The Difference between Love and The Hangover

More on the “acute” hangover that only lasts a week in another post, but “The Hangover” is forever.

In August of 1971 I had shaken off the physical effects of my alcohol and speed run, bounced back from the loss of the relationship that was a casualty of that spree and feeling mighty “frisky,” if you know what I mean.

I was just a year into my 14-year-long Marijuana Maintenance experiment, so I wasn’t “sober,” but I thought I was. After all, when you drink and speed, bad things happen. When you smoke marijuana, “nothing happens.” And that, of course, is the problem.

I was approaching the end of the pound of the best weed I ever bought until Hawaiian produce entered the mainland market, so I had quit sponsoring the “all-day rock and roll shows” (Stewart, R), in the apartment below me and was just hanging at home with my new BFF. A knock on the door didn’t change just my plans for the evening. It completely altered the rest of my life, right up to this minute.

I opened the door to find an acquaintance standing there with two attractive females. One of them smiled and the other two people sort of grayed out. He had brought them by in hopes of getting high before the three of them went on to the State Fair. I hadn’t been to the fair in ten years, but I suddenly had a powerful urge to check it out.

Two weeks later I was living with my smiling enchantress. You can get more on that in my long-awaited (by me) memoir, but we had two consecutive “Summer of Love-Winter of Discontent” affairs, before we reluctantly gave it up and didn’t rekindle the flame again until 1990. Around Fair time, come to think of it. We were married by that Thanksgiving.

As you can imagine, when two addicts reunite, love does not conquer all. I was five years into recovery. She stated that was her goal as well and promised to abstain, but made no commitment to a program to make that happen. My experience running the Detox/Halfway House notwithstanding, I found this promise credible. A million-candlepower smile is “a blinding sight to see” (Donovan).

Twenty-one years of intense love and bad craziness ensued, culminating in her two-year decline and death from liver disease, murdered by “the usual suspects.”  

Again, the emphasis: Addiction is a medical diagnosis and not a moral judgment. She was a wonderful person, with a terrible affliction.

She passed away in 2011, leaving behind children, grandchildren and the relationships that had developed among them, now interwoven with my life as well.

Lacking any legal responsibility, I could walk away from my “accidental family,” but a simple “thought experiment,” of the type beloved by Einstein, quickly put that notion to rest. My inconvenient mammal brain is not going to allow me to enjoy my freedom from responsibility to that family, especially the young grandchildren and the new greatgrandchild.  

Adding to the personal attachments I developed with her extended brood, I am haunted by my years of assuring fed-up people that they would not abandon a family member with, say, pancreatic cancer. Likewise, they may come to regret turning their back on their addict, now a zombie that only looks like their loved one, who has been left silently screaming inside. I don’t want to turn a deaf ear to my own words. I try to minimize hypocrisy in my life, even when the chickens have come home to roost and are defecating all over me. 

Fast forward (an essential habit to master in recovery, BTW):

My commitment to FINALLY starting the blog I’ve been planning since the day I first saw the word “weblog” was firm as December, 2015 began. Then a Pearl Harbor Day car wreck, involving two of my family, put the rest of my life on hold. I was haltingly moving toward liftoff for my blog when my days were suddenly dominated by phone calls and paperwork from several insurance companies and medical appointments to haul injured bodies to. My brain was overwhelmed from keeping track of it all, as their battered brains and bodies (no seatbelts!) crippled their own ability to care for themselves.

In keeping with my M. O. of either ducking the issue or forcing it, I counted down to New Year’s Eve day and hit “publish” on my blog.  

A month had passed since the wreck and I was comfortably slipping into denial of my initial fear that “the usual suspects” might again have had a hand in the latest disaster. Then, just as the insurance/medical issues were beginning to die down, the other shoe dropped and I was now dealing with the legal system. Gathering meds to take to the jail, gathering money to post bond for one and composing a letter to the judge outlining the reasons the person with a Missouri accent was not a flight risk and did not require a huge bond to prevent him from heading south.

Or, as I like to say, “just another day on South Jackson.”

And, all this, my friends, is just one more symptom of “The Hangover,” the lifelong effect of ever having had an active substance disorder. Every bad event and situation in my recovering life has been caused or made worse by the twenty-five years that I spent chasing, but never catching, the first ecstatic high and the illusion of freedom that was the always-just-out-of-reach bait, leading me across the trap door that dropped me into the pit of addiction.

A pit that included failed relationships, time lost, never-to-be-regained, with the grandparents, parents and siblings in my own family, a zig-zag tour through education and jobs, breathing dust during my sheetrocking era that has left behind nodules in my lungs, years of a BMI in the “obese” range with cholesterol measured at 450 during a rare checkup, periods of near starvation that were probably nearly as bad for my health, life in a spiritual vacuum, a precarious financial position in my retirement, years after treatment spent feeling my way out of the brain-fog and cutting through the web of lies I had told myself to justify my using behavior, living even today with an uneasy feeling that something from my past is going to ambush me still. After all, it always has.

During periods of high stress, I’ve had my regrets that I answered the door the first time and knocked on her door nineteen years later, but I would also regret missing the good times with her and this accidental family of mine. I’m never going to live a regret-free life.

If I fix my roof too soon, I’ll regret spending the money. If I don’t fix it in time, I’ll regret spending money repairing damage to the structure. If I do my “due diligence,” make the best decision I know how to with the information at hand and avoid impulsive behavior, I can minimize my regrets and avoid the avoidable ones. Number one on that list would be using any drug, anytime, anywhere, for any reason.

I don’t want to leave the impression that my last relationship was a net-negative experience. My rather unsentimental father referred to my marriage as “the icing on the cake” of my recovery and sweet it was in the good times. I was 48 years old when I married, childless and without any thought of having grandchildren, a condition alone that would have made all the difficult times worth the price.

The piece I was working on for tonight, before the time bomb left behind by the Pearl Harbor Day wreck exploded, “Evenings with Jason,” describes a high point of my life in 2015. Words cannot do justice to the experiences of watching all of them as infants, beginning to open up like little flowers, drinking in the magic of the world around them. As soon as I master putting pictures on the blog, I’ll share one from an otherwise bleak day recently that says it all. For now, I’ll just say that addictive tendencies aren’t the only inheritable traits. Smiles-that-blind are also there to remind.

And I won’t forget to present the convincing evidence, gleaned from the stories gathered in interviews and interactions with over a thousand clients, that hangovers do last a week and do include more than a headache.