writinginthemidwest

[writinginthemidwest]

Sunday 12:16

My Dad kept saying, “I’m so gourded. I’m so high!”

He wanted to keep performing at the end of his life. He wanted to be sober and keep his mind and wits about him. But he couldn’t. His liver and kidneys were failing- quickly- and the morphine was building up in his blood. Every dose just added to the cocktail in his system.

It’s perhaps a karmic coincidence that he spent a good deal of his life chasing the high. Drinking to excess throughout his childhood and early adulthood. Acid, cocaine, occasional narcotics, cigarettes and weed after he quit drinking.

He was so disappointed that he didn’t get the hardcore drugs sooner. And the diagnosis of impending death sooner. Because he kept trying to take as little of his oxy as possible so he wouldn’t have to deal with “the junkie itch” when he got better and didn’t have to take the medicines anymore for pain. He wanted to save them up for ‘fun’. He wanted to wait until he was healthy and his tolerance was lowered to have a good time.

Modern opiates effectively and acutely numb out the pain center of your brain. So it’s no wonder that we like it. The thought that you can, if only for a moment, feel nothing. Feel empty. Or conversely, feel full. Feel contentedly and comfortably full. I wonder which one you prefer. I have always liked the ability to feel calm, in the face of anything, that opiates give me. It’s not that nothing hurts, it’s that it no longer matters what hurts or doesn’t hurt.

Generationally, I see why that’s popular. Everything has hurt for a while in our culture. There’s been far away wars and economic strife and class based segregation. We’ve been fucking up for a long, long time. To feel that pain and guilt acutely is a display of the empathy that we have tried to create over time. But it’s incredibly uncomfortable.

On top of that, the increase in rigid gender roles enforced on children has created a new type of man- the man that has been shown GI Joe with massive biceps and told by his parents and grandparents that he’s got it so much better than they had, don’t be a pansy, real men don’t show emotions. Of course those men want to feel empty and free for a moment.

The women have to be everything to everyone. Trying to dedicate to their families like their grandmothers did while having the careers their grandfathers did in a world where their parents destroyed the economy. Wanting to be fit, healthy, thin, accomplished professionally and personally, and to be freed from the burden of aging. Perpetually 25 and successful and attractive. Make the bacon, bring it home, fry it up in a pan, never let you forget you’re a man.

Anyone in between or outside of that spectrum, having the pain of being told that your most basic identity isn’t real, authentic, or acceptable.

Of course you want to shut off all that pain. All that pressure. All that overwhelming anxiety. The tension in your back, releasing. Your jaw, unclenched. Your thoughts no longer racing with all the worries of the world.

But I don’t want you to die with the delusions my father did. I don’t want you to miss the pain because it seems easier. I want you to love, and be loved. And that means pain, without a doubt. It means anxiety and fear. It means being real uncomfortable, for a payout. Not one that leaves you looking leaner or feeling younger, inherently. Instead one that allows you to nourish yourself for the sake of something more than yourself. That allows you to know that you can and will have someone there when you die. Or that you’ll watch die.

The intimacy of sharing a life, a death, and a body with another person. Knowing what it’s like to take control of another person’s body when you make them cum. When they laugh. Or cry. When they’re sick. When they die.

The intimacy of all the terrifying and gross stuff that having a body and living in a body and watching that body decay and humiliate you but also carry you and give you strength and the ability to accomplish great deeds.

I think that’s one of the reasons I love nasty sex. It’s so intimate. Licking another person’s asshole. It’s fucking disgusting and pleasurable and strange and perhaps a little degrading for both parties, but it’s novel. And it’s intimate. It floods you with neurochemicals that make you feel oh-so-good, if only for a minute. I love sex with bruises and crying and blood. Deriving pleasure from scary functions that we’ve been taught to avoid at all costs. Intimacy.

The best and the worst things you can do with your life are uncomfortable. Feel that. Sit in it.

I’m begging you not to try to turn it off. Because you deserve so, so, SO much more than a life that you’ve fast forwarded through. You deserve to feel fulfilled and authentic in every moment because you are truly beautiful and special. Just like everyone else.

Death will come for you. You will feel like it’s too soon, no matter when it is. Don’t spend too much time numb, or you will regret it.