You Would Have Loved…

There’s no history in these fields. There’s no life left in these little communities. Trash bags collect along the fence lines. Broken bottles lay scattered across the open prairies. This place is meant for cattle and the oppressive boot of realism. Out here we must create our own fiction, our own history, our own myth. I can’t look back and see a beginning. We’ve come into being by chance. One day we simply “were”. And what that is, is a detached feeling towards all reality. The invisible hands that prop up this place are bound to ones and zeros. We are numbers, we are statistics, we are a drain on the federal budget, we are a people of abject misery.

“You would’ve loved such-and-such”

That’s what my old man used to say when he drank. Sometimes it’d be uncle John. Uncle John died young. Got killed by one of dad’s relatives. Cracked his head on grandma’s staircase. Said he pissed off one of my uncles over some bullshit. He was a musician. That’s what dad remembers. I ended up using the guy’s old Rogue bass amp some years later. Wasn’t anything exceptional. Maybe a forty watt. Maybe a fifty. I’m pretty sure I blew the speaker. Oh well.

He used to say I would’ve loved my uncle such and such. If it was Larry than it was because Larry was a hunter. Apparently the guy was a sheriff some fifty years ago. Pops used to talk about the guns he had. Used to talk about the long shots he’d take with a .308. Larry used to live in my other uncle’s house. My parents stayed there before I was born. They used to talk about how the snakes would crawl up the walls. Larry died way before I was born. I heard something about a woman using his service revolver to blow her brains out. Something about that stuck with the fella. And he did as we do — he drank. Didn’t drink liquor. He drank wine. I’ve never found out what was so evil about wine. Maybe it’s a volume thing. Thunderbird was the drink. I’m not sure what the winos drink these days. Dad used to talk about how Larry died. Said his belly started to swell up after a while. Said they transported him out to Denver towards the end. Dad said they had to pack Larry’s stomach with cotton.

There was a lot of hurt in dad’s stories. He had a bipolar nature about him. When he was sober he was a pretty admirable guy. He was more or less quiet all the time. A serious man who loved his old VHS tapes. He was a full blooded Sioux. So were a good number of his sons and daughters. Dad was brown and had kids with a few different women. He didn’t raise any of them. I think that was for the best. I wish we never met any of them. But that’s not really what happened. He ended up giving a few to my grandma and grandpa. I heard they came to the house covered in scabs and lice.

Hell’s a spectrum. That’s what you start to understand when you spend time out here. Hell’s a spectrum and so is poverty. In that regard we were doing okay. Our parents were always selling or pawning shit. They were always in credit card debt. But they made it work as best they could, and we got pretty far towards the end. But that never really translated out to much. I was the only person who ever traveled by airplane. I was the only one who ever got out for a little bit. Most of us fly towards the end of our lives, most of the time that’s due to alcoholism.

Pops wasn’t an exception. He’s been in the ICU more than anyone else I can think of. You start to hear gossip from people “in the know”. You hear about racism from hospital staff. I don’t blame them. I think people would call that “internalized white supremacy”. I hate that shit. “Internalized white supremacy” and “internalized misogyny” are some dark medicine man hacks that have been given to the younger generations. Things can’t be somewhat objective anymore. You can’t buck back at the shit they spit or else they’ll cut you off, and they’ll cut you off fast as fuck. Everyone wants to elevate a POC’s voice until the POC says something they don’t like. The entire “POC” acronym pisses me off. I don’t like being turned into a three letter word. I don’t like what it does to entire swathes of people. It shrinks us down into a totem that the rich people can hold, that they can use to make themselves feel better. There’s some real bigotry hiding behind my so-called-allies’ motivations and I’m sure they’re completely blind to it. I guess I hate them more because they’re so fucking condescending. I hate them more because they’re supposed to be our “allies” by default. I hate them because they care more about who toes the line. And toeing the line ain’t something I’ve ever been good at.

I am a gadfly. I like to piss people off. I like to say what I’m not supposed to say. I like going where I shouldn’t. I like making them uncomfortable. I think I do it because for most of them we exist only as people in a textbook. We exist in Howard Zinn’s conception of America. We have no autonomy. We have no say in this life. We have no means of moving forward. I think I like it though. It gives me something to play with. Maybe that’s all I really want. Or maybe I’m invoking the trickster god Iktomi. Maybe the only God I know is a fool who fucks himself over for all eternity. Iktomi, the asshole who tries to get more than he deserves. The asshole who tries to trick everyone. Maybe that’s who I am.

My first memory of my old man was him being on a ventilator. They pumped some black shit out of his body. My old man was a drinker in his younger years. I mean that in a different way. My old man drank a pint of Everclear every night. I can’t handle more than a few shots of it without blacking out. But that didn’t stay around forever. Eventually his tastes changed with age. He was an Everclear drinker, then he switched to schnapps. What he called “catfish juice”. And it did sort of smell like a catfish. Then he settled on Joose. Towards the end he couldn’t really handle too much booze. But that didn’t stop him from drinking everyday. People don’t talk about how miserable of a death alcoholism is. I remember the old man watching Native movies all the time. Pops wasn’t really the type to read. He wasn’t so much interested in reading about our history. Instead he watched movies. Dances with Wolves, Little Big Man, Thunderheart, Incident Oglala, Smoke Signals, Skins. I’m sure there were more. But Skins was a big one. Pops watched most of ’em a million times but Skins sticks out. Which it should. It’s a bleak portrayal of the reservation. I don’t mind it one bit. There are very few good Native anythings out there.

Graham Greene’s character dies without much effort in that movie. He gets sicker throughout and one day he’s just gone. But that’s not at all true to reality. Drinking yourself to death is one long, long decline. It’s one I got to watch first hand over many years. What no one ever talks about is the lack of potassium in the body. I had a small taste of that due to some hypertension medication. They gave me two of ’em, one made me piss. I think that’s called a diuretic. I remember my back starting to hurt like a mother fucker. It was a strange hurt too. It just burned like a mother fucker. It was like two burning hands squeezing on to my back. And things move slow out here, so I had to deal with it for a good week and a half before I could get an appointment. The doc said I pissed out all my potassium. He said there wasn’t much I could do about it but start eating potassium heavy foods. He said muscle potassium was a different thing. So I changed up the way I ate. Everyone says bananas are high in potassium but they don’t have shit on broccoli, spinach, or yams. I should’ve used my failing health as a wake up call but that never happened. When I started to get a roaring buzzing feeling in my head, and got winded walking a few steps — I didn’t use that as a reason to change how I was living. All that meant is that I had to pop a few pills everyday for the rest of my life.

You see that everywhere. People don’t change the way they live. And the tribe doesn’t make it easy. We’re still dealing with free will. We’re still dealing with our own self education. We’re not supposed to be eating carbs. We’re not supposed to be drinking booze. Bread, potatoes, wheat, flour, all that shit — ain’t good for us. We were hunter-gatherers. We ate foraged vegetables and meat. The rest of the world had thousands of years to acclimate to it but not us. Glucose still spikes when we eat bread. We could cut out all sugar and still fuck ourselves up. We ain’t like what you see in the movies. We’re obese. We’re ugly. We’re miserable. It’s not isolated at all. It’s everyone. You can’t work? That’s fine. Get food stamps and sell ’em. Either do that or spend all of it at midnight on the 10th. Happens everywhere. That’s where some of the shit talk comes from. That’s why the white people hate us. Ask any cashier what sells on EBT night. It damn sure ain’t fruits and vegetables. It’s soda. It’s chips. It’s warm-up sandwiches. The brain got hijacked. The dopamine system got hijacked. We’re growing bigger everyday and it kills people.

I think a lot about what would need to change around here. I think a lot about it. It’s not like I’d ever work towards making anything better, because I can’t. I’m just some bitter asshole who hides away from the world in a bedroom. You can’t “end the reservation” without killing countless people. Without forcing us into an even more fucked up situation. But I don’t think there’s any way to change course. We’re experiencing the fall out of an epoch. We’re raised on cheap media and cheap culture. Everyone I know grew up on a steady diet of trash culture. Everyone I knew growing up wanted to be a gangster. Wore bandanas and started getting fucked up early on. Everyone idolized the drug dealers and the gangsters because they had money, women, and drugs. There’s a warrior spirit alive in here and it brings with it one hell of a bargaining chip. It brings the promise of survival. That survival often ends in death and incarceration, but it means that the body will survive. The dipshits that should be educated get thrown into special education classes and get passed through the system with little care of where they end up. I know plenty of people who ended up becoming nothing. Who gave back more lives to this shitty place. Who wandered the area for a decade in a drunken stupor.

Had a relative. He was fucked from the get-go. He idolized gangster culture. Always called himself a “westside crip”. A “westside crip” in bumfuck nowhere. With no drug routes, with no real reason for a gang to exist. He was a monster in his own right. But a tragic one, whatever that may mean in the long run. I have a lot of empathy for the people trapped out here even if they’re fucked up people. Because I shut the fuck up and watched how it all came down. Watched it all sink into ruin. Everything’s connected to everything. Everything’s one mass of fucked up. And he was no different. He was drinking before he was in high school. He was stealing and getting our uncle to buy him booze cause my uncle didn’t give a shit as long as he was able to get drunk. I still remember when grandma kicked him out. The guy went through the bathroom and drank everything with alcohol in it. Body spray, cologne, after shave, mouthwash, cough syrup. Didn’t matter. This place scars you from the jump and suicide becomes a welcomed end.

We’re in the living room. Must’ve been two in the morning. There was a knock on the door. I couldn’t see around my old man. He answered it. Across the door were three people. The two on the outside had the middle guy propped up in the center. His face was disfigured. He barely looked human. They sat him down in a chair. There was blood coming out of his nose, mouth, eyes, and ears. He snored and could barely breathe. I hated him. I had every right to hate him. I had every fucking right to hate this person, but for a little while I cried. For a little while I was worried. The next morning we followed the blood trail. It went up the road quite a bit. Up a hill. There was some stomped on grass. There was a bloody shirt and an empty jug of mouthwash. They got him drunk and stomped him out. He recovered some time later. He said all he remembered was it hurting so much that it stopped hurting.

That blood came all the way to the yard. It stopped at the back door of my parent’s vehicle. The door was locked. If it was open then I’m sure he would’ve died. But things are complicated. Things are complicated and sometimes people get what they deserve. And that’s an ugly feeling too. Knowing that karma’s alive and well and wrathful. You can trace back what fucked you up if you’re honest. And there’s plenty of people that fucked me up. That’s just how it is sometimes. Most of the time. No one’s really in the right. Not out here. We’re all some shade of fucked up. Because hell’s a spectrum. I come to you with words and art but there’s an army behind me. There’s a horde of decay reaching all the way down into the lowest pit of hell. My friends were where the oil and water met, where the river and the oceans met, we were good, but we weren’t really good. And from there it just goes down, down down down.

That’s what’s at the beginning of these family lines. Entire lines of hurt. Misdeeds. Wreckage. Guy who got stomped out lived on. And he gave the reservation more lives. Gave life more hurt. Gave life more poverty. His son’s going to grow up thinking that it’s okay to beat your wife. That it’s okay to stay drunk all the time. Going to grow up with booze, pills, and smoke lying around. I don’t have much faith for most people out here. Just a dull acceptance. I don’t know how to change anything. I don’t know if it can be changed. For me there’s a passive genocide happening out here. Poverty breaks the spirit. The way the tribe is set up breaks the spirit. There’s something evil going on in the world right now. We’re so obsessed with the breakdown of structure and I don’t think it’s a good path to take. I think a lot of fathers. I think a lot about who’s left out here when it’s all said and done. There’s no good people left. There’s no strong people left. That’s what I heard from someone. They said you should be the person that others look for comfort at your dad’s funeral. That can’t be me. I can’t hold my head up. I can’t look at any of my family. I can’t feel right about being alive. I can’t feel right because I know where I come from. I know all too well what made me. For that I wish I still drank. I wish I still got shitfaced regularly. Because drinking narrows your sight. It narrows your meaning in this life. It gives you community. Gives you memories. Gives you something to live for. It makes things right. It gives you a reason to leave the house. Gives you a reason to reach out to people, and I ain’t got that anymore. All I got is the sum total of my fuck ups and a will to create.

Potassium’s deficiencies are a fucked up thing. I used to wake up in the early morning to the sound of screams. My pops had it worse than I ever did. For me a lack of potassium meant a long sustained burn and hurt. For my dad it meant his whole body was in pain. And there’s not much you can do about that. And it’s not like he gave a shit about eating better. The fucker never really ate. All he did was drink three dollar cans of booze. It’s crazy that the guy made it as long as he did without becoming a diabetic.

Ammonia’s another thing people don’t really know about. When you drink long enough your ammonia levels start to get fucked up. We thought for the longest time that my old man was losing his head. But it was his ammonia levels. By the end my dad would get fucked up off half a can of booze. He’d get fucked up easy because his liver was fucked up, and his liver fucked his ammonia levels up, and then his head would just go.

My old man was a good man when he was sober. He was a strong mother fucker when we were young. His arms were like tree trunks. He used to chop wood in the winter. He came from a different time. He was a passable mechanic as long as he didn’t need any specialized tools or excess labor. We hunted for a long time there but by then he was more of a drunk than a marksman. Didn’t stop us though. He used to always tell this story about dragging a mule deer for a good mile or so.

It was him, me, and my uncle. My uncle’s name was Kent. He’s been dead awhile now. He died one year before my old man did. My uncle was a lifelong bum. He’d hitchhike all over the reservation. Couldn’t handle his booze all that well but I liked bullshitting with him. He used to always talk about his time in Texas. When he was a young man he was a ranch hand. He never had money and he could get annoying after a while but he would always be down to take us out to the good hunting spots, would always field dress our deer, would always be down to talk into the early mornings.

He was a broken man. We all become broken at some point or another. I think for him it was when his step son died. He made an honest attempt at living a right life. But that didn’t last long. The son’s name was “cheppa”. Which is Lakota for chubby. I don’t know what his real name was anymore. We used to see him riding bikes in the neighborhood a good twenty years ago. Cheppa got stabbed to death around eighteen and that was all it really was. After that my uncle gave up for the most part. Broke up with his old lady and moved into a camper trailer behind my grandparent’s house.

He died of skin cancer. I suspect it was due to all the hitchhiking and begging. He didn’t have much interest in chemotherapy. Instead he spent his last days at my aunt’s house. Even then he would still drink. He collapsed a town over at an apartment. He went into a coma and never woke up. The people he was drinking with robbed him of his money and pain pills then left him there.

Pops used to talk about Bozo. I don’t know much about Bozo. He was my dad’s friend way back in the day. Died the same way as Cheppa. Said he got his stomach cut open at a party over a parking spot. Yeah. There was one other story that still doesn’t make too much sense to me. He said back in the day Bozo looked out the window and saw a joker walking down the street in full regalia. Straight out of the middle ages. With bells and the jester’s cap. Apparently the thing stopped in it’s tracks when he was noticed. Said he stopped and turned around and stared the guy down. Strange strange stuff. But at this point there’s not much folklore left. There’s no ghosts here because no one’s been alive long enough for that to happen, there hasn’t been enough myth-building around that sort of thing. All it comes down to is the hallucinations of alcohol brained assholes. I remember one of my uncles saying Larry responded to a call down by the river and saw some floating glowing faces out there. Used to talk about talking birds and the like. There was also talk of a woman that they’d occasionally see in the trees. Apparently her house burnt down way back in the day. But that’s really it as far as the ghost stories go. I personally find it hard to believe that there’d be anything down here. As far as I’m concerned this is fresh ground. We haven’t lived here long enough for there to be too much of anything. Hell, my ma’s grandparents were raised back in a time when the town proper was some fifteen minutes out in the woods.

I was listening to that book “Lakota America”. That’s where most of my knowledge of “my people” comes from. I have a bad recall but what I do remember was how lowly we were in the beginning. I remember the guy saying that there was a lot of ritualistic crying back in the day. It was a way to get sympathy from the early traders. A way to get in contact with the local governments. He also said we were outcasts for a lot of the early years. Just a roving band of bitch ass mother fuckers. And I sure as shit carried on that tradition. I was a bitch when I was young. I think a lot of that is reasonable. A lot of it was reasonable. My parents would always drink themselves into these big ass fights. We used to call it “getting miserable”. Because that’s what drunks do. They get miserable and it’s easy to tell when it’s happening. The jovial spirit dies while sad songs play. Sad songs play and then they just slump over and start breathing heavy. They slump over, start breathing heavy and then it’s either crying or fighting or some combination of the two. And that’s where I came in back in the day. For most of my childhood I had to make them stop fighting. I had to get them to stop trying to fight each other. I had to sit with my ma while she cried all her tears out. Because where I came from ain’t a fraction of where they came from. It’s been one long line of personal misery and I don’t see it changing any time soon.

I remember crying when they broke up. I remember crying and wanting them to stay together. And they did. But now when I look back I don’t really think that that was for the best. On one hand it probably saved my dad’s life. His toe went black after a while. The thing never healed and eventually we found out he had leukemia. I don’t think he would’ve gotten it taken care of if we left. When that happened the old man sobered up for the longest time that I can remember. That dude started drinking at sixteen and didn’t stop until he died at fifty something. I was there for twenty seven years of it and the only thing that was strong enough to make him change his ways was cancer. Ma and I would drive up to the city every week to stay with him. The tribe’s a fucked up place all around but at least they help out the community members with travel cash and funeral costs.

I went through a lot to sober up. A lot of it was hurt. I remember having to walk a few miles barefoot on a gravel road. When I was done my feet were bruised to shit. They were bruised to shit and I was still drunk from the night before. I got my ass kicked a few good times. I walked in a blizzard and thought I’d die, hell, I accepted that I would die. I even took too much K2 back when it was still a new thing. I had to champ it out in my bedroom because I was too embarrassed to go to the hospital for something so fucking stupid. And because of that I had to accept that I would die. If you mix that in with the dreams, visions, and the reading that I did, then you have a viable pathway out of alcoholism.

That was never enough for my old man. The hurt was never enough for him to turn it around. I can’t be angry about that either. I heard his stories. I know where he came from. I know where my family came from. When you have that it makes sense. Leukemia was as close as he ever got. I remember him talking about a vision he had while he was in a coma. But I don’t really remember what it was specifically anymore. Some bullshit about an eagle and a bear. I guess I primed my psyche for more eccentric visions due to what I was reading at the time.

When pops would want to sober up he’d always pass out with the tv on some Christian channel. I think he knew what he needed to turn his life around. He needed an authentic spiritual experience, but that’s more or less impossible to get without the right mindset. Without giving the dreams their due reverence. And that Christian left a giant mark on everyone’s psyche. The puritan view of the Bible didn’t hold enough water. When dad would get drunk he’d always ask those types of questions. What was at the end of the universe. What happens when we die. What did those stories mean in the bible.

I think that’s what made me so interested in Jungian psychology. I inherited a lot of those questions from my family. And I found my answers in those books, in a mushroom, through dreams…

My ma’s friend got out a long time ago. She’s my buddy’s mom. She packed her shit and got out around when I was born. These days I wish ma would’ve took us and got the fuck out too. I wish we could’ve started over somewhere far away from here. I wish we could’ve cut all ties to this place. I don’t know what it would’ve done for us and that’s what I want. I want a different life, a different timeline. An alternate universe, because this life hasn’t been kind to any of us.

Pops was an insecure mother fucker. Pops was steeped in that emotional manipulation that so characterizes everyone out here. Rez love, man. It’s a fucked up thing to deal with. The guy was paranoid as all hell. Used to accuse my ma of cheating. Used to tell me that I wasn’t his son. And that shit hurt like a mother fucker. And it hurt more when he got sick because I would’ve missed him a hell of a lot if he died. I never really questioned if the guy cared about me though. Because I know he did. He’d go out of his way to protect me. I remember once a good seven years back — he went down to my brother and slapped him around a bit because we got my vehicle stuck out in the country. I wish we could’ve stayed away from each other after that happened but we were all too caught up in staying drunk to change the way we were living.

I hated my old man as much as I loved him. He used to disappear in the mornings. He’d come back towards the afternoon. And over time he’d start coming back earlier and earlier. Each time he’d get progressively more drunk. Before long he was drinking all night with who the fuck ever. Lot of uncles and cousins around the house. He was a belligerent asshole when he got a good two months into a six month bender. I remember one morning before school he was getting shitfaced in the living room with my brother. He started getting mad at ma over some dumb bullshit. I had enough of that shit so I started yelling at him, started yelling at him and shoved the old fucker. He fell backwards over a chair and cracked his head on the floor. He got a nose bleed and just laid there for a long time. My brother looked at me and got pissed. I didn’t really give a shit because I was pissed too. Pissed at all the shit we had to go through every fucking day, pissed at my brother for keeping my dad drunk. Luckily he didn’t die like our uncle John. Didn’t sober him up though. Nothing would sober him up but DT’s. And he always ended up with DT’s.

And that’s where that racism shit comes in. You hear from time to time about overworked hospital staff saying ignorant shit about drunks around here. Because they have to put up with drunk assholes all the time. Drunk assholes who stick around long enough to not die, only to come back in the same condition. I don’t hate the reservation as much as I should because it does enough. But it doesn’t go far enough to change anything. I’m very grateful for having some form of healthcare but it never translates over to a lifestyle change. When you get sick you keep doing the same shit you did before but now you have some pills to take. I can’t imagine what that costs in the long run — what all those trips to the intensive care unit costs. What all that medication costs. I don’t want to see that go away but I damn sure want to see it change over time. I think what we have here is special. What we have here is what many, many, many people want to see nationally. But in practice it doesn’t work. You get free healthcare but what does that really mean if the population takes those services and fucks themselves over, over and over? I understand where the criticism about the reservations come from. I understand why Republicans will sometimes pop up in the news saying some shit about cutting funding to the tribes. What I’d like to see in the long run is a net positive for the taxpayers and the tribe itself. But what would that mean for the way things are handled out here?

Addiction and trauma are the de facto cause of most of the hurt out here. To change this place, to change the population at large would mean to address these issues in a way that works, but that seems like a task that will never get adequately taken care of. For all I’ve been through, for all the hope I have in my heart, for all the hurt I’ve seen with my own eyes, for all of this — I still have this strong urge to self destruct in me. I still have this cloud of personal anguish hovering over my head. I still see what we’re doing here as futile. We carry this hurt. It’s in the bones, it’s in the DNA. It’s something that can not be separated from us. There is nothing in the world that can take this feeling away from me. I will always be angry, I will always be bitter, I will always feel terrified and sad. I will always feel that there’s something fundamentally wrong. I walked the path that all of my elders walked and I can’t hold my head up. I don’t feel like I’ve changed anything, that I’ve brought enough back to be forgiven for who I used to be.

I know so many people that have tried to kill themselves. I know so many relatives with scarred up arms. I know so many people who drank themselves to death. There is something wrong here at a spiritual level, at a fundamental level and there seems to be no clear path out.

Everyone wants universal basic income — but I’ve seen a lot of people kill themselves when they get money for nothing. I know plenty of Natives that would get land-sale checks and just drink themselves into oblivion. I remember my grandma crying, saying “such and such is going to kill my son” because the fucker kept buying half gallons of whiskey with all the cash he got. He’d buy all this booze and keep my uncles and cousins shit faced for weeks and weeks.

I remember my brother getting many thousands of dollars every year from the land my gramps used to own and turning it all into nothing, losing all of it to booze and meth. I know so many people that use their disability cash to just get shitfaced twenty four seven. What’s fucked up about that is I don’t think that’s just a local thing. Look around and you’ll find similar accounts from a shit ton of tribes. The rich Natives don’t end up much better than how we end up.

Everyone wants free education — well we have the tribal college out here. It’s nationally accredited but they turn into ghost towns once the PELL grants go out. People use that place for a quick paycheck. That place should be turning us into productive members of the community. They hand out concrete pathways out of poverty. They pay for our books, for our transportation, they pay for our apprenticeships, they do a shit ton for us, but we don’t ever use it for much. It just goes to waste. It goes to waste because the households are going through hell, and have been going through hell for many, many generations. I still remember the radio ads about the local drop out rate at one of the tribal high schools. At the time there was a 50 percent graduation rate out there. That’s a lot of illiterate mother fuckers walking into the world. That’s a lot of people fucking themselves over. That’s a lot of defiance and rage. That’s a lot of future fathers and mothers who will give back more hurt, more misery, more poverty.

I remember my cousin getting an apartment from the tribe. This mother fucker only had to pay for electricity and he had his own place. Electricity was seventy bucks, if that, and he couldn’t hold on to it for more than a few months.

The natives seen in the media ain’t what’s out here. We have meth heads. We have meth heads and drunks and that leads to fatherless households. That leads to generations raised without a benevolent king. What we have are tyrant kings running amok. We have violent, bitter assholes. We foster anger and addiction. It was so bad in my case that I ended up hating my friend because he was a fundamentally good hearted person.

I want to leave it all behind. I want to move to a city. I want to get away so I can sleep at night. I want to not be paranoid all the time. I want to live a good life so I can hold my head up around my family. I want to experience life so I can have stories to tell. I want to be something more than this, but “this” ain’t much. I’m a broke artist, and that’s the best possible outcome there could’ve possibly been.

My brother used to get drunk and get pissed at me. He used to get pissed because I had a dad and a mom. He idealized that shit in his head, made it something it wasn’t. He thought that everything was good because I had my parents. And it was good to a certain extent, but it was still miserable. We still had to deal with alcoholism. We still had to deal with arguing, with fighting, with poverty. We weren’t doing all that well at all but he’d get pissed about it. There’s a wound in the heart that never heals. I think in the long run we’re supposed to find a way to heal ourselves and give that back to the rest of the community but I don’t think that’s possible anymore. I don’t think it’s possible to escape. I don’t think it’s possible to make anything better. But I think my brother intuited something. I put a lot of emphasis on the lack-of-fathers out here because I see it as a glaring issue that needs to be remedied. I was eighteen by the time I found a suitable role model. I was eighteen and by that point most of the damage had already been done. I was grown up around destructive people who hated everyone. They were the tyrant kings. They hated seeing good things happen to people. They hated seeing people do better for themselves. They saw anyone with potential as a target. And I joined in on that. I made fun of people for figuring their shit out, and what the fuck did that do for me in the long run?

Not a goddamn thing.

I’ve been sober now for nearly four years and I never really got over it. Never got better. I’ve been burning up on the inside that entire time. I still feel ashamed. I still feel guilty. I still feel evil. I still feel hopeless. I still feel fucked up and it never gets better. I can look at all of us and see, objectively, that I took the right path. I did what I could, when I could. I can see that things have improved, I can see that things are improving. I can look back at what I’ve done since then but still feel wrong.

I got in that car wreck on June 15th 2017. I started drinking again about two hours after getting out of the emergency room. And I drank for two days. By the second day I drank for the last time without me knowing that that’s what I did. I bought a good case and drank it all in about an hour. By the time I was done the bar was already closed and I couldn’t get anymore booze. I hate being drunk. I love getting drunk, but hate being drunk. It always feels ugly. Always feel wrong. And I had no other choice. I had to sit through it. The plan was to go up to the gas station at seven in the morning. Instead I fell asleep.

The next morning my pops was asking for enough cash to get some booze so I gave him my cash card. I told him how much I had and how much he could spend. But the dude spent a little too much. I didn’t find out until that evening when I went up for more. The atm was down so I didn’t know how much I had in the damn thing. What I did know is I didn’t have enough for a fifteen pack. I got pissed and came back home. Got pissed and suck “fuck it I’ll just sober up”. And that’s exactly what I did. I sobered the fuck up for the first time in nearly seven years. Last drink was on June 17th.

I was scared as shit because I knew what withdrawals felt like. I got a taste of it and never wanted to feel it again. I’ve seen a lot of people go through that shit. My dad got delirium tremens more times than I can count. All the way back when I was seven or so. I remember he used to see flies and shit. Used to hear people knocking at the door. My brother went through it a number of times too. He said he woke up to a horned cloaked figure sitting in his room. Said he was drinking with my uncle in that camper trailer and saw his ex peaking through each of the windows. I remember one time I went to the kitchen to get some water. Went to the back door to see what the weather was like. One of my cousins was just about to knock on the thing. He invited me out to drink a liter of vodka with him. We got sloshed and the guy says that my brother got taken to the ER about twenty minutes ago. Said he started hallucinating. Started seeing snakes all around him.

Most of my cousins and uncles went through it at one point or another. I remember one of the common occurrences was the feeling that they weren’t alone. Maybe the presence of “higher self” that lives this life with us was finally able to make itself known. That’s a hunch I got after reading a lot of that Jungian shit. They always talk about seeing the Eye of God in dreams. They say that when that archetype shows up it’s trying to show the ego that it’s not alone. I’ve seen it a few times and it always scared the shit out of me.

I used to hear about seeing faces in the trees too.

I don’t know how the fuck I lucked out though. I remember once a friend from the old, old days stopped by my window. He had a jug of vodka on him. He invited me to do some drinking. We drank a traveler, a few cans of joose, then the fucker scored some more cash so we bought another traveler, and then five or six cans of malt liquor. I drove him up to a trailer house and blacked out. Next thing I know I’m in the ER and my pops and my cousin’s boyfriend are there. I time traveled and asked them what the fuck happened. They said I got alcohol poisoning. It was an ugly feeling. Some four/five hours just passed in the blink of an eye. I was only the hospital, for me at least, for a good fifteen minutes before I got discharged. My buddy called me up a few days later. Said the locals saw me stumbling around town. Said someone pulled a gun on me. I guess I was trying to walk over to my friend’s house and got lost.

Never had dt’s though. And when I quit I was scared as shit. Scared as shit because I never went more than a few hours without drinking. So the first day passes and nothing happens. Then the second and nothing happens. Then the third, and the fourth. After that I breathed a long sigh and prayed to something out there. Prayed to something because I didn’t go through hell like so many others. And that was that. All I had to do was heal up. I broke my collarbone in the wreck and couldn’t do shit. Couldn’t laugh. Couldn’t cough. Couldn’t shower, shit, or piss without hurting like a mother fucker.

That wasn’t the end of it though. Wasn’t the end by a long shot. That’s something I read about in Anatomy of the Psyche. Apparently Origen was talking about hell around the 3rd century A.D. the church fathers were thinking allegorically. They didn’t see hell as a literal place you’d go to after dying, for them hell was a lived experience. He said something like about hell fire being the fires of jealous, hurt, rage, envy, that type of thing. And that’s what I went through for a solid year. And then shit got bad. It got so bad I started praying again. I used to rehearse with my band out south. It was a twenty minute drive through the prairies. We’d finish our set and I’d head back home and cry and pray and cry and pray all the way home.

And it never got better. Never got better. It got so bad that I’d lay in bed for days on end. Used to lay in bed and wrap a noose around my neck. Used to practice hanging myself off of a chair. I’d go a good week at a time doing that shit. Just lay in bed and feel miserable.

Things were getting better though. Objectively. I was making money. I was getting better at painting and drawing. I wasn’t taking watery beer shits all day. Things were getting better but it never really felt like it.

My old man was still getting shit faced regularly.

It was May or so. I remember pulling this big ass nail out of my wall. Used to be my parents’ room. Dad used to hang his twelve gauge on the wall. The nails were still there so I pulled it out and put it by my bed. I wrote a note and taped it to the wall. I painted “read” next to it on the wall. Then I let my body weight go. I let myself sink into it. I remember the fan changing from a constant drone to a pulse. I remember feeling it coming closer. Remember it so fucking clearly.

Remember backing out too.

The house got quiet.

Really quiet.

I didn’t let anyone know what I was going through at the time.

After a day or two I asked my ma why the place was so quiet. She tells me that pops got taken to the Emergency Room. Then they flew him out to the city. She said they were going to go soon. Said he was doing bad. I remember him being sick but he’s been sick so much that it didn’t really mean anything. He was going to get hungover for a few days, five tops, then he’d get over it and then he’d sober up for a good few months.

But this time was different.

The old man was puking, pissing himself, shitting himself. Was tied to a garbage bin the entire time. Got too bad so he had to go in and that was that. He disappeared out of nowhere for a few weeks.

The whole family disappeared for a few weeks.

I had a dream then. I dreamed that I was at this white house at the edge of town. I was there with a friend. She wrote for websites for a long while. We sat outside at a picnic table. There was a creek in the yard and it started to flood. When that happened a missile shot over head. It came from the northern horizon. But it wasn’t a missile. It was a rolled up piece of paper. When it got overhead it exploded and this golden light fell down.

In Jungian psychology the appearance of the flood generally means that there’s something in the unconscious that’s trying to get out. If you’re a guy then the appearance of a woman generally means that the anima is present. The anima relates to creativity and emotion. For me the roll of paper that flew overhead reminded me of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. They said he wrote the whole thing on one long manuscript. The whole experience reminded me of how Joseph Campbell talked about a certain Middle Eastern prophet. Apparently he’d go out to a cave to meditate everyday. One day he either sees an angel or hears the voice of God and it instructs him to write.

So that’s what I did. I wrote for a good week or so. The manuscript that I wrote ended up being used in the future. I still have it but I read those stories so many times that I got tired of ’em. Got tired of rereading and editing. So I let it go. Let it go and figured we’d rewrite ’em again. And that’s what I’ve been up to lately.

The clock in the living room ended up dying around then.

Then I got a phone call eventually. It was 3:23. Ma says they made the decision to turn the ventilator off. She held the phone up to my dad’s ear. I could hear the machine breathing for him. I didn’t know what to say to the old man so I said “I hope you don’t hurt where you’re going”.

Pops fell the winter before. The bones didn’t heal right and he lost the use of his right arm. He couldn’t move it passed his abdomen. The doctors said the brain scan showed signs of a stroke. He had one in the last year or so but didn’t tell anyone. They said he was also blind in his right eye. My pops was fifty. Fifty ain’t that old. Fifty shouldn’t be old for anyone. But out here, for men, that’s about as far as you could hope for. My uncle died last year too. He was relatively healthy. We had a long talk with him in February of 2020. He was a tribal councilman. He’d travel out to Washington D.C. to do legit business.

We were working on a project for some magazine.

He died later that year. Said he had a few strokes too. Then his heart just gave out. He wasn’t too much older than dad when he passed. Maybe five or six years or so.

When I was young I thought fifty was plenty. But now I’m closing in on 30 and I feel like it’s not enough. If I had a son or a daughter I know it wouldn’t grow up long enough to meet my ma. And most of the people that mattered to me have already died. I’d never be able to introduce ’em to my grandparents, to some of my friends, to some of my uncles and aunts.

Fifty ain’t old enough.

Pops died on June 5th, I think.

What I do know is we buried the old man on June 15th. That was one year to the day of the car wreck. Two days later was Father’s Day. It was also the one year anniversary of my last drink.

It rained pretty hard that day. I remember walking around outside. Felt like a ghetto baptism. While that was happening my family ended up going to the hospital because my sister was feeling sick for awhile. They ended up picking up a new clock. They also found out she was pregnant.

Life took a life, and gave a life.