marks look like (these are yours truly's). You can see that I have mostly ruined the major vein in the crook of my arm (called the median cubital vein); thus, I have had to search upstream and downstream for smaller tributaries to use, but these minor blood vessels are too easily blown out when used for injection. These fresh tracks will fade from a deep, angry red-purple to a lighter purple-pink, then over the course of years transform into white tracery. The extensive bruising is due to overuse of ibuprofen; in addition to the pain of intermittent withdrawal, I have an infected tooth that is killing me, which I really need to take care of. Altogether, some would say, quite a ghoulish exhibit of mental illness, indeed.

***

Peng, one of my several Chinese boyfriends, who had a body like an underwear model's and the heart of an artist (matched with the brain of a two-bit conman*), showed me a beautiful short film called The Karman Line (available here on YouTube, if you have half an hour).

*Peng developed a gay adult cartoon series called My Soldiers, which was a hit on Steam and Patreon for a time. During a slow season in Beijing in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I helped write dialogue for Peng's 18+ games (which, as pornography and LGBT media, are doubly illegal in China).

The Karman Line is about a family in which the mother develops a strange condition that causes her to rise upward - first by a foot or two, then higher and higher into the heavens.

Along the way, her daughter and other loved ones reckon with her departure - coming to grips with their last hugs - as she rises above the roof of their house - and their last conversations with her (before she drops the phone that she has carried up into the sky with her).

"I want to see as much as I can before I go," she exclaims at the end of the film (or something to that effect), at which line I almost lost it.

I want to see as much as I can before I go, too.

In some ways, my entire life can be reduced to that - wanting to experience as much of this wide and wild world as possible.

In many ways, by contrast, my addiction can be reduced to this: Wanting to feel as little as possible along the way.

This latter objective, of course, came about from my feelings being so intense and unstable in the first place.

As Fyodor Dostoevsky once said, "My crime was feeling everything too deeply; my punishment was surviving it."

***

As those of us over 30 are mostly aware, life likes nothing better than to augment a tough time with a nice kick to the balls.

I returned home from work one day a couple of weeks ago to two messages from close family members of a poet whose work I recently wrote a tribute to.

One of the messages, which almost entirely lacked punctuation (straining to avoid a generational reference here), was quite hostile; it accused me of writing an invasive and disgusting piece as the family was mourning the loss of its daughter*.

*I have been unable to verify if Laura has passed away, but to the best of my very limited knowledge, she is still alive but likely to pass away from anorexia if her condition does not improve.

I was shocked. My immediate reaction was that - if the piece caused pain for Laura's family - I would take it down whether their reaction was justified or not.

However, a couple of things changed my mind.

First, the unnamed nuclear family member who messaged me followed up with two or three nasty comments below the article, which called me a ghoul and a navel-gazer.

His original message to me had lamented the toll that cyber bullying had taken on Laura, which was something that I discussed in my piece. I have no idea why he thought that it was acceptable to leave vile comments on my blog to protest a blog piece that mentioned people writing vile things about Laura; "I'm going to cyber bully you for talking about the cyber bullying of my [insert family member]" is certainly an original take.

What I decided in the end - after asking a regular reader and my own mom for input - was that it would be wrong for me to take down my tribute to Laura.

For a poet who has published quite a substantial body of work, it is unusual that Laura doesn't have a single article that situates her work in the context of her life. I approached my piece on the dual levels of literary analysis and personal resonance, and writing such an essay without acknowledging the cyber bullying that Laura endured would be both unfair and impossible.

Laura helped to begin a fraught conversation about mental illness, and her relatives would be far from the first family members to be (perhaps) embarrassed by a relation's confessional writing and (perhaps) to want to limit a writer's legacy.

In the end, I concluded that Laura is the only one with the right to limit this conversation about her work (although most authors would accept that they don't have the right or the ability to terminate or constrain discussion of their work even if they become uncomfortable with the direction that it takes down the line).

If the tone of the messages had been different, I might have written back and tried to learn more about which parts of my article were causing pain. I would've considered limited editing of the piece in accordance with the family's wishes.

However, given the way that things have unfolded, I know that it is best that I not engage with this family member at all. I hope that it doesn't sound condescending to express myself in this way, but I fully understand the value of misplaced anger in such a torturous situation.

The only things I can say, if the family member in question happens to read this piece, is that A) I wrote a tribute to your loved one's truly beautiful poetry and confessional writing, in which she openly discussed her battle with the ugliest of diseases, and I intended it to honor and to thank her; and B) I highly recommend limiting your experience of the internet, if a piece like mine could cause this much distress (and I can tell by the speed of the response to my piece, by the way, that a Google Alert set up by the family member or someone close to them had informed them when it was published).

You will never be able to control what other people say about your loved one and her work. Laura paid a high price for her honesty, and the discussion that she started vis à vis mental illness is a timely one of existential importance to the U.S.

It would be fundamentally disrespectful to Laura and her legacy for me to erase my homage to her.

***

Speaking of unpleasant comments in the cybersphere, a day or two after the aforementioned messages from Laura's family member, I received a lovely comment on one of my YouTube videos about Mark Laita, which went something like: "7,300 days to get off of drugs and still an addict... what a loser."

I don't know what came over me - something about the timing, I'm sure - but I burst out laughing when I read this comment.

The idea that someone opened up their calculator app to multiply 365 days x 20 years, and also that they got the math wrong (20 years is how long I've been using benzos and opioids; surely I couldn't be expected to try to get off of them on the same day that I tried them for the first time?) - I don't know, guys; again, something about that comment at that moment absolutely sent me.

There's truth to it, I suppose. Fifteen years is a long time to battle any problem, and there is a part of me that says that - if I really wanted to be off of drugs, surely and finally and completely, I would be by now.

On a certain level, I know that's not fair. My addiction started very early on in my life; I shot dope by the time I was 15 or 16 and began binging on benzos shortly thereafter.

My entire physiology developed under the heavy use of these substances, so I don't have a healthy, adult neurochemical baseline to return to. I also haven't had access to high-quality, evidence-based, individualized treatment, which is outrageously expensive in this United States of Billionaire A-Holes, where "f*ck you, I got mine" is the philosophy of the ruling class.

Moreover, there is nothing that fundamentally distinguishes mental illnesses from physical illnesses; they're simply diseases that affect a particular organ, in this case the brain.

I wouldn't criticize someone with relapsing lupus for their failure to recover. Addiction, too, and in particular opioid addiction, is increasingly characterized as a chronic and cyclical disease.

The available treatments - except for the ones that substitute one opioid for another - have very low success rates, and the experts acknowledge that we don't have anything remotely resembling a cure.

My story, including my failures, is typical. Opioid addicts of my severity and duration rarely recover in the sense of completely getting off of opioids.

Moreover, to give limited credit where credit is due, I've been off of benzos for two years at this point. As I've frequently discussed, benzos were a much more damaging addiction than opioids in terms of my behavior while under their influence; they were also dastardly difficult to detox from, and I had withdrawal seizures in the process.

So, one Final Boss slain (at least for the time being); another rearing its ugly head in defiance of all of my efforts to the contrary.

Maybe the rest of my life will be this way. But maybe that's not the death of hope and meaning; perhaps I can make a life for myself in spite of my addiction.

And there have been such breathtaking high moments along the way, when my life has been more than even I (of the aforementioned delusional buoyance) could have hoped for.

I have traveled the world and taught some of the best students in it.

I have wandered ancient streets and realized that my sorrows don't belong to me, that nothing in this world is truly new.

I have learned Italian and Mandarin, and in doing so have absorbed new ways to think, to laugh, to bond. I have studied the human body, consciousness, life itself - its quirks and its weaknesses and its mighty resilience.

I've supported work to reform the Land of the Free's fundamentally unfair and counterproductive justice system, which incarcerates more citizens per capita than almost any other country's.

I've taught some of the poorest, most traumatized students in the United States, and I've loved them as I myself wish to be loved (unconditionally; goofily; completely).

Speaking of love, I have loved good, handsome men, and they have, to my endless surprise, loved me in return.

I have spent dopamine-drenched nights with them, love-locked and finally forgetting some of what it was time for me to let go of.

I remember long nights in eagle's nest clubs tucked into the skyline of Beijing, watching the future arrive with the ceaseless comings and goings along one of the city's gargantuan traffic circles.

I have seen so much, walked so far, dreamed without boundaries.

***

Not a huge fan of selfies of myself, but I wanted a pic of me to accompany my message about how much I care about you all. Incidentally, my eyes always get uneven like this when I'm on potent opioids (I had a friend from high school named Tom, who passed away of an OD [after saving my life], who used to judge the strength of heroin based on whether it gave him a lazy eye or not). The overall vibe of this selfie is such that - if I were a sofa or an appliance - you'd begin hunting through your miscellaneous papers drawer to see whether I was still covered by warranty.

Most of all, my dear readers, I feel grateful for and proud of and connected to you.

I know that it might be silly to a certain way of thinking, but my blog and my YouTube channel mean more to me than any other activity or accomplishment that I've ever been involved in.

I have risked my professional future by speaking frankly about my addiction. It's worth it, to me, and come what may, I will hold my head high and defend my right to share my voice.

If I die or disappear tomorrow, I am content with the idea that my channel and my blog are a large part of my legacy.

I know that many of you have already heard the origin story of this blog, which began two years ago when I was in the ICU for over a week after I OD'd on the sidewalk near my dealer's house (at the time, I was trying to taper off of methadone - I'm sensing a pattern here).

I'll never forget the panic that I felt during those long hours without my phone or my other halfhearted distractions.

I had so much to say, and for the first time (now that I was over 30), I realized that I could very well die without sharing any of it.

That panic and dread is mostly gone. I still have several writing projects that are in progress, but I have written and produced enough other content for the anxiety to subside.

I recorded a YouTube video a couple of weeks ago, in which I detailed my recent relapse. Over seven thousand people tuned in from all over the world; hundreds left me comments of love, appreciation, and unconditional support.

I have an entire folder of messages from readers and viewers who have found my content helpful, who have identified with my story, who believe in me and my writing and love me for who I am.

I have had several readers who I have become close with reach out to me during this trying time. Their love, generosity, and unconditional acceptance has had an ineffable effect on me; all I can say is that some very deep wounds that I have carried for a long time have been healed.

I love you all.

I've seen so much, and still, I want to keep going.

Once again, I love you all.