Thanatos

A lot of people have died over the last decade. I got a call at midnight a few months back. My uncle decided that life wasn’t really all that kind to him so he checked out early. That’s the easiest way to say it. I’d like to give you a grand story about his life but the truth of the matter is, I didn’t really know him. I don’t know many people anymore. I’ve sort of, fell back into a dark corner and have remained there for at least seven years.

My uncles went out drinking one night. Another one of our uncles was in the hospital at the time. He was currently dying from liver failure. One of them didn’t wasn’t too keen on the other driving eighty miles an hour down a gravel road so he got out of the car as soon as he could. Within a few hours two of ’em were dead. One from suicide and one from liver failure.

The second death was a long time coming. He was always sickly. He was a soft spoken fella who’s always had some sort of health issue for as long as I can remember. My earliest memory of him was of the blood in his piss in one of grandma’s toilets. I’ve heard over a few late night talking sessions that he may or may not have been fucked over by pregnant drinking.

In the end he was a lonely fisherman. He’d get driven out to these quiet lakes. Then grandma died. That’s it’s own thing. Grandma was the matriarch of the family. She was endlessly supportive of me. I guess it’s because not many of us had enough cognizance to try to be better. There’s also some weird hierarchy bullshit that seems to happen when an extended family is composed of refuse. When people are ditched at someone else’s house because their parents weren’t all that fit to be parents. The vast majority of my cousins and siblings and uncles and aunts were raised by a strong grandmother.

I’m going to have to go and get some surgery in the near future, at least that’s the hope, because my insides aren’t working right. I got a hernia at the start of the year and it’s finally starting to affect my life, at least more than a few months back — when it was just a passing discomfort.

I ran away from the reservation because I could afford to. The world went into chaos over night and I was busy hauling an SUV full of bullshit a good sixty miles from home when it happened. As I was settling in — the country decided it was time to riot for months on end. Being the self centered jackass that I am — I figured it was a reflection of the microcosm, of the inner-personal world changing and subsequently rippling outward into reality. But viewing the world in such a primitive way seems to be very much looked down upon these days. So I’ll bite my tongue until it’s time.

These communities aren’t really meant to support a single dude pushing 30. You can see that very clearly when you look at my family. We won’t get housing because there are single mothers popping up over and over and over. There seems to be an endless supply of them to tend to, so what we do instead? We implode. I can think of very few male cousins, siblings, uncles, even grandfathers that have managed to pull themselves up in any meaningful way. My kin are addicts in one form or another. I don’t think it’s too inflammatory to say that they are mostly panhandlers.

Some are convicts, some are assholes, most can’t hold down a job longer than a few weeks. Seems that the strategy in this life is to work until you can get fucked up for awhile, and then you run back home and start from scratch, without ever having anything to work towards. In some sense you can say that we are free. But it’s also overwhelmingly obvious that we are bound to this life, bound to what we make of this life. There seems to be something crucial missing. My feeling is that — that is a lack of beneficial relationships. Where are the fathers and grandfathers that I seem to idealize? Are they only works of fiction perpetrated through movies and television? Are they really just ghosts, or lies?

Sometimes I give way to my cynicism and think that that is very much the case. That these figures are simply nonexistent, that they never were, and we’ve been lied to by countless generations of story tellers. But if I let go of my nihilism I can say that that really isn’t the case. I’ve met a few in my time, I met a few people who seem to be able to carry the burden of responsibility, but when I say a few, I mean a few. And you can rest assured that they aren’t in these communities anymore. No one worth anything are in these communities anymore. They’ve all gone, disappeared into the ether like cigarette ash taken by the wind, by old age, by greener pastures.

I moved to a town just off the interstate because it was affordable. I was happy to find that getting was very simple as far as driving goes. I just go up to the highway. Head out west for forty minutes, then drive north for twenty. This cheap hotel is at the very end, just gotta make a right turn. It’s been a long time coming, what I have now is what most people have when they turn eighteen or so. When compared to my peers I’m a failure. But compared to where I was four years ago I am doing better than I ever have. I have the gift of silence now. I can rest comfortably without fear. On the reservation there’s a feeling, an ever present threat that never seems to materialize.

I can’t walk around without feeling guilt, without feeling ashamed, I can’t talk to anyone because I know just how little I’ve managed to do over the last decade. Artists aren’t all that much respected where I come from. I make a few hundred dollars a week shilling paintings, prints, by doing artwork for no name bands and clothing brands. I never once considered that my art would ever make it into a gallery, that somewhere down the road I’d be remembered by art historians, that what I’ve made over the last four years would be remembered by anyone. There’s no pretense in what I do, and I actively discourage taking this path to anyone that asks. Because it’s a pipe dream that shouldn’t be pursued.

There are no jobs back home. We have an eighty eight percent unemployment rate and I can’t even get a job interview anywhere. That’s what it is. A matter of survival. A last ditch effort at making some cash. And I’ll tell anyone who wants to become an artist to temper their expectations. To get a job first. It’s like psychoanalysis for Jung. Get your worldly affairs in order first before you examine the unconscious, get your affairs in order before you put paint on canvas. Don’t be a fool. Don’t go into this thinking that anyone owes you any sort of attention. This didn’t happen overnight, and I’ve shared my artwork in a million different places to a mostly quiet reception. That’s what this endeavor really is. It has to come from you, it has to burn in you, and you have to be able to examine what you do with a critical eye and be willing to burn anything you’ve created, with a knowing — that you will make something better soon. That this well will never be exhausted. That this fire will always be there, that these coals will light your candles for decades.

I don’t think the tribe wants us to leave. I don’t think they want us to get out. I have a feeling that we have to stay here to get our healthcare taken care of. We’re bound to these broken communities for the foreseeable future and there ain’t many Indian Health Services available. When I look at a map I have to make sure I’m somewhere where I won’t wheeze and be miserable. And there ain’t many homeowners on the reservation. There aren’t many apartments available to a single man pushing 30. These all seem to be meant to prioritize the propagation of our personal hells. There’s an economic incentive to reproduce, there’s tax breaks and financial assistance if you give another poor soul a life long contract in these dilapidated buildings. If you send off your blood to suffer for fifty years.

Where can I go to make money out here? What can any of us do to get ahead? I don’t know. I look at my friends and see that most haven’t lead the way. J is living off of his dad’s insurance cash and their trailer houses are slowly rotting. R’s still living with his grandma, T’s locked up for some drunken bullshit, K’s been dead for six years now, S was born in a good place, with a good family, and a tendency for honest work. And lining the family tree are countless dead drunks.

So I did what I’ve done since the beginning. I drew. I painted. I went inward, just like before. I started scribbling at five and didn’t stop until I discovered alcohol at eighteen. And even then I managed to make a handful of pieces through my boozing years. Art is all I had. Art is all I’ll ever have.

So I moved out in the middle of nowhere. Moved out cause rent was cheap. Because I can’t afford a six month lease or a security deposit. Because I can’t afford to get my eyes fixed, or to replace my windshield, my mirrors, or to figure why the fuck my wheels wobble when my car goes passed sixty miles an hour. And before you ask — the tires are balanced. The steering wheel doesn’t shake either, it just feels off, and I damn sure can’t afford to take it to the autoshop with what I make.

In the beginning it was quiet. And the quiet let open a door for ghosts. And the ghosts came in and woke me in the middle of the night. And I saw a decrepit old woman laying next to me in my bed. And I saw a distorted field of air that loosely resembled a human before my consciousness came back online. But the night terrors were a passing threat. And in time I found peace. I could leave the apartment without fearing reprisal. Without thinking the world would come to an end. I could rest without hearing more bullshit. The everyday fuck ups that seem to happen round the clock back home disappeared and I found a fleeting sense of peace. I closed myself off from the world, I ran away from the reservation, mentally, many, many, many years ago. And now I had finally found peace in the real world.

My grandma died this past May. She worked all the way until the end. She was in her seventies. A few years back I was in a rough place, I hadn’t had any work for a good two/three years. One day I went out to the woods. Zuya Sika, I think they called it. It was local marketing — a fancy brand name for the annual mud races. Every year our little town has a celebration where everyone comes back for a good three or four days. When translated it reads “Wicked War”. But all it really was was rednecks racing souped up trucks in waste deep mud around a track while the community got beer drunk and sun burnt.

Something in me told me to go out that way. So I did. The land was mostly overgrown, the grass was long and there was a lot of trash out there that never gets picked up. So I spent a few days picking it up. I gathered up all the plastic bottles, all the glass bottles, all the trash, all the cans, and put ’em in some piles, and bagged them. I got back home after the second or third day and ma told me that my grandma got me a job cleaning motel rooms. And that was the beginning of the end as far as my alcoholism went.

Before that I had a strange dream. I was trying to catch up to this old native woman. She was always just out of reach. She was moving fast and I couldn’t catch up to her. And in an instant I was looking at her, face to face. She seemed tall. She bent over and gave me something. As I took it in my hand I recognized it as a cherry pit. She told me to plant it and “in five days it will bloom”. What it was, what my eyes saw — was a fetus, still in an it’s amniotic sac.

Five days later it was my birthday. I wanted to go to the bar. Cause they give you a free shot of booze, I figured I’d bum around for a bit, ask some friends and family for some booze money, cause the days when I would buy thirty dollar bottles of booze have long since passed — I was at a point where I could get shit faced off of eight bucks. But I was out of gas and I didn’t really want to bother anyone, so I didn’t. Instead I walked around in circles outside. The moon hung low and lit the world up in blue. I went to bed at five in the morning after talking to myself for a good two/three hours.

And then I dreamed again. Like clock work. And in that dream I pushed a wheelbarrow around, and in that wheelbarrow there was a dead lamb. I walked by a group of elders. They were all dressed in white. It seemed as though the sky was cloudy gray but the sun shined on them and them alone. I recognized them, they were psychoanalysts. I saw Edward Edinger, Marie Louise Von Franz, Marion Woodman, Joseph Campbell, and Erich Fromm.

Then a tall son of a bitch walked up to me. Ancient man. It was the Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. He also knelt down and he said to me, “Say it’s name.” So I said the lamb’s name. What that name was, I couldn’t tell you. But I said it’s name. And the lamb’s eye opened. “Say it’s name”. So I said it’s name again. And it started to stand up. “Say it’s name”. So I said it’s name and it shook off the rigor mortis. “Say it’s name”. And it jumped out of the wheelbarrow. “Say it’s name”. And it began to run. “Say it’s name”. And it grew wings and flew.

I was worried at that point. Worried that it’d never come back to me.

“Say it’s name”.

So I said it’s name and it returned.

When I woke up I said I’d stop drinking, because I was always bumming money off my parents, always scheming to get more booze from my friends. Cause that’s the glue that binds these relationships together — addiction. So I quit after that for a bit. And then time moved on and one day I went down to the river and cleaned up the glass bottles and cans — and then grandma got me working again.

We worked with each other for months. She was old and tired and couldn’t do more than five-seven rooms. We were getting paid by the room, and sometimes we’d get tips. I started slow but in time I was doing ten to fourteen rooms a day. I wasn’t broke anymore, but I was drinking again, because the second day I worked me and the laundry guy (who was orienting me in the beginning) scored an eighteen pack and a twelve pack. He was a smaller guy so he took the twelve pack, and I took the eighteen pack. And my first run of sobriety ended.

I didn’t have to drive to work so I did what I thought was the right thing. I drank. I drank before work. And then I’d drink after work. I could put down a traveler of vodka every evening. Which ain’t much if you know real drunks. I don’t talk like I was some big boozer cause I grew up around real alcoholics. I know people that could drink a half gallon of whiskey every night. It’s not surprising that one of them ended up with multiple toes amputated due to alcohol induced diabetes, or that the other one became a cripple because of a botched suicide attempt, and I’m not saying that I could hang with any of them because that’s not true.

But it was an issue.

And in time I would start bringing liquor to work with me.

And after awhile I got the slightest taste of withdrawals while cleaning my last few rooms. And then I knew I had a real fucking problem.

So I switched from liquor to beer, and that turned into me drinking a case of beer every night for a good eight months.

That’s not really what we’re talking about though.

We’re talking about grandma.

My brother got stranded out on the reservation. Maybe, forty miles or so down south. He was with some of his family, you know, cause he’s got a different mom. Anyway. He was saying that he say his brother’s baby mama’s grandma was crying and making tobacco ties. Some old school traditional Lakota shit. She was crying and praying because her grandchildren wouldn’t stay sober. Arthritic hands and useless prayers.

He said that one night his nephew woke him up. Kept telling him to “make them stop”. So he walked to the back of the house and found his brother passed out in the door way, with his brother’s baby mama slamming the door on the guy’s head, over and over and over.

We’re asking a lot from our people when we bring a new life here. We’re more or less sentencing them to one long, miserable ride, and there ain’t much of a chance for them to escape. You gotta get real lucky. You need the capacity to reflect on your decisions, on your fuck ups, cause if you ain’t got that then you ain’t got nothing. Every fuck up that happens to you won’t be of your own making, it’ll be because someone’s out to get you, because god’s out to get you, and in time you’ll create a rock solid defense against reality, your lies will become truths, and your drunken mistakes will get drowned out by more booze, and the choices you make will ripple outward, outward and down the generations. That’s really what it all comes down to.

I’ve seen it time and time again.

I’ve lived it.

I spent months with my grandma working at that motel, and one day it was over. She was tired and put in her two weeks notice. I didn’t know that that would be the last time I ever saw her.

Because after that I got worse. I got careless. I got crazy. I got more and more drunk. And I stayed drunk for nearly a year. That ultimately ended with sobriety and a newfound respect for making art. Those were both good, and they’ve kept me out of trouble. But they also caused me to withdraw from damn near everyone.

Cause peoples’ brains start to rot when they drink too much. I used to love to riff with my friends. We could just improvise for hours. We could make each other laugh, and laugh. That’s what we did. But over the years the booze just dulled their personal interests until there wasn’t anything left outside of a never ending compulsion to get shit faced. That spark, that chemistry that we used to have died soon after, and all that was left was stories from a lifetime ago. Stories that I got tired of. When we’d hang out it got cyclical. One story would end, and we’d talk for a little while, and then that same story from before would start over. “Remember when..” It’s a boring refrain that just haunts the mind after awhile. We get so fuckin’ caught up in it that we can’t live anymore. We can’t go out into the world and experience new things without someone pulling out a jug of vodka. We can’t get together and enjoy life without the ever present need for more booze rearing it’s fucking head.

When you cut that off then there’s nothing left for us to do, nothing left for us to say. We become chained to the past.

So I stopped talking to everyone.

By that point I was sober, for good.

The car rolled over out on Jenson’s road one night. I was black out drunk when it happened. I came to to my friend yelling my name, telling me he had to the call 911. The windshield was broken, the exterior was crushed all along the outside, and my arm hurt like a mother fucker, and the blood was running down my right leg. And that was that.

I stood up, fuck the possible back injury, I stood up and walked into the back of that ambulance after downing the last of our whiskey. And that was that.

A ghost got free.

A tinge of bitterness was left.

I was pissed.

I was mad that I survived.

I was mad because dying while black out drunk is all I ever really wanted.

I got drunk after that. Got out of the hospital at three PM. Drove up town for more booze at seven.

And two days later I quit.

I quit and was scared that I’d get dt’s.

But a day passed with no symptoms. And then another, then another, and another.

And that was that.

Grandma died but it wasn’t over night. She didn’t just disappear. She withered. She withered for months and I didn’t visit her once. She lived down the street and I never stopped over to catch up with her. I never made any effort. But, that wasn’t just with her. Happened with my dad too. He drank himself to death. He was in the hospital on a ventilator for three weeks before they pulled the plug and I didn’t visit him once.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the summer.

It can’t just be selfishness.

You gotta be selfish and a bit narcissistic to be an artist — that much I’m sure of.

It’s not like I didn’t care about these people. It’s not like I didn’t spend most of my life around them. It’s not like I don’t miss them, that I didn’t cry when they were gone.

I don’t fault people who off themselves, and my opinion on abortion is similar. When you bring a life into this world, in it’s current condition, you’re doing something that’s almost evil. I grew up around addicts. Everyone was fucked up. My parents were getting drunk every weekend, my dad was drunk everyday, my uncles and all of my dad’s friends were drunks, and a lot of them are dead now. Hell, one of my dad’s pallbearers died a few months after the funeral. He died the same way my uncle died, the same way my best friends’ dad died, got hit by a car while walking home drunk.

I don’t mind suicide all that much anymore. I wish it wasn’t as violent as it is. I wish family members didn’t have to find their bloated, stink corpses days later. I wish we could find a more humane way to end it. Maybe we’ll get there someday.

And that’s not to say I’m suicidal, or that I don’t have hope in me. I’m hanging on entirely by hope. I’ve invested everything into art, and a big part of being an artist, in my experience, is luck. I hear that from people who reach out to me after buying some of this shit. Sometimes their place in life has a huge similarity to my own. I’ve seen my life reflected in their situations. One of ’em reached out to me, she showed me a picture of my art on her wall and the only other piece that was up there was from a murderer. It’s her story to tell but there was something about that story that seemed to reflect parts of my own life.

There’s something magical in what we do if we do it right. I think there’s a way to skip out on a lot of hurt if we approach it with sincerity. My own path as an artist was foretold by my only mushroom trip. I remember seeing a three/fourfold vision all at once and one aspect of it was this: I saw energy coming out of some paintings and I was more or less told that I would be remembered through my art, and that was at a time when I didn’t think that I’d pursue it further than a few paintings every five or six months. I was also shown a black spiral of extinction with a singular point of light at the end and was told that everything in this life that has ever been was dead, and that our task here is to carry love and wisdom, to protect it like a candle in a windstorm.

I’ve seen more than enough in my time to know that there’s something more going on here, that there’s something intelligent just behind the veil, and it’s something that I now “know” in the same sense that Carl Jung “knew” about god. It’s not a belief anymore, it’s something that you experience, in some sense it’s empirical because you’ve been there. That’s what Campbell was telling us about Schoepenhauer: “In his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.”

These are the discarded thoughts that can be killed very easily by the modern mind. His word is just. His word is “just”. It’s just a coincidence, it’s just bias, it’s just a delusion. And it’s very hard to break that view and I don’t fault anyone for holding on to that way of thinking at all.

I think there’s something about being born so lowly and defeated that makes you just naive enough to believe in belief. There’s something inherent in being on the bottom that opens your eyes to something that can only be seen as crazy by outsiders.

But I don’t fault the self destructive husks out there. I don’t fault them because I’ve lived it and I know for a fact that it can seem like a losing battle. And that’s what I was tasked with when I stopped drinking. Everyday after band practice I’d drive back from the trailer, some twenty miles out south, and I’d cry and pray the entire way back, because I got kissed by death, because I got a taste of hell and it burned me up inside, and I begged and pleaded, I asked whatever was out there to get me through because I couldn’t get out on my own. Because I was carrying a fire in me, because I was carrying an enormous sense of guilt and shame that hasn’t left me to this day.

People ask me why there’s crucifixes in my artwork and I tell them that it’s a reflection of what’s waiting for us. I don’t mean “us” as in you and your kind. I mean what’s waiting for us out on the reservations. I drowned out everything with a bottle of liquor, and I did it everyday. It was effective, it was immediate, and it caused more and more hurt. It was a negative feedback loop — and the end of that loop was sobriety, but it was also an inescapable feeling of loss, of hurt, of shame, and it’s something that we’ll never out run. And if it wasn’t for the mushroom, if it wasn’t for a handful of dreams that gave me just enough consciousness to take in what I was shown, if it wasn’t for the physical trials, if it wasn’t for the drunk tank, or the pepper spray, or the broken and bruised feet, or the concussions, for the ass kickings, or the loss of friends and family, if it wasn’t for the appearance of unexpected friends that could help me believe that there was something worthy of redemption within me, then I never would have stopped.

Having all of that is some batshit luck that most of my drunken asshole friends and relatives will never have.

When I was younger, when I was on fire, when I was full of self hate and self destruction — I had a dream. And in that dream I saw myself sitting between two poles that were connected by a wire. A voice told me to pray to the center. For whatever reason I couldn’t. And when I failed at that I was shown a monstrous tree. It had contorted faces lining it, from top to bottom. A black tree that emitted a sickly green color.

It was then that I saw my grandfather.

He walked up to that tree with a staff and he hit in the bough.

He was taken in by it and disappeared.

I saw his face moving in pain before joining it.

And that was that.

I can only think of maybe three or four people in my life that knew responsibility and discipline. One was my cousin B. He “acted white”, he was always on top of his school work and his health. He went off and joined the military, and when his time was done he came back and became a drunk for a few years before taking full advantage of the tribal college. And from there he left to seminary to become a priest.

The second was a cousin I met one afternoon — he grew up an hour away and we never really talked until I needed someone to smoke with. We ended up spending everyday with each other for months until he went off to college. He challenged me, he challenged my cynicism and melodrama, he gave me a worldview I never had, and did so while also encouraging me every step of the way. He helped me become a better person, and he never gave up on me. He’s why I started drawing and painting again. A lot of my work between eighteen and twenty five was to both impress myself, and to show him what I’ve been up to.

The third was my dad’s dad. He was the foundation stone of that family. He kept everything in line. He was an old barber and gospel singer that took care of his own. He was a gardener, and he always had a fat stack of cash on him. He died when I was young. And when he died his house was overtaken by weeds and roaches, before becoming an empty, cold place of misery — where my brother lived without heat or electricity. We sat outside by a bonfire every night, as late as possible, because it’d get somewhat warm in the day time, because it was winter and he had nowhere to go.

The last summer he was alive my dad made sure to take me down to visit him every night. And the last time I saw him was in late winter, he made me sit down with him and eat. He must’ve felt it coming because he was gone soon. And when he was gone things got bad. My brother went from a pot smoker to a meth smoker and a full time boozer, he was bright and could’ve gotten into any state university, but without grandpa around he didn’t seem to want to do much more than drink, get stoned, and play guitar. And over time he became a monster in his own right.

And finally there was my ma’s dad.

Gramps was always sober. He had a stroke sometime while I was too young to really remember anything. My grandma would fall off the wagon once every five or seven years, but I never really saw grandpa drunk. He was a hard worker. Was a roofer and a mechanic. And when he got old he kept busy. Kept the yard in order. Always getting my uncles work, always crushing and collecting cans, always gutting and cleaning fish, and he always read from the bible every night.

I think the dream was talking about the family tree, and the fucked up place it was in.

There’s a real, genuine evil there. But I don’t know how much of that evil came from malice, I think most of it came from not caring about it enough.

And the dream didn’t indicate that the tree would be saved, I choose to hope that it will be someday.

Gramps was the type to have visions. I don’t know of anyone else who can speak of those things. I’ve had my own. I’ve spoken about ’em in my writing over the years, and I’m sure you’ll hear about them more and more as time goes on. They played a vital role in my sobriety. I think that’s also why they chose him. The capacity to see what other don’t, as well as the ability to read.

Everything that I am now, no matter how lowly, came about because I learned to read. Came about because I found Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces — and subsequently Jungian psychology. That provided the framework and the reverence needed to see what others do not.

I’ve spent years inside a fantasy.

I’ve poisoned memories, and forcefully twisted them, contorted them, thought about them until they were unrecognizable.

Only in my writing do I appear as the good guy.

Everywhere else I am just as low as the others.

I don’t fault people who give up. I’ve known many that have. In the last decade I’ve lost many, many friends and family, to life and death. Every year someone goes — it just so happens that this year hit harder than most, hit harder and faster.

Whether you off yourself with booze, or sugar — it doesn’t matter and I don’t blame you.

A lot of times it’s both.

I still think about my cousin W.

I’m getting close to being as old as he was when he died.
He should’ve gotten farther than he did.

He knew how to work those earth movers. He could’ve gotten into honest work and gotten off the reservation. Could’ve become something more than what he ended up as.

I still remember the last time I saw him.

He was always a bigger guy, but then he drank himself into diabetes and lost all that weight.

Saw him at the liquor store a good four months before he passed away. Skinny and missing teeth and stink.

Just kept drinking.

And now his brother’s close to leaving the same way. Got his toes broken in a fight. Needs surgery to fix ’em but he doesn’t want to put in the work. Doesn’t want to get healthy, doesn’t want to stay sober, doesn’t want to get his diabetes in order. And now his foot is shriveled, weak, and stuck.

Thought about it a lot and all I can come up with is this: I quit living once the booze wore off. When I quit drinking life stopped dead in it’s tracks. I wasn’t getting into trouble anymore, I wasn’t moving the world so I could get hungover the next morning, I was sifting through a pile of beer cans from the night before, hoping to find one that was half drunken so I could have something in me while I picked up more from the gas station.

I stopped living and there was nothing more to talk about.

Nothing to say to anyone.

Nothing.

The big quote from Campbell that I think about is this “the presence of a vital person vitalizes”. And I’ve seen that work in my own life. I’ve seen how a good heart can come through and push away darkness. Seen how redemption might be possible for the lowest people. But I could never stand up with my head high. I could never become the person that others look to for strength. Could never speak with authority.

And now we have a new generation that’ll be in a similar position as the one I came up in.

Fatherless children. No mentors. No purpose.

Just another round of aimless assholes stepping into our shoes.

When I was eighteen, fifty didn’t seem like an unreasonable time to die. The last ten years have left a number of corpses in it’s wake. The good people are all gone and there’s no one left the carry the burden of responsibility. I won’t be the one to shoulder it either.

Ma’s getting older. She’s pushing fifty. My cousins and siblings are just as helpless as ever. My uncles and aunties are still drunken messes who can’t provide for themselves. And the families are fracturing into smaller and smaller pieces.

The rites of passage that I found through misery aren’t easily communicable to others. In that sense the vision quest is still alive, but it’s without ritual elders. It’s left to work itself out in miserable souls who are unaware of the burden that will come. It’s left to incarnate in people who don’t know the enormity of what it asks.

This life ends in selfishness and organ failure.

Grandma died from smoking. A few months later her youngest son’s body gave out. That same night my uncle took his car down the highway at a hundred plus miles an hour and hit an approach. There’s some blue flowers out along the highway now. And a scorched field where the gas burned, where his body lay lifeless in the grass.

My friend walked into a blizzard after a party and never came back home.

My cousin drank himself to death.

My cousin died of an aneurysm in a laundromat — homeless.

My uncle got skin cancer from hitchhiking. The night he went into a coma he got robbed of his money and pain pills before being left to die.

My dad drank himself to death a year later.

And all along the way are suicide attempts and shaking, hungover hands.