Monday 2/10/25
Friend shot himself with a nail gun last week, spent seven hours in the ER. Mostly waiting. Which I guess helps calm you down. You think, "They're not rushing me in, it's maybe not that bad." I can't handle sharp things. I don't know why I've always had an issue with them. I can't look at skin being cut in a film--I have to look away. I still get a shiver when I think of my scissor accident last year. I'm not very strong in this department.
Sometimes I do think about the time I went to the ER, and the nurse who checks you in reached for my wrist and felt my pulse and immediately called for a wheelchair and away I went. Scary and sobering. I can't even really say that was a turning point for me. I went back to what I was doing. Not good, was it? That should have been the day I stopped drinking, but it wasn't. The day I stopped was just a day. Well, it was a Saturday.
Someone would reading this journal would perhaps note that I try and find little ways that maybe aren't so little to keep going and do what I should do. I was going to say do what I need to do, but I worry that there is ultimately no need if what it's all for--the work--is itself for naught because the work isn't seen or won't be. So I prioritize Saturday morning, because that's now the start of a new week for me, instead of Sunday like it used to and like it is for everyone else. And I prioritize the start of a new day, because it's a fresh day. These are "tricks"--rallying tricks--I use. I need them. Especially right now.
I think I have the timetable of everything right. This period predated this record. I know that I was in the ER one time because of my heart and I hadn't been drinking. Every so often I gave it up. It wasn't often, but sometimes. I could give it up for a week, week and a half. If I went somewhere I wouldn't drink anything. But I'd go back to it. Back to mass volume drinking. I remember being in the ER with the accelerated heart rate--and the irregular heartbeat--during one of those lulls because I thought maybe that's why my heart was fast, because I had some sort of withdrawal effect happening. I'd read that this was a possibility. When I stopped drinking, I didn't have the shakes or anything. I couldn't sleep. Which is ironic, because now I can pretty much just go to sleep when I'm ready to go to sleep. All of this was before the stairs, too. It's when I was walking 3000 miles a year, though.
Anyway, I jumped the ER queue that day. Being in a wheelchair was a shuddering blow to me. I asked if I could just walk and they said no. I'd say I probably think about that day every few weeks. The few people who I know just automatically figure I won't drink because I've made up my mind not to. Like it's easy. I couldn't falter. I don't think that way. And I don't not think that way. Does that make sense? It's something I don't take for granted. It's not a given to me. I felt betrayed last week, as I said. And I had to protect myself. Unfortunately, things like this don't ever really go away--or they can't for me.
The truth is, I'm not close to anyone, and no one is close to me. I'm just too unlike them. And my life is too unlike their. And it would be if I lived in opulence and what for me would be the ultimate happiness--which is to say, if i was where I am trying to get. That's a hard thing to accept, that you have no one, and no one fully on your side, because you think everyone else does, right? I have to circle my own wagons--I mean, these were real blows for me--and look in the mirror and say, "Well, you have no one, man. I'm sorry, but that's what it is." Later in my life? I don't want to say never. But right now I'm not looking towards hypothetical people I've yet to meet and who might not be out there or ever to cross my path.
I could have drank. That was a thing. Those people don't know that. And if they knew this was true, the part they played in that--because it was a barrage to withstand, when I can't take on more when I'm already needing to withstand what would have destroyed anyone else long ago, or any single day of trying to endure it--they'd be angry with me, in all probability. Not because they honestly believed I'd done anything wrong--it's very easy for me to logically, factually, truthfully lay things out, such that no one could say, "That part's not true, nor is that part"--but they'd be upset, feel like they were under attack--that's how the truth tends to make people feel--and people can't face things unless they pertain to that which we don't think of as involving some arduous project where we have to admit stuff about ourselves that isn't so hot.
When we face things about who we are--the big things--we have to own things that aren't good things, and that feels like a huge job of work that will require much effort and concentration and won't be done any time soon. Better to be able to think there's no job that needs to be done at all, right? I mentioned the 3000 miles. I questioned so much about myself. The person I was. I put everything on the table. Potentially. And then some. The things I was willing to consider about myself? I spared not a single feeling. No pride. Things that were actually false and way off--I allowed for it all. I was willing to remake myself. To pull everything down and start again. Build up a new person, the person I should have been.
And it was a big job. The parts I did. The big parts I did. It was just me. Thinking and facing and walking. I wasn't enabled. I didn't have anyone say, "Eh, you're good." I didn't want that. When it was said to me by a friend, who meant it, I still challenged everything about myself. Was I a bad person? Was I unlovable? Why did I take bait? I wanted to be a form of love, even if I, myself, was largely unloved. Or completely unloved. And it was important to me. I wanted to make sure that my behavior, my responses, what I would do, would not be filtered through my feelings, my pain. I had to achieve separation. To feel as I did, but also to compartmentalize, so that I would know I had not done the wrong thing.
I harnessed the same will, the same purpose, that I know in my work and the creating of it. And these things all became interconnected. Works like "The Bird" and "Dead Thomas" and "Big Bob and Little Bob" and "Thank You, Human"--different as they are from each other--wouldn't have been written otherwise. There are people out there who could read this journal and think, "I tried to get him to take the bait, to react in anger," and to those people I could say, "Of course I knew what you were doing, because I am me, and I'd have to, wouldn't I?" but that taking of bait is not something I've done--not once--in many years now. I will handle things if they require handling and failure to do so will cause me to be complicit in the compromising of my own morals and values, to say nothing of what I think the world--my fellow humans--deserves and needs.
But even with the prose offs and in exposing these evil people, there is no anger; it's all laid out lucidly, as if I was presenting a case in a courtroom. If a given word is put in that you couldn't say on television, that's by design, the same as if it were a story. Nothing comes forth from me accidentally or out of emotion without being screened through my mind. I have mastered the discipline of separation.
These evil people have something to do with that, too, paradoxically. When you are treated this way by so many of these evil people, you can't give in to anger, or else they'll win, and you won't ultimately rip their corrupt system to the ground. It's not one person. It's thousands. You don't have the "luxury"--you know what I mean--of anger. You will feel something like it--which is actually something more than it--but you must channel it, make it over, so that it becomes something else and you use that in what you're doing.
My friend's ER story caused me to reflect privately on one of my ER experiences. I didn't really change anything because of that day--or not on that day, is what I mean--but it was an important day nonetheless for me, and it continues to be so when I look back on it.
