The number of problems stays the same, but the severity becomes lessened.

           I caved and bought a printer for $45 bucks today. My math teacher has something going on with keeping things in order, which requires her students assembling packets of work on a regular basis. I'm not 100% sure exactly what she wants, because listening to her is difficult for me: she goes into great detail about the end result of whatever it is we're doing, but kind of neglects the introduction. She explains what order the pieces of paper in these packets are supposed to go in, but doesn't tell us what in the blazing hell the assignments we're supposed to arrange are.

Congratulations, you've managed to make math 050 hard.

         Turns out setting up a 45 dollar printer isn't as easy as one might think. Especially when one has to download the setup install software using his slow, so slow, phone as a hotspot. It looks like it's going to take another six hours to download, and I actually thought about waiting it out. Kind of like Monday, when i stayed up until four in the morning doing who knows what. I had to be in class at eight and in order to do that i had to be at the bus stop at six thirty. I slept until six thirty. I'm pretty sure I took my alarm and stuffed it under the blankets, because I missed class.
                What I didn't remember about not eating is that my memory starts to slip. I forget things like keys, toolboxes, and which clever place i'd decided to hide my passport. I forget class times (which is why i have my schedule written everywhere; I'm this close to acting like Guy Pearce's character in Memento) and sometimes I forget to be polite. I'm thinking that tomorrow i should probably get a premature baby-sized burrito from Qdoba and make my brain work again. I wasn't thinking about the logistics of all the stuff i had to carry, and walked around looking like a confused hobo most of the day.

I have conflicting interests.

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I started writing this on wednesday. Whatever that means.

                 I slept through three alarms this morning. The rooms here are set up with bunk beds, so they can (barely) accommodate two people to a room, which can be a pain in the ass. Generally I'm pretty easy going, and i don't get upset if things are messy or loud or whatever (I've had about seven roommates in the lighthouse) because the situation isn't ideal for either of us and I'd rather not make it worse. My roommate, not wanting to be a dick himself and wake me up when all my alarms woke him up instead of me, quietly got out of the top bunk and went downstairs to the TV room to sleep on the couch. I felt like such an asshole! First off, until yesterday i don't think I've ever slept through an alarm, drunk, sober, whatever, I DON'T OVERSLEEP. Second, the guy makes an active effort to not piss me off, and instead of kicking the bed or shaking me (like i would have done), he just went and slept downstairs. Having a roommate like that here is like finding water in the desert.
             Unfortunately, that meant I missed French class for the second time, for the same reason. I had to email my teacher and i can't even remember what the email said. She came across as a little irked, but i'm not going to get dropped for it. which is really good news. I really need to get whatever this is under control; I don't have a good reason to miss class anymore. Except for tomorrow I have an drug/alcohol intake with a mental health place called Touchstone, which has a history of bungling appointments and records. I was supposed to do this on the eighth of August, but when i went in they told me that the guy i was supposed to see was on vacation and treated me like I was an asshole for showing up. These appointments are hard to set up to begin with; they usually have to schedule you over a month in advance because everything is so booked, so hearing that if I wanted to do this thing I would have to re-schedule just made me mad. I ended up pushing the issue and got an appointment for tomorrow, but it starts the same time as my math class. What a pain.
            On the bright side, having a little time to adjust to my new schedule isn't such a bad thing. I've been able to be social sometimes, alone others, and all in all don't feel like i used to. I didn't have it in me to write yesterday. I'd been out living life and kind of enjoying myself, so I don't feel too bad about it. I spent way too much money at the vapor shop, but came out with some cool stuff:

Just… Just look at that! How could I not!?

                  Because i didn't want to spend the extra $15 at Wal-Mart to get a wireless printer, I get a whole new set of problems. The printer i bought came with a software installation disc for WINDOWS, (i own a mac) so my other option was to download the installation software from Canon's website. Which literally took all night because i use my cheap MetroPCS phone as a hotspot, and it downloads at about 12 kbps. When i woke up (late) this morning, i was excited to get started with the whole thing; i went looking for the USB cable that connects to the printer and got confused, because why the fuck would you mass-produce a product and leave necessary parts out of the box?
         Because you're Canon and apparently Canon don't give a fuck.
          I really don't like the fact that i missed even one class this week. I'm not superstitious and i don't believe that rough starts always indicate problems in the future, but it is kind of disappointing to miss classes because of something as mundane as a shitty bus schedule or an exhaustion that literally knocks you out. To my credit, i took the time i missed and used it to make myself feel okay; the time that was taken from me I took back and turned into something positive. Sometimes i have to remember that i've been in worse places doing worse things, and although I'm miles ahead of where i used to be if i fuck this up it doesn't take much to go right back.

The best part is the unavoidable cuddling

           So I'm here for now, but (and this is in no way a sure thing) i get my refund here in ten days. If i can just make it to then, i can work something out. I'm looking at places, but with no deposit and no source of income besides school, people are a little reluctant to hold a place for me.
           

You come to me with your pockets hanging out and you want what?

School

           The first day of fall semester. I don't know what I was expecting, but there are quite a few more people milling about and walking purposefully around campus than I remember there being last year or the year before. Volunteers, or possibly work-study recipients, are handing out coupon books and trying to get people to register to vote. The school (a "no frills" community college of no real significance hitherto) now has an app that allows you to access all your class information and basically every part of your account with Front Range, but I'm pretty sure it's fresh out of beta testing because the fucking thing doesn't do what it's supposed to.

So many half-assed good intentions.

       I got back to Fort Collins two weeks ago. I had been gone for five months, in Loveland and Greeley respectively. When I got back, an almost staggering amount of student housing had been erected, the entire bus system shifted to work around CSU students, and rent got jacked up even higher than it was four months ago. The cost of living in this town is comparable to north Seattle now, and there isn't an ocean for at least a thousand miles. I thought about this a lot in treatment, not judgmentally or with a negative attitude, but objectively: Why would people pay the kind of money they do to live in northern Colorado? Living in a town that basically runs on revenue obtained by the students at CSU, I can see the economical reasoning behind fucking up the bus route to make it more convenient for CSU students. But what about everybody else? 
             The city of Fort Collins' website has a whole plethora of awards and accolades. Like, a whole lot. The second one currently listed is "America's most satisfied city," and that was from Time Magazine in May 2014. 
              I try to look at things objectively, I really do. So I can see how white, well-to-do people without mental illnesses or drug/alcohol problems could live here and be "satisfied". I could see how lots of people with college degrees, spouses, kids and disposable income could be satisfied here. College kids with trust funds and grants obtained by paying others to write their essays? Satisfied as could be. 

"Colorful" being a synonym for "White as Fuck"

              I can also see these "satisfied" people blatantly disregarding, incarcerating, harassing or otherwise maligning those of us who weren't so lucky; escorting the homeless drunks to detox in Greeley (because Fort Collins, despite the prevalence of addiction and mental health disorders, doesn't want a facility that handles these things in their community) or sending them to the already overcrowded jail. If these satisfied people hadn't adopted the self-righteous stance that "They brought it on themselves. I feel bad for them (and this part absolutely must be thrown in there, because pseudo-sympathetic "go to" phrases magically make unpleasant conversations about socioeconomic inequity and priority shifting less important) but they've made their choices," they might not walk around town looking like this:

Yeah, like that, except a whole lot whiter and less presidenty.

      

I know from personal experience what a clusterfuck getting everything together to go back to school can be. It's like playing 'Red light, Green light' with a methed out schizophrenic; one department telling you no, that isn't the correct form, go see this department, fill out this and come back with something else, go online to an account and format nobody explains to you, accept your award offer and BRING ME PETER PAN!

If you forget one little thing, your aid gets denied and you have to go through it all again, this time with the added pressure of classes already having started. It's enough to make you curl up in a ball and cry. Cameo learned this, and I think has been putting forth good effort and coping well. I tried reassuring her that this was a one time thing; that once she got this part out of the way it got so much easier.

 I may have lied to her.

 

Who, me?

             So in ten minutes I get to go down to the kitchen and dining room to clean up after forty nine cranky two year olds disguised as adult men.
             I just have to keep thinking "It's only a few more weeks," because if I don't, I'm going to turn into an insufferable, detail-obsessed pain in the ass, and quite possibly gouge out my eyes with a crusty fork.

You Know Nothing, Jon Snow

Almost a pillar of salt

                So I went to the doctor again today. She cut a mole off my back and cored a piece of my foot to biopsy. I've had a few things biopsied, and I just don't think about what that could potentially mean. She also adjusted my adderall and xanax, which I get to go pick up on monday before class. It's become apparent to me that i'm really going to have to start taking this stuff as it's prescribed, or come a week before refill time I'm going to be a cranky, cranky boy. I can't say that I particularly enjoy the feeling that either drug gives me; I don't feel drunk or woozy when I take the xanax and I certainly don't feel like superman (or even euphoric) when I take the adderall, but they do help me function the way I need to in order to do what I want to do.

              When I went out to New York the last time, I remember the feeling I got flying over the city; seeing all the lights on the ground and the bridges and buildings. It was like I was a tropical fish that had been caught in the ocean, (a la Finding Nemo) put in a tank for years, and through providence or whatever found itself back in the ocean after so much time spent in a ten gallon tank. I had so many feelings and emotions and thoughts, all mixed around in my brain like a freedom smoothie.

Go <3 your own city.

Despite how I handled it when I got stuck in Nashville, (drinking and feeling sorry for myself) that trip was absolutely necessary for me. I had been stuck in Fort Collins for three whole years. Not the whole state of Colorado, just Larimer County. For me, being stationary for that long is practically torture. I actually began referring to Fort Collins as Fort Coffin, and every week spent there was another nail.

               Whenever I get too excited I make mistakes. I love being caught up in the moment so much that I'll start drinking again and make an ass of myself, or forget obligations. When I was younger, that was basically how I lived my life: Fucking go!

               The past eight or nine years I've been stuffing the ghost of Neal Cassady in the metaphorical root cellar. I discovered that I like having some stability in my life, but I only figured that out when all the stability was gone. I'm not sure that anybody likes being tied down, with no wildness or adventure left in their hearts. I know that when my time as a “free spirit” ended I lamented the loss for years. The nostalgia and memories... Driving around in the black Pontiac Arwain brought back from Utah and the biker gang he hung out with there, listening to George Thorogood and drinking Carling Black Label outside some punk club in Seattle. The nights spent at Golden Gardens, drinking Sparks around a burning stack of pallets and wondering where Dan was walking off to, drunk off the alcohol and high off the caffeine and taurine. The anticipation of arriving at a show early to set up and seeing all the kids who were there to see you play. Going to parties and being ready for anything; a fight, a girl, the cops.        

                 Whatever.

                 When that chapter in my life ended, I mourned its passing for a long time. I wanted to feel like I used to, like there was still some wonder left in the world. I quit expressing myself; I let people treat me like shit and didn't stand up for myself under the pretense of “maturity.” The truth was I was still so heartbroken from losing everything I cared about I lost all my self-respect and confidence. I tried to play the part of the adult. I'd go to interviews, tell the people what they wanted to hear, get the job, and decide after a week or two that I hated it and quit. Basically I went through the motions and failed constantly. 

I'll probably have better luck doing it this way.

                When I was drinking, initially I could fool myself into thinking I was still the guy I was before life drop-kicked me into the shitter. As time went on, I was less able to fool myself and more prone to impotent raging at imagined and remembered slights. I pushed all the anger and reaction and humiliation I experienced every day into a little box. I tried to be the little zen center of my crazy-ass universe, but I was really walking around with an unstable vial of nitroglycerine in my shaky hand. 

                 When I drank, all the horrible shit I had done and the abuse I took from other people came out and where I used to explode, I would implode and ruin whatever I felt was actually good in my life.

It's gotten better over the past two years, ever since I got my first DUI and got thrown in jail. It's awful and I feel so stupid that after every other part of my life was taken away, jail was what inspired me to really take getting sober seriously. That probation and the loss of my license were more effective in convincing me to get my shit together than my girlfriend ditching me in Colorado, having to live on the streets of Portland, or the countless times I'd been to detox. 

              

"Where are my goddamned House DVDs?"

                Since then, I have had four relapses. Four relapses in two years seems like a pretty big improvement on six years of drinking every day, but the goal is zero. I'm actually afraid of relapsing again, and heres why:

                Waiting to get into treatment in detox, this 56 year old homeless man I was sharing a room with had two seizures and died while I was taking his pulse. His last words on the face of this planet were spoken after his first seizure when I asked him if he was okay. He said, “I brought this on myself.”

              The impact this had on me wasn't readily apparent; after the paramedics called it, I handled it pretty passively. I didn't want to talk about it and it didn't strike me as anything out of the ordinary, but it made me think that if something didn't seriously change in my life, I was going to be that guy. I was going to die in a crummy detox unit in a place like Greeley, and nobody was going to give a shit.

That night's wedged in my mind pretty tightly. During treatment there wasn't a single desire to drink. Since treatment I haven't had one either, even when I was hanging out with someone who was drinking. I still don't want alcohol around me. Nothing good can come of me going to bars or living with people who drink: It's actually pretty simple when I break it down into those terms.

I could see this working.

           I can express myself again. I don't feel the need to placate anybody anymore, and I'm not going to. As for how I'm going to conduct myself when I get “too excited,” I guess I'll have to wait and see.  

Amy

            In rehab, they didn't allow cell phones, mp3 players, Kindles, Walkmans, (because some of us just can't let go)

or anything electronic, really. Not that I brought one, but they even made the guys with electric razors or clippers keep them locked up with the meds, and sign them out and back in every time they wanted to shave. There was one phone for eighteen people, and two computers with internet for use in job hunting, resume writing, and email checking. It was repeated, almost to the point of contention, that the computers were NOT to be used for Facebook or other social media. The reasoning behind the prohibition of technology (at least as it was explained to me) was that all of us were there to work on ourselves and not to distract ourselves with the outside world for 45 days. I felt like mentioning the giant television with cable in the common area, in the spirit of continuity, but already knew how that would work out. As far as the electric shaving gear went, I still don't know what the point of that was. I mean, the company that the rehab is part of is called North Range Behavioral Health, not North Range Drug and Alcohol Treatment, and it wasn't just addicts in the program. There were people in there with severe psychiatric disorders, and I could understand the why the use of regular razors was diligently monitored.

The staff pretended not to see these, but everybody knew.

           During the first half of my stay, there was a female client in residence with all sorts of triggers, neuroses, and problems in general, I guess. In the beginning, she wasn't full-on bonkers; she had severe separation anxiety, co-dependance, issues that had something to do with her father (I never actually knew what kind- I just sort of assumed she was molested), PTSD and alcoholism. Basically, things that the staff and therapists were adequately trained to deal with. In my opinion, she wouldn't respond to treatment. That was what pissed me off; she took up a lot of time in groups with the same stuff, wouldn't listen to anything anybody had to say, and turned two and a half hours into what seemed like a fucking decade.

             She only got worse over the next two weeks: She went to the hospital once for what turned out to be water poisoning (not like cyanide in the water, she just drank it so compulsively it messed with her system). She had been rocking back and forth in groups since I got there, but she really stepped it up to the point that you couldn't overlook it anymore. She would walk around arguing with herself, and made strange comments about how she was “going to be with her Stephanie soon,” whatever that meant. I got the razor-monitoring in theory before this, but when this woman started playing what she called “hide the razor” with the staff, I gained a new understanding of why.

"Soon we will all be with my Stephanie…"

              Like a lot of people with PTSD, my situational awareness is pretty high. When I get around people who have lost touch with reality, my guard goes up and I get real edgy. This woman put me on edge all the time; she was an out of her mind, razor hiding insomniac in a building with no lockable bedroom doors. Fucked my sleep up worse than ever. The therapists sent her to detox for a few days, to try and figure out what to do with her, but since she was sober they couldn't keep her in detox for very long. She came back for maybe a week and made everybody nervous, but they didn't do anything about it until she sat outside for an hour rocking and shaking, yelling “Amen!” and other religious things with her arms raised to the sky. It was like she was getting plowed by the holy ghost; that's literally what came to mind.

No way in Hell that's the pizza guy.

              The paramedics came and took her to the hospital again, and this time she didn't come back. Whoever decides these things decided that she should be in the Acute Treatment Unit for people with issues that need to be handled pharmaceutically, who also have substance abuse issues. The ATU is also known (to anybody who has spent an extended amount of time in Detox) as the crazy side, because detox and ATU share the same building and the people over there are fucking crazy. She didn't come back to rehab, but she called the client phone at least five times a day for the remainder of my stay.

           Anyways, since I've been out of treatment I've been using my ipod non-stop. I ride the bus and walk everywhere, and since I try to stay out of the Lighthouse as much as I can, I spend a pretty good portion of the day with my headphones on.

I think I might need some new music.

Check Your Privilege (and your underwear)

Sometimes that's just the way it goes.

     I've been spending way too much time alone at coffee shops lately. I don't even buy coffee. It's almost like I'm living a perverted version of a social life; I don't have any friends to meet up with and I don't have any money to buy anything and justify my presence, and yet here I am! It beats sitting at the sober house all day, re-watching episodes of Louie, which really drives home the point that I have no friends.

     An author, I think it was Stephen King, said something along the lines of “The muse doesn't show up every day, but you won't know if she does unless you're waiting there every day.” I probably botched that quote, but I'm through running to Google every time I want to convey something. I have a history of showing up and waiting, and I don't mean metaphorically. I almost did it again this morning, and I feel like I might even be doing it right now. One of my friends, a girl I met in rehab, made plans to come hang out with me this morning after I got done with my probation appointment. Under the impression that this was still the plan, I called her (on my mobile, which is finally back on) and was told that she was meeting up with another friend from rehab. Long story short, I waited at that damn bus stop for a half hour, writing in a little journal and getting annoyed with the music on my ipod, until I said “fuck it, I may as well go get some writing done.”

       It's three hours later and I still haven't heard anything from either of them. And I'm going to sit outside this coffee shop and drink water and write until my computer runs out of batteries and I have to go back to the sober house, where I stayed up until three this morning, packing up the immense amount of dirty stuff my roommate decided to leave when he went to Boulder this weekend and didn't come back. Where a stolen truck plowed into the (thankfully) old, large, and well-rooted tree in the front yard two nights ago. That tree being where it was prevented the truck from smashing into the house, which would have put 49 guys out on the street. Tangents, always with the tangents. A woman who looked a lot like Jessica Walter just walked out of the pizza joint.

     When I was a teenager, there was a shopping center in the town I lived in. When nobody would answer their phones or want to go do anything, I would go and sit in front of the Starbucks and smoke cigarettes until some sort of potential amusement presented itself. As a boredom killer, it didn't work 100% of the time, but more often than not if I sat there for an hour or so something was going to come up. I actually ended up working at that Starbucks for a while.

Maybe that's just how things worked when I was a teenager; I went to junior high and high school in that town (which wasn't very big in any case) and I knew a lot of people. I can't remember ever having any great ideas about where to go or what to do. I mostly just flowed along when something would come up, and it seemed like whoever I was with was just as fluid as I was. Things got a little different when my friends and I started driving, but not much. At least until we discovered Golden Gardens in Ballard.

     Because I am fundamentally leery of new situations (see: crotchety), I didn't take to the beach quite as readily as most of my friends. There were constant invitations from friends of friends to come barbecue at the beach, and bring booze. The first time I went, I wasn't impressed with any of it; the sand was full of broken glass and rusted nails from people burning pallets and sticking their bottles in the fire, the company was a whole lot of people I didn't know who looked and acted like hipster royalty, and my best friend Dan, who got along with everyone, was off getting along with everyone instead of joining me in the shitty attitude section.

That's one aspect of my personality I really don't like. When I go somewhere or do something outside my experience or familiarity, I absolutely refuse to just roll with it until I'm convinced that whatever “it” is isn't going to bite me in the ass. It's a handy instinct; it's probably saved my life a hundred times, but it can also turn me into the king of the party poopers. It recedes gradually though, and the more I went to Golden Gardens, the more I liked it. At least until Jessie (another ex girlfriend. We were together for three years, I think) started taking me along to hang out with her friends.

     Jessie was spoiled.

     Okay, so this one might require some explanation on my part. If you don't mind, I'm going to write what you, the reader, may (or more likely, may not) be asking: “Hey, Ian! How, exactly, do you come to the conclusion that somebody is spoiled? I mean, you grew up with a single father and a brother, and you were POOR! By your standards, 75% of the country is spoiled, right?”

     Well, reader, I thank you for asking (or more likely, NOT) that question. While I will concede that your parents' Scrooge McDuck money vault makes it much easier to be spoiled, it is not a requirement. Spoiling your children is a very easy thing to do, and at its most basic level doesn't require any money at all. When the poor spoil their children, it's an accidental by-product of attempted social mobility (a crime they take very seriously in the suburbs). In my case, growing up poor around more affluent families (my stepmother and her daughter being a perpetual reminder) bred desire for better things and an easier life. I mean, I went to school with these kids, and aside from the ones who played sports better than me, what did they possess that allowed them to get a car on their sixteenth birthday?What did they do to deserve snowboards, gear and season lift tickets while I was getting rusty BB guns and water-damaged clock radios for Christmas?

     Life isn't fair. I know this now and I knew it then. It's one thing to grow up knowing that life isn't fair, but it's a whole other to have your face rubbed in it every day. And to have the same, “If you work hard and pay your dues, success is just around the corner!” speech crammed down your throat when you know, even at an early age, that your socioeconomic status contraindicates any real chance you might have at success, well, you start to get spoiled.

     You begin looking at everything you have as trash. Because compared to everything around you, it IS trash. You wonder why you're fifteen and a half and your dad yells at you to get a job every week while your buddy Mike still gets $100 a week allowance and just got a Subaru from his Opa. But you still ask him to drive you to work and shit.

     Basically, you're raised in an environment that is constantly showing you, through example after example, that the stuff you have is worthless, and that you deserve the same things everybody else has. You quit believing that hard work gets you anywhere, because you've seen your dad come home late and exhausted every day of your life, but your mom still died and you're still eating store brand macaroni and cheese with expired milk while all Mike's dad seems to do is drive his Mercedes to and from the links, and twenty to one when Mike eats mac and cheese it's Velveeta.

     So, in this example, we can't tell if Mike is spoiled or not. Mike might be a great guy, I mean, he gives you rides to and from your shitty job. He has you over for dinner three or four nights a week, and since his mom doesn't work she always cooks up a veritable feast for you two. Mike likes to go do things, like ice skating and bowling and go to the batting cages, and he always pays for you because he likes your company and it doesn't matter to him that you can't afford to pay for it yourself; in his mind, money is there to be spent on things he enjoys. Sometimes Mike will give you shit about being poor, but that's only because to him, money doesn't equal survival or comfort. Money is disposable for Mike.

Mike is lucky, naïve, and yes, a bit spoiled.

     You, however, think you have it figured out. You want to be able to go do things without Mike paying for you, because whenever he asks if you want to go do something, you reply “I don't have any money,” and you are so sick of saying that; it kills you a little inside every time. He just shrugs and says “Don't worry about it,” and you hang your head in shame. He drops you off at your house, you walk into your bedroom and look at all the thrift store clothes in the closet, the books you stole from the library, and the TV you found down the street; bunny ears wrapped in tinfoil and the power button replaced with a pencil. You hate it all. You don't appreciate any of it, and instead of working with what you have, you rail against the system that left you with the short straw.

     You are indeed spoiled.

     I was indeed spoiled.

     When I had nobody in the world left who would take me in, sleeping under a freeway overpass amidst used needles and rats the size of terriers. When I woke up because a 24 oz can of Monster smacked me in the head at 80 miles an hour. When I realized that nobody was coming for me and that I was fucked; that was when I realized how spoiled I was. What made me spoiled wasn't that before I had things like a place to live, food to eat or video games to play. I wasn't spoiled because I could afford to waste money occasionally. What made me spoiled was living like I couldn't do any worse for myself; like I'd hit bottom. The thing that never ceases to amaze me though, is

There's always more bottom.

Fat Boy In Love

Pretty doesn't get hungry

I'm not feeling morbid, but i still think about some pretty strange things. Things like "If I were to blow my brains out with a shotgun, it's such a pity that instead of a whole other world coming into existence all people would get is a mess of blood and bone and grey matter to clean up and put in plastic biohazard bags." I think a lot of these kinds of thoughts are a byproduct of insomnia- I only get an hour or two of sleep and my brain seems like it's constantly on overdrive, but generally can't come up with anything useful or productive.

I finally started writing a book. I haven't told anybody I'm writing a book. I remember living in Los Angeles and every asshole at the Coffee Bean or Starbucks with a Macbook was busily "researching aspects of the characters in their new screenplay," while never actually producing anything. A whole lot of “research” gets done in L.A, that's for sure. Looking up neurological disorders with the online DSM and tacking them on to John Q. Everyman isn't writing, just the same as an acoustic guitar and three chords at the beach isn't music. If you want to pick up women, i guess you're doing it right, but I still hate you. 

That being said, I am sitting in a Starbucks right now, typing on my Macbook. Without purchasing a beverage, because this is Fort Collins, Colorado and you can still loiter here (provided you aren't drunk or look homeless). I'm not doing it for attention. There isn't an internet connection at the sober living house i'm staying at, and even if there were, there are 48 other people living there and I share a shoebox of a room with another guy who's always home. So while I may look like a poser and a schmuck, sitting at starbucks typing on my expensive machine, believe me when I say that I'd rather be entirely by myself doing this.

There's a picture I took of my arm when I was eighteen, nineteen, I cant remember exactly how old I was. My ex girlfriend, Nichol, had broken up with me a few months before I took the picture. I remember that. She was my first real love; the girl I lost my virginity to and the first girl I had ever experienced any depth of emotion with. In the relationship I felt excitement, both physically and psychologically, desire, elation, anticipation, comfort, and confusion. There was also fear, anxiety, crushing despair, possessiveness, rage, spite, and finally, loss.

The year before we started dating, I began a physical transformation. I was 270 lbs and sick of girls referring to me as a teddy bear. I was sick of my dad making casually cruel comments about my burrito consumption at Taco Bell. Once, my stepmother mistook an earthquake for me running up the stairs, and bitched at me until I was standing in front of her while the house shook.

I was sick of my friends making fat jokes when we were drinking around the campfire in the Swedish cemetary or whenever when we went out to eat (even though I ate less than any of them). I hated the fact that I was too slow and fat to catch the bastards who made fun of me because of my weight and beat seven shades of shit out of them, and once I had hit my limit of shame and self-hate, I quit eating.

I had chemical assistance with this; my body, regardless of how healthily I ate, always seemed to go back to at least 250 lbs on its own. I didn't eat much as it was, and I was a vegetarian, but somehow I still stayed fat. This was back when ephedrine was still legal, and was sold at Rite-Aid in the supplement aisles. My boss at Papa Murphy's pizza turned me on to these pills that looked like vitamins (I can't remember the name of the supplement), full of ephedrine and god knows what else, that made my appetite disappear and still gave me enough energy to walk everywhere and live my life. There were some adverse effects: poor circulation, heart palpitations, panic attacks, tremors and the like. I remember one day in college (I was sixteen and enrolled in an alternative program) I had taken like four of these things and drank a big gulp's worth of black coffee. I was sitting outside my English classroom, waiting for my professor, when I really started to shake. This raver kid was crouched against the wall a few feet away from me, high as a kite. When the shaking started, all I could think was “Oh shit, I overdid it this time,” and from the look the raver kid gave me im pretty sure he was thinking the same thing. I popped my headphones off just as a large lady in a blue dress ran by screaming, “Oh my GAWD, it's an earthquake!” and I broke out laughing, relieved that I wasn't in the middle of an overdose.

The nine months leading up to my seventeenth birthday weren't very exciting, although I remember taking so much ephedrine and adderall that I felt cold all the time even if it was 90 degrees out. I functioned well enough; I re-enrolled in regular high school and got good grades in all my classes. I had various jobs I would go to for a while and quit unexpectedly (apparently even large quantities of adderall can't make me enjoy work). My parents had put me on something called an “At-Risk Youth petition” when I was fifteen, which basically meant that they had the final say on anything I wanted to do, under penalty of incarceration. The petition got me to stop smoking pot and taking handfuls of various unidentified pills (for the most part) and kept me in at night. The stimulants I began taking after it went into effect, along with the lack of energy from not eating, kept me docile and focused enough to stay out of trouble.

I made a point of not being home as much as possible. I made a few friends in high school, and spent most of my free time with them. We did stupid, harmless things like spend whole afternoons or evenings at Denny's, smoking cigarettes, (I refuse to set foot in a Denny's since they banned smoking) drinking coffee, and trying to make some sense of the people we were growing into. My friend Danny was on a bowling team back in Astoria or someplace, and he had a job, so a few days a week we would go to the bowling alley and spend an hour or two throwing balls at pins. My improvement was definitely not in proportion to the amount of time I played the game.

When you lose an enormous amount of weight over a very short period of time, your brain doesn't automatically adjust. When I was 160 lbs, I still thought I was fat. When I was 150 lbs, I still thought I was fat. Throughout the process, I received praise from just about everybody in my life; they must have thought that I was working out and eating healthier or something. At 145 lbs, my dad (who just a year before would poke my belly and giggle) would tell me when full grown women were checking me out in the grocery store, which as it turned out happened a lot. All this, and I still thought I was fat. It was like walking around under the impression that I was, in fact, horrifically deformed and everybody was too polite to mention it.

Fatass

By the time I was seventeen and a half, I had gotten down to 140 lbs. At some point during this rapid weight loss, I started dating all sorts of different girls. I never slept with any of them, it was just nice to have some sort of intimacy with someone who thought I was worth their time. I'd never had that before. I still had a horrible self image, and it affected the way I handled just about every situation I found myself in, including relationships. I would date girls for a very brief period of time and break up with them, seemingly at random. Even now I couldn't tell you what made me quit seeing most of them, but I remember thinking that when I broke it off, I was doing them a favor. I was a fucking mess and I knew it, and then I met Nichol.

A close friend of mine named Selena was Nichol's cousin. They lived about a mile away from each other in Kenmore, and had kind of a catty, passive/aggressive thing going on. Selena liked to talk a little shit about Nichol, about her sexual promiscuity and so on. I was seventeen and a half, and while all my friends were out getting laid, I had been losing weight. I thought about sex enough, but despite myself and how I wanted to think about it, I had it in my head that I had to wait for the “right one.” Some antiquated, puritanical notion coupled with my own dysmorphia, I think.

Selena and I used to talk on the phone for hours at night, because we were teenagers and of course we did. Over the course of one of our nighttime phone sessions, the subject of Nichol came up, and I asked if she was single, almost as a joke. I had seen Nichol a year before, while I was sitting at my friend Gavin's computer with a nose-bleed from snorting ritalin all day, and she was hands down the most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on. Even if she was single, she was so far out of my league I'd have a better chance of winning the lottery than sleeping with her. Selena missed the joking tone in my voice, and got really quiet for a few moments. I could tell that she was thinking, and I pushed ahead with it. I asked her for Nichol's number, and if she could put in a good word for me, as it were. I didn't even think about it then, but setting me up with her cousin was probably the most heartbreaking, selfless thing she had ever done: Selena was in love with me. I didn't know it, and if I had I don't know how much I would have cared. That was the kind of guy I was, I guess. And I'm not proud of it.

I can't remember how many nights Nichol and I talked on the phone before we actually met up, but it was enough to pique her curiosity. Her dad was (justifiably) protective of his little girl; she was gorgeous and even though Nichol thought her parents were clueless about her sex life I'm pretty sure they knew more than they were letting on. She had to get permission from them to meet up with me, and there were rules for the meeting. She had to have her friends with her, and we had to meet some place in Kenmore.

I didn't have a problem with this, even though I thought Kenmore was trash. I wanted my friends with me too though, because in my experience nothing good could come from trying to bear up to the scrutiny of a potential mate's best friends without some backup. The bowling alley was too trashy in my opinion, which left Denny's (I apparently had no concept of irony at seventeen) and the docks. So that's what we did; it turned into what we always did. Denny's and the docks.

I showed up early, with Dan and Danny. We spent a lot of time at that Denny's in any case, and I'm pretty sure that in Danny's mind, he was doing me a particular favor by being there for this thing. Danny never had a lot of patience for things he considered stupid or a waste of time (which was also ironic, considering the things he made a priority. One time we were sitting at his apartment, he had Selena in his bedroom, literally begging him to fuck her, and his response was “I'm eating macaroni and cheese! Shut up!”).

Danny and me in Selena's front yard

Nichol walks in about fifteen minutes late with her friends Jenny and Andrea (both of whom I would come to hate for their constant henpecking and Andrea's eventual seduction and subsequent subjugation of Dan). Nichol told me later that she was expecting me to resemble what I had looked like a year before when we had met briefly at Gavin's house, and didn't recognize me in the restaurant. I found this particularly funny; the last time she saw me I was sitting in a computer chair, wearing a ripped up dress shirt with the words “ I Fucking Hate The Beatles” in big block lettering on the back, cursing at the monitor while stuffing kleenex up my bloody nose. I recognized her, though. I'll never forget that moment; I got out of the booth and walked straight up to her with the most honest grin on my face and said “Hi!”

Nichol had a number of personality traits I found very appealing. A number of physical ones, too. She wasn't very quick on the uptake though, and when she looked at me it was funny to watch her expression change from complete confusion to vague recollection to relief that I was indeed Ian. We hugged, introductions were made all around, and we sat at Denny's talking for a while.

Nichol told me on the phone that night that when she walked in to the restaurant, she didn't see me. She saw a lean young man with dark clothes and hair smiling and laughing with his friends, and since I didn't show up, she was going to try her luck with him. This confused me, but I took it as a compliment.

Anyways, that's how Nichol and I started dating. I fell in love, and I fell hard, with absolutely no idea what I was getting into.

The breakup was so hard for me... The cost was too high. When I say I had no respite from the despair and emptiness for months, I'm not over-exaggerating. I couldn't take it; the sleepless nights, driving around aimlessly for hours on end thinking that maybe I would run into her somewhere. The complete loss... I didn't know what happens after you die, and I really didn't care. All I wanted was to not feel, because every feeling was loss. Not sleeping, not eating, taking whatever drug I could get ahold of, I was going crazy.

I took this picture two weeks after they let me out of the hospital and I could unwrap the bandages. The other arm looked pretty much the same. It's the only picture I kept from the whole incident, and now is the only picture I have from my and Nichol's relationship, which is a shame because regardless of how it ended and how i lost it afterwards, there were actually a lot of good things we did together.

After the suicide attempt, my friends tried being there for me. None of them knew I had seriously tried to kill myself, and i didn't tell them for a while. I was so broken, and they were all still friends with Nichol. The only friend I had who actually succeeded in making me feel better was Arwain, who introduced me to Josh, who introduced me to heroin, which killed the despair long enough for me to recover from the heartbreak enough to keep breathing.

I never wrote about this before. I wrote songs and poetry and alluded to it frequently, but I've never taken the time to just lay it all out there until now, over a decade later.