It's Fun to Be in the I-O-OH-P (Not): The Dictionary of Self-Loathing

Of all the faux profound psychological games one is forced to play in either group or individual therapy, the one I hate most is the Positive / Negative game.

The idea is to write down. on one side of the paper, all the negative messages you've received about yourself from family, peers or other outside sources since your earliest days of childhood, and then to write down, on the other side of the paper, counter-balancing positive messages to tell yourself.

This is the second time we've had to play this sort of self-loathing game in the Eye-Oh!-Pee. The first time it just depressed and humiliated me. The second time, last night, resulted in one of those moments where if there had been a loaded gun in the room I would surely have turned it on myself, pulled the trigger, and blown my brains out in front of the whole class.

By the time I was done with the exercise, I had a list of negative messages as long as your arm -- but nothing at all in the positive category. There simply is nothing. It's no good putting on s smiley face and just Making Shit Up. 


Of course we were then expected to read our lists to the whole damn class. Of course. You can't express anything privately in these sessions. My head was downturned and I would not meet anyone's eyes, so I was called upon last. I said, "I don't have any positives." The instructor said, "Well, start with the negatives and maybe we can help you with the positives." I said, "I'd rather not." Seriously, who wants to read out a litany one one's flaws and failures when that is all you have? 


Next we were told to pick one of our positives and write it out in big letters. I did mine in block letters with shading. I wrote:

NOTHING.

ZERO,

The instructor saw this and said, "Doug, if you're really stuck you can use one of the messages on the blackboard." 


I had read the positive messages on the blackboard earlier. It was all Complete Bullshit like "I am a Caring Person."


Well, no, honestly, I'm not. I mumbled something to the effect of, "I don't believe it," and went right on shading my Nothing and my Zero. 


The instructor said, "Doug, I'm concerned. . . " and before I could even think "Bully for you" B____ chimed in from across the table. B_____ is a big, loudmouthed junkie who is just the sort of person who used to push me around on the playground when I was in school, but he leapt in with, "Yah, I'm concerned, too; you're a good man an' --"


I guess my expression told him to put a sock in it. I wanted to tell him, "What do you know? You don't know me from shit."


I was down for the rest of the evening, right up until bedtime. I didn't sleep well. I guess that it's remarkable that I wasn't tempted to take a drink, not that any stores were open where I could have bought the stuff. But I have to wonder if some of these social worker/instructors really know what they are doing sometimes. Do they know what cans of worms they are opening? Do they know that they are playing with fire?


-- Freder.

Welcome to 4 East: On Visitors

Without any doubt, the most Stomach- churning, heart-in-my-throat, shit-in-my-pants moment at 4 East came when I was paged by the nurse's station -- only to discover that I had a visitor, and that visitor was my boss.

My employer has a very tough, no-second-chances policy when it comes to drinking, which is why I took such care every morning to at least not smell the part. Normally I did not drink in the morning, but if by some chance some vodka managed to arm-wrestle its way into my orange juice, I knew that some thorough Oral Hygiene mixed with either peanuts or corn chips would do the trick. 

On the other hand -- anyone who knows me knows the stresses that I have had with my current boss, knows that in the past I have dubbed her irreparably inhuman, sadistic even, and that it's not just me: every single person who works for her feels the same way. I have seen student workers actually dance when they were told that she would be out for a few days. I myself have not been above a whispered "Yessss!" and an air-pump at such news, and I get laughter every time I do it, no matter who I'm talking to. Everyone agrees.

So you can imagine my horror as I waited behind the red line and watched as she was admitted onto the ward. She came through the door and gave me that same smile that a snake gives before it devours its prey. Then she said, "You look good."

I said, "Are you crazy?" I had a four-day growth of beard, my hair was scraggly and uncombed, and I'd been wearing the same clothes since I'd been admitted. Everything was clean, but I still felt and looked like a hobo.

We walked across the hall to my room, where, thank goodness, I had back-up: my old friends H___ and BC, and my former boss and ally E____. So I felt that I had Moral Support; I felt that I had back-up, and I felt that I needed it, because I also felt certain that my boss had come to tell me that my job was gone.

Instead, she had come to tell me that they were drawing up Family Medical Leave papers so that I could keep my job and continue paying into my insurance policy in case I ran out of vacation and sick days. Later, H_____ told me that he'd found her "really nice." Well, dude, she was on her best behaviour, but still and all it came as quite a shock to the system.

*

It doesn't make things easy for visitors that 4 East serves dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon. Not only does this  make the evenings long, but it makes it almost certain that your visitors are going to show up while you're eating. Sometimes I'd be rude and push on through the meal while we chatted; sometimes I'd be polite, and have a cold dinner waiting for me when they left. The most comical example of this came when my old boss E____ came to visit during dinner, and was shortly joined by my current boss (back for another round? Back to perpetrate some evil that she hadn't been able to the time before thanks to my other guests? Whatever the reason, she seemed disappointed that I had company to protect me once again.)

Anyhow -- both of these women are in the book business, and both are managers of small, independent stores (E_____ owns hers) -- and E_____ was sitting to my left and my current boss was sitting to my right, and it wasn't too long before the shop talk was flying past me right and left. They were comparing notes, exchanging news, thinking out loud about current trends and suchlike. And it went on for a long time, with me in the middle wondering when I could get back to my dinner. At some point my roommate came in and flopped on his bed -- I wondered what he was making of all this. After, honestly, ten or fifteen minutes of the two of them talking across me about the book business I started to have thoughts along the lines of "Hello! Alcoholic in the room! I'm here!" and "Why don't you two just do a book convention together and let me eat my dinner in peace?"

It was amusing, to say the least.

*

I was always glad to have visitors, always glad to be reminded that there are people out there who care about me, but in one respect alone I did sometimes feel somewhat guilty about it. This is because I believe that I had more visitors than anyone on the floor. and I know that I had more visitors than my roommate, who had none. Ever. The entire time he was in 4 East. He was, underneath the tattoos and the scary appearance, a nice, decent man who had lost his way a long time before and who was paying for it now in a big way. He'd come up to me and say, "Boy, you had a lot of folks visiting you today!" And I could tell that although he meant it in a nice way, it made him sad that he had no one "out there" who gave a shit, no one who could even be bothered to visit him. 

This makes me even more grateful to everyone who took time out of their day to stop by 4 East and see how I was doing, especially BC, who drove all the way up from another state for what must have been a not-very-much-fun twenty minutes or so. The day that he came up, I came out of a group session and there were the three of them sitting at a lunch table in the commons room. I literally did a double take, not expecting to see my friends in that place.

Even then, it took my favorite person on the staff, the one I've less than accurately called Joan Arkwright in these posts, to remind me of It's a Wonderful Life and specifically of Clarence's gift to the Jimmy Stewart character at the end. She had a way of saying things that made me dissolve into tears.

-- Freder.

It's Fun to Be in the I-OH-O-P (Not!): Questions with No Answers

I am cursed with a bitter sense of humor that shows itself at the most inappropriate times, especially in Meetings for the sake of Meetings, Stuck -Up social occasions where people who have no right to take themselves seriously attempt to do so (The Oscars would be a good example of this), and Intensive Outpatient Program sessions that are run more or less by the cookie-cutter book.

Two Wednesdays in a row we have been given a Post-It note and asked to write upon it our names and our current mood. On my first night in the program I didn't know what to expect. For my mood, I wrote down "Terrified" and when it came my turn to say this out loud to the group, the woman running the meeting got an awfully sour look on her face. Her partner said, "Terrified of what?"

I said, "Terrified of everything. What's not to be terrified of?"

They moved on.

The woman running the IOP is a woman who claims to have a sense of humor; but she would not recognize humor if it were jumping up and down in front of her, holding a sign that said "HUMOR" in big red and gold letters.

This week, the two councillors were joined by a trainee, G_____, who is much more savvy, knows how to work the room and get responses, and can tell a joke when he sees it. This week, when it came time to write my name and my mood on that obnoxious yellow post-it note that doesn't actually stick to anything, I wrote: "A 'mood' would be an Emotion, Captain."

Everyone in the room donned either a puzzled, bored, or sour expression except G_____, who was the only one who "got" it. He nodded and smiled and said, "Yes, it would!" I was forced into the position of having to explain myself. I said, "I guess that would be 'irreverent.'"

The councillors knew what I was saying -- but among the "patients" of the IOP I was met with blank stares. "What does that mean?" One of them said. They literally had never heard the word. Even the woman sitting next to me, who works in an attorney's office fer crine out loud, didn't know the word.

I was asked to explain and this really floored me. I thought, What am I, a blasted dictionary? Do I look like Mr. Webster? Why, you pointy-eared, green-blooded aliens, go get yourselves a damn dictionary and look it up! I stammered and hemmed and hawed. I use words with specificity. I never thought of "irreverent" as all that mystifying a word. Yet they were serious. They didn't know what it meant, and I'm not used to having to define words that have been a part of my vocabulary for about 43 years.

Next we were asked to write down our answers to 32 so-called "open-ended" (read "loaded") questions. And because that's the way they do things in the IOP, we had to go around and around the room, all giving our answers. Mine were alternately flip or full of self-hatred, and I think a majority of the room was mystified. When asked to name "something I really like about myself," I wrote: Nothing.

The junkie sitting next to me wrote "My penis." and his junkie girlfriend sitting next to him wrote "My boobs."

So you see what we have to deal with.

The evening ended with yet another Round-Robin. I hate these. At 4 East, we had discussions. If you had something that you wanted to offer, you were given the opportunity. It was productive and constructive, because, like Mister Ed, people only spoke when they had something to say. Usually it was worth saying, and worth listening to.

A Round-Robin is a completely different animal. The group leader asks a (usually inane) question, and everyone has to answer it, whether they have anything of value to offer or not.

Last night, for the second time, P_____ asked, "What sort of tools do you feel that you need in your Toolbox in order to be successful when you leave this program?"

Inane. Just inane. Not only does the metaphor fall on tin ears to me, but I feel that I was given my sword and shield at 4 East and that it is only up to me now to use them.

I never know how to answer that question. But, thanks to my equally irreverent friend S______, I know how I'm going to answer it when it inevitably comes up next week:

"A screwdriver."

And the final Round Robin question for the evening was an equal Peach: "What have you learned about yourselves this evening?"

I passed. I couldn't say what I was thinking, which was, You mean something that we didn't already know? Not a god-damned thing.

But now that I've written this post and have had a chance to get my thoughts in order, I absolutely know what my answer should have been: That I am not a dictionary and if you don't understand what I'm saying, look it up in your damn Funk & Wagnells!

-- Freder.

Welcome to 4 East: On the Variety of Spiritual Experience

Towards the end of my first stay at 4 East someone gave me a copy of the AA "Big Book," the third edition, "Not the most recent," they said, "But the best."

I've been reading straight through it, in small bites, of an evening. As AA's roots are in the 1930's and most of this material is contemporaneous with the times, it's written in a formal, mannered style that's easy to digest. Their most basic tenant is, an alcoholic cannot do it alone, cannot quit by himself, on his own force of will. Check. I got that. It was made clear to me earlier this month, although I had already begun to suspect it.

Their next most basic tenant is that one must surrender themselves to a higher power -- by which they mean the God of the Bible, pure and simple And Nothing Else. There are a few wimpy cop-outs here and there where they tag on words like "your perception of a higher power" so as not to offend the different branches of the faith,

But the book's chapter on agnosticism is revealing. It is woefully inadequate and under-thought, and can be summed up crudely as "Well, you have to change your mind or this isn't going to work for you."

I haven't read nearly enough of John Muir, but in the small bits and pieces of him that I have read, I don't recall him tossing God around here and there like garlands of flowers. And yet none could deny that he was a spiritual man. When he wrote about his thoughts of Nature and Supernature, he used metaphors like "Cathedrals of the Forest." He was not, shall we say, a conventionally religious man, but found spirituality in the ground underneath us and the trees around us and the mountains cradling us.

Would he have felt at home in AA? I doubt it.

Neither the book nor the organization seem able to take into account the infinite varieties of spiritual experience that don't involve organized religion or dogma. With one exception.

Buried deep, deep within chapter two is a quote from Carl Jung. Jung was not the figure in the 1930s that he has become today, and the quote is not even directly attributed to him, nor is his name used more than once (he is otherwise referred to as "this doctor" throughout the small section that I describe).  But it has the ring of Dr. Carl!

Jung was, essentially, a conventionally religious man, but he expressed himself in such remarkable ways, not just throwing God and Jesus in your face, but really trying to get to the core of what spiritual experience was all about:

Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are

called vital spiritual experiences. To me these occurrences are

phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional

displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes

which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are

suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions

and motives begin to dominate them. In fact, I have been trying to

produce some such emotional rearrangement within you.

You go, Carl! I was kind of astonished to find this little nugget of reason buried in the mound of conventional Religiosity. It not only makes sense to me, but it makes me want to take my Jung books back off the shelf and re-read them -- and aside from that, I lived it and experienced it in 4 East.

I experienced it in the group sessions, listening to the stories the other patients told, choking back the tears. I experienced it in one-on-one conversations with my roommate and others on the floor. I experienced it in the eyes of other patients who were reacting just as powerfully to what I heard -- and sometimes to what I said. I experienced it in the tears that I shed every day and the tears that I watched others shed. I experienced it in the words of certain of the councilors, both individual and in the group sessions. I could feel myself being humbled, day by day, and I could feel my thinking begin to turn. It was just the short of emotional rearrangement that Dr. Carl writes about above. But it had nothing to do with God. Unless--

If you try to tell me that God is a self-determining, self-conscious Being with an Ego and an Id, a painter with a design for every living thing, a bearded old man sitting up in the clouds on a throne, a being who actually cares about all the little details like whether or not I choose to crawl into a bottle, I'm going to tell you that I think you're a pretty Gulli-Bull.

But I do believe, have always believed, that it's possible to draw a diagram of the thing that might actually be the pulse that runs through the universes, whatever you want to call it. It's not a diagram of my invention. It looks like this:

Well, actually, this is just an infinitesimally small piece of it. First, pick a triangle, any triangle. That's you. (I get the one in the lower right corner, because that's where I always squish myself in a crowded room). 

Every living thing: plant, animal, human, even Republicans, gets a triangle of their own. I don't say it's you, I'm just saying let it represent you for now.

Pretty soon you get triangles nested within triangles nested within triangles, expanding infinitely outward into the universe. When every currently living thing in the universe gets its own triangle, and everything that ever lived in the past gets its own triangle, and everything and everyone that will ever live in the future gets its own triangle, and all those triangles are nested within an even larger pattern that cannot possibly be comprehended: that, my friends, is God.

OK, my friend, my dear friend, if you are reading this, I have to give you some sort of a name. I can't keep alluding to an empty noun. I will call you Joan Arkwright, and in some ways it is a lousy name for you. because you are neither a saint nor a martyr. But you are my hero. You gave me hope, you gave me strength, and you put your faith in me. When I was speaking with you, I was speaking with just a tiny little piece of that great patchwork design, and I say the same about the group sessions and the people I shared them with. We had some great groups.

So, while I tend to agree with Jim Morrisson that you cannot petition the Lord with Prayer, I do believe that some powerful shifts of thinking and ideas can occur when a handful of these triangles collide at random under emotional circumstances.

We are all pieces of what AA likes to call the Higher Power. That's my God and I'm sticking to it.

-- Freder.

Welcome to 4 East: Two Admissions

Early this past March, an incident at work really shook me to the core. My immune system, already weakened by alcohol, seemed to completely vanish at this point, and I became ill with a flu virus. The doctor could not or would not do anything for that, but I felt terrible and didn’t want to feel that way, so I began “self-medicating” to an alarming degree, basically just drinking myself to sleep, waking long enough to do my chores and take care of my cats before drinking myself to sleep again.

As the flu began to subside and I began to get my strength back, I began to realize that all this drinking was certainly Not Helping, and it was probably making things worse. So I quit Cold Turkey, just like that – and that was my biggest mistake yet. Within twelve hours I had another fever, was dry-heaving uncontrollably, and my hands were shaking almost cartoonishly. I knew what the solution was: I got myself a bottle and within three drinks was feeling much better.

On, I believe, the second Monday of March I had an appointment with my usual therapist. She declared that, as she was not licensed as a substance abuse councilor, this would be our last meeting until I could get alcohol out of the picture. I didn’t quite understand this: I was able to separate alcohol from the other issues – why couldn’t she? But she was insistent.

With some helpful  brow-beating from one of my more assertive co-workers, my therapist made an appointment for me with a Substance Abuse RN at Seton. Which I showed up for drunk. D_____ was very good about it, but she also saw what needed to be done, and very much against my wishes I was loaded into an ambulance and taken off to the Thayer Hospital Emergency Room.

It was a busy afternoon. There was a young girl there that I'd seen at Seton who was also waiting to be admitted. I was put through the pre-registration process, and led to an inner waiting room where I could lie down.

I waited. And waited. More than an hour passed. Nothing was happening. No one was getting in. After who knows how much time had passed I finally went back out into the main waiting room and called my friend S_____, asking if he would give me a lift over to my car at Seton so that I could just go home.

While I was waiting in the doorway for him to arrive, a nurse came up behind me and asked what was happening. I told her that this was completely ridiculous, I'd been waiting for however long, and the other girl had been waiting for over two hours. She went away and reappeared with a form for me to sign, saying that I was walking away against medical advice.

I signed it, then ventured outside. The girl from Seton was sitting on the steps out there, smoking a cigarette. We both complained about not being able to get in. She showed me her forearms. She had slashed them almost to ribbons.

We wished each other luck and I went around to the back of the building to see if S____ had come in that way. No soap. As I came back around into the  Emergency Room parking lot, S_____'s wife C______ and I spotted each other at about the same time. She came up to me and asked what was going on. I said, "This is crazy, no one is getting through, if they won't help me, I can just go home and after a couple of drinks I'll feel fine."

At this point S______ came up to us. He said, "I don't feel comfortable letting you go home."

C_____ went into the ER reception hall declaring that she would read them the riot act, and S_____ took me by the arm and turned me back in the direction of the Entrance. As we came up inside the building, the girl I'd been talking to saw me and cried out, "They just called your name!" The nurse was standing right there waiting for me. S_____ passed me off, and I was taken in to where I disappeared off the face of the Earth for five days.

*

On my release, I immediately relapsed. We'll get into the whys and hows of that in another post.

Just three days later, the following Tuesday, I had another appointment with D_____ for which I again showed up drunk. She explained that I would not be able to go into the IOP if I had any alcohol in my system, or had any signs of withdrawal.

I went home, and was a Good Boy, and did not drink. Well, in true Alcoholic Thinking I finished up what was left in my only bottle (I rarely ever had more than one in the house at any time), but after THAT I did not drink. I thought everything would be hunky-dory. I'd be sober and get into the program the next evening where I would begin to get the help that I finally was realizing that I needed.

But by early the next morning I was again suffering heavy signs of withdrawal, as before. I placed a frantic call to D_____ (though I could hardly push the buttons on the phone without making a mistake, and had to make three tries to get it right), who had not yet arrived at work, but who called me back after a couple of anxious hours around ten AM.

She said, "Doug, what's going on?

I told her and said, "I don't think they're going to let me into the program tonight!"

She said, "They're not."

I said "I'm afraid. I don't know what to do."

She said, "I strongly urge you to go back and re-admit yourself to Rehab."

I was faced with a choice. I could blow off the IOP completely, just go out to the store, get myself another bottle, and feel artificially fine within three drinks. Continue the cycle. Or I could take D_____’s advice.

I didn't want to take her advice. I didn't want to go back there, to leave my kitties and my home and trouble my friends yet again with their care. D_____ said, "You're not going to be any good to them dead."

So there was that. And there were a couple of other things about my admission the previous week that led me to believe that this could be different from the so-called (failed) "Detox" that I endured two years previously, shortly after the death of my my mother. I knew that there were programs, and group sessions, and one person in particular that I could talk to.

And so, by my own free will, I re-admitted myself to 4 East, determined this time to just put myself into their hands and listen and do what I was told. My friend S______, who lives just down the block, gave me a ride over and waited with me until they called me in for pre-regiatration.

When that was done, I used the phone to call one of my oldest and dearest friends, H______. He said, "I'm proud of you, you're doing the right thing. I'll pass the word on."

I started to cry and he said, "Don't cry about it, you're doing the right thing."

And I knew that. It wasn't why I was crying. I was crying because by taking this action voluntarily, I was finally admitting to myself and everyone who knew me just exactly what and who I was.

-- Freder.

It's Fun to be in the I-O-OH P (Not!): AA= Antipathetic to Asperger's

Just back from my third (and last for this week, thank goodness!) official AA meeting. We are required to attend three each week as part of the Intensive Outpatient Program, and for this reason alone I may have to leave the program. I don't knock it -- if it works for 99 out of a hundred people, then it's doing what it's meant to do. But I strongly believe at this early point that I'm the one in a hundred that it's no good for.

The second two meetings at least were not as bad as the first, because I had the sense of get out of there before they all started holding hands and reciting The Lord's Prayer. Now there's a point in itself. They pretend to welcome all beliefs, sects, denominations -- but let's say I were a Muslim Alcoholic. Holding hands and saying the Lord's Prayer would not be cool.

For my part, when it comes to God I don't say yes and I don't say no. I say, "Whatever happens will happen." But I also say: "Don't anyone dare shove your damn religion down my throat because I'll puke it up and shove it right back at you!"

The strongest adherents of AA insist that it's not a religious organization. And yet God is all over the place in AA, and the very structure of the meetings is similar to that of a church service.

Never mind. I can deal with that aspect of it, knowing that it's there, seeing it for what it is -- and also knowing that I do have a Higher Power -- and she works in the building next door. If AA is telling the truth about letting you decide who or what your Higher Power is, they'll just have to accept that.

No, the part of me that makes AA so difficult is the part of me that is strengthening again the longer that I'm sober.

It's not that I'm an anti-social person, as so many people have misunderstood throughout my life -- it's that I'm a non-social person. Alcohol loosened and opened me up and made me much more social than I truly am. The head psychologist who spent a total of fifteen minutes with me before rushing to judgement after hearing a fraction of my issues was quick to dismiss my self-diagnosis as being someone with a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome, and gave it a completely different name -- more to prove that he was The Boss and would be Making the Calls than for any good reason. Then a third guy came to my room and gave it a third Completely Different name.

And you know what? I no longer care what anyone wants to call it. The fact is that I have a  social disorder, the symptoms of which seem to be pretty much the same across all three diagnoses.

And when I stepped into that first AA meeting on Thursday night, my heart shot up into my throat and it was just as if my soul was lifted out of my adult body and deposited back into the body of that little kid in the First Grade who sought out the most remote, emptiest part of the playground and just sat there in silence, waiting for the bell to ring.

Here was a gymnasium full of people, all of them strangers, not one of whom I could talk to.

My old instincts took hold, and I went straight to the back of the gym, where I sat with my hands pressed between my knees and my shoulders hunched.

If there's anyone left out there who doesn't know how I feel about large gatherings of Strange People (and to me, most Normal People are Strange), I'll refer them to an earlier post on this blog called "A Nightmare of Hell." I went into this meeting in a state of serenity and strength, knowing that alcohol would not be a problem for me that night. I came out of it desperate for a drink, clawed by anxiety and fear, so upset that I shouted out loud and scared Whitey.

Instead of drinking, I took one of my anxiety pills and my last mood-evener of the day, poured myself some ginger ale. By mid-afternoon of the next day I had finally regained my Happy Place, the place where I knew that I was safe from drinking.

But then there was another AA meeting last night, and another this morning, and I sure hope this gets easier as the four weeks in IOP roll on ahead of me. Because if it doesn't, I will be buyig a bottle and relapsing before you can say "Danger Will Robinson!"

Not all solutions work for all people. I understand that most Normal People like Rituals and Large Gatherings -- but I can't stand either one. And since neither AA nor I will change anytime soon, I guess we're about to find out what happens when an Irresistible Force meets an Immovable Object. . .

-- Freder.

Welcome to 4 East: Therapist Roulette

Every day at 4 East you get about an hour one-on-one meeting with a therapist -- either a PMHNP or. . . or. . . drat! I can't remember what the other category is!

On my first stay, I got really lucky. I'm not going to write much about her, because we're kind of friends now and I want to keep it that way. She's a wonderful person. She's not the only one who helped me at 4 East -- but she's the only one there who put hope into me, who put strength into me, who showed real faith in me.

The second time, I worked primarily with two other therapists sharing almost the same first names. I'll call them Ilsa and Ilse, after the title character in a series of vile exploitation movies.

I don't know whether they compared notes and worked in tandem, but a better Good Cop / Bad Cop routine you would not be able to find anywhere else. First up was Ilsa, the Good Cop. She practically twisted herself into contortions trying to be nice, trying to be understanding, trying to be Caring -- but there was a notable artificiality to it all. It was a put-on job, and if she and I accomplished anything at all in the two sessions that we had together, I can't say that I remember it.

Well, no, that's not entirely true, now that I think back. She gave me the assignment to come up with an Affirmation, which at first just made me roll my eyes. But in casting about for something that I could possibly use I stumbled upon the following quotation from Thomas Merton:

"It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced."

It's too long to be what they call an "Affirmation," but it's as close as I'm going to get, and I keep going back and back and back to it, because it addresses the core of the issues behind my drinking. So some good came out of meeting Ilsa. Just to put some perspective on the matter, I'd rather work with her any day of the week than with the woman who is running the evening IOP sessions that I am currently attending, but how much that says is anyone's guess.

Next up was Ilse, the Bad Cop, and what a very Evil Bad Cop she was indeed -- although I guess her methods are effective if you don't mind bleeding all over the floor.

Every therapist has their own style, and Ilse's style is to spend the first few minutes of the session sizing you up, checking you out, feeling for the weak points. Probing. Once she's found  them, she strikes. First she kicks your shins out from underneath you. When your knees hit the ground, she clouts you a good one on the back of the head with a billy club. When your face smashes into the pavement, she sits back and gives you the Evil Smile.

All metaphorically speaking of course, except for the smile.

So -- you're lying there, stunned, and a pool of blood starts to form underneath you, and you're not sure what part of your anatomy it's coming from, and then she begins to ask more questions.

I think my answers were along the lines of "Guh --gurgle -- wah -- please don't hurt me anymore!" and my thoughts were more in the direction of Why won't they let me see the therapist I had the first time I was in here? I liked her! She gave me hope! She didn't kick me around the room!

Nonetheless, I don't believe that it's possible for an alcoholic to move on without having to answer some hard questions -- and most of the time, we probably have to be forced to face and answer them. I'll say it again: Every therapist has their own method. Sometimes, as with Ilsa, it's an artificial method. Sometimes, as with Ilse, the methods are harsh.

And then, once in a lifetime, you make a real connection. 'Nuff said!

-- Freder.

Welcome to 4 East: Not the Beginning

I think the contrast between my thought process in the early and later  days of my second stay at 4 East are well illustrated by the difference between this very crude cartoon I drew at the beginning:

. . . and these only somewhat less crude cartoons that I drew near the end:

Yes?

Now I'm going to tell you a joke, and then explain why I'm not going to be the third priest. Becsuae this represents a shift in my thinking, too.

There were these three priests riding together on a train towards some Priestly Function. And for some stupid reason, just because this is a joke that needs a hook, they all decided to take each other's Confessions. 

The First Priest said: "Well -- my name is Father A_______ and I'm an alcoholic. Every nigh I drain all the sacred wine dry and every morning I have to go down to the local merchant and replenish the supply. It's gotten so bad that I sometimes have to go four towns over so that the locals don't suspect anything."

The Second Priest said, "I hate to admit this . . . but my my sin is -- is -- is -- s-s-s-s-s-s-s. . . sex. Once a month I take a train down to Lancashire and hire about five prostitutes and we go at it and tie ourselves in knots!"

The Third Priest said. "Hmmmmm. Very Interesting. My sin? I'm a GOSSIP -- and I can't WAIT to get back to my Parish!!!"

Cute joke. But it represents something real to me now. When I first began my second stay at 4 East and started going to group sessions and started hearing the stories these people had to tell, my first thought was, My God, not only are these stories of Epic struggles, but these are stories that Need to be Told. 

By the end of my stay I had completely changed my mind. I realized that to pass on even the smallest details of anyone's story would be a betrayal not just to the program but to the brave, good-hearted people whose lives they represent. Not even my antiquated Victorian devise of picking an initial and following it with blanks (Q_______) would be sufficient: 4 East is too small a world. 

If this was a novel it might be differemt: I could combine events and people and add as many completely fictional flairs as I wished, and it wouldn't be a betrayal because it wouldn't be the truth anymore.

But truthfulness is the whole point of what I'm going to be typing here in the coming weeks -- so you won't be getting any Juicy Gossip or learning anyone's private details here.  I can only write about my own personal experiences, and my impressions of the people that I met, and the changes that I experienced during my stay. When I refer to a specific person, I will use a completely ridiculous made-up name like "Trefusis P. Quackhammer" or something silly like that. 

After all, you have to hang on to your sense of humor in situations like this.

-- Freder.

What's Wrong with Detox?

Well, folks I did end up in Detox last week, for the second time in my life, the second time in two years. And I can tell you that the process is Deeply Flawed on a number of levels, and many of those levels I'm not prepared to discuss here, because I'm not a professional, I don't know Jack Shit about the subject, and beyond that I am an Asperger's patient who, uhm, kind of has trouble with the whole Reality experience, and beyond THAT I'm still stupid enough to believe that Ginger Ale Tastes Like Love.

OK, I know that some of you are going to be WAY too young to get that joke.

But here are two, I think legitimate, points that I want to make.

1) There are no Public-Access computers available in Detox, and believe you me, a Detox patient is not allowed within fifteen feet of any kind of computer at all.

Here's the funny part: You ARE allowed access to a public cell phone.

Now, most of y'all probably think this is great. But I don't own a cell phone, never have, never will -- I don't even use my LAND LINE unless I have no other options, I don't have ANYone's telephone numbers memorized (some of them I have written down, but I keep them here on my computer or on a notepad next to my Land Line). 

So, if you put a cell phone into my hand, my immediate instinct is just to toss it out the fucking window, 'cuz honestly, I can't even figure out how to USE the damn things.

I am a person who communicates with the outside world by means of the internet. And if you say to me -- "No, you can't have access to the internet" -- that's exactly the same thing as saying to me, "Sorry, you just dropped  off the face of the planet, and nobody will ever know what happened to you, nobody will ever know where you've gone, Sorry, but you've just Ceased to Exist as  Human Being."

And not only is this Unfair, but it genuinely created some problems for my friends and family and people who care about me. It was, literally, as if I had vanished.

2) There are No Pussycats in Rehab.

You think I'm joking? I'm not. Not only was I deprived access to my OWN pussycats, who I desperately needed and I feared (as it turns out, correctly) needed me -- but I was deprived access to ANY pussycats at all. And you know what? I think that pussycats are really therapeutic. I kow that some people don't like them, but guess what? Pussycats are smart enough to know who doesn't like them and smart enough to know to stay away from folks who don't like them.

I  think every Rehab ward should have at least eight or ten pussycats living on the  premises, all of them available for adoption, all of them available to Go Home with a patient who really takes a liking to one of them. I think that this would be one of the most Amazing Healing things that any Detox Ward could do. God damn it: just give them a pussycat to pet and (if they mutually wish) Snuggle Up to.

In fact, I think that I just Invented a job that I would be the first one to apply for: 

Detox Ward Pussycat Wrangler.

Don't those of you who know me think that that job and me would be the perfect combination?

-- Freder

The Return of Doctor Shrinker

Today was my first session back in mandatory counseling (two words which I just now seem to have spelled correctly for the first time, despite the unbelievable amount of times I have typed them!)

The title and the picture may lead you to believe that I am mocking the sessions or not taking them seriously. This is not true. I am fully invested in the experience. But -- you have to have a sense of humor about things, yes? Otherwise, what the hell's the point?

I vomited so many issues up into that woman's lap that I don't think she knew where to begin. And I believe that's the biggest issue: If I had FEWER issues I might be able to, you know, sort through them and deal them out into nice even stacks and look at them objectively. Instead -- it's like the end of Alice Through the Looking-Glass with the cards flying all about, this way and that.

She took FIVE PAGES of notes.

We have agreed that I need to speak to a Substance Abuse Councilor, which is something that became evident this week, during the latest round of the flu or whatever the hell this illness is which has been biting me on the butt for two weeks now (although, once again, and I hope for the final time, I have AT LAST, in the past couple of days, beaten it).

I knew that my heavy drinking was not causing the problem, but I also knew that it couldn't possibly be helping. So I quit. Just like that. "Cold Turkey" as they say.

And that was even worse. Within fifteen hours I had broken out in an all-new fever (having only just got rid of the last one!), I was back on the couch drenched in sweat, and my hands were shaking almost comically, almost like something out of Reefer Madness.

I did have enough energy to hop online and check out the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, where I went: check, check, check, check -- could go on for weeks?

This was not acceptable. I would end up in the hospital again, and believe you me I am never going to allow that to happen ever again! It was not just a humiliating experience on so many levels. It separated me from control over my life, and more importantly it separated me from the only things that made my life worth living: my home and my kitties. I swear to you, even if my appendix is bursting through my body, I will never allow this to happen again.

So I crawled back into the bottle. Three drinks later I was feeling fine. Not drunk, mind you -- just not shaking and not drenched in sweat.

Do I believe that the situation needs to change? You betcha. Who caused it? Me. My new damn doctor wasn't doing anything at all for me, and so I self-medicated to a degree that alarms even myself. I'm still self-medicating. This situation needs to change. So -- as soon as I get the referral, I'll be over to the substance abuse councilor, I promise.

Meanwhile --

I threw up so many issues into that poor woman's lap and I sobbed and I cried and I even told the joke from Mel Brooks's wonderful film Blazing Saddles:

CLEAVON LITTLE:

You drink like that, and you don't eat?

You gonna DIE!

GENE WILDER:

WHEN?

... and instead of laughing I sobbed like a damn baby.

-- Freder.

Winter of our Discontent

There are days, more and more often, when I feel like I'm losing the war. I'm hoping that it's just the effect of winter, that things will start to get better when the seasons change. But I don't know. I end up in tears every single night. There's shit going on that, even with my almost complete lack of shame, I can't type about here on the blog. When people ask me "How are you?" I don't even know how to answer anymore. I mean, I can't tell them the truth.

Down the Road a Piece

Up at an ungodly hour to get out to Albion by 8:00 AM for my three-week follow up with the doctor. It went so smoothly and quickly that I got back into town with time to kill. I was able to do my grocery shopping, take it all home and unpack it, and still get to work fifteen minutes early.

Last time I went out there, by blood pressure was 171 over 110, and nobody even wanted to discuss my liver. I was drinking nearly half a bottle of vodka every night, and for all of the Wrong Reasons -- only slightly less than what put me in the hospital last year around this time.

It all started with that disastrous experiment a couple of months back of cutting the Prozac dosage in half. By day three, as you may recall, I was crying all the time. The little detail that I left out was that I immediately returned to self-medicating in a big way, draining the bottle to numb the sadness and stop the tears. You start drinking for those reasons, that's when you're really in trouble. You think you need more all the time, but what you're doing is feeding the Melancholy Beast -- which immediately starts to demand more. And I didn't stop when I felt the drug begin to kick back in -- the Prozac never seemed to work as well after that. I never made the connection.

It wasn't easy at first, but I managed to dial back significantly on the vodka. . . and the difference it made on my emotions was, as I told the doctor, both immediate and dramatic. That, in turn, made a deeper reduction possible. I can drink in moderation when my emotions are under control. When they're not -- forget about it, all bets are off.

My blood pressure today was 144 over, I think, 98 -- still high but within the acceptable range, or so I am told. At least, he didn't make me go on medication for it, which is a triumph all by itself. As well, I know -- for reasons that we won't get into -- that my liver is doing better.

Of course I got the speech that I should stop altogether, and I know that my doctor is right about this. I'm not in denial. I know and am the first one to admit that I'm an alcoholic. It's not for nothing that I've labeled dozens of posts here with the word "alcoholism." When it gets out of hand as it did recently, it ceases to be a pleasure and becomes a problem that needs to be brought under control. But I've no interest at all in stopping completely. I won't make any excuses about that. It may well be, as the doctor suggests, that this is the addiction talking, but if so, it's not talking alone. With my whole heart and conviction, I say to you: I have few enough pleasures as it is. Not giving this one up, at least not now. 

Lesson learned: that I'm on Prozac for life. Because if I ever try to get off of it again, it could shorten my life by a considerable bit. . . for more reasons than just one.

-- Freder.

Plumbing and Backsliding

I was dismayed when the plumber got out of his truck. He was tall and lanky and he looked like he was about sixteen years old. Service and Repair people are supposed to be older than me and come with an air of reassuring authority. When did that change? When did they start sending out babies?

But he got the job done all right. He was only here for about half an hour. He snapped my leaky valve off in nothing flat and slapped a new one on. Done! Now I can water my garden without having to fill the watering can indoors.

So that appointment went well. The same can not be said for my doctor's appointment this afternoon.

My blood pressure is through the roof, and he didn't even want to take a blood test to see how my liver was doing.

The fact is, and I was perfectly honest with him, for the past couple of months, ever since my disastrous attempt to cut my dosage of the Prozac, my alcohol intake has quietly and insidiously been on the rise. It has reached the point where I look at the bottle in the morning and think to myself, "How in god's name did that happen?"

And as my doctor pointed out, this is probably why I've felt like the Prozac never really worked as well once I got back up on my dosage, probably why I'm having frequent and extended anxiety attacks, probably why my emotions have been so out of whack lately. You drink too much and it cancels out the Prozac.

I was doing well enough for so long, and then a couple of months ago everything seemed to fall apart. Now I'm at the point where I have to back away from the edge yet again and at least be more mindful of what I'm doing and how much I'm doing it.

And, damn and blast it all, I have to back over there in three week's time. If my blood pressure isn't down to a reasonable level, he's going to put me on medication.

Bloody hell. I came out of the doctor's office even more depressed than when I went in, and wanting nothing more than a quick slug of bottled courage.

Instead, the wall of hot air that I walked into when I got home convinced me that it was time  to install the air conditioner. 87 degrees inside, and humid -- my quats are all flopped on their sides on the floor, making themselves as flat as they possibly can. Me, I'm staying in front of the fan.

-- Freder.

NWO

I had ideas for this weekend, but the weather pattern and ten consecutive days on the job (including a horrific day of enforced social activity, see below) necessitated a change of plan. Besides that, I really wanted to finish reading The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome. With a grisly, drizzly day to accommodate me, I parked myself on the porch and spent most of the day on that goal. From time to time I had Patches on the back of the sofa up by my head, and Whitey and Honey on my lap. It was chilly enough that I needed a blanket, and the quats liked the extra padding a lot.

I wish you could see my copy of the book. Every fourth of fifth page has a corner turned down, book darts adorn the edges, many, many passages are underlined or highlighted. Whatever doubts I had got smaller and smaller as the reading progressed, and now they are completely gone. Autism, no. Full-blown Asperger's, oh yes. And not a mild case.

If I fooled anyone, it's because I'm a good actor. I should have followed my own instincts and desires and pursued theater as a career. It's what I wanted. But I had no support from my parents, and lacked the courage and the social skills to proceed on my own. When it came to college, my parents' style was to say "If you need any help, just ask!" They should have known me well enough by then (and perhaps they did) to realize that this was the exact same thing as saying to me, "You're on your own."

And it's just like now with the car situation. When there are too many options before me and no clear answers, and every option comes with its own set of problems or modifiers, and I'm frustrated and don't know what to do, nothing gets done.

I am going to quote just one segment, because it speaks to how I've lived my entire life:

When the reaction to Asperger's syndrome is to achieve social success by acting, using a pre-determined script and a designated role, people with Asperger's syndrome may camouflage their social difficulties but not be true to their real selves or understand who they really are. Their personality is determined by the role they take in a particular situation and imitating those who are successful in a particular situation. An adult with Asperger's syndrome who is a retired professional actor, said to me that, "It was only in my adult years I developed my identity." During his childhood through to his young adult years, he did not know who he was, other than a repertoire of roles.

To  this day, the happiest time in my life was the year that I played the John Travolta part in Grease back in high school. This was before the movie came along and watered-down the material forever. The part stayed with me when I was away from the stage. I became more confident, even popular. I became a different person.

But you can't hide in a romantic relationship, and my girlfriends, if they didn't know the cause any more than I did, certainly all figured out that a relationship with me would be far more challenging than anything they were willing to put up with. The longest I ever lasted with any of them was a year. Now I've given up trying. It seems the better part of valor. Or, as W. C. Fields so wisely put it: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it."

If anything, my behaviours and signs have grown more pronounced (aiding the self-diagnosis but making daily life that much more distressing) since I stopped drinking like the proverbial fish. I was masking an awful lot of anxiety, hypersensitivity and social unease with alcohol, not to mention depression, which I see now is not the source of my troubles, but merely a symptom, and not even the most profound symptom at that. With the alcohol taken out of the picture, the behaviours came roaring back, stronger than ever.

Now that the shock is behind me and I have some knowledge about what it is that ails me, I'm much more relaxed about it. It can't be changed. All I can do is continue, knowing what I now know.

Well, I started this post going in one direction and ended up going in another. That's me all over.

-- Freder.

Memorial Day

A terrible bout of tears at 5 AM on Memorial Day when I should have been asleep.

The realization that I am "on the spectrum," so to speak, brings with it a lot answers to the questions of what a lot of "normal" people would -- and have -- judged as being an unhealthy relationship with my mother and an unhealthy reluctance to leave home.

But there was nothing Freudian about it. I had Asperger's. No one in the family had a name for it, but we all knew that something was wrong.

Mom was my Protector. Home was my Safe Haven in a world that I could not begin to understand.

How difficult, then, to suddenly have the roles reversed when, six years ago now, she had to have her right leg amputated due to diabetes, and I was suddenly thrust into the position of being the Support Person -- physically, emotionally, financially. . .

Coping, coping, coping, my life and hers became a landscape of dealing with things that were a horror to us both.

And still how much more difficult to lose her so suddenly, without significant (to me, anyway, although a neurotypical might have picked up on the signs more easily than I did) warning -- and then to be assaulted by my sister, entering My World and stealing from the estate, turning things upside down; by the legalities of death; by the auctioneers coming into my home and tearing it apart into a horror, a ruin, literally, for me, ripping my Reality into shreds, turning a rich world of organized clutter into a Depression-era state of Chaos --

A year ago today, we laid her remains to rest around the  old house. This was made necessary because Memorial Day was the only day that I could  get off from work. I was drunk, of course, as I am drunk now typing this at 5:30 AM, for the same reasons.

I gave everybody a chance to say what they wanted to say, and then I said my piece, and then in deference to my hypocrite sister, who wanted Jesus present in some form, I recited the following verse, the only verse that I know by heart, because it's from a favorite movie of mine, and as an Aspie I am good at remembering these things, even drunk --

My name is known: God and King

I am most in majesty in whom no beginning may be, and no end.

Highest in potency I am, and have been ever!

I have made the stars and the planets in their courses to go

I have made a moon for the night

And a sun to light the day also..

I have made Earth, where trees and grasses spring.

Beasts and fowl both great and small

All thrive, and have my liking

I have made All of Nothing for Man's sustenation.

And of this Pleasant Garden that I have Mostly Goodly Planted

I will make HIM gardener for his OWN re-creation.

There was a pause. Then my father said something along the lines of Amen -- and, I do not exaggerate, everyone RAN for their cars. ZOOM! There was dust in the air in the wake of their tires tearing up the driveway.

I was left alone.

I thought, Why did they all run away and leave me?

Then I went inside and poured another drink.

-- Freder.

Pick Your Metaphor

The four boys from Liverpool in their Sea of Holes.

Yes, I know that I typed just yesterday that my posts would be getting fewer and farther between and here I am today back again "just like a bloody great opera star always making her Positively Final Appearance" (I think that's from Fawlty Towers, but I could be wrong), but this is actually pretty big.

Call it a lightbulb or a road map. Call it anything you like.

I was reading last night about cognitive behavioural therapy as a means of helping control anxiety, and although I could understand the principle all right, it wasn't really connecting with me on an emotional level (which is how I need things to connect if I'm ever really going to fully comprehend them) until the author, who is a diagnosed Aspie, came out with a metaphor of his own.

Imagine if you had a smoke alarm that was going off all the time, even when there was no smoke.

That one dropped into my emotional understanding like a ten ton weight! Suddenly the constant morning anxieties I have had, especially in the last six or seven years of my life when I became responsible for absolutely everything, are comprehensible to me. I thought once again, as I have thought so often recently, Oh my god, that's me!

Friends and readers of this blog will know that I am emphatically not a morning person, never have been, never will be, and that it sometimes goes a lot deeper than that. Now I understand why.

My smoke alarm is going off. It's not overstating things to say that mornings are an assault on my senses at a time when I have not had a chance to gather myself and prepare for the onslaught.

I've learned to wake before the alarm rings, because it shatters me.

Even something as simple as taking a shower when I first get up can sometimes have me weeping and begging for mercy. The water beating on me, sometimes too cold, sometimes too hot, the necessary scrubbing, it all feels like I'm being worked over by two big orderlies. Now, I don't have a problem taking a shower in the afternoon or evening, or even a couple of hours after I've gotten up. But first thing in the morning it is a shock to the system, and as I go through my morning chores and think about the day to come it sometimes feels like shock after shock is being piled on, jolting through me when I am not adequately prepared to receive or cope with that input. In fact, I'm in a state of hypersensitivity.

Within an hour or sometimes 90 minutes, it starts to get better: I have been able to gather myself, calm down, my senses begin to dull somewhat.

This is THE REASON why I drank heavily in the mornings from the moment I got out of bed: it was my way of numbing my senses to a dull roar, to a point where I could cope with the onslaught of that damn smoke alarm going off constantly in my head!

See, I told you it was big.

This morning was better than normal, but, as usual for me, I started feeling a deep sense of panic and anxiety during the short drive to work. I started moaning. Then, for the very first time, I was able to think to myself: It's that damn smoke alarm going off again.


Look around you. Is there any smoke?


No. No smoke. No smoke at all.

I took a couple of deep breaths. The panic didn't go completely away, and I expect that it never will -- but the alarm turned off (or at least was reset for the next time) and I was able -- my god, as they say -- to feel like I was in control of it, not the other way 'round.

[Insert metaphor here]

-- Freder.

Nothing White or Black

Alcoholism is one of those things that you wish was as simple as everyone says it is.

What I'm about to type is not self-justification. If it were, then I wouldn't feel as conflicted about it as I do, going so far against the grain of what's accepted as it does.

I used to get up in the morning and go to the kitchen before I even went to the bathroom. I used to show up for work with anywhere between three and five strong drinks inside of me.

And the actual fact is, I was a better employee when I showed up for work half-cocked than I am now and have been for the better part of a year, since I started showing up for work completely 100 percent sober.

I knew the policy. If they caught you drunk on the job, you were out, no questions asked.

And so I had to focus. I had to accomplish things. I knew that if they knew the state I was in, it was all over -- so I made myself the best damn employee that I could. I did my best and I got a lot done.

Now that I show up for work 100 percent sober -- honestly, I'm lousy.

I can't focus on anything, It takes me DAYS instead of hours to get things done. My mind wanders here and there, I waste time on the internet, the past is oftentimes much more in my eyes than the present. . .

If I were my boss, I would fire me, and re-hire the guy that I used to be.

The same thing is true about my driving. The stigmata about Driving Drunk in our culture is so intense that I am certain I will catch a lot of heat for this, one way or the other, but the fact is that I was a better driver half-cocked than most people are sober.

I was a better driver half-cocked than I am sober!

I think the reasons are the same. I was aware that I was impaired -- and so I was aware that I needed to focus, be careful, and not do anything that could harm anyone.

This morning, completely sober, I tore out of my driveway at about Mach Nine and swerved across the lane and put the pedal to the metal because I was running late. I shouted at the car in front of me: "Get the hell out of my way, asshole!" At the intersection, when the opposite car did not move when it was clearly his turn, I shouted, "Come on! What are you doing, idiot?! Are you a moron? Go, stupid!"

I'm not saying that the Emperor doesn't have any clothes on and that alcohol isn't everything that common sense says it is. Even Rodney Dangerfield wrote in his bio-book that he couldn't understand why pot was illegal and alcohol wasn't, because he saw alcohol ruin many people's lives, but he never saw the same thing among pot users.

I'm just saying -- nothing is as simple as anyone makes it out to be.

Alcohol may have hastened my mother's death -- we drank together, when I wasn't drinking alone -- but it also took a lot of pain and anxiety out of her life. Even now, knowing everything that I do, I would not deny her any of the drinks that she took in the last five years of her life, including the ones that I poured for her on the last morning that she spent at home.

On the morning of Friday, May 14, 2010, by the time she made it into the kitchen she was exhausted and in terrible pain. These situations were not abnormal. . . just maybe a little worse than usual. By the time she had had a chance to relax in her chair, and had a couple of drinks inside of her, she said, "Oh, I feel so much better now."

That changed while I was away at work.

The end was near. I knew it. And I kept on throwing alcohol down my gullet because I desperately wanted not to know it.

It didn't work.

-- Freder.

Flowers for the Dead

I know that other people are thinking this, because I think it myself sometimes: It's been a year. Why aren't you over this? You should be over this by now.

In just a couple of hours, it will be -- would have been -- my mother's birthday. She was no worse off than she had been for some time. I thought she had a few years still left in her. Instead, she was gone in two weeks.

For the past two mornings, and tonight, this evening, I've had much more than the usual amount of tears.

I can't believe that it's been a year. My perception of time has been even more whacked-out than usual.

A year ago, the largest problem seemed to be my mother's financial troubles and the way that they were tapping me out, too. Every couple of months she'd come crying to me to ask for another thousand dollars. I didn't mind the drain on my finances so much, because I'd sold a piece of art for a lot of money and I could afford it. What I did mind were the waterworks.

She was so dependent on me for everything -- most especially for company -- and it was emotionally and physically exhausting. She used to complain that I stayed in my end of the house too much. But with the job and being responsible for absolutely everything around the house, I desperately needed my Alone Time to recuperate.

Now I know why. My senses were completely overwhelmed. No wonder I kept myself well pickled pretty much 24/7. Life was demanding the very things out of me that were the hardest for a Probable Aspie to give.

Last Spring was a good deal warmer and sunnier than this one. The weekends that began the month of April were sunny and hot. On Saturdays, we made our errands run into town. It took the whole damn day. Mom would walk out to the car, and then at every stop we made, I would pull her wheelchair out of the trunk, set it up, and she'd wheel herself through the various stores. It was a lot of work for her, and she performed like a champ.

Until we got home. Somehow, somewhy, the walk from the car back to the house hit her like a ton of bricks. The sun was high and bright and hot. She would collapse into a chair just short of the door, and I would have to stand over her with an umbrella to shield her from the heat. I'd plead with her to do what she could to get into the house where it was cool and she could rest -- because the umbrella wasn't helping much. A couple of times I ran into the house to get her a glass of ice water.

That walk from the car to the house was a real point of concern. On Friday the fourteenth of April, I was looking ahead to Saturday and worrying about that walk.

We never got that far.

On Friday the fourteenth of April, just a year ago, she walked out of the house for the last time.

That's another post. For now, there's nothing left but to cry and cry.

I spent the bulk of today planting more and more nasturtiums. . . in pots and planters, along the edge of the side back garden. I'm done now. I hope that they come up. Some stupid atavistic monkey stuporstitious part of myself still imagines that I can bring her back if I plant enough nasturtiums.

Triggered by Pancakes

Everyone in the house loved pancakes for breakfast, but Mom hated cooking them. Funny, but when the roles were reversed and I was the one doing all the cooking -- suddenly she loved pancakes for breakfast again, wanted 'em all the time.

Unfortunately, I could not cook pancakes to save my soul. The two times that I tried, I botched it so miserably and made a mess of everything and ended up in tears. It was one of those things that confirmed to me that I destroy everything I touch.

[This is why a part of me welcomes the realization that I have Asperger's, because it explains so much, while at the same time I hate it, because it confirms that I really am everything that I felt I was]

So, we ended up eating breakfast as much as two or three times a month at Friendly's, just about the only place in this town where you can get pancakes for breakfast.

Pancakes made her happy. Making her happy made me happy.

Just now, I was really set off by a commercial on TV for Friendly's. All they had to do was show the logo and I was off.

I'll never eat there again. Me, I'm more a French Toast kind of person, and I can actually cook French Toast without bringing destruction down around me.

We're rapidly coming up on a couple of rough landmarks here. May 2 will be her first birthday where she's not around to enjoy it. And just two weeks after that, she was dead. I never dreamed on May 2 that by May 16 it would all be over.

Except that it wasn't over -- it was just beginning. While I stumbled about in a drunken haze of despair, my sister began her systematic efforts to completely disassemble my life right out from underneath me. I was living in an illusion, trying to plaster over everything that was falling apart around me. Literally nailing boards over the windows that my sister broke so that she could steal from the estate, from me, from herself. Mom's death yanked the whole rug of my life right out from under me.

It's important to note that it's slowly getting better.

But every once in a while a Friendly's commercial comes along, and peels the scab clean away.

*

The books that I ordered arrived today: The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome, by Tony Atwood, and Asperger Syndrome and Anxiety: A Guide to Successful Stress Management, by Nick Dubin. I've already started reading the former, while dinner was in the oven.

With every page, with almost every paragraph, I'm experiencing a surge of , , , gad, certaunly not elation. Confirmation. Yes, by God, that's me! Yes, by God, that's me! Yes, by God, that explains so much!

I am coming to realize that the anxiety and depression that I always thought were the causes of my other behaviours are in fact only symptoms of the larger cause.

I feel just as if a previously undiscovered skeleton key has been slipped into my brain, and the lock has finally tumbled, and answers are pouring out through an opening that never existed before.

Somewhat more calm, no less angry, in need of moving on. . .

While casting around for some images of Bad Dads on the internet, I found this quite funny British blog post:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/feb/10/clip-joint-bad-dads

So that made me smile a little bit. There hasn't been much of that going on at my place over the past couple of days.

I wanted to write about Adaptation and The Frighteners, both of which crossed my eyeballs earlier in the week. I wanted to write about the progress I'm making on the new website (not much) and in setting up the new house (somewhat better).

Instead, I've been stewing in hatred, restless, unable to focus, gnawing on the bone of my father's latest betrayal, angry at myself for ever thinking that, just perhaps, he might have grown a vestigial sense of personal responsibility in recent years.

That he hasn't, and I fell into my own trap, that's my fault.

It didn't help matters that he sent he sent me three emails, one of them labeled "humble apology," and there wasn't anything humble or apologetic about any of them. Instead, it was the same old self-justifying crap that he always does, the same crap he pulled on mom all those years ago when he justified his affairs by telling mom all about them, as if that made it all right, because he was being honest, you see, he wasn't keeping a secret.

When I was seven years old I came home from school one day and found mom sobbing. Now I know why.

Last night I got drunk and flamed him from the bottom of my heart. I said, Do you know what you did? Do you know how bad this is?

 I said that this blog is just for me, it's my therapy, the only therapy I have, and what you did was the same exact thing as if you hid out in my therapist's office and eavesdropped on the sessions.

I said And then, and then, you had the unmitigated gall to write and tell me that my feelings, my own personal thoughts and feelings, where you were not even invited, were not valid.

I believe I then launched into a string of obscenities.

But it's true -- it's just as if he leapt out of hiding in the middle of the session and "corrected" me in front of the therapist.

.I should get over it. I need to get over it, this is just one more violation in a series. But right now I can't stop kicking myself, can't stop wishing that I could kick him. This is as big a betrayal as he's ever committed against me, but I gave him the opportunity to do it, knowing that nothing ever changes, knowing that you can't put a bottle in a drunkard's hands and expect him not to take a swig.

I have to pretend to work now. Maybe that will help me climb out of this bitter soup that I'm sitting in. My goal for tonight: take a few more deep breaths, and write that post about The Frighteners. . .

-- Freder.