Higher!

Some say marijuana is a gateway drug and for me that was very true. A beautiful sixteen-year-old girl blew smoke in my fifteen-year-old mouth on the Columbia River bank while we skipped class during my freshman year of high school. She was one of my dancing partners in P.E. and I am pretty sure that I was aroused every time that I touched her – she reminded me of Alicia Silverstone in the Aerosmith videos. I was smitten and she had a boyfriend that was dangerous. Weed did not effect me that first time and I think it took a couple more attempts before I felt the effects. Once I did, I didn’t want to be sober anymore, just high, higher!

I think my next gateway drugs were psychedelics and that took me even further from reality which was my goal. Sober felt irritating. I was invincible when it came to drugs and alcohol or at least that is how I acted – no problem mixing several substances in one evening. I did have a hard line at no needles and that may have saved my life. I would smoke, snort, eat, drink or drop in my eye many substances over the years. From mushrooms and LSD I graduated to cocaine and tequila. From there I hit my kryptonite which was speed – I started with mini-thins my senior year of high school football and finished senior year with my first purchase of crank – a good ole brown bath tub variety that kept me awake for several days. I really liked the feeling that the crank induced – ultra clarity massive dopamine hit. The down wasn’t as violent as cocaine especially if you rode it for a couple days and your body just gave out and went to sleep. Weed also took the edge off as the come down came. Cocaine was often cut with aspirin, which I am allergic to, so that could go south with swollen eyes coming into the picture. Speed just opened my airways and was usually cut with a crystal substance from GNC that was harmless (I know this because I might have cut some product later in life).

My full on addiction started my senior year of college. I had taken a trip to Europe for the summer and had lived like Hunter S. Thompson, but with a camera, taking pictures throughout Europe while hooking up with all the other crazies. I must have radiated the stoner vibe with my long hair and scraggly goatee. While traveling through Europe I drank the equivalent of a bottle of wine or a six pack of beer each day while smoking weed, snorting cocaine, chasing that with Valium and alternating nights with ecstasy. I stumbled into a bar one morning as the sun rose in the Algarve of Portugal with two new Portuguese brothers and missed the one step down to the bar sending my robust American body into all the patrons sitting at the bar and wiping them out like a set of bowling pins. We had driven thirty miles to the last bar serving drinks and didn’t even get one as I was tossed out directly. We went to the beach after acquiring some oversized cans of beer and watched the sun rise – I had lived through cocaine, ecstasy, valium and some German downer all in one night mixed with at least a gallon of alcohol – fucking invincible. Lucky more like it. I took a brake after that in a small fishing village relying on some Port and local fish to bring me back to life.

Arriving back in the states I had forgone my senior year of college football for the European trip – I had not built myself into a better athlete, just a better drug user. I wrote for college newspaper and criticized the football team that I had been a part of and established a full blown methamphetamine habit. I made it through the first semester some how and ski season, but I went down a dark spiral staircase after that. I somehow conned my computer science teacher to give me a D- by shooting pictures at her granddaughter’s birthday – I didn’t attend one class. But my photography teacher was having none of it – I had to drop his class as I tried to salvage it towards the end of the semester, but he left me three credits shy of graduating and I was in debt to my drug dealer. My dad paid my drug bill before I had to hand over my car. My brother brought me to his house in Seattle to get clean. I didn’t know what AA was at that time and was not going to go anyway. I just went to work, drank a shitload of coffee and eventually replaced my drug habit with alcohol. Addiction for me is a constant sprint from reality – I would still love to be intoxicated if I could, but a higher power has stepped in and shuts down my body upon any intoxicants entering. I have been mostly sober for close to ten years – the California version slips in from time to time, but even that has become an enemy in my system – my subconscious blending with the power of the universe to find joy in sobriety. I still need to be able to dance. Most years of my life, social situations and music shows have been lubricated with weed or alcohol so it is difficult to go into these situations dry, without my lube.

My second severe case of addiction was linked to my first case by a couple years of hard drinking and more and more drugs when they were available. I always ended up buying coke at the bar at the end of a night of drinking and did ecstasy as much as I could afford and if it was available. Kryptonite came back into the picture right before I said, “I do”. I actually did some meth on my wedding night – it became a daily occurrence soon there after. It took me a year of daily use to completely destroy my life, but as far as drugs go, you can get a lot of shit done on meth, so by the time the DEA came crashing through my door, we had our own home and I had a business that wasn’t doing too terribly bad. It was the drug dealing that I was bad at – the customers were unreliable and the overall black market, was just that, black – or as my wife called it, green ooze. My physical self was down to one hundred and fifty pounds, fifty five pounds below the weight I generally carry. I ate honey buns and vanilla coke followed by a cigarette and a dip of chewing tabaco (at the same time) and chased most nights with a good amount of Captain Morgan Seven with a lime. My temple was being treated like a dumpster fire and fueled with speed.

Recovery can come in many forms and for me it has been a very long process of finding peace within myself – I am constantly standing at a crouch ready to run like hell. It is no one else’s fault. I have made all the bad decisions within my own struggling mind and with my own tainted heart. I feel the world acutely and I have always tried to numb the sharpness that comes with reality. I have gotten better as sawing off those edges with exercise, work and parenthood. A literal run can blunt anxiety and pickle ball always makes me laugh and gets my heart thumping in my chest, full of life. It took the DEA whisking me away to federal prison to stop the abuse to myself and others, but it has taken twenty five years to build something real and to put my temple back together. I now work on the board of a recovery center and I see men and women struggle with their versions of recovery, some of them come back three times before they get it right, others aren’t as lucky as they only get their recovery in the next life. I give my heart and time to my two teenage children who I hope like hell don’t have to face recovery – I am honest about what I have been through with them and use all my might to help steer them onto the right path. I work a lot at a lot of things because I am driven to succeed and I want to see people around me succeed. I get up six days a week and work out – my mind does so much better when my body is firing and I am concerned that I have damaged myself with my dumpster fire days. I am building it back stronger. I live life sober, but I am constantly stepping on higher clouds as I finish a hike with my family, walk into a college football game or watch the sunrise at the beach or the sunset at the lake. I am finding God’s high – it is more subtle than the substances of the past, but it doesn’t come with the same freefall down that ends in death, jail or rehab – it just continues to get higher!