It’s Not Unusual to be Mad with Anyone

I miss the destruction. I do. I miss waking up for work but drinking instead. I miss knowing that ninety dollars is for my car insurance but spending it on pills instead, crossing my fingers, and putting it in God’s hands. I can’t count how many “No Insurance” tickets I amassed. And I miss going into the courtroom and begging the judge for an extension on my fines, pleading that I am what I am not: I go to school, you see, trying to be a teacher, trying to get myself out of this hole, once and for all; drugs? No, your honor, not once. And the gavel hammers for another me, in another universe, on his way to great things, and I would walk out of the courtroom ready to spend the money I just saved at Copper’s.

I miss my destructive friends. I miss how effortlessly we bonded and harmonized in our efforts to self-destruct. It wasn’t effort, though, it was fun, natural, easy as sunshine. Or it was that my destruction and theirs came together as magnets do, all predetermined, all unavoidable, all arranged and assembled by some invisible force within or outside ourselves.

I miss making eye contact with someone and knowing they craved my destruction and I craved theirs. Seeing that person in a crowd of hundreds and knowing that, by the end of the night, you would be connected forever. He would always call. He would always be available. Like I was, job and bills and futures be damned.

Then, I used to think this…ease was a defect. It wasn’t physics; it was black alchemy. Good things aren’t easy, they say. Nothing great ever came easy, they continue. Buckle down, surround yourself with good people, and their good will lift you, as only the truest physics can attest. It’s the Godhead promising salvation paired with endurance. It’s the Buddha demonstrating transformation through negation. It’s purification, and health, and eternity all made real because one worked toward it, worked to keep out its antithesis. Whole, not dust. Complete, not pieces. Health and happiness, not the black tar fractures inside my lungs, coating my arteries, wrapping my ventricles. And it seemed right. It did.

But it’s the effort that makes me blink. “No worth ever came to those who didn’t try.” The problem is that that worth feels empty after the great effort it took to create. Why? Why is it that when I force myself to engage, reach out into the void, struggle and pull and rip and drag another to me, it is only a composite? They wave. They smile. They say, “How was your holiday? How are your littles? We should get together soon, yeah?” And I pull another composite: “I agree, it’s a tough situation.” Another: “Yeah, you know, shoot your shot. I think you’ll be fine,” they sip and scan the party. I surround myself with their reflective nature which glimpses them as mild reflections of me, trusting in physics and it’s promised holy reward to lift me as all worthy boats. All that effort and what is of worth?

It’s the journey. A journey is effort. See?

It is like they say, the prophets and messiahs. Withhold, endure, abstain, and you do feel purified and awake. But what they didn’t say is how lonely purity and awareness is. That within the zen of oneness there is nobody else and your hunger for them is somehow impossibly satiated.

Drug friends are fake friends, they say. They’ll cannibalize you the moment you hesitate. But I wonder have those same people stood in a farmer’s market? Have they hunkered down in the corner of that company Christmas party? What about a feed store where somehow they need six people manning the till? If drug friends are fake friends, friendship is really only a decent magician’s trick. There is nothing like distracting the liquor store attendant with numerous requests at the bottom rear shelf while your friend sneaks out the door with a coat full of Black Velvet, both racing home laughing. The pawn shop owners who eventually drop the charade and haggle with your shameless humanity in the mud, both of you adorn with a knowing grin.

It’s only that Buddah doesn’t understand; there is no oneness like picking up a broken piece of someone else and finding it fits in your chest, edges softened by percentages of proof and painkillers. And when you find enough loose shards, you and the others pecking through the dirt, you realize that what you built was a gutter monument, a Mighty Morphine Megazord, shimmering with gasoline and broken glass, and not only is it glued with the same essence that all myths are, but it was fun, it was easy, like sunshine.

I’m trying a new tactic. I’m trying. When I stand next to that composite, I’m not going to hide how much I want them to be something else. How much I miss not being a composite myself. How much I wish I didn’t wear the featureless void on my face as I ask, “What’s the square-footage of this place?”, when, instead, I want to ask if they’ve ever considered burning it to the ground? Did they have matches somewhere? Did they want to self-destruct? But then I would tell them that I’m just tired. They must be tired, too? It does sound nice, doesn’t it?

It just feels like it never works, or even kind of works, in this world of effort. It’s as though I am trying to walk upright when everyone knows I should be on all fours. Intensity like a stray animal. And I hate that the path I’m headed down feels like it’s leading away from that goal not closer. Not connection on this “higher” plane, but starshine and Merkabahs, dimensional fanatics and quantum-entangled inner-peace, everlasting madness and misery inside the halls of their cackling podcasts and self-published novellas.

I’m just tired is all. It’s been a long week.

Addendum: In case anyone considered the moniker “composite” inappropriate or labeled without empathy, it should be noted that I know the void-sheen they wear is to protect themselves. It’s like when I talk to the wild vagrant, frantically informing me of—who knows. But I don’t introduce myself, and if I do, I certainly don’t embark on a rumination of addiction and fire, community and friendship. That would certainly mean I belonged on the stoop next to them. No, I nod politely and say, “Yeah, I agree, it’s a tough situation.”