Honeymoon 3

 

 

This is my wife. This picture is also a symbol of her new freedom. Amanda, much like me, has a dark past. Our former lives are similar although on opposite ends of alcoholism. Many of my readers know that we met at work, but she reached out to me as a result of finding this blog, and wanting to know about the disease. She was hurt, and had been for years.

We have been through a lot together, but by herself, she has climbed mountains and become an individual capable of anything. She is free to make her own choices, be her own person, and trust unequivocally. She knows I am here when she needs me, and I know she is there for me. We are free.

This picture is worth 565 words. It tells a story of liberation, love, and triumph. It shows transformation, courage, and hope for women who have overcome (or still need to) fear of harm. This picture is the epitome of courage. Watch out world, here she comes.

This is the binomial theorem. I have not a clue what it means (although I am positive the answer is 42), but as I was searching the tool bar for those three little asterisks that separate ideas in a chapter (or post), I came across several equations and thought it was nice. It’s nice.

On the fourth day of our familymoon, the weather was perfect. Amanda, her mother, and the girls all spent hours playing in the water. I stayed a fair distance away from the lake as many of you may know I don’t care for water having nearly drowned in the Cayman Islands fifteen years ago. I don’t even like taking baths. In public pools I will go in, but even when I go under just briefly I get extreme anxiety and I gasp for air and want to leave immediately. Enough about that.

Yesterday, we grilled pork chops, sipped exquisite coffee, the ladies indulged in leftover wine from the wedding, and we had another campfire.  I’ve really enjoyed my mornings writing with coffee on the screened-in porch. It’s a little chilly, and I only brought clothing with short sleeves and legs, but I’m a man of the woods now and cold don’t bother me none.

Today is our last full day at the cabin, already. Time moves too quickly for my taste, but it seems to have slowed ever so slightly out here in the country. Two nights ago, Amanda and I went out by ourselves to dinner to a quaint little cabin-restaurant overlooking Webb Lake. We sat out on the patio and watched the sun go down, basking in silence and photons. When she and I first started meeting, we would sit at a coffee shop and talk, or not talk. Even in the beginning, we could just sit and enjoy the moment. We could talk for hours, or just watch the people, but it was never awkward or uncomfortable. We enjoyed each other’s company, and still do. Now I get to spend the rest of my life with the one I love and have grown to understand and appreciate. She’s unique, funny, intelligent, and caring. She’s a little crazy, unbelievably annoying, and perfect. She’s my life. We are the light.

It was you all along, my love.  Be you. I love you forever.   

 

Honeymoon 2

There’s something stunning about nothing. I mean the nothing that happens when you get up before light; before the birds first chirp, the frogs croak, and the children scream. I recall just six years ago this was a regular occurrence.

It was different then. I would stay up all night doing meth, and every morning just before the sun came up, nature would warn me that soon enough, reality would be alive again. It was a devastating feeling, especially when I actually held a job and I knew at some point I would have to put down the pipe and take a shower. Toward the end of my run, it didn’t matter much because I didn’t work and rarely showered and I was headed into prison.

Today is different. Just in writing these two paragraphs, the world around me has begun to sing its song. Aside from a woodpecker close by, it is all rather soothing, and I find comfort in its harmony. Perhaps to them, the rhythmic stroking of my keyboard is music to their ears. Perhaps.

It’s time to stop writing for the day. My grandmother, who has joined us with some other family members, is awake and looking for coffee. So, I will spend some time with her and write more tomorrow.

 

It’s tomorrow, which is today. The sun is at my back and it’s early morning here in the Wisconsin Northwoods. The idea of having a family honeymoon has worked out. The girls are with us, and family from both sides of the new tribe is here to spend our vacation with us. Yesterday I toured the lake a couple times in my uncle’s duck boat—very likely not used for hunting—exploring the new cabins and watching the loons swim peacefully and slowly, occasionally calling for their mate, or maybe just screaming because they are crazy. This area has been developed extensively since my uncle and I first started coming up here some 30 years ago.

There is a radio on a table just by the sliding glass door that leads to the screened-in porch. I recall my late childhood when he and I would listen to twins games while sitting around the fire and eagerly awaiting the early morning when we would cast our lines into the tranquil waters of Pear Lake. Back then, this was just a patch of woods and we slept in tents. Everything changes, but the memories remain. Amanda and I have decided many times in these few short days that we need property; a little getaway from the stressors of real life. We can’t afford to do anything about that at this point in our lives, but it’s nice to have dreams. It’s also a possibility. In my sobriety, I seem to have been able to everything I’ve set out to do with a few exceptions. Nothing about my criminal past can hinder my ability to seek out and purchase a plot of land. Maybe in a few years when we have our own business up and running, we can add on another piece to our lives. I just love the idea of getting away for a bit.

 

Today we (probably not me) will all relax in the lake, floating endlessly, guided only by the wind. Tonight we will assemble and roast—probably not in that order—s’mores around the campfire. Tomorrow we will do the same, or maybe not. It’s nice not to be bound by the thought of having to go to work tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, etc.

Signing off for now,

V

Honeymoon 1

It’s just me and the loons. Or is it the loons and I? Am I a loon? At 6am all is quiet in the middle of the woods, and I’m at peace with the world. My wife is sleeping soundly in our honeymoon suite, and the girls are upstairs in the loft, building up their daily charge. For the second year, we are here in northern Wisconsin at my aunt and uncle’s cabin overlooking beautiful Pear Lake. Nothing is better than this.

To my left is a cup of the best coffee I’ve ever had. It wasn’t the brewing process this time; normally I only give that praise for pour-over. This came from a simple drip machine, but on our way up we stopped at a place called Fresh Start Coffee Roasters in Webster, Wisconsin, where they roast your coffee for you wait, one pound at a time. I chose Tanzania pea berry at a light roast and wish I had time to wait around for more of all they had.

The roasting took about twenty minutes so we all wandered over to a little shop that peddled wares of a local nature, and kids trinkets and whatnot. Right before we went inside, Emme grabbed my attention and asked if she could go to her friend’s house which at this point was well over two hours away. I said yes, and she was excited until she became distracted inside the store. We all found some treasures and made our way back just in time for the roasting to be done. Now, I’m a coffee snob but only in the fact that I like good coffee and like it a certain way, I don’t know how to describe to you the notes or flavors, I just know that this is one phenomenal cup of coffee. But enough about that.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to write about the wedding. We were there, it was beautiful. People kept telling us to soak it up and be in the moment, and that’s what I did. If you were there, you know how special it was, and I thank you for sharing your time and lives with us, and I hope you have fond memories as well.

Amanda and I aren’t gamblers. However, on our way up north, we saw a casino coming up and thought we should give it a try since I had to pee anyhow. I allotted us each a crisp $10 bill, and we went in one at a time. I have had luck the three other times I have gambled in a similar setting, so I went to the penny slot machines and put in the bill. I left the casino about five minutes later up a solid $12.50. When Amanda came back, she was up $40. All-in-all it was a solid 20 minute bathroom break.

 

The loons are calling, the squirrels are playing, and the water is still. It’s a little chilly this morning on the porch, but it’s worth it to be surrounded by tranquility. We had a lovely fire last night during which two eagles passed us overhead a few times. They were just above the treetops—maybe forty feet up—and I could hear the wind passing through their wings and some low grumbling noises they were making. They were playing, and I wondered if maybe they were on their honeymoon, too. We are completely exhausted. We were in bed by 10pm, which is still pretty late for me, but I’ve been up late and up early for several days now and it’s been quite taxing.

So, now it’s time to relax. I’ll share some pictures of the week, and maybe a video of our dance. But for now, I’m going off the grid.

 

Fifteen Days

Fifteen days remain until I get to marry my best friend. If somebody had told me how expensive it would be to have a wedding, I would have settled for a handshake, but nevertheless I persist. You people. You people better have a good time.

Very few people know this, but, we’ve been getting dance lessons for about two months, tailored specifically to our wedding dance song. By all appearances, I’ve paid little attention, and I have the rhythm of a thing that doesn’t have very good rhythm. I’ll still be lost the second the song is over for regular dancing, so I’ll probably go chat with people. Dancing really isn’t my thing. But I’m trying.

Food, tables, chairs, cakes, costumes, haircuts, dance lessons, drinks for both drinkers and non-drinkers, flowers, port-o-potties (I splurged for the kind that flush.), paper plates, plastic cups and silverware, photography. Those are all nouns and I can’t wait to verb them from my mind when this is done. People keep asking if we are registered anywhere. Yes, we are registered at Wells Fargo. Please get us a gift card for there.

But all of these expenses are a one-time trade for a lifetime with my soulmate and two precious bonus kids. The girls are also a lifetime expense—for which their biological father has still contributed exactly $0 in the last two years—but they are a lot of fun. I just discovered today that we actually have to pay for the four-year-old to go to preschool. WTF? More and more, every day, everybody wants more money. But, fuck em’, we have it, so let’s spend it on education.  With what we paid to have a babysitter today, I made less that I did per hour than I did when I left prison. But I wouldn’t trade any of these complaints for any part of my old life.

As I was pushing the merry-go-round at the park today, Emme was laughing hysterically and screaming, “Daddy, Daddy faster!!” and when she fell off she got up, brushed herself off, looked at me and said, “I’m ok, you a good daddy.” Then she ran off to fall off of something else. I can’t imagine not wanting to be a part of their lives. I would and have sacrificed anything and everything to get to see them as much as possible.

Ella, who is eight, is becoming quite a character. She wants desperately to be a YouTube star, and I think she could do it because the bar is so incredibly low. She watches hours of kids unwrapping toys. She wants to do that. She also watches people play video games. So I make her go outside. When I was a kid, I actually had to play video games and unwrap my own toys, and look at me now. We have a special bond; she looks to me for guidance, supervision, and humor. We went to her first Twins game a little under two weeks ago, and it was a great time. She made it onto the jumbo Tron, about 31 years faster than me.

I thought a lot about my recently deceased friend at the game. He knew when I told him we were going that it would be special and it was. We saw the only triple-play ever at Target Field. We watched five homeruns leave the field, and the Twins beat the Yankees. Ella didn’t understand much of what was going on, but we had fun getting her face painted, eating cotton candy, and eating sushi on a rooftop in downtown Minneapolis before the game. What a beautiful day.

This will likely be my last post before the wedding and honeymoon. I just want to thank everybody who reached out after my friend’s passing to share their strength with me. It’s been a tough road for a lot of people, and I am so grateful that I had an opportunity to share some of his story at his final ceremony, and I hope my words will make a lasting impact.

Fifteen days remain until I get to marry my best friend. My new journey awaits, and I can’t wait to share our story with you.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

For Ever Ever?

Yesterday was tough. Amanda and I attended our fourth funeral of 2019. Every funeral is emotional, but losing my close friend suddenly was particularly shocking and after everything, I have found a new perspective on my sobriety.

I have to be brutally honest here. In the back of my mind, for years, I’ve always had the thought that maybe, just maybe, when I retire, or I get old enough that everybody who I know and cares about me is gone, I could try some controlled drinking. Maybe I could hire a bodyguard to protect others from me, and hire a driver so that I could drink the way that I want to. I could just sit by the lake (by my cabin I don’t own yet) and have a few beers or a margarita. Don’t worry, this is perfectly normal thinking for an alcoholic, what probably isn’t normal is admitting it, and openly writing about it. But I have to do this to help me process this new found need for permanent sobriety.

Having and end in mind for sobriety, or even thinking I could handle a controlled drinking life, is the end to many an alcoholic. It’s how my friend started his relapse that lead to his demise, and even in the Big Book, it speaks heavily on what a waste the idea of controlled drinking is.

My longtime readers will know that when I relapsed sometime in 2006, I started with one beer in a classy Italian restaurant with my girlfriend at the time. The next night I sat at a bar alone and finished a liter of Jack Daniels and blacked out sometime after I laid down a vomit-trail to my house. When I woke up in my piss-soaked clothes the next day with the worst hangover I ever had, I promised myself I would never drink again. And I didn’t. For three days.

Three weeks after I started drinking, I started doing meth, and then it was the year 2015 and I had nothing to show for my life. I was dying very slowly, and fortunately, I was hit by a fast-moving trolley car called prison and I was able to turn it around. But this doesn’t mean I’m safe. None of us is ever safe.

That last line was in the original draft of the eulogy I wrote for my friend. I thought it was too ominous, and I wanted to stay as positive as I could for the moment. When I delivered the eulogy, my eyes welled constantly and I kept thinking that somebody would be doing this for me if I ever have one drink. One sip. If I ever stop going to meetings or talking with my sober network, if I ever stop giving back, calling my sponsor, listening to the newcomer, speaking in front of groups, I will die. Now that’s ominous.

The day that I found out my friend died, I received a letter in the mail stating I had finally been approved to bring meetings into the McLeod County jail. Service work is where I thrive, and I’ve always wanted to bring meetings to people in custody.

 (Just now, the four-year-old came to me on the couch crying because she wanted to give me a hug and a kiss. I obliged but she snuck the kiss in before I realized she had a large trail of snot streaming from her nose and when she touched my face I quickly pulled away and we sort of reverse Lady and the Tramped it and she laughed, I gagged. This is my life now.)

When I was in St. Cloud state prison, we were able to leave our cells very little. You could go to church, school, meals, occasional recreation, and meetings. In the beginning, I went to church and meetings because those were the only places in the building with air conditioning. I stopped going to church because it just wasn’t for me, but I kept going to meetings. I kept listening, and eventually I started sharing some of my story, and people listened to me. And then I started going because it made me feel better. Every time I left a meeting, I was happy. And to this day that remains true, and it’s why I kept going to meetings after I wasn’t forced to do so when I got out.

Bringing meetings into a locked facility will give me the chance to give somebody else that opportunity. I’m only bringing the meeting, they still have to show up, but it will be there for them.

 Too many people are dying from addiction. It’s never hit this close to home, but I know it has for so many others I know. When does it stop?

Today I choose to think of my life without chemicals forever, and it doesn’t sound impossible or boring. My sobriety can define who I am, and it can help others, and it makes me tolerable. I will picture myself by the lake by my cabin (that I don’t own yet) surrounded by grandkids and family, with a clear mind, a clear conscience, and a loving heart. I don’t have to drink. Ever. I just have to put in a little work to make sure I don’t. So I will.

 

 

See You, Man

My only cellmate in Moose Lake prison knew that I was going to boot camp. For the first few days he warned off the wannabe bikers from trying to intimidate me into giving them my newspaper every week in exchange for not beating me up because they assumed I was a sex-offender because of my state-issue glasses. I’ll admit, I questioned myself in the mirror a few times. He knew a few other guys that were also non-violent offenders and were going to C.I.P. and he offered to introduce me to a few of them so that I wouldn’t accidentally make friends with an actual rapist.

He brought me out into the common area and took me to a table where there was a rather lanky, tall, bald-headed man playing cards and introduced me to him as a fellow boot camper. We chatted, realized we were both from St. Paul, and spent the next few months playing Monopoly, cribbage, and as many different games as we could find to help pass the time. He became one of my friends along with a select few gentlemen that seemed to care about not being in prison anymore. We were the few that gave a shit.

The tall one I’ll call Mac, to protect his identity. You’ll know why soon enough. Mac was there when I ran my first mile, and he helped me get my technique down and breathing pattern correct enough to pass the fitness test for boot camp. I distinctly remember one time he ran a mile backwards while I was struggling to run a few laps at all. I was wearing my full prison-blue uniform, and he had on his optional sweat shorts and white t-shirt. It was hot, and it was the worst.

Mac went to boot camp two months before I did, and thus left two months earlier. We maintained contact in the program as much as possible even though we were housed in separate barracks, and when he got out, he wrote me a letter. He told me he found work, and that I should come get a job at a laminating factory when I got out.

I did. And I ended up moving into the house he was in and we were roommates for nearly a year. We were really friends. We loved baseball, and went to several Twins games together. We had grill outs, went to meetings, talked at coffee shops. We were sober and we weren’t bored. We remained friends for years after we evolved in our lives and purchased homes, and found our forever-gals. We chatted, we met, and we reminisced.

 

Yesterday, I took the girls to the pool in town after writing my blog post. While I was there, I received a message request over Facebook messenger, and it was his mother. She asked me to call her.

My heart sank.

I knew something was wrong, and I hoped that it wasn’t relapse. I hoped she just wanted to plan a surprise party, and she wanted to invite me. I called her.

Mac died yesterday morning after a short struggle with our mutual disease of addiction and alcoholism.

My heart is shattered; tears streaming as I try to write these words on my keyboard. My friend—one of my true friends who can identify with who I am, what I’ve been through, and how I think—is gone forever.

 

Mac. I need you back. I didn’t know you were hurting, and I want to fix it so you don’t have to die. We need you. We need your love, compassion, and your friendship. I want to go back so you can tell me you need help. I want our times back so I can remember more. I want to hear you laugh and call me Mr. Meartz like we had to do in boot camp. I saw you in the sunrise today through the clouds and I cried because you didn’t answer me. I know you can hear me. I know you know I love you.

You don’t get to see the sunset anymore, and it’s never going to be as beautiful for me knowing you can’t see it. It’s only been a day and I already miss you so much. I should have called you more; I should have seen it coming. I should have seen the signs, but you were hiding. I’m so sorry you were hurting. I’m so sad you’re gone.

 

PooPee Roofie

For three weeks, my life has been a solid mixture of liquid and semi-solid waste. For three weeks, my life has been filled with frustration, confusion, and bitterness toward our new dog that nearly exclusively uses our house as a toilet.

We got him as an older pup: 14 weeks. By then, most dogs are potty-trained, however we got him from a breeder that apparently didn’t have housebreaking in their schedule, and it’s been a literal mess ever since. His name is Roofus, and he is a beautiful German Shepherd.

Imagine a litter box, and then imagine it without litter, then imagine the litter box as our home, then change it from cats to dog. There you have it; my life of shit and piss.

He also excessively whines, barks, and chews. I have frequent urges to hit him, and I fantasize a situation in which he magically disappears and my life is back to normal. (I know negative reinforcement doesn’t make a better dog. I don’t hit him.) But, alas, we keep adapting to him, and closing off areas of our house to ensure we don’t have to use the carpet cleaner every day. And slowly—almost painfully slow—he’s catching on to the fact that he gets a treat when he goes potty outside. I started going outside as well because I really like the flavor of the treats and I think maybe he will learn faster if daddy shows him what to do.

The first time we left him home alone, we put him in a kennel, and when I arrived home, all sides—including the top—were completely smeared in feces. Roofus himself was caked from head to tail and just getting him from kennel to door left a splattered trail of poo on everything he neared.  I hosed him down. I hosed down the kennel. And I did it all again the next day. On a completely unrelated note, I have a large, shit-splattered kennel for sale. Cheap.

He is loving, kind, and learning obedience. I have him enrolled in an 18-week obedience course where I go for an hour every Tuesday night and learn some basics and into some advanced stuff for the last six weeks. He picks up simple commands rather quickly, and he’s eager to do anything that’s new. We took him to the dog park earlier this week and he did really well.

Willie gets along with him too, which is very important for him. The cats don’t like him, but I think that’s pretty standard. And, the girls love him and that is the most important. He will be our family dog for hopefully a decade, and even though he’s off to a pretty rough start, he has a lot of time to improve. He can really only improve.

It’s about a hundred degrees outside right now and I am so happy I mowed the lawn yesterday. I am stopping this post short to take the girls down to the pool to cool off and have a little fun. I’ll write more later.

 

Any suggestions on potty training, please let me know.