The Bloody Doors Off

More days like today please.

Wasn’t falling asleep on my face all morning.

Two clients sent in work requests, which I handled with ease and aplomb.

(I like that word. Aplomb. Why don’t we use it more often?)

Had a productive rehearsal with the cast for Last Call.

Grooved with Jim Clayton Jazz on Facebook.

And now prepping dinner for me and the boy.

So yeah.

More days like today.

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.

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But what if it isn’t?

Tonight’s regrets brought to you by the amygdala, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the prefrontal cortex.

I’ve done stupid shit. We all have.

Alcohol abuse runs in the family. My grandmother (on my dad’s side), my father.

Me.

I was in the last year of high school. Nineteen years old. And despite my best efforts, following the Koster footsteps down the hazy, boozy, path.

I kept a bottle in the closet in my bedroom. Once, at a bar and I had no more money for beer, I convinced a poor sod I’d write a piece on him in exchange for a drink. (I was in a co-op program at The Scarborough Mirror at the time. In a drunken stupor, I stumbled across the set of 1980s television show Night Heat and convinced the security guard I was on assignment. Turned out, one of the actors was from Scarborough, which landed me an invitation back to set and a puff piece for the paper. But I digress.)

I hit bottom the 3rd night of a bender after a friend had committed suicide. Barely able to stand, I’d made my way out of a strip club to a McDonald’s for a burger, puked it (and everything else) out in a back alley, and then headed back for another drink.

I quit cold turkey that night. Was sober for over a decade before I even considered the possibility that I had the willpower to try a drink again. Since then, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been inebriated because of alcohol.

But I’ve done stupid shit. Sometimes I think of that poor guy, who just wanted to be heard, and instead had a punk ass kid con him out of three bucks so he could stay drunk. I worry that I’ve treated people badly.

So yeah, that started my shame spiral this evening.

Dovetailed into failed relationships.

My breakdown seven years ago. I was so fucking shaky when I got out. To this day, I think I should’ve stayed locked up an extra week or two. I wasn’t ready.

I think I am now, though.

Despite the utter shit I’ve done, the muck I’ve waded through, I’ve arrived at a good place in my life.

I just don’t wanna fuck it up.

And I wish I knew how to make it up to that guy in the bar.

You know Judas was in on it. Even if he denied it 3 times. And hey, he got paid in silver.

Can you tell I have issues with religion?

I’m on my fourth cup of coffee in as many hours.

That’s how you can tell if I’m busy. Like counting rings on a tree to gauge its age, look to the amount of caffeine I’ve consumed to see how busy (or not) I am. When I’m engaged with work, I’ll have two cups. When I’m bored (like I have been all last week and now), I consume copious amounts.

And I could still take a nap.

I have an odd, recurring dream. It involves travel, usually to places I’d never consider visiting. Not because it wouldn’t be interesting, because in my dream it usually is. But it also involves byzantine airports and rescheduled flights. Even the seating on the plane is strange. And it feels so real, I’d almost think I was remote viewing. I can feel myself standing on the cold, wind-swept streets of the capital of Czechoslovakia (hey I spelled that without an assist), or the feel of warm sand between my toes on the beaches of Antigua.

I took a trip once I’d never gotten to finish. I was in Ireland, and was supposed to spend a couple of days in London before a week in Amsterdam, but had to come home because of an illness in the family. It’s a trip I vowed to finish some day. But the weeks pass by and I have new responsibilities and god, I have a CPAP now and there’s no way I’m backpacking through Europe with that so I’d have to stay in B&Bs or hotels which automatically changes the feel of what the trip was meant to be. And this was my solo trip. I have a family now. I want to take holidays with them. And I don’t think a walking tour of Amsterdam is high on their list. Understandably so.

And shit, the latest mini-vacation we’d planned for got cancelled by the Ontario government with their lockdown and stay-at-home order. I’m not sure how, isolating as we would be in a cottage 20 minutes outside of the nearest town would cause mass panic and make us a super-spreader event, but that’s how it is. We’re stuck for at least another month of this crap.

Maybe that’s why the dreams. I can’t go anywhere in my waking life. So.

I could go on a much longer rant about how the government has fucked all this up, that the anti-maskers are selfish assholes who — not that I’d ever consciously wish it on anyone — should get the ‘rona. But that’s pretty much just spitting in the wind. It’ll eventually ricochet and wind up hitting me square in the face.

And that’s the fourth coffee done. Back to waiting oh so patiently for potential work to trickle in.

When I hear that in my head, it sounds like John Oliver. Which makes me wonder if that’s where I got it from.

Most people would choose Morgan Freeman or Samuel L. Jackson narrating their lives.

I got John fucking Oliver.

Let that sink in.

Better yet.

Don’t.

I’m writing.

At least there’s that.

Not exactly the choice I’d make, but it’s something.

Is anyone else warm?

Just me?

Okay.

The pain around my chest has lessened.

My heart still aches.

I’m feeling raw.

Yesterday’s post did a number on me.

I’m really feeling this one.

My chest is tight. I chewed baby aspirin just in case. I’m fine.

No really.

“What is Athens?”

Jeopardy is on in the background.

And I was wow, really off-base.

The answer was, (because I know you’re dying to know), “What is Istanbul?”

I find I’m wrong about a lot of things.

But then, aren’t we all?

I don’t know where I’m going with this.

Can I claim PTSD?

Am I going to have to continue collecting CRB?

I got an interesting email two weeks ago. It portended a very. Good. Thing.

Something wonderful.

But I haven’t heard the follow-up. And no, I was not contacted by a Nigerian Prince looking to wire transfer me thirty million dollars.

I dunno, maybe it’s the bi-polar (2) in me. I can’t be happy with intangibles.

Hell, I’m still hung up on waiting for a client to send in edits they spoke to me about a week ago. I know the job will come in, but when? I’m not busy now, it’s the perfect opportunity. But nope, it’ll show when I’m neck deep in another project with a tight deadline, and I’ll have to burn the late night oil and drink coffee to keep my eyes from unfocussing.

Now I want coffee.

This post is pretty pointless.

But I’ll take the alliteration.

I spent 3 minutes writing and editing the title.

Because that’s what I do.

Edit myself.

I’m so damned careful around words. I know how they can injure; I’ve been on the receiving end. And yet I can’t speak the words, because I was never directly verbally abused.

That’s a lie.

And there I am. Again.

Editing.

Let me qualify. Bullied.

Why am I so scared of that word? That I have to pull it apart and twist it inside out to find another way, a less frightening way, to say it?

The moment he entered our lives, I was. I wasn’t happy about it. It meant that my mom and my dad weren’t getting back together. (Which as an adolescent, I didn’t fully understand why my parents were divorced. It turns out, for a Very Good Reason.) He was was dating my mom, he was moving in with us, they were getting married. I tried to accept it but there was something I just couldn’t get past.

And it was mutual.

He showed open disdain, would often belittle things I said or did (when he first moved in, I left out a tape recorder with all my favourite television theme songs; the next day, he’d taped over it, saying “whoever listens to this is fuckin’ retarded”.)

When I was. 17? 18? It was after they’d sold the house (which naturally I was against) and my brother, mom and step-father, and myself were living in a 2+ condo in north Scarborough. I was still in high school.

He hit me.

One time.

My mom, god bless her, stepped in and said he’d never do that again. If she had to choose between her son and him, she picked me.

So yeah. That was the low point.

My 20s were rocky. I edited myself out of family events. In my early 30s, at a party I did attend, he pulled me aside and told me I needed to do better. For my mom.

He was right. I wasn’t just punishing him. I was punishing her. And that broke my heart.

So I started trying to do better.

And, over time, things got better between him and me. So much so that, now, a few years after her death, we can end a phone conversation with “love you”.

I’m two seconds away from deleting this post.

Or at least editing it.

Yeah, I was right.

I’ve never done cocaine.

Go with me here.

I have horrible sinuses. I can’t sleep at night unless I use a prescription-strength nasal spray before bed. And sometimes, like thirty minutes ago (I struggled whether or not to say ’30 minutes’) my nose’ll stuff up so bad I can’t breathe without it.

And it reminded me.

See? I didn’t go off on a long tangent to get there.

Back when I worked in an office (names and places redacted) where the group would get together by the photocopiers every Friday at shift change, we’d all been invited to a Christmas party. We all went. Had a great time.

As the group made plans to splinter (some, like me, were headed home to sleep; the others were off to a club), a couple of the guys ducked into the main floor powder room to uh, powder their noses.

And I wondered why, like Rudolph, I hadn’t been invited to this particular reindeer game.

End of story.

Until tonight.

When that memory comes back and hits me upside the head. Because I needed my own hit.

Where was I going with this?

Right. It made me wonder. If they had offered, would I have accepted? Or declined?

The honest answer is.

I don’t know.