My friend Johann sent me the following last week’s installment, it feels like the right thing to include:

no one ever teaches you that people will come and go in your life. i think i've grown to find that out and now i not only accept it but i welcome it. almost how we grow out of our clothes or realize we really don't like a certain food. our bodies and desires will always change and grow - relationships and our relationship to those relationships are the same. sometimes people are only going to be a part of your life for a certain (short) amount of time. that's fine. sometimes they'll be around for much longer. that's fine too! making peace with that i think is a part of the human condition. "best friends" become "someone i used to know". and sometimes through circumstance you really can't be as close to people, but the feeling and bond is so real and so strong that the distance doesn't matter - there's always love there.

Writing to you from the left window seat in the 9th row back on a discount and deliciously mid-day commuter bus heading to Baltimore. It’s a beautiful day, the trees along the Jersey Turnpike are green and fully springed out, and I have forgotten my headphones at my office this morning so I am sitting quietly, almost peacefully, listening to the white noise hum of the AC vents and the low rattle of the bus’ mechanics below. It’s peaceful. Thinking through a lot. I have only ever spent ~6 hours in Baltimore previously - a friend of mine organized something called the Fung Wah Biennial once, an art show that featured installations and performances aboard chartered Chinatown busses, in rest stops along the highway, and in a destination city, with a return trip in the evening. That bus tour took us to an art gallery where I remember making friends but can’t remember who with, for the rest of the afternoon we drank cheap beers at an Irish bar around the corner with my friend from high school. I don’t remember what year this was. And I drove through Baltimore once a couple of years ago after having gone to absurd lengths to rent a car to visit my then-partner’s family - she was, for whatever reason, sleeping 12+ hours a day that weekend and spent most of the drive conked out, me listening to the local NPR station almost inaudibly, one last gasp of tenderness between us, and then on the way home we waited an extra 15 minutes at a rest stop so we could be the first paying customers of the day at an Auntie Anne’s pretzels. One indelible image from that weekend: wanting to impress my partner’s party bro brother during a game of beer pong (could it be? I think the whole family played) I shotgunned a beer on the deck overlooking the Chesapeake by biting it open, chugging it down where from where I had ripped the aluminum open with my teeth.

The ripped open aluminum reminds me of the deeply chaotic month I spent driving cross country to college when I was 18. There are a lot of stories to tell about that time - I’m glad that I’m 12 years away from them now. I’ve probably written about it here before. But one night we were in New Orleans at a house party. This was the summer after Katrina and we were staying with a friend of ours, a kid who had been displaced after the storm and, as a gesture of goodwill, was allowed a semester at our fancy private OC CA high school. He was living in his house again - still no front door - and we had a wild week of staying up late and getting fucked up in various people’s bedrooms. My friend I drove to college with was a weed dealer in high school and very enthusiastically loved to rip bongs (I was still unsure about it, it felt like a sin plus, asthma) and I think there was something about how he had really good weed from California, a special kind of weed he wanted to share with the New Orleans buddies. We were smart then, we removed the spare tire from the back of his Prius so we could stash giant cans of Asahi and a bottle of Malibu under the floor mat in the trunk, he had a $400 bong back there in a special carrying case, he was keeping his weed in a false bottom can of barbasol like it was Jurassic Park (later all of these things plus many fireworks were discovered by the border police in Canada including, terribly, the digital scale my friend used to use to sell weed with. Very incriminating. Now I remember writing about that here in particular because I don’t think I had ever told my mom that we had gotten strip searched at the Canadian border before that). Anyway, we were too fucked up at the party in New Orleans, we couldn’t figure out how to get the false bottom off the can, so we ripped it open with a kitchen knife and, tempting fate with the blood in our fingers, we kept the jagged, smashed open can where the spare tire used to be for the rest of the trip, at least all the way until we got to the Canadian border.

I haven’t had a drink in 5 weeks besides the ceremonial 4 glasses of wine at my friend’s family’s seder. I’ve had a few puffs here and there but mostly I’ve been coming at the world clear eyed and stone sober, I even turned down the free and delicious looking tallboys at our show in Philadelphia last weekend. I’ve done extended karaoke twice without a beverage. Some have asked me why recently, a couple of friends in particular seemed absolutely dismayed that I would do such a thing. And what I’ve said is that I’m focused on running and watching my calories, which is true - a night of drinking is awful for that. Plus my life has become unexpectedly more expensive all of a sudden and you can really save a lot of money by staying dry. But I think there’s something deeper than that going on, something I’m still wrapping my head around, and it’s essentially this: getting fucked up inoculates you from your inner world, it smears a warm finger full of vaseline across the lens, it allows you to sidestep responsibility for your actions and your desires, projecting the motivations of your three beer heart onto an irreconcilable shadow. It’s convenient. You can place the more challenging and harder to swallow aspects of yourself within that shadow, you can acknowledge them at a remove and go about your day without reckoning with it. Oh, I was fucked up then, I acted crazy, I screamed at someone, I sent a risky 2am text message, I cried, I felt real anger, I danced on a table, I ate popeyes chicken in bed, etc, I was fucked up then, the real me wouldn’t do those thing otherwise. But substances don’t fundamentally change who you are, they merely amplify your tendencies and subtly remove your understanding of the ramifications of your whole vibe. No matter how fucked up someone gets they are still themselves, however bitter, miserable, sentimental, goofy, or shitty that might be. I guess what I’m saying is this: I don’t want there to be any further distance between me and what I desire, I want to assert myself as clearly as I can in this life, I want full credit for my actions, I want to reckon with it. When I was ripping open weed stashes in New Orleans or clinging to life by my incisors stuck in the beer can, or that other time when I tried to shotgun a beer with a butcher knife in the front yard of my house in Mystic and the knife went all the way through the back of the can and into my palm and I was bleeding everywhere and beer was coming out both holes in the can and I was drinking my blood mixed up in the beer and also I was wearing a dress at the time, I wanted obliteration, freedom from my interior life. Now I just want to actually be free, not just feel that way for a night.