The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.
William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.
The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the
creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."
A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing
is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."
The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.
Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it.
From concept to completion, it'll be here."
SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative
history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.
Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.
Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life,
the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.
Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.
Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.
(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)
Sunday, June 22, 2003 Health [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
We were walking along, enjoying the day, when I suddenly felt dizzy. I had to sit down to clear my head. Zeena, who worked in a hospital, suspected something or other (a potassium deficiency comes to mind) but made me swear to see a doctor as soon as we got back.
I went to doctors only when I was in pain or worried about something – and suddenly I was worried. Back in Portland, I went to the V.A. for a checkup and learned, to the horror of the doctor, that my blood pressure was something like 240/170. I was put on blood pressure medication immediately.
My doctor gave me a stern lecture about the relationship between my drinking and my blood pressure and my survival – and since I’d admitted to only a fraction of my daily alcohol consumption, she scared me to death. If I was being this reckless with my life based on the lie, imagine how much more I was flirting with death based on the truth. What I was doing was drinking myself to death. This obvious fact was a revelation to me.
I didn’t want to die. My best writing was still ahead of me. I decided to do something about it. I decided to quit drinking.
I decided to quit drinking on my own. Most drunks make this decision first. It took only a few months for me to realize this wasn’t going to work at all. I needed help.
The Veterans Administration (V.A.) had a program that, if I were accepted into it, wouldn’t cost me a cent. It was an intense 28-day in-patient treatment program, followed by months of out-patient care. The program was called CARS, which stood for Chemical Addiction Rehabilitation Services.
Even though the program wouldn’t cost me a cent, I was living so close to the edge financially that I didn’t feel I could take a month off from my freelance writing income. How would I pay my rent if I took a month off? The gods heard the question. Quite unexpectedly, Chateau de Mort got scheduled for a revival in the Pittock Mansion in the summer of 1993. My contract provided decent royalties for each season they performed the play. Now I could admit myself into CARS and come out with a fat check waiting for me. I bit the bullet and applied.
I entered CARS on June 14, 1993, a Monday. The previous Saturday night I went out and got plastered, having one each of every favorite drink I could think of. I wrote about this experience in my essay “Liquor and Lit: A Portrait of the Writer as a Drunk,” which was published in Oregon Magazine:
For a nightcap, I ordered a special drink for old times, a farewell toast to a way of life, a moment I expected to remember forever – and have. I ordered a B-52. Its layers reminded me of the different periods of my life – the high school science nerd, the confused mathematician, the Berkeley street person, the linguist-spy-mascot, the ambitious grad student, the less ambitious playwright – each period clearly set apart from the others. When I raised the small, narrow glass and tipped it, the fragile spectrum dissolved as each color ran into its neighbor to become a drab concoction of spirits, suddenly dark and dreary, just as the periods of my life finally had succumbed to one all-encompassing description, which had become more meaningful than any colorful distinctions between them: I was living the life of a drunk. I belted down the B-52, paid my considerable tab, and left.
One B-52 pilot on one final mission. Over and out. (But somehow I lived to tell the tale.)
Upon admittance at CARS, I was assigned a room and a roommate, a counselor, and a part-time job. My counselor was Mel, a no-nonsense former addict with a reputation for taking on the tough cases. To my surprise, I was considered a tough case because I was “a college boy.” Mel told me that the failure rate among those with college degrees was higher than in any other demographic. We thought we knew too much, we’d second-guess everything we were told, we had perfected rationalization to an art form, we were arrogant – all of which would make sobriety difficult for us. I was determined to prove him wrong.
Mel’s no-nonsense approach became the model for the character of the counselor in my screenplay, Recovery, a thriller about an abused woman who tries to hide in a treatment center. Here he is addressing a group who have just entered treatment:
How many here want a drink right now? Or a fix? Drag a weed, snort a coke, shot a Wild Turkey? (No one responds.) You lying sacks a shit. You scumbag assholes. You'd kill your mother for a drink. You'd sell your little sister to a known carrier of AIDS to buy some crack, you'd take money off your grandma's night stand to buy your weed.
The style at CARS was in-your-face and confrontational. Though I rebelled against it just like everyone else, in the end it was just what I needed.
Each morning, we read a proclamation that summarized the CARS philosophy: “Our concept of a meaningful life is not merely to stop drinking or using drugs. It is to replace that part of yourself that caused self-destructive behavior in the first place. … If you're not ready to examine yourself with ruthless self-scrutiny, then you may want to reconsider your reasons for entering this treatment program. You may want to leave before we kick you out.”
My part-time job was in the medical library. As a result, I read everything about alcoholism that I could get my hands on. What I learned didn’t always jive with what I was being told in treatment. For example, in Europe, according to medical journals, a large number of studies had shown that the success rate for getting sober in treatment was no better than for getting sober on your own.
Mel, to his credit, did not chastise me for reading medical journals at work. On the contrary, he started slipping me books that were not part of the official reading list in treatment. Three books in particular became important to me: Under the Influence, Rational Recovery, and Man’s Search for Meaning.
Under the Influence is a scientific disease-model discussion of alcoholism, which coincided with the V.A. treatment approach. Yet the V.A. didn’t approve of the book because of its criticism of Alcoholics Anonymous, which also was a cornerstone of treatment. The book did not approve of A.A.’s contention that all alcoholics have a character flaw. In the disease model, this would be like giving a diabetic a character flaw.
As a result, Under the Influence was not even in the medical library! It was as if it had been banned for its small criticism of the holy A.A. Indeed, when Mel lent me the book, he did so surreptitiously, as if he were slipping me forbidden material.
Rational Recovery challenged everything about A.A., including the contention in the first of its twelve steps that the alcoholic is powerless. R.R.’s approach was to empower people to take control over their own lives. This appealed to the existentialist in me. I decided that I did, in fact, have complete control over whether or not I started drinking. After that, after the booze kicked in, I became powerless to stop drinking – but I was in control up to this moment. I always had the free choice whether or not to begin drinking. Rational Recovery supported this contention but A.A. did not.
Man’s Search for Meaning is a philosophical look at surviving the holocaust, written by a philosopher who did. What the Nazis could never change, the philosopher learned, was an individual’s attitude – and this was the foundation for survival and finding meaning in life, even under the most depraved circumstances. This was a lesson I’d learn to put to use in less inhumane environments than the one in which it had been forged.
Because of the books Mel loaned me and my other reading in the medical library, my approach to sobriety became a program based on knowledge. Know the enemy – and conquer it. This, too, rubbed against the approach of A.A., which had an anti-intellectual streak in it, if not in theory at least in practice. “Keep in simple, stupid,” was the retort to anyone who might raise a question or challenge a presumption. I went to A.A. meetings through treatment because I was required to do so, but I became less interested in them. During my out-patient phase, I attended meetings of Rational Recovery and felt much more at home.
An important part of treatment were group therapy sessions. As a result of one such session, Mel again showed creativity in dealing with his “tough case” patient, yours truly.
During one session, in the middle of talking about my daughter, I broke down. I couldn’t stop crying. I was crying so hard that it was disrupting the session. The next day, when Mel asked me to go on about my daughter, the same thing happened. Mel didn’t want the daily group therapy session to turn into everyone watching me bawl, so he came up with a plan.
He gave me an assignment: every night, from seven to seven-thirty, I was to sit alone in my room and think about my daughter and cry. It was very important that I cry. I was to do this every evening until I had not cried for three days in a row, and then I was to report back to him.
As a result, I cried myself out about my daughter in about a week. What I was crying about, of course, was my failure to become a part of her life. I had no one to blame for this except myself. How hard would it have been to write her or call her every few weeks, to visit her once a year? I’d done none of these things. I had pretended she didn’t exist. In treatment my guilt about this erupted like a volcano.
Once I was able to talk about my daughter in group therapy without breaking down, I told the full story. I also decided to write her a letter and explore the possibility of a future relationship with her. I drafted the letter while I was in treatment, reading each draft to the group, but when it was time to mail it, the address I had was no longer current. Considerable time would pass before I tracked her down – and you know the story of what happened next.
My original plan had been to enter CARS for 28 days, then move back into my apartment with my royalties check and go on with my life. I really hadn’t given much thought to what “go on with my life” meant. Halfway through treatment, Mel forced me to put my plans in writing. When I did, he scoffed at them. Where was I going to spend my leisure time? Who were going to be my friends? I assumed that I’d go to Seafood’s or Nobby’s just as before but sit at the bar drinking coke. I really had made no plans to change my routine, other than to quit drinking. Mel tried to make me understand that my routine was part of the problem, that I needed to find new things to do with new friends, friends who weren’t themselves alcoholics.
This is when he brought up the Domiciliary, which everyone called the Dom. He wanted me to stay for six more months of in-patient treatment, moving into the Dom. Six more months! This was not part of my game plan.
Mel was clever. Seeing my resistance to the idea, he started working on me where I was vulnerable. He began talking about six-months in the Dom as a kind of writing retreat for me, where I could get free room and board while I worked on my next script. Sure, there would be classes to attend and chores to do, but so what? I’d have lots of free time, he said, and I could bring my laptop computer and write. Since when did a writer turn down six months of free room and board?
This was a ploy, of course, but Mel also was on my side. During a meeting in his office one day, he looked me squarely in the eye and shook his head, saying, “What a waste. You have so much to contribute. So much to contribute. What a goddamn waste to spend your time on a barstool.”
I told Mel that if he could get me into the Dom, I’d do it. I’d sign up for six more months of in-patient treatment.
6/22/2003 03:08:00 PM |
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