In Search of Lost Time: New Year, 2026

First flesh is finished

Second chances are incomplete

I wrote God a letter

Full of rhymes and resentments

Groans and gibberings

I think I never sent it -

I let it rot with the rest of me.

The universe is unfolding

As I'm collapsing fervently

I'll give God the letter

When it arrives in pieces

With the rest of me.

"The Rest of Me," by Yours Truly

At the age of 37

She realized she'd never ride

Through Paris in a sports car

With the warm wind in her hair.

So, she let the phone keep ringing

As she sat there, softly singing

Little nursery rhymes she'd memorized

In her Daddy's easy chair.

"The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," by Shel Silverstein

In Game of Thrones, there is a rakish priest named Thoros, a devotee of the Lord of Light ("For the night is long and full of terrors"). Thoros claims that he has resurrected Beric Dondarrian seven times through the magic of his hungry god.

"You should not have this power," rebukes Melisandre, the Red Priestess, who considers Thoros unworthy; she is perhaps shocked that a potential rival has been granted such a gift.

Beric Dondarrian looks on a little sadly. Eventually, he contributes: "Every time I come back, I'm a bit less. Pieces of you get chipped away."

I, too, am a bit less.

We speak of "growing up" in language that calls to mind expansion, progression, completion. The term bildungsroman, which we apply to coming-of-age stories, contains the German word bildung, referring to formation, education, cultivation.

I've experienced time and aging as something quite different from that - a process more akin to a careless sculptor hacking away at a block of marble.

We begin life - incomplete but with potential limited only by the amount and quality of our raw material - and then we are shaped and shaved by family, education, physiology, relationships; by pain and success and love and loss and, perhaps most of all, routine.

By the time that we complete adolescence, at which point we are (hopefully) mostly still untouched by the worst of life's troubles, we are as complete as we will ever be.

I miss the Brian of that age. I was so vibrant, so healthy, so clear, and so sure (I could also, to note in fairness, be a tremendous asshole).

I've said it before, but I'll repeat it because it's the most direct and forceful way to convey what I'm trying to say: I don't have a suicidal bone in my body, but if I could go back and talk to that young Brian (say, catch him at 21), knowing what was to come in the next fifteen years of florid opioid and benzo addiction, I would be sorely tempted to smother him in his sleep.

If he had discovered what was in store for him, the young Brian would've begged me to.

Addiction, to follow my cliche metaphor, is like a deeply impaired artist overconfidently sawing away at the block of marble. Sometimes, we lose crucial bits: Our dignity; the ability to breathe. More often, though, the loss is subtle but significant - quirks, memories, aspirations and inhibitions.

We lose them until the only thing left is the drug and the drive to take it. We become like insects whose brains are hijacked by parasites; we are complex organisms trapped in a loop of simple, lethal behaviors that serve the interests of a much smaller, deadlier entity (in the insects' case, the parasites; in ours, the drug).

Death by addiction is classed as a death of despair for a reason, and it doesn't occur in a single hour or a single day. It is a slow, seeping end; we hemorrhage ourselves bit by bit over months and years.

In the end, when the body finally goes, it is often a relief - for us and for those who loved the parts of us that are long gone.

For those of us who linger, the prognosis can be grim, but there's nothing else but to soldier on.

***

I've read several memoirs lately, and every single book has hit me where it counts. Maybe this is because, for the first time, I'm reading people's life stories with the realization that I, too, am not immortal - that I, too, am aging.

Marya Hornbacher's eating disorder memoir, Wasted - which I prefer to call by its German translation's title, Alice in Hungerland - is one of the most cogent examinations of mental illness that I have ever had the painful pleasure of reading.

It is phenomenally honest, frightening, and at the same time scholarly and acute in its examination of the societal influences and psychiatric biases that help to create and perpetuate eating disorders.

Young Marya was the quintessential bulimic - restless; brilliantly and endlessly reflective; explosively expressive. She knew how to make a scene. She had many sexual partners early on in life, and she shot drugs by the time that she was thirteen or fourteen.

(Reading Marya, in fact, is practically the first time that I've ever come across someone who started injecting drugs as early on in life as me; I felt a frisson of something novel and uncomfortable when I read about that - the realization that someone else was broken in the same way as me).

"You came this way, Marya," her mother insists when Marya gently raises the topic of how family patterns might have played into her eating disorder. Her mother speaks as though her daughter is a factory reject, an item appropriate for an outlet mall but not for standard sale and use / consumption.

I think, especially in the old days, that I could imagine my mom or dad saying the same of me.

In both Marya's case and mine, perhaps they are correct.

Marya's book is so deep and so powerful that it deserves its own post, so I'll save the rest of my thoughts on that one for a later date.

***

I also read Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, which taught me that opioid addiction was much the same in 1821 as it is today.

It's funny, in a way - to imagine this Victorian gentleman writer at his disk, with his quill pen and elegant, hand-cut paper. He's sneezing uncontrollably from opioid withdrawal (he refers to sneezing as sternutation, a charmingly technical word).

To think that Thomas De Quincey was garden-variety dopesick, and to compare his experience with mine - as I sit at my laptop writing my blog post with an open Diet Coke can next to me, sneezing from methadone withdrawal - is a total trip.

We've come so far, but in some ways, we've learned so little.

De Quincey devotes an entire section of his book to discussion of his opium dreams. In an incredible instance of synchronicity, at the time that I was reading this chapter, I had just begun writing a part of my Last of the Laowai memoir that deals with the disturbing dreams that I began having during my last months in China and that followed me across the globe when I returned to Upstate New York during the pandemic.

These dreams were so vivid and so sinister - and I was so sapped of strength and agency during them - that I considered the possibility that they might be a signal from my unconscious mind that I was dying (don't laugh).

I think of them as my voyages in Hell, and I still don't know quite what to make of them. At any rate, it caused a strange, sparking epiphany, the knowledge that De Quincey, dressed in prim Victorian attire, might be there walking along that dread dreamscape with me.

Most affecting of all, though, has been writer Gore Vidal's memoir, Palimpsest.

Gore was the undisputed social king of his day - connected by blood and achievement with senators and presidents; writers and actors; royalty and titans of industry and Old Money families so refined and reclusive that their names have mostly faded to whispers.

It is astonishing how well and how actively Gore lived and traveled. Every day, it seems - whether he spent it at his homes on the Hudson, in LA, or in Ravello, Italy, or visited friends in Tangiers or an English country house or Guatemala or Mexico City - held a dinner with a personage so accomplished and so interesting that for most of us, such a conversation would be the jewel of a lifetime.

For Gore, such interactions were so commonplace as to become almost meaningless; what endears his contemporaries to him and enables his crisp memories is knowledge of their flaws - their lies and eccentricities, their vices and pitfalls.

Gore is a ruthless gossip and an uninhibited critic. He drank to excess, especially in his later years, which no doubt contributed to the many arguments and feuds that pepper his tales.

He speaks extensively of his years abroad, of the intriguing sets that he socialized with while living in Paris, Morocco, and Rome.

I've not finished Palimpsest yet, but it's led me to wonder how my own life would sound, if it were written about by a biographer.

The young Gore Vidal, looking handsome and contemplative. He and Jack Kerouac spent a pleasantly confusing night hooking up in a cheap hotel in the Village. Kerouac in his prime - before his alcoholic, anti-Semitic later years - was one of the hottest writers of all time, in my humble opinion; imagining the two of them in bed together is like envisioning a literary legend sexual Superbowl for me.

***

In any account of my life, these last two and a half years would seem passive, insignificant; I've been reclusive and internally focused, and very little has happened, in a certain sense.

By contrast, I'd had some of the most invigorating and productive times of my life in China. Returning to my hometown in Upstate New York after over a year of pandemic lockdown was, in many ways, a worst-case scenario.

I love my family. I really do. They are interesting, earnest, generous people.

But my addictive struggles - against the backdrop of a family filled with similar problems - have created anxieties, disappointments, and resentments, such that the fabric of family has been forever stretched and stained.

It's more than that, though. I'm different to the people in my town, including my family, and although they accept me as I am, they never understood me completely. I'm simply not meant to live somewhere like Upstate New York.

I crave extremes - a shack in the woods or a penthouse on the Upper East Side. Suburbia is about spread, convenience, convention, mediocrity. It is just not me.

It's much better for me to live and learn at a distance, I know. Preferable for me, for my relations with my nuclear and extended families; better for everyone.

The thing that's keeping me stuck is my chemical crutch - my methadone maintenance.

I wrote at the end of 2024 that, come Hell or high water, I would be off of maintenance within a year.

2025 has proven me either a weak man or a liar (or both).

I've gotten 75% of the way there, but I tapered too quickly, and I was forced to take a break for the last several weeks.

This break from tapering was logical and circumspect; it was what I would've recommended to anyone else in the same position.

However, it was still a failure. I remind myself that if I really, truly wanted to be off of maintenance, I would be done with methadone withdrawal already.

True, that would've made me sick enough that I probably would've lost my job, my housing, and what's left of my sanity (for a time). But the point is that, if I really wanted to be, I could already be free.

And there have been times when, fed up with my methadone-induced purgatory, I considered radical action: Just walking away from my life; quitting methadone cold turkey and retreating to some couch or cot to whimper for 80 days or 100 days or however long the primary withdrawal would last.

Methadone, and opioids in general, are my soul's comfort. They are the factor that balances the equation of my life. For me, existence feels unviable without them.

I've gotten truly and totally clean and sober before, and it has felt incomparably wonderful to be free. I call that state "happiness without a half-life," and when I'm in it, everyone around me tells me that I'm glowing, and I feel that too.

However, it was extremely difficult to make it last. I woke up every morning fighting what felt like a doomed battle.

Life can be cruel, and chemical comfort, as capricious as it is, plays a role in the lives of most human beings at some point.

I've got to make peace with giving up the last remnants of my opioid attachment. When I get back from England in mid-January, I am completing the taper process with a vengeance.

As I've written about before, the risks of getting off of maintenance are outweighed by the benefits, for me. The sedation, the cognitive fog, the emotional and creative dampening are too much.

I abhor living life at half-mast; I yearn to be me again, whole and free.

***

At the same time, I've realized that most of life's serious struggles are perennial. Very few people only struggle with their weight, their sobriety, their anxiety and depression just one time.

For most of us, there is a periodic recurrence of our central problems. We grow in spirals, and sometimes we corkscrew backward with time.

It's not a palatable thought, but it's possible that I'll spend the rest of my life struggling on and off with addiction.

A friendly reader recently sent me a copy of Art and Laurie Pepper's autobiographical book The Straight Life, which reveals that jazz legend Art was on methadone and abusing cocaine in a limited way right up until his final trip to the hospital.

The Straight Life was another book that was so potent and so relevant to my life that it deserves its own post, but for now, suffice it to say that it made me think more about the ways that I can pursue creative success - and stay productive by writing and making videos - even as my wrestling match with methadone withdrawal takes up a significant proportion of my time and energy.

I've never had so many opportunities as a writer or general creative as I do right now. I've had agents, documentarians, and other artists reach out and talk to me about my video and written content.

I have a couple of interesting interviews arranged for my YouTube channel in early 2026. In addition, I'm in talks about upcoming collaborations that seem like the next logical step so that I can continue to grow.

I know myself: At my worst, I am the world's best, most unconscious self-saboteur. What a gross and embarrassing revelation, to realize that - for all of my academic and professional progression, for all of my work ethic and (erratic) aspirations - there is a small, clever part of me that exists solely to step in and snipe any good thing that develops.

That diabolical little psychic goblin never sleeps; God forbid that I should be safe, stable, partnered, and happy.

I don't know if even a lifetime of therapy could fix that; it's taken half a lifetime of serious self-hatred and dedicated self-destruction to form it in the first place.

***

Jay, my fiancé, has proven resistant to the effects of the angry autocannibal that lives within me.

No doubt being Mainland Chinese helps with this: Historically and culturally, they are a serene people, guided by the wise flow of Taoism, a spiritual system which famously celebrates the bending of the reed in windy weather. The forceful imposition of Communist pragmatism atop that base has created a distinctive, playful perversity that treats human weakness gently, with bemused understanding.

"I think that, more so than being intellectual, I'm an intuitive person," I say one day to Jay as we are eating our respective Eastern (me) and Western (him) breakfasts. I am taking an online Myers-Briggs personality test.

"Do you agree?" I ask.

Frighteningly, I must confess that - for my entire life - every time that I take a personality test, I get a different result. It's not that I'm lying; it's that I interpret the questions and my life history a little differently each time (and because I've been so many different Brians through so many arcs and eras).

"I do think you're intuitive, but it doesn't make your life any easier," Jay sagely replies.

I have my right arm in a sling. I've lost use of it for several months after killing a nerve from lack of circulation during an overdose. I was damn lucky that it was just the nerve, not my entire brain and body, that was extinguished during that particular fiasco.

The day after the overdose, I switched to my left hand as I ate with chopsticks.

"Wow; so fast! I could never do that," Jay remarked. It is, to my recollection, one of the only times that he's complimented me.

To his credit, Jay didn't seem fazed in the least by having a suddenly one-armed fiancé; he is fundamentally unflappable.

We've been together since 2018, but we've been physically separated since March of 2022, when I returned to the U.S. due to the extreme, COVID-related lockdowns in Mainland China.

(We fell under the "two point, one line" system at the time, which allowed for leaving one's domicile once per day to get to and from work, directly and with no stops permitted along the way; alas, for me, school had gone online, so I was subject to what I called the "one point, no line," system, aka solitary confinement with internet access).

Jay hasn't been able to visit because he had to give up his ten-year tourist visa when we applied for his fiancé visa, which has been in process for years now due to COVID-related delays.

He's working in London this year, so I'm headed there to celebrate the new year with him. On YouTube, I've gotten comments from people - or bots pretending to be people, which are apparently increasingly common on all digital platforms - wondering whether I expect that it will be weird or awkward to be together again after such an extended separation.

Honestly, I'm not nervous at all to reunite. Jay and I have known each other for long enough, and our relationship is strong and seasoned enough, that falling back into our daily routines will be like slipping on a favorite housecoat, well-worn and with a plush, fleece lining.

I love him. I miss him. I'm absolutely psyched to see him.

For most of my life, I assumed that I'd never find a partner.

In Jay, I believe that I've found the right person to steady my ship during the storm of my existence.

For whatever their profession's perspective is worth, psychologists say that the "opposites attract" aphorism is false, but in the case of our relationship, I think that there is just enough in our cores that is similar, and just enough in our cultures and personal histories that is divergent, for us to balance each other out blessedly.

There's also just enough of a language barrier to create plausible deniability and reasonable doubt about what a sick fuck I am. That's helpful, too.

Jay's life without me might be a little on the dry side. After all, he's an accountant: A true bean counter. (When I'm deploring his reliability, I refer to him as the Walking Spreadsheet).

As you, dear reader, are no doubt aware, I am a truly epic, long-term spastic, and recently international mess.

My life is many things, as am I, and boring is not one of them.

The Brits don't know what's coming for them!

I haven't been in the UK since a short exchange program during the summer before my junior year of high school. On that trip*, we were based in Newcastle, a city in the northeastern region of Northumbria, which is on the River Tyne.* We also traveled to London, as well as Edinburgh, Scotland, a city that so enchanted me that I considered attending University of Edinburgh or Oxbridge).

*Newcastle, like my hometown of Syracuse, New York, is a wild city with working class strength; it has a very active club scene and is a favorite destination for stag and hen parties. In 2005, the city gained the Gateside Millennium Bridge; my host mum, an English teacher named Shelley, recalled that the bridge had to be assembled, then floated down the River Tyne on a boat. To celebrate its arrival, 1,700 people walked across the bridge stark naked! Image from Cultured / North East.

We visited Alnwick Castle (called "the Harry Potter castle," but not nearly what it sounds like) and toured Cambridge, where many of the interior scenes at Hogwarts were filmed.

I laid in a concrete cast of a coffin in the ruined abbey at Whitby, beside which were the foggy shores where Dracula lands in Bram Stoker's novel.

I didn't see Dracula, but I did see many Brits with scary teeth.

The drinking age was 18, but no one in our group was that old yet. However, I remembered that Brits read dates differently than we do; in the British notation system, month and year are switched, so that date is first and month comes after.

We realized that one member of our group had a birthday that made her 18 if you read it this way. We gassed this shy girl up until she had the confidence to go into a liquor store and buy a bottle of Smirnoff vodka.

We declared the day our Fourth of July celebration - no Brits allowed - and we all got drunk on the cliffs overlooking the River Tyne and then, later, in a cheap hotel where we had to sneak out of our rooms to continue our soiree.

One girl ended up in a bathtub, vomiting up semi-digested food, alcohol, and eldritch stories (like a lie about having had cancer and losing her hair due to chemotherapy treatment).

Psychiatrically speaking, it was a strange and very curious thing, this normally sort of contained girl becoming a pathological liar after over-imbibing. Despite our assurances that her friend would be okay, the girl's nervous best friend ended up panicking and waking up the chaperones to tell them that the drunk liar girl was sick.

The next morning, our chaperones took us on a brutal walking tour of London as punishment. I didn't mind; I was young and brimming with energy, and my ability to rebound was unmatched.

Drunk liar girl looked green, I remember - like something from a cartoon.

We visited Princess Diana's memorial, which is a winding loop of stone with a little waterway running through it; it's a place for people to gather, one final symbol of how she brought them together.

The trip instilled a streak of Anglophilia in me. I love how staid the British are: Their sense of pace, poise, and their formality.

I've read and watched quite a bit of material on the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, Princess Diana, and Princess Michael of Kent.

I've also studied up on the royal rejects, of course, including the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated the throne, and Wallis Simpson - a legendary flapper who married the Duke of Windsor and committed the scandalous crime of being an American. The Windsors are an intriguing, troubled lot, for sure.

For what it's worth, by the way, Princess Margaret, Wallis Simpson, and the Duke of Windsor all spent time with Gore Vidal. As far as I can tell, their royal titles didn't cause him to treat them with any more reverence than any other famous personalities who he savaged.

***

I know that this pre-New Year's post is a little disjointed, which is apropos given how I'm feeling.

Getting older doesn't feel the way that I expected it to. It's weird - just layers on layers on layers, with struggle and tragedy making frequent, jagged appearances and peace and productivity mostly slipping in through the irregular spaces between everything else.

There's nothing that feels integrated or easy to make sense of, really.

I've heard that doing drugs halts your maturation at whatever age you start using them. I mean, I don't feel like a 12-year-old, but for most of my twenties, I felt like a particularly dysfunctional 18-year-old.

Now, though, I think I do feel a little older?

Mid-twenties, at least.

After years of being out of touch, I've recently reconnected with Xiao, one of my best friends from growing up.

She's the daughter of Chinese immigrants and was one of only two non-white students in our small, conservative town.

Xiao's parents, who didn't speak English, had a restaurant called the Great Wall in our village's tiny downtown area. Xiao would help them with the restaurant until close; on many nights, she'd be up doing her homework until 2 or 3 a.m. because she couldn't start it until after midnight.

Xiao's brilliant and beautiful, and her work ethic is unmatched. I had no doubt that she'd go far in life.

Naturally, she has an impressive job for a luxury goods line. She lives in Beijing but travels to LA for work and to other parts of the U.S., Europe, and China to see family.

Hilariously, Xiao and I were the male and female recipients of the "Most Likely to Succeed" senior superlative. I'm glad that one of us held up her end of the bargain.

It's been incredible to reconnect with her.

Those of us who didn't fit the mold in our crankily conservative little town stuck out, so we stuck together. Me, Xiao, and our gay friend Peter held a combined graduation party when we were finally judged fit to bust out of that place; coincidentally, Xiao and I ended up going to the same college.

(Over a decade later, all three of us would end up in Beijing at the same time; I was within miles of Peter and Xiao, halfway around the world from where we grew up, and I wasn't even aware of it!).

I'm kind of curious about how Xiao would interpret all of my problems during the fifteen or so years when we were out of touch - whether she'd seen signs of trouble to come during our teenage years.

I've lost touch with nearly everyone else from those supposedly formative times.

I wasn't who I wanted to be then, and I'm sure that most of my peers weren't, either. For some reason, none of my "friendships" from that era really stuck (with a couple of significant exceptions).

I'm not that surprised. I never brought friends to my house because my parents would sometimes get home from work and scream and scream. I was always the kid who disappeared over the summer, anyway.

Then, as now, I'm completely comfortable with keeping my own company. I don't need other people in the way that many people seem to.

"In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends," John Churton Collins, a British literary critic, famously observed. I guess that maybe I've had too much adversity for too long to have many friends remaining by my side.

At any rate, it's been wonderful to reconnect with Xiao. My Aunt Mary Pat used to speak of circles coming round, and - again, if not a circle, then a spiral of connection and continuity would undoubtedly do me good.

Aside from that, I have you, fam, and you mean so much to me.

Please keep writing me to check in. Your messages brighten my days, and your problems make them more interesting.

I love you all.

Tomorrow is a new day, and 2026 is a new year.

Let's make 2026 everything that we've dreamt it could be - everything that we need it to be.

By this time next year, we could be so far from here.