Ever Forward a Daniel Powter Cover

I have spent a lot of time trying to decide what should be my first post here on my brand-new website. Ok, in all honesty I spent the length of time it takes to make coffee; there shouldn’t be any lies between us. I thought about tossing up some fiction or maybe something completely fresh, but then the kettle whistle went and I decided on this.

It is New Year’s Day, a time of new beginings, a time of positive self talk (lies), and a time of letting go of the past and all of the plaque that builds up on our lives. I wanted to post this idea because it is all about moving on from shitty days.

I decided to do this not because I wanted to compete with their bad days, but rather to highlight the most important fact about bad days. This too shall pass. I truly believe that you cannot compare shitty days because in the end, what is shitty for me, is not necessarily shitty for some other people. Oh sure, there are some universal truths about shitty days we can all relate to, just ask Biff from Back to the Future. But even still, it matters little what I think is shitty. The real important thing is that no matter how bad our days are, no matter what happens, it can get better from here. I share with you now, my shittiest day. I share this with you not to…. brag? Rather I am doing it because you know how this story turns out in the end. In our bleakest hours, or just on our blah humbug case of the Mondays, the story doesn’t end there, and for all the shitty days, what comes after can be a thousand not so shitty days. This is the promise of a New Year.

I remember the night clearly; well it wasn’t really night when this story begins, more like that twilight time when the shadow people come out to play. That’s the dangerous time for any meth freak. That’s the point where the shadows start making faces at you and pretending that they care.

That was the situation I found myself in at the time. Sitting in a folding chair at a card table peeking out the window, wondering if the random passersby knew what I was doing. They might have,  had they bothered to peek in and see; had they cared enough to take time out of their busy schedules to give me a second thought.

Oh and the sight they would have seen. Of course that sight wasn’t for them, it wasn’t for anybody. It was all for me. It was the ritual you see. All mine. Nothing for you. Just me and my addiction. Just me and my ritual.

Most addicts can tell you of the ritual, but few will reveal what it is to you. The ritual is the process most, if not all, addicts go through with their addiction. It is the start of feeling good, the start of the run or the binge or just the start of the average day. It is the required element to complete the entire process of escape from reality, of breaking away from whatever it is they don’t want to face, or for some it can be the part required to push down the shame of how far they have fallen.

I had my ritual, and since I lack the shame gene, I will share it with you. It was a simple thing really. It starts with pulling a small picture frame down of the wall. I can remember it now, fake wood, maybe what they call Formica, I don’t even know what that means, and frankly never cared. It was not really even wood coloured, more that bright yellow they make fake wood in and pretend is wood. I doubt it was glass either, I never really knew. Inside was a small sign that read: In Case of Emergency Break Glass. Underneath the sign was a single cigarette, a match and a strike plate. I always found this an incredible irony and uproariously funny at the same time. The real emergency took place on top of the glass. That is where the magic occurred.

That is where I would spend a long time, sometimes even hours lining up the meth. The first line would take maybe 45 minutes. I would dump out maybe half of what I had; take the razor and just play! Push the powder around, crush it, form it, reform it. I would look at it from every angle. How could you not admire the beauty of it? It was always just slightly shiny, just slightly off white, just slightly singing to me in a sultry voice.

And thus the ritual would continue. By day two of the run it could take hours. By this time I would be clenching my jaw and talking both to myself and to it. By day four, and that was what this was, a day four without sleep, without rest, without reality, it could take forever.

I was down to maybe three or four lines, at best. This was always the time of great decisions. Should I do a big line to recapture the glory of the rush! Or should I do smaller lines and draw out the run some more. Escape from reality longer. Avoid me for longer. The joke was on me that night, because I imagine either choice would have led to me. The real me. Naked me, no clothes, no curtains no respect, no lies. Either choice would have ended in the unmistakable reality of who I was.

I choose smaller lines. Thinking back, I am not sure what I was using as a tooter device. It might have been a pen, a fiver, maybe just some cardboard…no it was a straw. I remember now because later there was a little blood on the end and I kind of went weird, but that part is getting ahead of myself. I put the straw up in my nostril, it was the left nostril because at the time my right was pierced, what a fucking chore that was, and I went to town. I took a short breath and let it out; there is nothing worse in that world than breathing on the damn dope. Then I leaned in and wham, into my head it went.

I am not sure if maybe I got a bad hit (there is no way, this was primetime one step from the chemist, mixed myself shit, and I never made mistakes, never!) or maybe it was just my time, but I knew right away something was wrong. The world did a small flip and there I was looking out the window, across the street at the little hill that made up the driveway to the Golf Steakhouse. I always found that ironic too. What probably amounts to the most expensive steakhouse in town nestled upon a hill overlooking the slum. Crappy low rent, the strip club, the biker bar, a Dutch girl store, nothing redeeming really. Ok it was near the river and there was a bunch of nature, but I could care less about that. I was a city boy away from his natural habitat. Ok wait I am doing it even now.

You see this is what happens when you do a line. All of the sudden your mind races and you follow tracks of thought that have nothing to do with anything, or your intended destination. Even now, after all these years, as I write about it, I am feeling it. I guess they are right, it never ever really leaves you.

Ok, so where was I, right me sitting, line dancing. I looked outside after the world changed and I was frightened for the first time in a long time. Fear gripped my heart with icy fingers, wrapping around it and clutching so hard I could not wrestle it away with the thought that I knew what I was seeing was not real. Reality didn’t matter. All that mattered is what I saw, and all that mattered were those blue fingers gripping my heart and turning it to stone hard ice. I can even picture the sublimating vapour.

I can see it as clearly now as I did then when I close my eyes. Outside across the street on that beautiful manicured grassy hill in the twilight were more than a dozen body bags. I can see the street lights glisten off the surface, see the headlights of a car too fancy to be local shine brightly for an instant off of one of the bags. The effect that had was to show me that the bag wasn’t zipped up all the way, and in that brief instant of clear illumination I could see the face inside the bag.

I wish I could tell you it was my face. I wish I could say that in my drug fueled haze, combined with sleep deprivation my mind had tried to conjure an image that might snap me out of it and make me see what I was doing. I wish I could say that self-preservation had caused my mind to rebel against my diseased gut. I wish I could say these thing because I think then I might have been able to avoid what came next. In that avoidance would have been my own destruction, but at least I would never have had to live the rest of that night, never had to face my true being, my true nature.

That instant my whole body did a weird sort of reverse triple Lundy thing. People talk of stomachs doing somersaults, of hearts doing back flips and of minds doing back gainer thingies. What you rarely hear about is it all happening at once. Right then and there my mind, my heart, and my gut jumped up and screamed, hey buddy, what the fuck? I think now that this must be the soul; the combination of all things that make up the human existence.

The mind. The cognitive center. The true rational guide to all that we do.

The heart. Our figurative emotional core. The drive that sustains us in our loneliest, most desperate hours.

The Gut. Our instinctive center. The place that guides our survival and our base instincts.

When you combine all three in to one massive motor function, I like to think that is the soul, that is the totality of us, the Tao of me. And at that moment in time, the Tao of me was pissed. It was ready to fight back and call me to task for everything I had done.

The face I saw was Ian. Mybest friend, my brother. The last of us. And in that moment I was convinced I killed him. My mind raced. Thoughts, images, sounds, smells a kaleidoscope of moments in time careening across my cerebral cortex swirling in and out of focus. I was dizzy with the shock of it all.

Then everything came in to focus. A sharper focus than I had had in years. One thought came into my head. How had this happened? That led to me thinking, how had I gotten here? And then I remembered the beginning, and at that moment, I feared it was the end.

I did what any apocalypse fearing mortal would do, I grabbed a pocket knife and I hid under a futon. No shit, a real futon, and a ireal folding blade pocket knife.

I am not sure how long I was under there before they came, the meth, well most drugs really, will do that to you, mess with time and space. They were here, at the front door.

They were every lost soul whose life had touched mine. That night they slowly came knocking at my door. I heard their voices as they talked to me through the closed front door of what was a porch converted into an bachelor apartment.

The whole time I never left the safety of the underfuton. It was my sanctuary, and my pocket knife was the cross talisman that would surely keep the dead at bay. Each one had a story to tell, and each one wondered why their story was over, and mine, such as it was, still had legs left in it. Why were they so much worm food, splayed out over the rolling hills of a goddammed Steak House parking lot?

Why was I the lucky one? Why was I wasting my time being even less productive than a parasite?

I had no answers.

I have no answers.

I am more productive now, so if they ever do return, I can tell them that; however, something inside me, something we will call a soul for no other apt term tells me they are gone. They did what they came here to do, and after all, they weren’t real. It was all in my head. I know that now, as I knew that then, but in the moment, in the place of our unhappiness, nothing, and I mean nothing can truly break us from what we feel, even if our head tells us otherwise, and our gut is holding a pocket knife hiding in the underfuton.

So yeah, I hope there is a bit of redemption in the day for all the people who have the shitty day, and while I am loathe to end in cliche, without the shit, how do we know flowers smell good?