Past Behavior Predicts Future Behavior

Patterns are never broken

It’s a night in my early twenties. I’m overcome with grief. Not of death, but the grief that comes with knowing you’ve left yourself with nothing, lost it all. The grief that comes with losing a bet that you never had taken in the first place.

I throw the bottle of Jameson back, and by the time I’m halfway through the second, I’m lying on the floor, crying, in a puddle of spilled whisky, and shamefully, I probably hope someone will find me this way.

There’s nothing like knowing that some of the saddest moments you’ve had in life were in more way than you’d like to admit, manufactured by a need for consolation.

When I broke my leg, when I injured myself in a way that will never heal, not correctly, and not completely, it was because I was black out drunk, and apparently, though I can’t say because I’ll never remember, I took my leave out of a moving car.

I tell people I did it balancing on the curb walking home, that it was a freak accident. It wasn’t. It was simply a product of my own making.

As are most things.

Afterwards, I make a call at three in the morning asking a coworker to take me to the emergency room. My roommate was an alcoholic too, and honestly, he probably couldn’t have cared less how badly I had hurt myself.

Instead of coming himself, he sent his pregnant girlfriend. Before I was aware who he had sent in his place, I had tried to convince myself that I had merely sprained my ankle, that it was an overreaction, that I was of course, invincible.

So, when she arrived, she walked into me sitting in the shower, which had run so long, it had become cold and bitter. I couldn’t get up to get out. So there I am, my cock swinging in the wind, shriveled from this cold shower I couldn’t leave, trying to be pulled up by a hundred-pound pregnant woman who could barely lift me.

There’s nothing quite like relying on a not-so-strong, soon to be mother that should never have to know what your dick looks like, or how small it can get, trying to get a good grasp on your intoxicated, slurring slippery ass, and then having to dress yourself while standing on one leg when your balance was already initially questionable.

I lived on the second floor.

Needless to say, the two of us haven’t spoken in some time.

Painfully, I made my way to the emergency room. But I lived far from my hometown, and my roommate, being an alcoholic would not have been useful during my recovery. In need of surgery, they didn’t cast it, they placed a splint and sent me home until I could be around those who could help in the meantime, three months, without walking.

I was drunk when I went in, so no painkillers.

It was three days until I was picked up.

It was a five-hour car ride home.

When I tell you that I was miserable, I am not extrapolating for dramatic affect.

And once I got home, I took Oxy, four times a day, for three months, and then bought my own on the street for six months after that.

I tell my loved ones that although I’ve been sober for several years now, that I am not wired for it. I am built upon a foundation of intoxication, and every day I fight against that current, I understand more deeply than ever, the truth behind that admission.

I wonder, no, I know, somewhere in my ‘mind palace,’ that I am not alone by circumstance, but by choice. There is no relationship that could mean more to me then my relationship with stumbling steps, morning hangovers, painkiller puking, and heroin naps.

In fact, I’ve decided that I’m asexual. The pleasure of sex is incomparable to the pleasure of the high.

When I think of my detachment to the world around me, I find that it’s less a psychological or mental detachment, and more of a physical removal of myself in it. The present moment is only another moment I ask myself why I’m not drinking, smoking, snorting, or shooting.

Round and round, I circle the toilet bowl, asking why I’m not shit-faced.

If it was to be better than the person I used to be, I haven’t accomplished that. All I’ve achieved is a gritted tooth, white-knuckled, stubborn stance to prove something to people who have already come, left, and found me wanting.

I continue to question the purpose in my writing. A common critique “You have said this. Not so much the theme, but this specifically, in slightly different words.” I don’t deny that.

“What’s it matter? There’s no one reading it to keep track.”

A friend asked me if I would ever write a novel.

I told him that if I did, it would be for a very specific reason, and that as much as I’ve thought about, that reason would never to be to tell a story.

That’s the same with anything I’ve written. It’s the same in the way that I only write in particular purpose, and that purpose isn’t even something I’m aware of, it’s simply an incessant and obsessive compulsion to speak for speaking’s sake, and there isn’t anything special in what I have to say.

That’s why there isn’t anyone reading, and if there were, they would read a thousand pages, a thousand pieces, and it would be a thousand pages about one, singular concept.

The concept of how much I hate myself, how handcuffed I am in this cycle.

I’ve heard comparisons to Bukowski, who I didn’t even know. But now that I do, there’s hardly a question, there is no competition between the two of us. If I’m a writer at all, it’s only because I can’t stop talking, and it’s easier for someone to listen when they can read at their own pace, instead of spoon-fed the fetid shit I’m shoveling.

Care for a dance? We can step on each other’s feet, screaming ouch in unison, and licking one another’s wounds. Wouldn’t that be fun, purposeful and fulfilling?

They say there’s no money in writing. There is. But the value isn’t in pieces that drag and beat the dead horse of depression. That manically ramble through the act of manslaughter against meaning.

I couldn’t give a good goddamn about holding your hand through my writing. I will write this and forget it in the morning. My obsession with being heard and acknowledged was created in a lab, given life through lightning, and fathered by a man that thinks himself God, and the blueprints have been destroyed. Science has forgotten the recipe.

It is annoying, and not worth a thought, outside of the subtle irritation it creates.

I write because I have nothing else to do. I have no goals. I have no direction.

If anything I write is ever published, it will be an obituary.

I’d rather stick to the booze that sits in my lap, and rests in the vomit on my shirt. That I smell on my breath in the morning. That lingers in the periodontal disease brought on by the laziness of alcoholism, and the indifference of hygiene on a bender.

I’ll shoot ropes to the euphoria that comes with a strip of methadone, the heroin snaking on the tinfoil. How it relaxes a body taut with nervousness and anxiety. That reminds me how to laugh genuinely in the face of a life lived in burning buildings, saying softly, “Cum for me baby,” in spite of the habitual erectile dysfunction and impotence caused by the dope itself. Cum for me, with that small, shriveled cock and leg you can’t walk on.

I’ll sleep with my top earning bitch, the sexy, slutty methamphetamine we snorted off of disgusting bathroom counters, that burned so badly it made your eyes water, and your asshole tighten. The hours and hours and hours of what felt like importance but was really nothingness. And when it became clear it was nothing, another upside-down light bulb, a straw and lighter could remind you it was important all over again.

I’d prefer to secede originality, to instead, capitulate in the idolization of pharmaceutical and psychoactive stimulation that I’ve rehashed to incapacitated literary repetition.

I’ve heard life is about letting go. Maybe it’s time I say fuck it, relax my jaw, unclench these white-knuckled fists and have a drink.