Stopping the Soul-Scream: Restless REM / Remembering the Psych Ward / I Summon a Demon / à la Bernese Method aka Brian Reborn

In which I wake up from a three-year methadone and fentanyl coma, and, shockingly, do not regret my Internet presence.

The Scream, by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1893). Munch was heavily influenced by the deaths of his mother and sister from TB. There are other paintings of his in which this same sort of expression is applied to deathbed scenes.

"We can be heroes /

Just for one day."

"Heroes," by David Bowie (aka the Tunnel Song from POBAW)

***

A nod toward improving my "hooks" in this dopamine-drenched era of mass cognitive decline:

At the end of this post, I am going to tell you about something I did that is so fucked up and evil that I have never shared it with more than a person or two IRL.

But first, you need to read to the end of the post.

***

I am on Day 10 of switching over from methadone and fentanyl to buprenorphine (Suboxone et al.).

The issue with this transition is that the ultrapotent full agonists, methadone and fent, have so cooked my tolerance that taking the partial-agonist bupe puts me into severe withdrawal.

The PA who is overseeing the process uses a gradual upward titration protocol, but the first three to five days are savage. I feel like I have been Narcan-ed.

(My video diaries for Days 1 through 6 are available on YouTube, if you're interested. Day 1 shows my pile of approximately 2,000 [not exaggerating] dope bags from the past few weeks; there are also some used needles in the pile, if you look carefully like it's a Where's Waldo. Holding onto them for some Save SR-17 art.)

I'm not going to dwell on the withdrawal symptoms overly much here, but I will say this: Coming off of high-dose fent gave me by far the severest akathisia - restless legs, arms, everything - that I have ever experienced from any withdrawal syndrome.

For about 60 hours during Days 3 through 5, I was trapped in what I can only describe as a Pilates class in the innermost circle of Hell. I could not sleep, not even for a minute.

My arms were thrashing like I was fighting off wasps, my legs ceaselessly peddling a warped and sadistic bicycle; I began rocking my torso backward and forward to try to find some way to soothe the inner need to move.

By the end of Day 5, I took some (weak, non-controlled) sleep meds along with buprenorphine and clonidine, and I finally passed out for four hours. I have slept for 3-5 hours on every night since then, and each day I have woken up a little better.

I have been entirely without methadone and fentanyl for days now.

It seems that three years that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy might finally be over.

I woke up on Day 6 and realized that I wasn't in florid opioid withdrawal. For the first time in as long as I could remember, my initial thought wasn't when I could dose methadone or when I could cop dope.

I started shaking all over. It wasn't a good feeling, but it was a feeling.

I have been living for months and months in perma-withdrawal, first due to my steep methadone taper, then my full-on relapse on fentanyl.

To have my mind and body settling into the bupe - to feel the same, mild-to-moderate opioid receptor stimulation throughout the day - is a spiritual relief as much as it is a physical one.

I feel clearer-headed than I have in years. I have pupils for the first time since 2018.

I feel, dare I say it, nearly sober.

***

It sounds like it should feel good to wake up this way, I'm sure.

It doesn't (at least, not 95% of the time).

I'm the emotional equivalent of a third-degree burn victim.

Last night, I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a book / film that has a pretty high degree of resonance with my own life.

I had to stop it three times because of how raw I felt.

Every time I experience a strong emotion, my brain resorts to the same old tricks - take some more Suboxone; go eat something; stop eating; take a clonidine; shoot dope; go for a run / walk; cut yourself; touch yourself.

One good thing about having been to rehab is that I know that this desperate-for-dopamine rollercoaster is normal, and I am largely successful in riding it out without falling into its worst traps.

In fact, going through it as a drug veteran in my thirties is almost how I imagine it would feel to be someone with coping skills - you know, a "normal" person who doesn't let a cavity turn into sepsis, who course corrects via mild adjustments here and there instead of jerking the car off of the road at the last minute.

Almost, fam.

***

Yesterday, for the first time in over a decade, I remembered my roommate from one of my first involuntary psych holds in my early twenties.

At the time, I was fresh out of both college and options. I was in awful benzo and heroin withdrawal, and my whole soul was a wound. It felt like I was trapped in an endless, Edvard Munchian scream.

I don't recall what circumstances led to the psych hold, but I remember the moment when I arrived on the locked ward, where I was given a hospital gown that covered less than two-thirds of what by all accounts clothing is meant to cover.

This middle-aged woman came over and showed me where to get another gown, then how to wear them sort of inversely for maximal coverage.

"I'm Macy, but everyone calls me Mama," she said to me. She had the blown pupils that heavy psych meds can give you, and she was mountainously overweight.

"Thanks, Mace - Mama."

Before I realized what was happening, she drew me into an inescapably powerful hug that felt a lot like what I imagine swimming in a bathtub of Jell-O might feel like.

I'm a notoriously noncommittal hugger - my hugs are like a combination of "I'm glad to see you" and the middle finger - but here was a hug I could immerse myself in.

"Thanks, Mama," I said again.

"Anytime," Mama smiled her slow-Buddha's smile.

Next, I met Kiera, an anorexic chick who I instantly vibed with.

"I've done heroin," she told me about five minutes into our conversation after I confessed that I was pretty much just a garden variety drug addict.

"The only reason I'm not a druggie is that I have this weird paranoia about how many calories are in - not just pills but also powders, even like coke and things."

"I wish I had that," I told her.

Kiera handed me a bunch of Mandala sheets that she had made so that I could color while I waited for the nurse to bring me to my room.

She introduced me to Tom, an alcoholic in his early fifties who looked like a has-been TV news anchor; he'd been admitted for DT-related psychosis. I also met Ashley, a woman in her mid-thirties who had tried to kill herself with alcohol and acetaminophen.

The two, I would soon learn, were fucking.

People fuck all the time on psych wards and in detox units, I would gradually discover.

People fuck all the time everywhere, really, life has taught me.

People do; just not me.

After an hour or two, as meaningless time unspooled toward 9 p.m., a nurse arrived to take me to my room.

"I want to make sure you meet your roommate before he falls asleep," she told me.

This gave me a sharp, unsettled feeling. I'd had no idea that I'd be sharing a room.

"Don't worry - Justin's great."

The nurse knocked on the door. She shifted a small, clear bag of toiletries into my hand.

Four accelerated heartbeats later, an arrestingly handsome man in his thirties opened the door and shook my hand.

"You guys have benzo withdrawal in common!" The nurse added before pulling the door shut behind her.

I remember sitting across from Justin, both of us taking stock of each other in silence for considerably longer than would've been appropriate in any other social setting.

Justin was one of the handsomest guys that I'd ever been in the same room as (think Armie Hammer good looks).

He was tanned, subtly muscled, and had that masculine nobility of features that often, to my chagrin, accompanies intergenerational wealth, especially of the WASP variety.

I later learned that he came from one of the handful of blueblood families who run Syracuse. He was a lawyer and a businessman, and he was good enough at tennis to be playing competitively as a serious hobbyist or semipro.

You'd think that being roomies with such a goodlooking fella would be a dream situation for a gay guy, but it only added to my unease.

I've always been an NLOG (Not Like Other Gays), so afraid of being the proverbial creepy perv that I'd early on perfected the ancient Catholic art of "custody of the eyes" even when I was, say, in a locker-room with decent-looking men who were nude.*

*Let me just note, in fairness, that your average heterosexual man would feel no compunction whatsoever about leering at undressed women were he given a chance to peep, so there's a bit of a self-imposed double standard here.

The idea of meeting a guy like Justin then, in those circumstances, rankled me. I hated people seeing me weak.

All of this was evidently more visible on my face than I ever would've wanted it to be, because Justin leaned forward and shook my hand again, this time putting gentle pressure on my shoulder for a moment afterward. Then, he sighed, swung his legs up onto his bed as though it were a psychiatrist's chaise lounge, and spent the next half-hour giving me the abbreviated rundown on his present predicament.

Justin had a fiancée or wife, I can't remember which, and things were not going well with their relationship.

He'd become heavily reliant on Ambien to sleep, and before his psych admission, he'd gone days and days with no sleep at all.

Justin and I were sinking ships passing in the night, but there is a certain camaraderie to shared, severe insomnia experienced in a psych ward.

Sarah, one of the ward nurses, stopped by the next morning after Justin and I had spent a pristinely sleepless night in desultory conversation.

"Justin, I really think this new medication is going to be the change you need," she said.

As soon as Sarah closed the door, I used my Arrested Development narrator's voice: "Spoiler alert: The new medication was not, in fact, going to be the change that Justin needed."

On another occasion, when one of the hyperventilatory panic attacks that I get when coming off of benzos seized me, and I lay on my bed wide-eyed and paralyzed, sure that my heart was giving out under the impossible strain, Justin came and stood over me.

"Jesus, Brian, your anxiety is so bad that it's like a virus. It goes into everyone around you."

Suddenly, I saw myself from a million miles above - nothing special; just another failed and flailing organism. My shallow in-outs deepened into great, gasping laughter, and I curled up on the bed, calm within 90 seconds.

"It takes a real asshole to make a freak-out like that all about you," I noted in fairness.

I don't remember the other things that we talked about, but I do recall what we didn't talk about. Justin never mentioned his family, and he never asked if I had a girlfriend.

He didn't talk about business, and I didn't talk about my addiction. The questions that we didn't ask were the gifts that we gave each other.

He seemed so self-assured, so controlled and so normal. I had no idea exactly how gone things were for him.

Justin had this warm, brotherly energy. He was hands-on in the least sexual way possible, and he made my adjustment to the ward a million times easier than it would've been otherwise.

It occurs to me now that Justin was probably my current age when he killed himself a couple of weeks later.

I went straight to rehab from the ward, but I stayed in the psych unit for a day or two longer than Justin. On the day that he left, Justin gave me a pair of shorts to sleep in at night (the ward had complicated rules about gaining access to personal items if you followed protocol and made treatment progress).

For years, my tattered Norton Anthology of English Literature, the prayer card from my grandma's funeral, and Justin's shorts were the only material possessions that I valued. I dragged them around the world with me.

He also gave me his phone number, which meant more to me than I can put into words.

I was a BPD nutcase in my twenties, and particularly when it came to straight men, I was forever pining for them silently and then feeling wretchedly abandoned when we inevitably went our separate ways because I self-quarantined myself to the point that no lasting friendship was possible.

Justin was one of the first men to break through that, and he paved the way for several close friendships with straight guys in the years to come.

Suicide is often an act of desperation, but it is also a commitment of consummate courage (try to do it, try even just to get close, if you don't believe me).

I admire Justin for having the strength to end things on his own terms. He was such a good, charming man, and I understand him wanting to end things before anyone could remember him as anything else.

I often think that I would've been better off had I been braver and more realistic about my outlook and done what Justin did. I also think that my family and friends would've been spared the searing pain of seeing me torture myself until there was nothing left of me but a substance-seeking shell.

I wish that Justin could've gotten better, but if that wasn't possible, I'm glad that he left this place his way.

I've said it before on this blog: If I had a kid, and I had absolute prevision and knew that he was going to become an addict and go through the same things I have, I would wait until his last good day. Then, I would get him glowingly, gorgeously fucked up, wait until he passed out, and make sure that he didn't wake up.

***

As promised, fam, I'm going to tell you about my dreams, which are all nightmares, and the thing that I went into the woods and did when I was 13 or 14.

Withdrawal dreams are amplified. The brain is experiencing REM rebound, which creates a sort of uber-nightmare that is impossible to put into words (but I must try).

After months of methadone-muted nightquests, during which I stumbled around my dreamscape, unable to speak, unable to move, drained and demented and convinced that this was a sign that my real body was dying, my dreams have suddenly resurged with a crisp, electric clarity.

All of them are warped and wretched, and most of them have to do with getting drugs. It's true, for me, that using drugs in a dream is like dying in a dream. I almost always wake up before it happens.

The drug dreams, though, are actually some of the milder ones.

I have a recurrent nightmare in which I'm hiding under this staircase, using my body to shield a younger guy who is underneath me. I can feel his shuddering breaths; he is so frightened that he's vibrating.

We hear gunshots from upstairs, and then we hear someone coming down the stairs.

I flash back to an article that I read about a terrorist attack in Paris, during which a Captagon-amped Islamic extremist sprayed gunfire with the blank gaze and casual manner of someone watering their garden.

Whoever and whatever he is, the guy with the assault rifle is almost at the bottom of the stairs. I hold my breath as I hear him come around to the area that we're hiding in.

I am completely paralyzed. I want to get up and rush him, but I can't.

I hear the boy under me hiss in a breath, and I shift my body as best I can to cover his head, his chest - the places where a bullet could kill him. I try to make it look like there's no one under me.

The killer is standing over us now, but neither one of us will look up and see him.

I close my eyes. I am still holding my breath. I know that, after one small infinity, he will shoot me in the head, and every lie that I've ever told, every stupid hope that I've ever cherished, every time I've laughed and hurt and thought that maybe something better could come, will soon be blown apart.

I wake up from this dream to an incongruous digital clicking sound.

Believe it or not, this nightmare isn't even the worst of them.

Most of my dreams take place in international waters. I've moved so often that my brain has trouble averaging Upstate New York, New York City, South Jersey, Oregon, Maui, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Beijing. Instead, it creates a place that's a weighted fusion of everywhere I've ever been.

Sometimes, it's a cruise ship, but more often, it's a town at the base of a mountain.

First, I pass a surging waterfall - powerful as a young man’s first piss in the morning.

There are snow-spotted peaks in the distance and a pass that runs between them. I’ve hiked up there before. It’s beautiful, but I can never remember what it is I’m looking for. 

I enter a building, which I never see until I’m right outside it. I walk through what looks like an ornate reading room in a university library. If I take the elevator up from here, I know that whichever button I press, I’ll end up on an upper floor with research labs in it, which I’ve explored before. 

I don’t take the elevator. I take the stairs down, and I come out on a level that consists of little dormitory-type rooms that look a lot like what you might find in the servants’ quarters of grand old houses. 

I see the first whatever they are, then. They’re in a room with a long, wooden table in it, and they’re seated there, eating. 

Gorging. 

There’s one who’s shoveling food into her mouth with both hands. She scoops handfuls of noodles and cake, fresh oysters and rare steak, and she shoves them into her mouth indiscriminately. 

She has chunks of food covering her clothes, spread over her face, scattered in her hair.

She sees me, seems to smile a little with her mouth still full, then turns around and vomits into the space behind her chair. 

No one else at the table notices. She squares back up to the table and begins eating again. 

The next level down is a communal shower and a locker room. As soon as I arrive there, I feel an erotic current spread through me. 

I’m alone there now, but I am instantly hard. I have the urge to strip down and jerk off. I think of sleek, naked, athletic forms - like the masculine bodies depicted on Grecian urns - firm and yet yielding, dilating like overripe fruit when the time is right.  

I notice a second shower area beyond a door that's just appeared in front of me.

I walk in, and there's a twink-looking guy on all fours, naked, with two men and two women, also naked, circled around him.

One of the women turns and raises an eyebrow at me. She looks Russian or Eastern European, and she has a video camera in her hand.

I know that I'm not supposed to be there. I see her features shift, and I realize that she's not a woman at all.

What happens when you tell the people in a dream that you know that they're dreampeople? They attack you, I think I remember.

I steady myself and back away slowly, silently. I keep walking down. 

On the landing is a big black man lying on his side. I’ve seen this one before. 

It looks like he’s frothing at the mouth, but when I look more closely, it’s just a cigarette. 

“Just a cigarette,” he says. 

I don’t know how I know that he can’t move his legs, but I do. 

Sometimes I find him lying there looking at a phone. 

I walk down. 

I come to a door in the basement. For years, I was too frightened to open it. I knew in the most unspeakable, instinctual way that there was something wrong beyond it.  

That door’s been open a long time, now. I walk through it, and then I wander for a long time along what looks like a service tunnel. I’m walking along a catwalk, diamond-latticed metal beneath me, and there are pipes and wires of all sizes running in every direction beside and above me. 

I keep walking. There are many intersecting passages - a whole underground city’s worth - and it doesn’t really matter which route I take. 

When I’m ready, I find the door. I steady myself, and I step out into the strange, stale and timeless place where He is. 

I’m walking along a railroad track, now. It’s elevated on a gravel pile that sits three or four feet above the thick, craven brush beside it. 

The thorned bushes lining the track hunch together like witches in an Eastern European fairytale. Spiky grass crops up under and around them. 

The air is yellow-gray and hazy here, like when smoke from the wildfires drifts down from Canada.

I continue along the tracks and pass an old slaughterhouse. I stopped there once and looked around the crumbling stone structure. I saw the bone fragments and the bent, rusted metal remains of devices used to murder. 

I left when I heard squealing in my head, over and over, loud as judgment and inescapable as pain. 

There is an old quarry that has become a lake off to my right, which looks a lot like one that my cousins and I used to walk to when we visited our grandparents’ house. 

I’m getting closer to Him, now. 

I wish I had noticed the water that fills the quarry when I started coming here long ago. How it sort of breathes a bit - it looks like maybe wind is worrying its surface, but really, it's the lake itself that moves in and out. 

How if you dip your hand into the fluid that fills it, what you find is something more viscous than water. Something that reminds me of cerebrospinal fluid, of the extracellular liquid that bathes our cells. It's warm, even in the winter, and there is something syrupy about it.

I’m almost there, now. 

I pass what looks like a Mayan temple. Again, it's something that I saw when I was younger, the rock crusher that was used to grind the gravel that was carted off along the railroad tracks. 

It has two huge arms that reach down. There's an open hole at the top that looks like what’s left behind when a head is cut off.

The real rock crusher exploded and killed several workers decades back. I don’t know what happened here, at this one, and I don’t want to. 

I keep walking. The brush thins out, and I abandon the railroad tracks. 

A moment later, I spot His dusty and dilapidated trailer.

I can’t walk forward. I feel weak, like I don’t have enough juice to move my limbs, just like I did during my methadone dreams.

I always wake up before I meet Him, but it doesn't matter. He's always with me now.

Who knows? Maybe if I opened that final door, I'd just find myself inside, anyway.

***

The seal of Seere. If you know, you know. There is a special way to use this sort of seal in the context of ritual magic - it's sort of like a web address to connect to a demonic site. There are certain materials and gifts that you bring to entice the demon to appear before you, too. I don't know, my dear readers. I never believed in this stuff more than 1 or 2 percent, but considering the nature of the possibilities, even 1 or 2 percent can be enough to freak you out.

When I was 12 or 13, with a hurt, precocious, curious, sharp, and boundary-less mind and too many free hours to spend on the internet, I became very interested in esoteric knowledge - in Kabbalah, in ritual and ceremonial magic.

I'd always loved the pomp and ceremony of the Catholic Church that I grew up in. Later on, in fact, mostly on the basis of my then-strong faith and speaking skills, I was appointed my Confirmation class's sponsor.

I was drawn to the darkness of our faith. How we believed in the Devil, in demons, in Hell.

I loved how beautiful our demons were, too. The Prince of Lies (once Lucifer, the Lord of Light), the most beautiful of all the angels, the profligate son who rejected his father and was cast down into Hell.

At the same time, I despised the small-town Christians who I grew up around. I hated them for hypocrites, for their petty and vicious cruelty, for the way that they treated someone who was different like me.

I started with yoga and I progressed to Jung. To this day, I believe in a metaphysical, synchronistic dimension to our universe. I hold that quantum entanglement, space-time relativity, and other concepts from the physics of the very great and the very small bear out the possibility of ritual magic being effective.

I was nothing if not diligent (this was vintage, 90's Brian). I studied ancient languages and located full copies of key mystical texts, including The Lesser Key of Solomon and some older fragments of ritual / ceremonial magical texts from other traditions.

I realized early on that the Jews have true mystical knowledge on lock. I met a rabbi in a very strange sort of chatroom, and he became my teacher.

He wouldn't accept money as payment; not weed, either.

He wanted me to purify myself, to prove that I had a strong enough will to command the forces that he told me he had access to.

I stopped eating for 72 hours, which I explained to my parents as being due to a stomach bug.

I prayed, and I fasted, and I denied myself. I purified myself.

I asked the rabbi if I was ready, and he finally told me which sort of gift he would accept. But first, he warned me about what would happen if I continued down this path.

If you gain access to the forces and powers that you claim to desire access to, then eventually, all that will remain of you is what kind of gift you will accept in exchange for teaching the next novitiate.

I thought about that.

Teach me, please, I told him. I'm ready.

I'm an old man now, he replied. Help me to remember what it's like to be young.

I thought about the rabbi's request for days. In the end, I wrote a short, vivid essay about what it felt like to run through the forests and farmland around my town.

How I would squint my eyes so that the burning colors of the fall all blended together into a red-orange haze. How I would sprint until my eyes watered and my muscles burned and I pushed and pushed and always made it to wherever I wanted to go.

I wrote about what it felt like to inhabit my body, how sometimes it seemed that there were these extension sticks, maybe two to three feet long, attached to my arms and legs. How sometimes when my friends hugged me, it felt like they were touching someone else's body.

I described what it felt like to pleasure myself - the warmth and the wharf-smelling wetness and the heavy, rebounding shame after I finished.

I attached a picture of myself in my underwear. I looked lean, almost lupine.

I told him the truth: That I never felt sore or tired, that I never got sick, that I was strong and my mind was clear and I had curiosity and purpose.

I wrote another piece about how some day, all of my running, my breathing, my growth and my pleasure would catch up with me, how Time would collapse them into pain and stiffness and flat, ceaseless sorrow.

It was this last part that convinced him to teach me, the rabbi told me later.

Under the rabbi's tutelage, I studied Kabbalah. I connected to the Sefirot (the ten sacred emanations), learned to manipulate the cosmic geometries and numerologies, began to study ritual magic.

I learned how to form a circle of protection, how to purify myself through self-abnegation and transcendent clarity of will.

All magic comes from God, the rabbi told me. There is no entity or ritual or occurrence that God does not condone.

In my heart, I was against God. I had prayed for years that he would make me straight, and he had ignored me.

I felt this midnight blue void inside of me; weird maelstroms of igneous anger and bitter emptiness and desperate desire to connect with other people lashed out from it with brutal, unpredictable force.

I felt completely alone. I was surrounded by normal, utterly fucked up, loving family, but I felt completely bereft.

I hated God for making me, for putting me as I was and where I was, and because of this, my self-purification was a lie.

I want to try a summoning ritual, I told the rabbi about eight months into our correspondence.

You're not ready, he warned me.

I'm going to try it.

If you try it, I will never speak with you again. You are years away from this, he warned me.

I didn't listen. I went to a quiet place in the woods with chalk and blood and some other materials, and I cast my circle. I called to it one of the greater demons from the Ars Goetia, also known as the Lemegeton or the Lesser Key of Solomon, a 17th-century magical text.

The entity or emanation that I invited was Seere, a powerful Prince of Hell said to give access to hidden knowledge. He could traverse the world in an instant, and he could transport objects with him.

He was said to be good-natured. The descriptions of his appearance when manifested varied greatly, but more than one magician had seen him as a beautiful man riding a winged horse.

I felt a kinship with Seere from the start. I had secrets, and I, too, pursued mysteries.

I followed the ritual, and I sat in a kind of stillness that I haven't experienced now for twenty-five years.

I closed my eyes and waited for Him.

I'm like you, I promised. I'm an outcast and a freak.

Make me powerful, I prayed. Give me knowledge; make me powerful.

I said it over and over again - give me knowledge; make me powerful.

I sat in the circle as the woods went red, then gray with twilight, and in time, though I wasn't tired, I slumped into sleep.

I had an unusually vivid dream. In it, a young boy and girl - golden-haired, like the prince and princess from a fairytale - rode a great, white horse up to the ridge where I had formed my circle. They dismounted and approached, but before they reached me, I startled awake.

I felt a pang of panic as I took stock of my arms and legs - still sitting cross-legged. My body was contained in the circle, I realized with relief.

Immediately, I knew that I was wrong. I heard the rabbi's voice in my head.

You are the circle; you power the circle. If you forget that it's there, what it means, the circle is just some marks you scratched into the Earth.

I went home, and most of me believed that what happened was just a dream.

I lost access to the rabbi; I lost interest in magic. I moved on.

***

Weirdly enough, the following fall was when my grades went from the 88-92 range to consistent 99's and 100's.

I became known as the smartest student in my year, and I was placed in advanced classes.

I never told anyone this, but I didn't really think when I answered multiple-choice questions. I moved on pure intuition - there was no conscious consideration.

Math, from basic geometry to multivariable calculus, was the same. My hand often wrote and rearranged equations while I looked on, vague and dissociated.

Words came to me and ordered themselves as though they'd been manifested from some land of supreme expression. I had a facility with foreign languages - Latin and Spanish, particularly - that I had never shown in my youth.

All demons are allied with the Prince of Lies, my priest had told our congregation.

They covet humanity's special relationship with God, and they seek the ruin of souls.

How do demons corrupt us? I'd once asked the rabbi.

Through the lowly impulses, he'd responded. Mostly through sex, through sensory pleasure, through drug addiction.

I don't really believe this, guys. I mean, I can't have sold my soul and cursed my family, right?

I'm not having, like, a psychotic break. I promise. Not even a little.

But sometimes, in the absolute clarity and soul-coldness of withdrawal, I wonder.

It can't be true, right?

I mean, no one who says "like" as much as I do could possibly be taken seriously by a Prince of Hell.

But I went into the woods when I was 13 or 14. I wanted power, and I wanted knowledge, and I was willing to bleed myself and to summon a demon to get it.

It's not real. I know it, fam.

Right?

To this day, though, I have a SATOR Square hidden everywhere that I live, and I look for the same auspicious numbers as some Jewish people do when I'm buying or selling something.

It can't be real, right?

It can't be real, fam.

***

I don't want to die with my soul screaming.

I had a spiritual moment the other night. It was Day 2 or Day 3 of my switch to buprenorphine, and I was in flagrant withdrawal.

Every hair on my arms and legs was erect; there were hundreds of goosebumps running in lines along them.

If there is a meaningful God, which I am very on the fence about, I don't want to go before Him like a tantrummy toddler, I realized - returning again and again to addiction because I'm too weak and short-sighted to pay the pain-price and escape the trap.

Even if there's no God, I want to leave this life knowing that I have learned the chief lesson of the past 20 years: That pursuing shallow, sensory pleasure leads to ruin, and that the only way out of the quagmire is to learn to suffer incredible pain.

I stopped praying for the pain to leave me. Instead, I started praying that I would learn what the pain was meant to teach me, so that I wouldn't have to experience it again and again.

I don't want to go before God a screaming toddler.

I think that Justin stood before hypothetical God with his typical self-composure. I know that he would make a solid, lawyerly case for why he did what he did, and I believe that God understood.

I don't know if I really believe that God would condone a suicide. I don't know if I really believe anything I say.

I don't want to go before God a screaming toddler.

I want to learn the lesson. I want to get this right.