Tuesday, February 27, 2018

The Start


Good morning from Bridge House Coffee and Café in the beautiful, frosty town of Delano, MN. Many of you know who I am and have followed me from the very beginning, I call you my stalkers. Some of you are new to the blog and have only recently started following and/or reading my recent posts which generally follow a message of life after the bottom. I like where this blog has been heading as it chronicles my daily life in the position of an accountable male, new to the world of children. There are trials daily, and some days are better than others, and I am still figuring out how to live with another adult, but my worst day in sobriety is better than my best day of addiction. So I continue on because love is the new answer to my old problems.

 

I said all of that to say this: infrequently, I like to return you all back to the beginning, especially if you’ve never been there. I haven’t read the old stuff for about a year now, but every now and then I get the urge to remember what it was like in confinement. Not because I want to be there, but because I don’t. Here is a link to the home page of the original blog. It started nearly four years ago while I was sitting alone in a prison cell in the E-House block of St. Cloud prison. I started writing my story before the blog concept was ever conceived by my mother. I used the five pieces of lined paper and my two flexible three-inch safety pens which are both part of the “welcome to Prison” packet to write out a brutally honest version of the beginning of my addiction. It was graphic, sarcastic, and maybe a little over the top. I was writing to shock, but I had nobody to write to. I threw the original version of the beginning of life away. I sat and contemplated life for a couple weeks until I was moved to B-House.

B-House is where I lived when my mom approached me with the idea of telling our stories respectively, but interwoven through time. Maybe the time jumping was my idea, as it seemed to fit the life well. I told her I loved the idea and I had already started but would start again. And I did. My first envelope I believe contained 17 pages—back and front—which made up the first few posts from my side of the fence. It was such a great concept. I kept writing, and eventually it was published and I got to start reading my own stuff, which is great for somebody who lives a self-centered life. What I didn’t consider was the other side of things—addicts never do. I started reading and I learned a lot about what I was putting others through, namely my mom.

In a cell, alone one day, I read a post about a particularly frustrating situation for loved ones of those incarcerated, and I really started to understand the beginning of what I would learn over the next few years: accountability. I am fully accountable for my thoughts, feelings, and actions, and all of those have consequences—good and bad—and they affect others.

These days I need to be fully aware of all of my actions, words, and even my body language. Things I do and say have the capability of setting the mood for others, and I am no longer in control so I constantly ask for help from the thing I don’t comprehend that I call God, and what I ask for is the ability to make the next right move; ask Him to remove selfishness, resentment, dishonesty, and fear, so I can only put good things into the stream of life. I have to do this constantly, along with everything else I do to continually fight this demon inside me that never wants to stop fighting. I WANT TO BE SELFISH! I LOVE BEING DISHONEST! But I can’t be those things anymore if I want to be happy and loved.

The link above will bring you to the beginning of all of this. When I started, I still held onto my character defects. I wrote to become famous, not to heal. I told stories that I thought people would want to hear, and even though they were good and they really happened to me—that was part of the problem, I was doing it for me.

These days I’m part of something that helps others. When I write each post my only hope is that I inspire hope in somebody that is just beginning their adventure in recovery. I hope somebody with a loved one who is suffering finds the courage to reach out and help. I am no longer part of the problem. I am part of the solution.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Outside


I’m writing today because tomorrow (Monday: President’s Day) I will be taking the oldest girl (a six-year old) to the Science Museum of Minnesota. It will be her first adventure there, and she’s as excited as she should be.

This week contained a Valentine’s Day that will hopefully not soon be forgotten. As much as I would like to tell you all what I had planned and orchestrated, I will leave it in Amanda’s hands if she would like to share what transpired. I don’t gloat, and I don’t share things with you to make you think I’m a great guy: I focus on others and actually try to be a good person.

At this moment I am standing at the kitchen table, watching Amanda make gluten-free cookies. Both of the girls are trying to help but it appears to be adding an element of frustration to the process. From three feet away, I enjoy the scene…

 

Outside these walls the struggle is real. Everywhere are souls searching for another way of life that once seemed so attractive. People I know from the program are falling by the wayside and some with whom I spent six-months of treatment hell that I left nearly three years ago are back in—with some pretty substantial charges. One of my squad mates recently received a 15-year sentence for assault and will not be eligible for release until 2027. Several more have been in since our release, and a couple of them are back out. I think of all that I have been able to accomplish while in the real world, and I wonder how many wrong turns I could have taken, especially at different points in my life while sober or not. I am nearing the end of my pronounced 50-month sentence which coincides with my sobriety date. I see my parole officer infrequently, and soon it will be not at all.

My relationship with my parole officer is…bare. I’ve met with her three times since I decided to move to Delano, and every time we part ways, I get the sense that there aren’t many on her caseload that consistently do the right thing, or even communicate with her. She bluntly told me that people were “dropping like flies” and in and out of jail.

I can’t do that shit anymore.

I’ve moved from standing to sitting at my normal spot at the dinner table (which also functions as a lunch table, and in a lesser capacity, as a breakfast table.) Across from me is a child who is just beginning to understand the world around her. She knows me as Vince. She depends on me to feed her, clean her, and teach her. Not just me, there is her mother who raises her equally. To my left is a six-year-old. She won’t stop talking and it’s a little maddening as I sit here and type about how I’m supposed to be a nonesuch (look it up). She looks to me as a (I just asked her for a word that describes me and I was going to insert that word here, however, she said, “You have a beard and a mustache.” Fucking priceless.)

As exasperating as life can be on the daily, there is nothing I would do to risk what I have now. There is no measure of frustration that has pushed me in the wrong direction, and no tool that I do not use when I find myself thinking negatively, or wondering if I have put myself in all the right places since my release from the prison of my mind and body. I am here now, and I can’t wait to stay.

Monday, February 12, 2018

No Gamble


Well I’m at the coffee shop and even though I fully charged my laptop, my battery icon indicates that my time remaining on this computer is just one hour. That’s usually enough time to type up a post, but now I feel pressured…

My last post harvested some emotional and well phrased comments both publicly and privately, but once again, the darkest posts bring my mind to the darkest places and throughout the week I’ve been reliving the event in my mind periodically.

I wrote only of that one night, but the theme was recurring in that part of my life. I was in and out of jail, and stealing from everybody I knew, and many people I did not. I wasn’t particularly good at stealing—I would say I had a 50% success rate—and I caught my first felony when I was just 18 for theft of a bicycle.

That felony from 1997 is still on my record because of how long it took me to successfully end my probation (8 years for a one-year sentence.) Sometime in the year 2005 I received a letter stating that my rights had been restored, but the felony would remain active and a part of any sentencing process for the next 15 years. So, in 2020, my first felony will be removed from my permanent record.

 

Processing my past mistakes and writing them out for the world to see has been part of my healing, and even though I replay a lot in my head, the idea of getting high or drunk has left me entirely. I have no desire to imbibe or ingest all those things that made me feel good. I feel good on my own now and it’s because I put the same effort into my recovery as I did into my criminality.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.”

Albert Einstein
Vincent Maertz

There’s no way I could maintain the relationships I have currently with the thinking and feeling I used in my addiction. The most important thing—and I’ve recalled this numerous times—is love. I don’t mean that I now have this ability to love other people and things, I always had that. I mean that I now know how to feel, accept, and process the feeling and words of love from those that surround me in my home and family life. When I receive a compliment, I do not shy away or retort with sarcasm (well sometimes I’m sarcastic, but only when it’s super funny, which I always am, just ask me.) I can embrace that which makes me feel good.

I feel love every day. More often than not, I am greeted with hugs and jumping and screaming. I tell Amanda to stop jumping on me but she just gets so excited. But really, these two children have been such a blessing in my life, and I am grateful that I have this unique opportunity to impact their lives with love and laughter, and I show them gratitude by showing up in their lives as a responsible adult. Gratitude goes in both directions for me, and I have to give away this freedom and newfound love of life that I have been gifted. Maybe that all sounds clichĂ© and sentimental, and I definitely repeat these same ideas over and over, but like I said earlier: I repeated my mistakes over and over until I was at the bottom, now I have to do the opposite to survive. It’s that simple for me. If I stop the cycle of gratitude and love, there’s a certain gamble that I will fall back into the world of hate and mistrust and shame.

There’s no more room for gambling in my life. The direction I’ve chosen is a sure thing. The 12-step program with which I’m affiliated has all of the answers I need, and although the work is hard, the reward is precious.

Monday, February 5, 2018

A Night


It’s easy to write about what life is like for me these days because it doesn’t generally—actually, at all—bring about painful memories, or make me wonder if I’ve fully amended certain areas of my past. For this post, I’m going to stray away from my current life to bring you a harrowing story of redemption and heroism all the way back from the year 2000. Now when I say redemption and heroism, I mean degenerate crack-addiction, just to clear up any confusion in what I’m about to portray.

Dreamy fade to the year 2000. (Think the Wayne’s World dueduladeudela noise.)

The 1900’s were over, see, and I was just coming up in the world of skillful distribution of street pharmaceuticals. I wasn’t very good at it because I was always disinclined to heed the advice of N.W.A.’s Dope Man or Biggie’s Ten Crack Commandments, which I believe all stemmed from some counsel by one Tony Montana: Don’t get high on your own supply. It’s great information that should be strictly adhered to in the dealing business.

In my case, it started back in the 1900’s with weed. I would front an ounce of weed and I would start smoking off of it right away. Then I would get my friends high, and then I would owe and struggle to find new criminal ways to pay my debts. I would fail, succeed, and fail again, and eventually find a new source and start the cycle over again. On and on it went for years until I found the hard stuff. Cocaine changed everything for me: it was a new game.

Now I would go get my bag of weed and sell it all and take that cash and give it to the crack dealer. It wouldn’t take long for that to be gone, so I quickly burned all of the bridges. I burned the cars, too, (Like Eagles fans!) and anybody else that I could get to, like my mom. People became metaphorically flammable.

After a particularly vicious cycle, and very possibly shortly after being released from jail, and also just after being responsible for allowing my closest and most honorable friend of years get arrested (but never charged or convicted) for a crime I committed, and shortly after stealing cocaine from a friend and replacing it all with baking soda, I found myself back at my mom’s house. Again.

Now, I don’t know how many times I had landed back in that situation, but as far as I recall, this would be one of the shortest stints and the catalyst for a very long cruel winter that saw me couch-hopping and eventually land me in a treatment center where I desperately needed to be.

 

I recall one night in particular, it was bad even for my standards. My mom went to bed and I was left on the chair in the living room all alone. I had a liter of whiskey which I had cleverly hidden while she was in the room with me, and I could finally drink freely. It took me about two hours to polish off the bottle. When I get whiskey drunk—and I mean liter of cheap whiskey in two hours drunk—I’ve been known to make decisions that I would later in life reflect upon, much like I am doing right now.

I made a choice. I’m fairly certain I even slurred the words in my head, “I’m gettin’ high.” Of course, I didn’t have my own money, but I was sure my mom did. The first place you look for woman money is a purse, and that’s where I found the jackpot: her A.T.M. card (they still had those back then.) I also found her keys, which was great because I was in perfect condition to drive, which I did.

I hopped in, went to the cash machine, and drove down Marshall Avenue until it became east Lake Street. I never spent much time in Minneapolis, but I had spent many years as an active drug addict, so I knew that when I saw the guy and nodded to him, he would know what I wanted, and he did. He brought me to a nearby crack house (twice) where I spent everything the card would allow me to withdraw. I gave the stranger a small portion for his work, and I headed back home without incident.

I smoked on the venomous  intoxicant through a pop can the entire night, alternating between sweating profusely and peeking through the blinds as a result of paranoia, and playing scrabble with myself.

When my mom woke up, I pretended I had also just risen, and played the good son by offering to start her car for her (because I wanted there to be a reason there was less gas than when she parked it the night before. It made sense then.) She didn’t say anything to me then, and she didn’t know the weight of what had occurred for a while, but much later in the day she left me a note telling me to leave. I did just that. I didn’t want to deal with what I had done, so it was time to move on to the next heist.

 

There is the biggest difference between an addict and a drug user. I was an addict. My decisions affected other people and society. I didn’t care about what you had or how you got it, if I needed to get high, I would do anything I could to take what was yours. And I didn’t care. That is the aspect that still haunts me. That is why I go to any length now to stay clean, because it is still within me to go to any length to destroy whatever you own. I was the literal definition of detriment to society.

Years later I found out that what I had taken from her account amounted to everything she had (in that particular account). It took even more years to really feel the burden that I had assessed onto loved ones, and to try to make things right. I’m still in the process of writing my wrongs, and righting my crimes. I may never be done, but it’s important for me and you that I keep working on it.

This all happened on just one night in roughly 15 years of steady addiction, some nights were worse. Every night was a story.

And Counting

I remember vividly waking up at 5:19am, one minute precisely before the lights would come on; the indication that it was time to stand a...