My writing was my redemption.
In grade school, I kicked a window pane out of the back door. My mother grounded me. My mother said, No TV. My mother said, No monkeybars and no tag with the neighborhood kids. My mother said, No Saturday morning cartoons until you write me a story.
About what? I asked.
My mother said, About whatever you want.
So I sat and I struggled and eventrually I wrote a story about a talking parrot that lost his way in the Grand Canyon. A firefighter came to his rescue.
Sometimes it was an essay, like when I was caught throwing rocks at cars.
Or it was a poem, like when I got in a schoolyard fight.
Whatever the form, my writing forgave my sin.
My writing was my redemption.
I grew older and again in need of salvation. I needed to be saved from my contempt of myself, from the contempt of my peers. I needed to be saved from the soul-crushing experience of high school.
There is no such thing as being gay in high school. There is only being a faggot or a dyke.
So I hid in my closet, sought refuge in my basement bedroom. I stayed awake until 2am or later re-imagining my experiences. I wrote the dialogue of what I should have said. I wrote the action of how I should have behaved. I created a new self for myself. Late, late, much too late I stayed awake and awoke a new identity, a new image that existed on paper. My paper savior.
Everyday in high school I died. Every night in my notebook I was reborn.
In adolescence my writing saved me from myself. Once again I was redeemed.
My writing was my redemption.
After high school I attended the Evergreen State College for nine months. After high school my self-esteem diminished again, but instead of losing and finding myself in writing, I found drugs and lost my mind.
I befriended the wrong people. Our sole common interest was getting high.
At first we were getting high once every Friday or Saturday.
Then we were getting high two days in a row.
Then we were getting high twice in one day.
Then we were getting high before class.
It wasn't long before class was just time away from the bong.
And then it wasn't long before I spent the entire weekend high on acid. Or mushrooms. Or ecstacy. Or some veritable rainbow of pharmacuticals. It wasn't long before I spent the weekdays trying to unstring myself from being strung out. As the weekends grew longer and longer, my self-esteem grew weaker and weaker.
I faded away. I faded into co-dependency. I let my friends dictate my actions, my decisions, my personality. I would sit down with a pen and feel as blank as the page in front of me. Soon I abandoned writing altogether.
When my nine months was up, I left. I returned only once ot visit my friends. I entered the roon and saw all the familiar faces. I recognized not only the owners of those faces, but their expressions. Every eye was glazed in red. Every eyelid drooped. Every posture slouched. Every lip curled in a stupified smile.
This is what I must have looked like for those nine months.
When I last saw him, my friend Tavis said to me, If I puke tonight, don't worry. I just did too many drugs today.
These drugs included: cocaine, ecstacy, GHB, marijuana and alcohol. Since he and I stepped over every drug boundary in our nine months together, had I stayed, I would have been right in the gutter beside him. He and I were closet homosexuals together. We were lovers, but we never fucked. The way we did drugs together was itself a form of fornication.
Subtract writing and my life equals this.
I moved back home, back to the shelter of my closet, back to the bedroom in the basement.
I got a job and put myself back together. I tried to salvage something, anything from my time as a drug-addled college student, so I wrote about it. A retroactive journal. I catalogued my experiences. This is my brain on drugs. These experiences gave me material.
The act of writing gave meaning to this worthless college experience. The act of writing made me feel that my time wasted all the time was not a waste of time. I wrote and my pages filled in, and I was no longer a shadow of my drug-abusing friends.
My retroactive journal redeemed me retroactively.
My writing was my redemption.
In a state of grace I moved to Bellingham. After another aborted attempt at academia, I discovered what Oscar Wilde meant when he said, Work is the scourge of the drinking class. I toiled unstimulated, and when the day was done I imbibed with my coworkers. I spent every morning reviving my body and every evening erasing the workday.
The cycle recurred for four years; and many times I discovered the meaning of Nirvana, the state of complete oblivion. I also discovered my brain afflicted with alcohol functioned no better than my brain afflicted with drugs. Again my writing waned.
The sole ray of hope that shined through this alcoholic haze interrupted the cycle in the beginning of the third year. My relationship with alcohol changed over night. No longer just a consumer, I became a producer. I became a brewer. The activity of drinking became occupational, and I found contentedness in the brewhouse. This was not because of my daily proximity to beer. It was because this was work I actully enjoyed.
Brewing gave me greater satisfaction than writing. Although I had all the beer I desired, I didn't feel compelled to drink to exess. With a clear mind and a satisfying occupation, I wrote daily in my journal.
But this was only a year long respite. The brewery closed, and I was laid off. The cycle relapsed and recurred for another year.
I still struggle with its ups and downs. This is why I'm committed to succeeding in writing, so I won't forever be trapped in the proletarian cycle of work and drink. In writing I hope to find an occupation that stimulates me as brewing did.
I'm enjoying the challenge. I'm enjoying myself. I write and remember the satisfaction I associated with brewing. But although I enjoy it, I doubt I have the chops to write for a living. It seems I would have to swim across the ocean to reach writing professionally, the goal is that remote. It's a task that collasal.
The undertow of the drinking cycle still pulls forcefully, but now I have writing to keep me afloat.
My writing will be my redemption.
