I wonder, a lot of the time, if I’ll ever get tired of licking my own wounds. The old world’s been gone a long time, and I still circle around it like everything just happened. Thinking this way ends up freezing the calendar. A decade’s passed at blinding speeds and my body’s all beaten down and broken. The concrete flowers done grew up, wilted, and got replaced with people from my generation! The bums from my youth have been gone a long while now, and familiar faces from my time have taken their place, have grown up to become tweakers, and a lot of them are just flat out dead.
They saw my friend back in our hometown, he was trying to get a ride to the city. Apparently, his eyes were all swollen and black. I’m not sure who did it but given how much he drinks, it wasn’t really a surprise. That’s not to say I’ve seen him be particularly shitty towards anyone, but those are the risks that come with the lifestyle.
I’d describe our decades long friendship as being based around convenience. We were both losers and losers need friends too.
I was always self-paced with new ideas. I tried to read or listen to anything new or novel. When I wasn’t a complete degen, I was following my own path towards what I thought were important ideas. My buddy wasn’t really like that.
We didn’t approach alcoholism the same way. I went inward; I quietly tried to drink more than I did before. I tried to ride that line between buzzed and fucked up. I tried to push my tolerance while keeping everything on track, as much as possible.
I never wanted to come across as sloppy. Problem with being a fuck up, is that when you do slip up, no one will remember you redlining it for years before. They’ll only remember you being a sloppy mess, so the overall project really didn’t help in the long run.
My friend was what we call a “soak.” He hung out all the time, but he never contributed shit to anything or anyone. Never as a courtesy, never “just cause”. It was the strangest thing, dude soaked up booze and smoke from everyone.
I guess we liked him enough when he wasn’t sloshed.
What I’m getting as this: we talk in circles when we’re drunk and that tendency doesn’t go away simply because you sober up. You learn to live with it as best as you can, and that’s about all you can do without venturing into mindfulness or meditation. I would never claim to have a real ailment that fucks with people, but goddamn is my brain a bit fucked. It’s like a minefield of hangnails.
Old memories live on. Old events live on. Regrets about the past live on. Never healing, never peeling completely off. Always present. And each time I stumble over a hangnail, I want to scream, I want to yell, I want to fire off all of my muscles to pull away from my own brain.
My buddy would talk in circles. Always about what we drank the last time we hung out, what he drank the last time he was drunk, we were in our mid-to-late 20’s, and he was still bringing up shit that happened ten years before. It was a challenge to hang out with him because he wasn’t really interested in anything. He lost a few people in his life and if he wasn’t talking about what he drank, he’d talk about them and other sad stuff.
I knew there was a person in there, I knew that he was interested in life at one point, and I had to pry it out of him. Had to fish for threads so he could talk about stuff that he used to care about. And that’s what we all are to a certain degree. And by “we” I mean my own specific strata of aging degen loser.
I was twenty-four when I realized that I could simply remove myself from miserable people. My other buddy sold a brick of government cheese for a liter of vodka and he wanted to share it with me, which, to be fair, was pretty sick. What wasn’t sick was the woe-is-me. It was a repeated cycle of stories, and he circled around them for at least an hour and a half. It got to the point where I could guess where each thread would lead to.
I appreciate the free buzz but if it means I have to listen to a drunk talk in circles and try to make me feel bad for their bad decisions?
Yeah, fuck that.
And that’s how I approached the situation. He started on another retelling of the same stories, and I stood up. Finished my next shot. Turned around and just walked away.
You’re allowed to do that, turns out.
He was a friend. Someone who had been in my life for a long time. But the lives we were living, the mental decline that we were inflicting on ourselves with hundred proof, that shit was making us slow.
I say all of that, to say this: I didn’t change much internally. I’m still licking my wounds. I’m still thinking about the past. I still relive all of it. I still get preoccupied by it. I don’t really know any other way to live. And the more I hold on to the past, the more time I lose out on. It’s a real problem, and a problem I wish could heal, or at least, lessen.
My parents used to terrify us with their old stories, and I don’t think it was intentional. I don’t think they were trying to one up each loss with more hurt. I don’t think they really knew what kind of effect it’d have on us. It was just who they were and these were the lives they lived.
I don’t have a family to trauma-dump on, so I do it through my art and my writing. Let it go somewhere where it can die permanently, like the final leaves falling off of a fucked epigenetic tree.
I don’t want to mention anyone by name, and there are stories I don’t think I should share, because they belong to someone else. They belong to different families and different friend groups. I’m not in the business of writing fiction or fictionalizing things that happened.
All of that to say, that I still think about the past. I still think about people who died. I still think about old friends. But I’m old now and I don’t really have as much of a connection to the past or those past feelings like I used to. It’s lot like getting a toenail removed. It hurts, but the skin hardens eventually. And sometimes a direct hit can still feel strange, but it ain’t like it used to be.
Death Premonition – my buddy’s been dead a long time now. Him leaving hit hard because we were similar. He was the type of person to get curious about stuff, and he’d search for some kind of answer, might not always be the right answer, but he was open to learning and thinking. Being open to new ideas, to new experiences, that’s a lot rarer than you’d think. Especially in a no-name, isolated ass town.
He died at the beginning of 2014. I would then proceed to drink more than I ever did before. That would go on for two years. And then I would eventually sober up. Sobering up meant that all of the people I used to associate with were left in the past. And the good people I knew before life got bad were long gone.
Life got quiet. Life would be quiet until 2021.
My family opens gifts at midnight on Christmas. They gave me two jugs of cheap wine. A bottle of cheap wine has as much of a kick as a single forty ounce of malt liquor. I got a hold of my buddy, who was usually up pretty late, and asked if he wanted to catch a quick buzz. He said he was down and that we should meet in the woods, which was a little over halfway between my community and town. “The woods” was a large creek area, with a decent fishing spot, that used to have a main road going through it about eighty years prior.
The state eventually made a proper highway and a lot of those old roads and bridges started to crumble into nothing. All that was left was a degraded dirt road, one that would get overgrown and washed out, more and more through the years.
The old bums called that creek area Ho-Chi-Man Trail, as a good number of them were vets.
Pops said he once found police negatives down there with pictures of a frozen dude, half submerged in the water.
I don’t know how true that is, but I do know that a pair of brothers died near that lake, one on one side of the road, the other on the other side, that was a long, long time before I was born.
Our bored imaginations used to search around for something interesting. We’d walk up that road to the church in the summer, about eight of us. Our grandparents were lifelong church goers, and the church would feed the community. Someone burned it down eventually.
Our older cousins would tell us about “tiny men made of sticks” that were hiding down there in the woods.
Time would paint that area as harmless. As I got older, I’d walk the actual creek line with pellet guns and .22s. When I got even older, I’d wander through in the middle of the night, with pupils the size of saucers, mind overrun by a mushroom, with stars hanging low overhead.
One day a relative would get beat to near-death just passed the creek.
On Christmas morning, 2013, at approximately 1am, the sky was clear. The moon was in its last quarter but still bright enough to light up the woods when reflected off the snow. My buddy came down from above, and we went for a walk. We followed the gravel road, passed the creek, up the hill, and down again, all the way to a hidden pond, about a mile away from town. We caught a buzz and caught up.
He was excited about a party happening on New Years Eve. I told him I could get someone to work for me, and that we could get a few people down near our little campsite/bonfire area. He wasn’t interested in that because the party was supposed to be a big one.
I don’t think I could’ve gotten anyone to work for me anyway.
It’s been so long that I can’t even fake a conversation between us for anyone reading this.
We drank two bottles of wine and started walking towards town. I went with him back to his street, said goodbye and made plans to drink soon.
I used to wash dishes at an old folks home. It was on the edge of town. It was a solid walk, you could take the highway or cut through the woods. I’d walk to and from even if the weather was shit, and the weather was shit. It was cold as fuck. But, when you get moving, it’s like an inner furnace starts goin’ and the cold doesn’t really fuck with you so much. Not as much as the frozen patches on the roads and sidewalks.
A section of the old-old road started to erode by then. In the real world, that thing was up to my chest. I got daily updates on a neighbor’s SUV. It got stuck in that eroded ditch earlier in the week. And each morning it got more and more fucked up. By the end, every piece of glass, every light, every window, all smashed and broken.
Between Christmas Day and New Years Eve – there came a dream. A vivid fucking dream.
In the dream, I’m walking that stretch of road and fall into that washed out section. It’s a lot fucking deeper than I remember. It becomes a cave system. There’s something calling out to me, telling me to get closer, so I follow.
At the back of the cave is a snake made of neon colored glass. It shakes its rattle before chasing after me.
I am not athletic.
I am not able to escape in time.
I try to climb up and out but I’m too slow.
It bites me.
I open my eyes and I’m in this massive space, inside of a dusty warehouse, but it felt like the inside of a teepee.
There are these massive, massive robed or cloaked figures, all standing silently.
I find myself falling to my knees in front of one and I start to cry and beg and cry.
“Are they going to kill me? Are they going to kill me? Are they going to…”
This cloaked figure presents a dead infant in front of me. I instinctively start smashing it with my foot. I’m scared as shit and WOOOOF.
I’m awake.
Fuckin’ shook.
Freaking out as the dream residue slides back like cooking oil in a bottle.
I had to work on New Years Eve and Day. I was kind of pissed, but only on a “I wish I could be getting sloshed” level.
New Years Eve – pops got me a bottle of wine, nothing strong, but it was alcohol.
Instead of getting shit faced off of some cheap booze, I painted. I painted and listened to a lecture by Manly P Hall. You can still listen to it as it’s freely available – Secret Powers and Why We Should Not Use Them.
He says something like, “prayer works, and because prayer works, we should pray for good things if we have to pray.”
I didn’t think much of it. I was never a theosophist, or a particularly avid Hall listener, but his lectures were interesting and strange enough as background noise.
I remember saying “I hope you end up in jail or a ditch.”
Not aimed at anyone in particular.
I was annoyed about not being able to drink, so I put some of that negativity out in the world.
Do I think I caused any of this nonsense with my attitude alone? Fuck no. Not one bit. But it is interesting, the way that things worked out.
Out of respect for my friend and his family I will end things here.
My buddy went missing that night. His family would go looking for him the next day, and the day after. I thought he got got for a night in the drunk tank, worst case scenario.
My ma would tell me that they found him about three days later. The weather cleared up and a good number of people were able to walk in a massive line out in a field. The big party he talked about was out in the country a good way. I’m not sure what he was thinking. We used to hunt out there; it’s a decent drive, and a walk that I never heard of anyone taking before.
I guess he figured someone would be driving and he could hitch a ride in.
Sometime later, after a lot of drinking and crying, and moving on, I had another dream. A dream that I think deserves a retelling here.
In the dream, I’m hovering over where he went missing. I’m a good way back and up, but I can see whereabouts they found him. And the dream says, quite explicitly, that I should go back out there with some sage. I should go out there, light the sage, and make sure there’s a trail of smoke from where they found him, all the way back to his grave.
I never did do that.
And I don’t think he’s trapped out there.
I’m too much of an atheist to think that way. I listened to too many near-death experiences to think that someone’s soul could get lost in the wilderness. I’m sure we’re all going somewhere strange, outside of space and time, or at the very least, we’ll return to nothingness again, and before you know it, we’ll cry and breathe again, in another life.
I do think, though, that these types of dreams are what informed the actions of old school medicine men and mystics, and potentially were why certain traditions or rituals started.
Behold A Red Horse 