just words

It is a constant internal struggle regulating my own stupid-ass behavior.

My life has been characterized by addiction. Addiction to digital entertainment, chemical substances, irrational thought patterns, and feelings both emotional and physical, typified by the chase of dopamine through harmful repetitive behaviors that I am aware are repetitive and harmful yet continue to justify through immature and potentially deadly rationalization, stuff like, “this will be the last time, for real this time” and “I work hard, so don’t I deserve to have a little fun every now and then?” and “hey, I’m here, so I might as well partake in some stupid shit, when in Rome,” and so forth.

“Alcoholism” is a decent categorization tool, it gets the point across, helps diagnose and potentially correct problematic behavior, but it misses the big picture, that being that certain people are just born fucked, like their brains are strongly inclined toward addiction, and not just to alcohol, but to anything that makes them feel good, anything that releases dopamine or one of the various other feel-good chemicals our brains so enjoy, and unfortunately, due to harsh biological reality, some people are just born this way, born fucked, and because of that, their lives forever mirror Sisyphus pushing a giant rock up a near-vertical incline, but the rocks are not rocks, the rocks are brains, their own brains.

As you might have gathered, I am one of these Sisyphusian brain pushers.

On the final night of the big company conference, a customer-appreciation party was held. I was all dressed up in a nice grey sports jacket, tucked light-blue collared shirt, wrinkleless black slacks, dark slip-on dress shoes, and fancy black socks to round it all off. The party was held in this huge open room, and the lighting was turned to like the lowest possible setting so it was all dark in there, but there were strobes and blinky blue fluorescents going off, which made the whole place feel quite surreal and futuristic, and there was a house band playing 80s power ballads and soft rock classics poorly. There must have been like at least a hundred people there, customers and employees both, many wearing cowboy hats with blinking lights strung into them, some with long feminine wigs of many different colors, as the party’s theme was like “Wild West but in Space” or something like that, which I had apparently missed the internal memo for. Everyone was dancing and screaming their conversations over too-loud music and huddling together in their little corporate cliques, because people don’t really change much after high school, and there was an open bar with free drinks, so everyone had a cocktail glass full of auburn liquid or a damp beer bottle or a glass of dark red wine in hand, everyone except for me, of course, because I don’t drink, since I’m pretty much a low-key alcoholic, although I don’t go to AA or anything like that, instead I just regulate my alcoholism internally by choosing not to drink.

But as you know, it is a constant internal struggle regulating my own stupid-ass behavior.

So of course I’m standing there, in the middle of all these happy luminescent people, shrouded in waves of darkness, feeling totally out of place and alone, and I’m hyperfocusing internally on the fact that I’m standing there feeling totally out of place and alone, which makes me loop on the idea that other people see me as being totally out of place and alone, which makes it almost impossible for me to strike up a normal conversation with anyone, since I’m stuck in this I’m-a-weird-awkward-loser type thought loop. So at some point I sulk off to a corner, lean back against the wall, and look at my phone, browsing both my company and personal emails, trying to distract myself from the thought that I’m being a totally weird awkward loser, and that’s when the thought occurs to me that like if I just have a small drink then I’ll loosen up and be able to mingle with all these people and then maybe I’ll have a good time, but I hadn’t had a drink in over a year and was sort of proud of myself for having abstained for so long, so I continue scrolling and swiping through my phone, hoping this nagging just-have-a-drink bullshit goes away, but it doesn’t, instead it just evolves into a myriad of stupid justifications, as if there’s a devil on my shoulder whispering into my ear, like “one beer isn’t going to hurt” and “everyone else here drinks because they’re just as awkward and antisocial as you are, so it’s not like you’re doing anything wrong” and “maybe having a few drinks will facilitate some sort of exciting life experience like a steamy one-night stand with that redhead you keep looking at” and “when in Rome” and “this is a one-time special occasion, you deserve this, go for it” and “why do you have to be so uptight all the time, loosen up, Jesus Christ.” All while the angel on my other shoulder is like, “just go back to your hotel room and read your book” and “you don’t need to fit in or prove yourself to anyone” and “drinking as a social lubricant is a crutch, you shouldn’t need alcohol to socialize with people” and “if you did have that one-night stand, you’d literally never forgive yourself and you’d spiral into an existential crisis and possibly kill yourself” and “what would your wife think?” and “don’t listen to that red guy with the horns and the pitchfork, he has gotten you into trouble before.”

So I take the angel’s advice and leave the futuristic ballroom party place, but I can’t bring myself to take the elevator back up to the fourth floor and return to my room. I just can’t. So I kind of just pace around outside the ballroom, at which point one of my party-going peers, who is wearing this long blue wig, comes up to me and starts saying stuff like, “what are you doing out here by yourself?” and “how about I grab you a drink?” and “are you going out to the bars later tonight?” and “a few customers were asking about you,” and then they take off their wig and hand it to me and say, “wear this, this’ll make you feel better,” so I put on the blue wig, do a funny little pose with a peace sign near my face, and they snap a picture of me with their phone, and it’s around this time that the little devil on my shoulder rips the head off of the sweet little angel on my other shoulder and shits down their neck, and then there I go, back into the dark strobing party room with all the people and the too-loud music, wearing this ridiculous blue wig, and suddenly I’m at the bar saying to myself “just one beer won’t hurt,” and then, before you know it, I’ve got a Corona in hand, and then I’m taking sips of bitter pale liquid, which is just as fucking nasty as I remember it being, and I’m pretty much immediately feeling loose and uninhibited, and so then I start to confidently mingle.

But of course, one Corona turns into two, turns into three, turns into four, and so on, until I’m all warm and toasty and fucked up, having not felt this way in a long time, and, for an hour or two there, I was really enjoying myself. I even talked to that one red-headed woman I was always looking at, and she turned out to be pretty repulsive, personality-wise, because she was pretty wasted and only wanted to talk about all her different semi-automatic rifles, going on and on about the different specs of each gun, so when I jovially told her that I had never held a gun in my life because one, I never needed to, and two, it seems like simply carrying a gun increases the likelihood of being shot by a gun, she started looking at me like I was a huge pussy and eventually wandered off to talk to somebody else, but that was OK with me, because I was feeling happily fuzzy at that point and just found someone else to talk to myself.

But it was around the time of my fifth beer, when the customer-appreciation party ended, that I started to feel a little weird, because the party was ending and I was starting to think stuff like “what the hell am I doing to myself here?” so I was starting to come to terms with the fact that I had failed at internally regulating my own stupid-ass behavior, but I still wanted to drink because I figured the more drinks I had the less I would care about my failure to regulate that stupid-ass behavior. So when I was leaving the ballroom, still wearing the ridiculous blue wig, and one of my team members came up to me and asked if I wanted to continue the party at the local dive bar, I smiled real wide and said “when in Rome” and off I went, out those big hotel double doors, with like six other people, into the concrete jungle of downtown Dallas, where massive obelisks pulsing with technicolor rainbow light pierce the heavens and the pretty faces of huge women on billboards look down on you and corporate brands try their very best to invade your mind. It was all very surreal, being drunk in the middle of a midnight metropolis, having no idea where I was going, chain-smoking cigarettes, following the leader, just hoping for the best.

We must have walked at least half a mile, passing a number of mentally ill homeless people wearing all sorts of dirty ripped-up clothing, some of whom with backpacks nearly bursting on their backs, others with shopping carts full of heavy-duty trash bags and miscellaneous junk all of which seemed entirely useless but surely had some sort of imaginary use to them, the mentally ill homeless people, one of whom was a barely clothed skeletal woman lying supine on the concrete in a pile of her own filth right outside a sketch-as-fuck alley, and she was holding a sign with incomprehensible scribbles on it and screaming some quite unpleasant things about my father as I passed her by.

The bar was called The One-Eyed Penguin. It was one of those second-story bars in which you have to walk up this long flight of claustrophobic stairs with stickers all over the walls to get to the bar proper. The bar itself was pretty small, but it had a pool table and an outdoor space to smoke. The people I was with got themselves some shots then started playing pool. I ordered myself another Corona, my sixth, and asked the bartender if I could smoke in this place, but he said no, you have to go outside to the porch, so I went outside to the porch, sat down on an uncomfortable stool and lit a cigarette, then I gazed out at the midnight metropolis skyline with something like awe before a couple walked out there with me, and then they started smoking, and then they started making out. The woman was pretty cute. I was watching them, perhaps a bit longer than I should have, but they didn’t notice me. I was thinking about how long it had been since I had felt like that, so in love or limerence or whatever that I would be willing to make out with a woman right there in front of people at the local dive bar, and how, being married, that sort of excitement just sort of fades away after a while, fades away into comfort and complacency, and this thought sort of depressed me a bit, so I lit another cigarette and gazed down at the concrete below me, where I saw a homeless man trying to bum cigarettes off some dude walking by, and I started to think like how do you get to that point, that point where you’re wearing like poop-stained pants and bumming cigarettes off random people at midnight in downtown Dallas, and I started wondering like, perhaps it’s addiction, perhaps addiction is how you get to that point, addiction not only to alcohol, but to anything, addiction to digital entertainment, chemical substances, irrational thought patterns, feelings both emotional and physical, and it was at that point that I started to feel bad for that unhoused individual. I started to feel real bad. So I watched him a little while longer. I watched person after person wave him off, ignore him, keep walking, until eventually I watched him stagger off to a street corner, sit down with his knees up, fetal almost, and just rock back and forth. And that’s when I became overwhelmed.

I became overwhelmed with some sort of radical empathy.

Looking down at that dirty man from my smoky perch, I saw a seriously fucked individual. I saw a Sisyphusian brain pusher, someone who had failed to internally regulate his own stupid-ass behavior, someone who was just born that way. I saw an addict. I saw myself.

So, leaving my half-full Corona behind, I stepped down that long flight of claustrophobic stairs, exited the bar, walked right up to that unhoused man, gave him my half-full pack of cigarettes, then I just walked off, back to my hotel, where I took the elevator up to my room, called my wife, and told her all about my night.