A Pickled Past: The Brief History of a Doomed Cucumber

[Doktor Howl]

So, DP, I take it you're not in the "DRUGS ARE MAGICKAL" camp here, then?

[Disco Pickle]

So, DP, I take it you're not in the "DRUGS ARE MAGICKAL" camp here, then?

In my experience, which will become much more visceral in the next few posts, drugs can become the worst sort of escape.  Given the right sort, enough of them, over long enough time, they will kill you.  Anyone who argues that is deluded.

[Doktor Howl]

So, DP, I take it you're not in the "DRUGS ARE MAGICKAL" camp here, then?

In my experience, which will become much more visceral in the next few posts, drugs can become the worst sort of escape.  Given the right sort, enough of them, over long enough time, they will kill you.  Anyone who argues that is deluded.

I've always been an "all things in moderation" type.  A little pot or cactus never hurt anyone, but I've watched peoples' lives evaporate with cocaine and/or meth.  Or just booze.

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

My heart goes out to you man. Seriously. Every word of this is ripping it out little by little.

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

I'm on the edge of my seat here.

[Disco Pickle]

So, DP, I take it you're not in the "DRUGS ARE MAGICKAL" camp here, then?

In my experience, which will become much more visceral in the next few posts, drugs can become the worst sort of escape.  Given the right sort, enough of them, over long enough time, they will kill you.  Anyone who argues that is deluded.

I've always been an "all things in moderation" type.  A little pot or cactus never hurt anyone, but I've watched peoples' lives evaporate with cocaine and/or meth.  Or just booze.

In my own life I am an all things in moderation type.  I've rarely met my own type though.  Most just let it get out of control, until it's too late.

next entry coming this morning after I get some work off of my desk.

[Disco Pickle]

Changed title because it makes me  and is somewhat metaphorical even if I myself am not doomed.

My mother's decline would have been apparent to anyone looking in.  Living in it made it impossible to ignore.  Her temper, usually directed at my father unless my sister and I had done goofed, was becoming less rational, more random.  I recall waking early one morning and making breakfast for myself and my sister, and forgetting about the toast I was making, subsequently burning it.  My mother was asleep on the couch in the other room and woke before I could clear the house of the smell of smoke.  She was enraged about being woken up, having finally passed out at 5 or 6 no doubt.  She smacked me across the face when I said what I thought was a reasonable assessment:  "It's just toast mom"

Incidents like this began to get more frequent.  It became where if my mother was mad at my father, she was mad at us by proxy.  We could do no right when she was in her rages.  She would sometimes sit in the living room in the middle of the night after something she had thought about regarding me had angered her all over again and yell back to my room about it.  2 am, 3 am, her circadian rhythm was broken by the alcohol and cocaine.  I cannot imagine the hell that must have been her conscious mind during these times, but it wore on us all, my father as well even knowing he was her enabler.

It was one of these very volatile nights that I decided to cut the cord.  Things had been bad that week, but this night was particularly bad.  My father and my aunt, mother's sister, had Baker Acted my mother.  She had just returned to us that week.  Being a bit of a sociopath and what I believe to be a master of disguise, she was able to convince them that she was of no danger to herself or others and they let her go after 3 days.  When she came home, she had hell in her eyes and her tongue had never been sharper.  She tore into my father unceasingly and he, never one to back down, returned it with gusto.  My sister was staying with a friend, her frequent way out.  I began to set plans in motion I had made months before.  I had a family willing to take me in, under the condition that I could convince my parents to sign over guardianship, and live by their rules.  That meant no more trouble with the law, and no more drugs.  I was sure I could do the former, and sure I could hide the latter.  I was also sure I could accomplish getting them to sign over guardianship, but this was not the night to do so.  Still, I wanted out that night, and resolved to handle the details when they had both calmed down and instead focused on their missing son. 

Perhaps that was selfish of me.  I thought it was at the time.  Looking back, I'm not sure I think any differently about the method I used to achieve the end.  I got out, and that seemed the most important thing.

My life would be very different from then on, and I planned to make the most of it. 

They fell apart again shortly after I left.  Unable to keep the lights on and pay the rent, they were forced to move, with my sister, out to Mayport.  This would put them closer to my father's work, and he was able to secure a small loan from the man who employed him to get them set up in a condo.  Shortly after they moved in, my sister made her own arrangements to move out, also at 16.  We had made our exodus, and the financial weight we lifted from our parents shoulders seemed to actually do them good.  They cleaned up again, made arrangements to purchase the condo, the first time they had attempted to own a house.  My mother still drank, but it seemed my father had called an end to the cocaine supply again.  Without another supply, without a job, and having developed what appeared to be an extreme anxiety disorder that manifested in agoraphobia, my mother had no choice but to clean up as well.  There was always a 5th of Vodka though.

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

All this before you're even an adult? Holy fucking smokes! :O

[Doktor Howl]

All this before you're even an adult? Holy fucking smokes! :O

Troof.  This makes me even more grateful to my parents, who were like something out of an idealized 50s TV show, without giving me that entitlement syndrome that's so prevalent today (probably because they kept us long on hugs and short on money).

How I ever turned into the horrible cunt I am is a mystery.

[Disco Pickle]

I entered what would be my last high school half way through my 10th grade year.  When you change schools as often as I did growing up, it's difficult to maintain close friendships, even if the school is just across the city.  While I made no friends from that school that I am still in contact with today, the neighborhood in which I lived and started my working career provided me with a large body of good people to pal around with, and I'm in good contact with nearly everyone I met from that neighborhood today.  

I rarely spoke with my parents.  Some part of me blamed them for their condition and my the circumstances that required me to grow up so much earlier than my peers.  I developed a taste for reading at a young age, and used this to my advantage: I would learn everything I could about addiction, human psychology and sociology, behavioral patterns, etc.

No author on the subjects was excluded.  I dissected Freud with as much gusto as Jung.  Berne, Allport, Erikson, Glasser..  I read them all.  I raided the local library for texts on drugs and their effects, for for stories about people's battle with addictions.  

I wanted an answer to a question: "What would cause two adults with children to develop a pattern of self destruction so profound that it would cause their family to break down less than 20 years from its' inception?"

The answer I eventually came to was addiction, coupled with personality traits that exacerbated the feeling of needing to escape their reality tunnel, even at the expense of their own children.  It wasn't that we weren't loved, we were.  It was that the combination of their own personality deformities with a highly addictive substance created a meeting of two points of chaos that fed on each other and grew seemingly exponentially.

It was at the age of 16 that I acquired my first computer, and the love affair is still strong to this day.  An HP with an i486 processor and a 14.4kbs modem was my introduction to the internet.  I had ambitions to be the first in my family to attend college and resolved to learn as much about computers as I possibly could.  

I saw my sister as often as possible but when you're attending high school in two parts of a very large, spread out city, and working nights to begin to save for college, it becomes difficult to maintain the closeness we had when we lived together.  She stayed in contact with our parents more than me and I would usually get my news from her.  It seemed they had leveled out and were staying on their feet.  Mom's drinking, however, continued to worsen.  She would go through a 5th of vodka every two days.  Around this time my father injured his back, an injury he carries to this day.  The doctor began prescribing pain killers, and my mother began to take them as well.  This was a new combination, and it would prove to be the deadliest combination of all.

[Aries Gurl]

so sad

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

Just a question, how old are you now?

[Disco Pickle]

Just a question, how old are you now?

31 as of June

[Juana]

Good lord, man. What a childhood.

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

Just a question, how old are you now?

31 as of June

I just wanted to know so I could contextualize all the information, and get a little perspective on how long the story is and from how far away you're viewing it. Even with all those years, you talk about it like all this happened just yesterday.