Oh shit, It’s my liver’s 25th birthday!
A few years ago I decided I didn’t really care about my own sobriety anniversary so much anymore. With that, I promised myself I’d lay off this kind of shit. But, 25 years seems like a big deal round number sort of a thing so here goes More Self-Aggrandizing / Depressing Shit Which You May Or May Not Find Useful In Your Recovery Journey: The Quarter Century Edition. (it starts off like a big bummer and gets pretty OK by the end, promise)
Hey, it’s close to mother’s day. How’s your mom doing? Mine’s still dead. You remember, she smoked two packs a day for 50 years and then ran up a quarter of a million dollars in cancer treatment medical debt right at the finish line. To be honest, she was always doing cool shit like that. Blowing shit up and leaving the cleanup portion to the people around her was her only lifelong hobby. It took me way too long to figure that out about her and I’m still dealing with bits of it now. Which is a very cool and healthy thing, tbh.
What about your big brother? Is he doing alright? Mine’s still dead. You remember, he killed himself in the driveway of our house when I was 15. Can’t say he was always doing shit exactly like that because, you know, you can only pull that off once, right?
So yeah, big brother who you had an adversarial relationship with kicks it, mom still around at the time but she super sucks in all the ways you really don’t want a mom to, Dad pretty solid but somehow always at work so we can afford to have an otherwise normal life. What are you to do when you’re a weird young person not getting the wisdom, guidance, and companionship you should be getting from those relationships? You outsource that shit. I can’t say I ever went looking for a big brother type figure in my life after mine died. We were very different kinds of kids and didn’t spend all that much time being cool to each other. It was a drag having a live-in bully when I really could have used some kind of a trustable guide and mentor. With that, I can’t say I ever knew what it was like to have a traditional kind of big brother relationship. After he was gone I was definitely able to get those big brotherly emotional vitamins and minerals elsewhere though. Kinda by accident most of the time.
One of the more pivotal people who was there for me in this capacity was my hometown friend Bill. He died a couple of months ago ( I know I said this one got OK by the end but we’re not there yet. Just hang on). Bill had a massive heart attack. It was the only kind I can imagine him having because he was a massive guy. High school football and wrestling star. Just a large and solid dude, both physically and vibes-wise. Big personality, top notch puns, perfect teammate, natural born beef-squasher. Not exactly the kind of person I liked to roll with when I was younger but, like every other extrovert who has forced me to be their friend over the years, I appreciated how different we were once he cornered me into getting to know him.
Bill and I became friends as I was really starting my slide into being a full time alcoholic and drug addict. We worked in a lot of different restaurants together, we hung out a lot, it was cool. Let me tell you about some ways he saved my life: there was the time we were drunk in the woods at night while camping and we all went to a big cliff for some reason and he grabbed the ass of my pants as I obliviously and drunkenly walked off the cliff in the dark. My biggest concern at the time was that my hat came off when he jerked me back over the edge and it ended up like a hundred feet down the cliff. I told him that was his fault. He got me safely away from the edge of the cliff and then kinda beat the shit out of me for being such a gigantic asshole. He was right about that and I super deserved it for being a reckless and ungrateful dickhead. We went back to being friends like an hour later.
A few years before that he had introduced me to the sport of disc golf. Once I got sober I started to take it seriously and that dumb-ass sport ended up taking me all over North America and Japan in the 15 or so years that followed. Weird, right? I learned a lot about myself and my place in the world out there in the world of professional disc golf (back before the sport was taken over by weird christians, anti-trans fuckheads, and statistics nerds). Bill was a big part of that. We continued to play together as homies and doubles partners any time I would be back in my hometown in those days.
The biggest way he saved my life was by providing a lot of the resources and all the physical space for me to start seriously learning how to produce and record music. A couple of years after I got sober, He and his girlfriend at the time rented a house in the suburbs that was way too big for them so we converted the entire downstairs into a project studio. I recorded some punk and metal bands down there but mostly I spent hours upon hours learning, via trial and error, the technical aspects of making music. When I decided I was no longer fit to live in the south and made the decision to move to the pacific northwest, we didn’t split up the gear. He just gave me all the stuff that was his. I didn’t understand it then but after a few years I realized he was more of an acoustic guitar and mandolin kind of guy. He had no passion for the technical parts of it so he let me run with it. Amazing. Neither of us ever suspected I’d turn pro with that shit and end up doing it all over the world. All that time spent down there in the basement endlessly recording bullshit was all time I wasn’t fucking around with the idea of picking up the bottle again. So, in the short term, it kept me from going somewhere I shouldn’t have been. In the long run, it’s taken me everywhere I’ve ever wanted to go.
He and I kinda fell out of touch about 8 years or so ago when I got off facebook (no regrets). I hadn’t really thought too much about how impactful all of his contributions to my life had been until the past few years. I’m bummed that I never got a chance to tell him how I felt about all that shit but he was always the kind of guy who could see the horizon in any situation, so I guess it’s all right in the end. I’m sure he understood it as it was happening.
Bill wasn’t the only big brotherly kinda dude I’ve had in my life, but he was the biggest (by volume). Once I got out to the pacific northwest 20 some-odd years ago I was sort of out of striking distance for a lot of my mom’s dumbest bullshit. And, continuing my lifelong process of being adopted by extroverts and then being made to be their friend, I ended up becoming friends with some people who absolutely won the genetic lottery when it comes to moms. Those folks saved my life a few times too.
My friend Aaron started as a disc golf friend and quickly became a real brotherly kind of guy. So much so that he would let me borrow his parents when I would spend holidays in Portland instead of going back to visit my family… which was most of the time. I was on a strict “only go home for weddings and funerals” diet at the time and it was great. But, it was also a pure joy to get to know Aaron’s folks over the years. Aaron moved out of state to get his life going in a big way after a few years but I kept spending holidays and dinners and whatnot with his folks. It was nice and I felt welcome.
My Dad has always been solid so Aaron’s dad didn’t need to fill that role. He became more of a quietly hilarious friend to me who forced me to take home books I didn’t want to read but which became life changing favorites. That whole family was always doing shit like that, honestly. Being around it, being a part of it, healed things in me that I didn’t even know were bruised or broken. Aaron’s dad died recently as well. The one-two punch of losing Bill and Aaron’s dad was a lot, man. Both of them changed my life in the best ways. One of the books the dad made me read was Man-eaters of Kumaon. A kind of “Tales of True Adventure!” book from the 40’s about hunting tigers in India. I had no idea why a grown-ass man would still love a kid’s adventure book as an adult and no idea why he would want me to read it. But I relented as he softly bullied me into reading it. Then I understood. That man never lost touch with his inner child and he made sure to do things that nurtured that child for the entirety of his adult life. After realizing that, I loved the book too. Still do, in fact. I visited Aaron’s mom not too long after he died and I asked her for his copy of that book. She gave it to me and I only cried a little. Now I’m using it to nurture my inner child too so it’s all good.
Aaron’s mom though. She made me read One Hundred Years of Solitude and that one still lives deep in my bones. She always treated me like I was a good person and, to be honest, that was a new thing for me. One year she even let me carve the turkey at thanksgiving. I did a kinda shit job of it but she let it ride. And man, to be cared about and trusted by a nice, cool, amazingly well read, super interesting, cleverly funny, and bravely tender mom figure like that. Buddy, that shit is wild. I can’t believe folks are out there spending their whole lives with moms like that. Just being able to borrow one for 15 years has done wonders for me. The hours I’ve spent in her house chatting in the kitchen or recounting mildly scandalous anecdotes by the fireplace have been among the most well spent hours of my life.
Not too long after Aaron invited me into his life I became friends with my homie Ryan. We worked in a music venue together. He was kinda living like a dumb kid but we adopted him to the production team from the wilds of the security crew anyway. We ran the living hell out of him to make him a top notch production guy and helped him turn his life around in the process. This was when I was still kinda new to being the boss in a music industry organization and I was way too much of a hard-ass about shit. I was way too much of a hard-ass about everything back then, really. Anyway, one day Ryan’s mom sent me a thank you card for being such a good friend and mentor to Ryan. I had no idea how to deal with that. And just like that, I was once again being reeled in by an extrovert. Over the next few years I spent some holidays with that family too.
In the time since we’ve all stayed close. She’s another absolutely rock solid mom. Super sweetheart, so kind, absolutely determined to look right through all the weird tattoos and evil-obsessed bullshit accessories that dominated my and Ryan’s lives, wardrobes, and vibes in order to spend peaceful moments together. She treated me like a benevolent older brother kind of dude to Ryan. And man, I was not prepared for that. To be valued in that way was what the kids used to call “That new new shit”. Until then I had never thought of myself as a person with the capacity or ability to be a mentor or a role model. I was resigned to just being “a young adult for the next however many years I would accidentally live”. But man, once she saw it in me, I had permission to see it in myself. These days, I'm gonna mentor the living shit out of motherfuckers. I gonna nurture their strengths so fucking hard. I'm gonna protect their weaknesses so good they won’t know what hit ‘em. But it took her giving me a thank you card (and also a gluten free cake, if I recall correctly) to get that whole ball rolling.
So what’s the moral of the story here? I guess it’s this: If your family played a big part in fucking you up, fuck them. You’re free to let other people invite you into their families to un-fuck you up. I highly recommend it. No need to go looking in the rear view mirror while you’re doing it. So yeah, Happy Mothers day to Roberta & Jeri: the moms I didn’t know I needed, the moms I now know each one of us deserves. I love you both and I wouldn’t be here without you. Eternal thanks to Aaron and Ryan for letting me soak up some of the love your families have so much of. All the gratitude to the collected big brothers I’ve had along the way and all the rad little motherfuckers who now let me be their big brother. That still seems like a questionable move on their part but I’m doing my best, promise.
And, as always, if you’re struggling with the bottle or the needle or whatever don’t hesitate to reach out. If you want to have a life free of that shit, you deserve to have it and you can have it. I’m one of the stupidest people I know and I managed to get off all that shit. I’m sure you can too. Seems scary as hell until you do it.
Alright, I promise not to do this again until 2049. Or the next time I feel like it. Whichever comes first.
Update: turns out there is an action shot of me wrecking that turkey. Thanks Aaron.
Haven't had enough? You can read more of this bullshit here:
The First One!
The Helpful One!
The Oh Shit Mom Has Cancer One!
The Short One!
The 23rd One! It's A Big Bummer!
