so you want to take a vacation from your problems...

There is a saying in my house, a phrase we use when someone is trying to escape their lives, their reality, through avoidance. Usually commercial grade, illicit avoidance. Any practicing or relapsing addicted can be described as "taking a vacation from his/her problems." I think it is safe to say that I am an expert in such vacationers. I could even call them travelers, riding the snake or dragon or any other reptile, men and women who walk a dark road, one that often doubles back on itself, full of menacing pot holes and lined with houses of ill repute. Whether a traveler is collecting poppies or dusting snow caps or wearing vibrating beads, he or she is actually not traveling at all but sitting at the bottom of a forgotten, dry well wondering when someone will send down the bucket. 

I have been in such a well, and I too thought I was on a vacation. I was still riding the wave of my emo nineties cred (yeah, I know, I'm old). I was out six nights a week. Searching searching searching. I went back stage at shows, and skipped the line at clubs, and had all manner of doormen call me "sweetie." Being young and being cute and being able to hold my liquor was the trifecta. At least that was how it felt at the time.  I'll dub this time period in my life as "college." I did go to class, but I did not live in a dorm, or have the typical experience which that word usually reflects.

(this is me back then, obviously about to tell the photographer to frog off)

While I was in "college" I met hundreds of people and made no friends (Miss j the exception that proved the rule). For someone who valued her life, I spent far too much time lingering in 24 hour fast food spots, throwing up into their parking lot bushes. Glamorous, I know. I went to magical places like the city impound lot at 3 am, the rooftop of the Johnson Paint Company (though I can't remember how I got there) and the Micky D's on the McGrath O'Brien highway. Maybe I wasn't technically an addict, or maybe I was. I often embarrassed myself, told lies, put myself and others in danger, did things I couldn't remember and generally made poor decisions. 

Amazingly, one day it stopped being fun. One day I woke up at the bottom of a well and thought, this is not as nice as I thought it would be. When I was 18 and first started traveling, I realized that drugs (including alcohol) just made doing nothing fun, and I promised myself that I wouldn't let them take over my life. I saw too many friends go down that road. Some scratched and kicked their way into rehab, some turned blue on the hardwood floor of my apartment and had to be kept awake and breathing for hours, some disappeared in the middle of the night, some went to jail, some were burned up, some buried alive under all their wasted potential. Many years later I remembered that realization. It took a whole year to find a way out of that well. But when I did, I was all done. I turned it off. One day I just didn't want to drink any more. One day I just didn't want to be miserable any more. I think that is what leads all addicts to recovery, not the hope of happiness, but the rejection of misery. Maybe I'm not really an addict or maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones in recovery. I still have a drink or occasionally two (after two I am a mess). And if I have two I often want a third, and I feel that old twinge, the old rubber neck of the addict in me looking for the next party, not wanting the night to end, searching for some like-mined soul to join me in my dank little well. But I never do have that third drink.