I'm Back

Late summer / fall 2025 updates

I didn't feel that blogging was surrendering what little remains of my dignity with enough speed, so I took up YouTubing, as well (flipside: I get to create the cringey, clickbait YT thumbnails of my dreams).

I am straight-up rambling today (prioritized rambling, but still).

I took a couple of months off of blogging, as my regular readers know. That was partly to step back and reconsider the big picture of my social media presence; to help me decide where I wanted this blog in particular to go; and also just to give me a break after over a year of weekly posting.

During the interim, I went semi-viral on YouTube for a video about Mark Laita of Soft White Underbelly infamy. I grew from like ~100 subscribers - I had just started YouTube a month before - to almost ten thousand in the space of a few weeks. The video in question got 400K+ views, which is wild; I was looking at the watch-hours for my account, and the idea that little old me took up tens of thousands of hours on people's screens all over the world is so weird that I can hardly process it.

Like many things in life, it was cool until it wasn't.

On the whole, though, I'm grateful for the experience. (A few weeks after I published my first video, Mark Laita disclosed the sudden death by OD of his girlfriend, Kyara Guidry, who was 43 years younger than him and who he met and began dating when she, at 19 years old, brought her addicted mother in for a SWU interview; Mark found her in the bathtub of the apartment that he was paying for, and - despite Mark having spent thousands upon thousands of hours interviewing addicts - he "didn't see any of the signs" that she was struggling).

My creep radar stands undefeated. I don't believe a thing that is coming out of this guy's mouth in regard to what happened with Kyara, and I've heard enough alarming tidbits from people who have dealt with Mark IRL to be going on more than intuition at this point.

Almost all of us are wired to want to believe the best about people who work with vulnerable populations. However, a friend of mine who works for a nonprofit that serves homeless people delivered a nice aphorism for the reality: Where there is prey, there are predators.

***

Speaking of homeless people, I made a YouTube video about Trump's Executive Order ("Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets"), issued on July 24th of 2025, which is, without question or qualification, the most alarming piece of government-issued excrement that I have ever had the displeasure of reading.

Among other measures, it:

• Ends harm reduction measures for treating addiction, including needle exchanges, and urges the investigation of harm reduction providers for potential criminal prosecution

• Encourages long-term, locked-down "treatment" of addicted and mentally ill people using a civil commitment model that doesn't involve trial by jury or citizen review; this is shocking, unconstitutional, and downright un-American

• Ends Housing First anti-homelessness initiatives, which are evidence-based (because how do you improve your mental health by taking your psych meds regularly when every time you fall asleep someone steals your belongings?)

I have always resisted political fatalism because it leeches away the fight that we need to hold our government accountable.

In the U.S., we've got a problem with Big Pharma, Big Business (particularly private equity), Big Tech, and Big Religion (mega churches that now own huge chunks of major cities, that have countless businesses operating under their auspices, but which somehow don't pay taxes). Until we get rid of these leeches on the body of the people, we're in trouble.

In the meantime, consider checking out "I've Had It" on YouTube, a political podcast by Oklahoma City firebrands Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, two smart, beautiful, foul-mouthed broads who make me laugh every single time I watch them.

If your response to what I just wrote is to think "Wah! What about the Democrats!," just know that I am almost as angry at most of them right now as I am at anyone in the Republican Party. Instead of countering the GOP's bold rightward move the way they should have - by countering with an equal step in the progressive direction - they sold themselves out to AIPAC and billionaires, essentially just becoming Republicans in cheaper suits.

Unless we bring the Democratic Party back to what should be its true platform: National healthcare; living wages; affordable housing; taxing the wealthy (so that they pay equal taxes to teachers, firemen, small business owners); reversing Citizens United so that billionaires don't dominate U.S. politics; the Dems will lose two sets of elections that should be virtually unlosable.

The sad thing is, these very milquetoast, piquantly progressive platform points are broadly popular. Many people on both sides of the aisle are sick of the stunt politics, the us vs. them, the pushing of pointlessly inflammatory social issues while the entrenched elite enrich themselves year after year after year by performing this theatrical farce at the people's expense.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Another bright light who I've become aware of lately is David Hogg of the Leaders We Deserve PAC. He's a Gen Z'er who lived through the Parkland high school shooting in 2018; he and his friends / fellow survivors successfully campaigned to change red-flag laws and increase the age for owning a firearm from 18 to 21 in Florida, which the establishment politicians told them was impossible.

He's cute. He's got fire in his belly. He says fuck a lot. I dig it.

Leaders We Deserve is resisting the influence of AIPAC, and they're primarying the shit out of the corporatized Dems who are folding in front of Trump while refusing to support people like Zohran Mamdani (NYC mayoral candidate), who are the future of the party if it is to have one.

Anyway, my response to the E.O. is going to be volunteering at the local needle exchange. They can take me in if they want. I don't even care anymore. Maybe I'll finally get off of methadone, lol.

***

On that last subject, I'm closer than ever to the goal but have had to take my own advice on performing a slow, low taper with an extended tail. I dropped from 203 mg a day to 70 mg a day at a rate of about 10 mg per week, which is asking for trouble. Because of that, I've had to slow down in the final stage to make sure that I'm really fully adjusted (or as close as I can get to that) before continuing on.

To complicate things further, because the methadone simply isn't holding me at a lower dose, I'm almost certainly going to switch over to bupe for the very last part of the process (specifically, the monthly Sublocade shot, which is sort of self-tapering).

I've found a doctor and Nurse Practitioner who actually care, and God bless them for that. Unlike the clinic that I had been going to, which uses a very outdated methadone-to-buprenorphine protocol that requires decreasing all the way down to 25 mg per day, then skipping three days of methadone before starting on a low dose of bupe, my new care team is amenable to using the Bernese Method, which uses microdosing to convert people over to bupe from higher methadone doses.

Insane given the lethality of opioid addiction that we have to beg, and beg, and beg to get doctors to take even mild risks that are supported by the clinical data. Don't even get me started.

On the plus side, I've been running 8-12 miles per day and walking on top of that. My physical health is the strongest that it's been in three years, which is in no small part due to being less fatigued from the methadone.

Needlessly rushing the rest of the taper is the stupidest thing I can do, and I know it. I had all kinds of arbitrary goals and deadlines built up in my head - not another New Year on maintenance! totally clean and sober next time I see my fiancé - and I just need to keep reminding myself that there is no objective reason why, if I need four or even six more months on maintenance to get off of it safely, that won't work or isn't worth it. Particularly since I'm on a lower dose with less severe side effects.

I think that the impulse to rush through things could actually be a kind of self-sabotage in the sense that something in me wants me to be sick to a point where it seems intolerable, cue "justified" relapse, repeat the last 15 years of my life.

At this point, I'm over it.

***

That's about it as far as updates go, I think.

I'm currently looking at flight dates so that I can visit Jay in London in mid-January, which will be the first time that we've been together in person since I left China due to the pandemic lockdown 2.5 years ago.

Oh! In addition to continuing my work on my "Last of the Laowai" memoir, I'm working on a novel at the moment. I read something strange in a news article, which sparked a story that feels more like I'm channeling it than making it up.

More details as things move forward. I'm in touch with a couple of people in the publishing industry, which was one of my dream outcomes upon starting this blog.

We'll see how things go.

Will keep you all updated. I love you guys, and - as my YT channel grows - I am even more grateful for the core set of you who read here and stay in touch!

Oh, and autumn is here; always my favorite season because all of nature looks and smells as doomed as I feel inside!

The inimitable (if for no other reason than no one would want to),

B.