All or Nothing

Just when I think I’ve figured out a way, some new thing fucks me up, I’m back in panic mode. Ditching responsibilities, avoiding my commitments. High and hiding.

Sometimes, when I’m hiding like that, I get motivated to get some shit done. I mean, only shit I can do by myself, and usually it only amounts to cleaning out my hard drive or something. But still, it’s better than nothing at all.

There’s no telling how long that motivation will last, though. Sometimes it’s a few months, but usually it’s more like weeks. Days, really. Yeah, mostly days. Okay, one day. Once I had my breakthrough, got some shit done, and fell straight into the next bender, all over the course of one insanely stressful weekend.

‘What a loser’, right?

But everyone does it. Just not as much.

I’ve been doing nothing for eleven years.

Eleven. Fucking. Years of this shit. Lying to myself. Getting stoned and wasted and thinking I’m getting shit done. But every time I double down on the ‘I’m gonna get it together this time’, I just sink deeper.

It’s getting even worse, too, because over those eleven years I gained a hundred pounds. Sitting around with the shades drawn for eleven years, never seeing the light of day, and a whole swimming pool of beers and whiskey will do that. Plus getting high makes me overeat, and I live across the street from a fucking McDonald’s.

So yeah, maybe that wasn’t the right choice but I didn’t mean to make it worse. It just sort of happened that way.

I just lost motivation, I guess. Probably happened back when I lost my job under really unfair circumstances. I wasn’t the only one who showed up high, after all. I was just more noticeable. That’s probably why I don’t work anymore. No sense in making things worse by trying, right?

My creative outlet has been writing, although I’ve dabbled in avant-garde artwork, coding, day trading, crypto mining and songwriting, too.

But this time it’s different. This time I’m taking this shit seriously. In between benders, sometimes I can even write all day. All morning anyway.

Okay, for an hour. I can write for an hour. Then I toke a bit and maybe a Xanax but don’t judge. It’s an anxiety thing. But then that makes me edgy when it wears off so I don’t want to go through too much of the bottle, and then the drinking starts and yeah, well, the writing doesn’t usually work out too well then.

When I come to and go back to read what I wrote—after the cringe stage I mean—sometimes it’s not half-bad. If I was turning that into something worth publishing, watch out! I’d be unstoppable!

And I will be. You just watch.

Just need to cut back a little and stop making things worse.

I don’t write anything that’s commercially viable, anyway, and so it’s mostly just for practice. I churn out a chapter or two every month, and sometimes more than that. I’ve also got something like a hundred drabbles under my belt, but I haven’t bothered trying to publish any of it.

Not even friends or family can suffer their way through my shit. Neither can I, for that matter, which makes editing a real bitch, but what can ya do? I don’t read it, much. I just cover my eyes and peek through, maybe fix a sentence or two.

If I could stop stressing about the daily grind, that’d help. Do this, do that. Go to the store. Text your friends.

I mean, I used to text my friends. I don’t get messages much anymore. And the store is right across the street, so I pick up supplies on one of the McDonald’s runs.

I’ll hit the gym one of these days. But first things first, right?

Some days I think I’m just not going to make it. State-funded checks only stretch so far. If the liquor store didn’t take my food stamps I’d really be fucked.

Might even have to get a real job.

But who wants to sell out, right?

I don’t.

And I won’t! I’ll keep working. I’ll get somewhere, in bursts, you know. Between benders.

I could write a bestseller, conjure up popular stories the masses will lap up like dogs, but what would that make me? I could teach, but why the hell do I want to waste my time with people who don’t get it?

So I sit, watching the clouds roll by, hoping one of them’ll send down a bolt and get it over with.

Then it hits me.

It wasn’t even words in the brain, more of an overarching concept that struck so perfect, so complete, that I burst out laughing, only to choke it back and choke back tears for a few minutes. It was that poignant.

I thought I’d die if I lost it. That I’d climb the nearest flight of stairs and jump. Or go on a rampage, maybe. Death by cop.

That was how desperate I was.

But of course, it started to fade—before I could even put a finger on what was so important, no less—and I felt a panic the likes of which I’d never experienced in all my angst-ridden years of hiding.

it was slipping away.

I reacted like a climber slipping off a ledge—no thought, just reaction. I knew exactly what I had to do, instant after instant, to hang on.

Instants became seconds. Inches became feet. I fought, scraped and clawed myself back, mentally holding on for dear life. It was as tedious as it was painful, every bit of it gravely necessary all the same.

I needed it. Needed it like I needed my next breath.

My sense of impending doom increased, tightening my chest, making it hard to catch that next breath at all.

Fear of loss gripped me like death—like the best idea that ever rose out of nowhere in the fragmented brain of a dysregulated body, and all you could think to do was try to recreate, reconstruct—flipping through memos, computer searches, check the cloud, check the desk drawers. Those notebooks next to the pens.

At a certain point in the spiral, I stopped being “me.” Just became this guy, like a split-screen, watching myself try to hold on.

Maybe he wrote it in his sleep. Maybe he... no, nothing like that.

Maybe if he cooked something. He needs to cook something and then it’ll come to him, because he always clears his mind when he cooks.

No, not this time.

A plate of bacon and eggs later, but nothing.

Shower, same thing. Cold, then hot, cold again to finish, just to punish himself.

But he didn’t have any idea. Any better clue than before.

Drugs. Maybe he’ll do more drugs. Or sex. Sex might help. Jerk off. Eat salt. Punch someone.

He needed to. Life or death here. He needed to.

Something.

But no.

Nothing helped.

It was time for the nuclear option.

He was going to recreate the moment of clarity, right down to the playlist that was blaring on iTunes.

Or was it Spotify?

He had to know.

He started to think back, not racking his brain for the idea, but for the circumstances. The time it had been. He couldn’t recreate the time, but he could recreate the lighting. The way he’d been stretched out of the bed when it came to him.

He took off the clothes he’d changed into and grabbed the ones he’d been wearing out of the laundry. A little stinky, but that was alright.

Although that was a difference. It all had to be the same.

So he took them off and he did laundry. And he put on those clothes clean.

Then, there, a flash. Just a thought, an inkling of a thought, a piece of a thought. An emotion behind the thought. A physiological reaction, followed by a wave of additional, confused emotion. And words. Nearly complete thoughts.

It was starting to piece itself together.

Just a little, but brilliant, drugged out brain notions. Coming together now.

It had to come to him, or else.

Or else what?

Why don’t you just move on?

“I’ve been high this whole time.”

Those words, spoken aloud, cracked through the silence of the room in which he sat, reality shattering the reverie. The truth coming at last.

He shook his head at the realization.

“Really?” He said to himself, a muttered bemusement in his cracking, disjointed, disheartened voice.

Yeah, really. Came the inward answer he’d been dreading, knowing all along what it was he had to remember. But just not wanting to.

Stay away from that shit, man. It’s bad news, said the voice of his rational mind, in that fucked up, moment-of-clarity way that always came after a long absence.

That brilliant observation you came up with?

That brilliant insight you thought would change your life?

You remember it now, don’t you?

He did. He just didn’t want to say it.

Say it.

“I need to quit.”

The words echoed into his dingy apartment as if he’d actually spoken them. And maybe he had. There was no way of knowing what was real anymore.

He grabbed a beer, reached for the pill bottle off the top shelf, and washed down a few to get started.

“After one more run.”