Three of my favorite poems about life and death, a quick political rant, and some updates on what's going on with me, my methadone taper, and the blog.
My mind is all over the place this morning, and I think I'm just going to lean into it.
But first, can I rant for a moment? I'm not a particularly political person, and I know that most of you probably don't come here for that kind of content, but I'm genuinely angry right now.
Joe Biden just torched his own legacy and spat in the face of our democracy.
For all of the endless headlines about Trump setting dangerous precedents - and he did, particularly when he called the 2020 election outcome rigged and stolen - he was not a lawyer and therefore there is an argument to be made that he mightn't have understood the ramifications of some of his actions in the same nuanced way that a lawyer would have (although he had the advice of lawyers, a VP who was a lawyer by his side, and it was his job to learn, after all).
Joe Biden has no such excuse. He's a lawyer by training and practice who went to law school at SU, in my hometown. He knows full well that he just reinforced an extremely dangerous precedent in pardoning his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted of several tax offenses as well as charges stemming from lying on a federal firearms application.
He pardoned him despite promising again and again that he wouldn't do so, too (you love to see it; this is a man we can trust, right?).
Joe Biden's reasoning is that the justice process was subverted by political machinations in his son's case. There is some evidence to support this; the type of charges brought against Hunter Biden usually aren't pursued so long after the fact, and he normally would've gotten more leniency due to being a severe drug addict at the time*.
*Again, no one is saying that Hunter Biden is innocent; the argument is that he wouldn't normally have been prosecuted for tax evasions long since settled up with the IRS or for his misrepresentations on a gun purchase form, which are almost never prosecuted although technically a crime.
That's not really a justification for pardoning him at all, though: It's an excuse. If the justice system didn't work the way that it was supposed to, then you use the appeals process to fight the conviction (that's what it's there for, after all).
If the system is so broken that even an appeal can't save your son despite the fact that he is unbelievably privileged and can afford the best counsel in the United States, then - as one of the most politically powerful people in the U.S. - you spend the rest of your life campaigning to reform it.
As a show of solidarity with the American people, a true leader would have accepted the verdict, affirmed his faith in the basic validity of our justice system despite its imperfections, and acknowledged that the legal system only works if no one is above it, including the sons of Presidents. In the midst of an opioid overdose epidemic, he would've used his son's experiences with addiction to connect with the American people and leveraged that goodwill to help end the failed War on Drugs.
He would have put money on Hunter's books and visited his son during his (relatively short) incarceration like millions of American family members are currently doing for their loved ones, not a few of whom are wrongfully convicted - unlike Hunter, who actually did what he was accused of.
The Presidential pardon was absolutely not meant to be used in this way, and it wasn't for the first 200 years of American history. It would've been inconceivable to the drafters of the Constitution that a leader would be so crass and kingly as to use such a power for personal benefit; the public would've rebelled against it.
Out of the 46 Presidents that we've had, only Trump, Clinton, and Biden have used the pardon for a family member (and in Trump's and Clinton's cases, that family member had already served his time, so it was a matter of record-clearing rather than avoiding prison time). It's a list that I wouldn't want to be a part of, and if that trend doesn't show the nepotistic decline of U.S. politics, then I don't know what does.
Among other problems, this precedent opens the door to dangerous situations in which family members and associates of the President commit crimes on his or her behalf and then receive pardons so that they don't face punishment for them. (Ironically, this is what Trump has been accused of using his pardon to accomplish).
At a time when public faith in U.S. institutions is the lowest that it's ever been and the Supreme Court has just had its impartiality credibly challenged, Biden's actions reinforce the "rules for me, not for thee" principle. Pardoning his son is a repellently elitist thing to do, it is hypocritical of him, and it is just plain un-American and just plain wrong.
What makes it even worse is that during his early career, Biden worked as a public defender, so he's well-acquainted with the ways in which the legal system can be biased against poor people and minorities. Instead of spearheading an effort to improve the plight of the most vulnerable people in our country, he has taken action to shield one of its most privileged from the consequences of his illegal actions. It is indefensible.
This solidifies my view that the two parties' modern incarnations are essentially wings of the same eagle, which these days cannot seem to fly; they exist to perpetuate a two-man con that makes use of Americans' team-sports fanaticism and short attention spans to blame one-half of our country for everything wrong with it instead of reaching across the aisle and creating tenable, centrist solutions. As long as we the people are turned against each other, then we won't rise up against the "leaders" who are selling us out for their own enrichment and empowerment.
I haven't actually liked a candidate since Obama, and even he sold out when he reaffirmed the profoundly unconstitutional Patriot Act after campaigning against it as a Senator. I wouldn't want to have dinner with any of these disingenuous, disheartening people.
Our parties perpetuate the Culture Wars and other nothingburger-but-extremely-divisive political issues to conceal the truth, which I've written about before (link here), which is that in the modern era both parties are made up of, beholden to, and exist to protect the entrenched, increasingly international elite.
We've become a police state that incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth, save for perhaps North Korea, mostly for drug offenses that shouldn't even be illegal in the first place. Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer; the United States' wealth gap is the second-greatest (worst?) in the world. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and it hasn't been raised in 15 years.
Joe Biden has begged to be judged as a father. I'll give him this: He might be a good father, but we didn't elect him to be a father, and he's not exercising his fatherly pardon power to end Hunter being grounded.
He's a hypocrite who did precisely the kind of thing that he has lambasted Trump for, and in so doing, he has desecrated his own legacy.
There is, I suppose, the possibility that it's some sort of elder abuse situation, that Biden's so mentally addled that he can't even appreciate what he's doing anymore. And I don't blame anyone for not supporting the Democratic Party in the recent election after it gaslit the American people for years about Biden's mental state. Who could have faith in them after that? This was our Commander in Chief, who had to be trusted to wield the world's most powerful military in an attack-on-the-U.S. situation that could develop in minutes at any time of the day or night.
They lied to us outright, again and again, and assumed that we were too stupid or brainwashed to notice. It's pathetic. We can't get decent candidates because only the ones who have sold out to Big Pharma, Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Everything have enough money to present themselves to the public.
If something doesn't change, we're going to lose our democracy.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Okay; thanks for letting me get that out.
For real.
***
I have two important posts coming up.
One is about advocacy strategies for U.S. methadone clinic patients whose programs aren't implementing the revamped federal regulations, which I wrote about in detail here. (During the coming months, much of my time is going to be spent supporting fellow methadone patients who are in this situation; I'll also be organizing efforts to help pass legislation such as MOTAA, which would render methadone clinics obsolete in the U.S. by allowing it to be prescribed in standard outpatient settings and dispensed at regular pharmacies).
I also plan to write about how high-end treatment differs from standard, insurance-covered detox / rehab. It's not just luxury settings with thousand thread-count sheets and jacuzzi tubs that you're paying for with these high-price-tag programs; you're getting individualized, high-yield treatment that incorporates the latest science (for example, one program that I researched uses a pharmacogenomic survey to scan your genes for markers that indicate how you will respond to certain anxiety and depression medications, plus low-dose ketamine infusions to heal trauma responses and to deal with refractory anxiety and depression).
One of the reasons that I'm writing about treatment again is that I'm considering going away to finish my methadone taper.
Methadone detox typically takes a few months, and it's a god-awful drug to come off of - the druggie lore is that it has the worst detox of any substance, which I'm not convinced of, but it's got to be close - and I haven't been able to decrease my dose as quickly as I would like to.
It's tough when I'm teaching because I don't have the option to show up to class sweaty and shaky, pupils dilated and voice tremulous; teaching involves having a spotlight on you in a certain sense, and my students are way too perceptive to miss any shift in me. So, I've got to keep the withdrawal symptoms moderate enough that they could be mistaken for a couple of nights of poor sleep and a severe cold.
Instead of finishing out the remaining four to five months of the taper that I had initially planned, I'm considering ripping the band aid off by doing a two-week, rapid detox in a hospital or private clinic setting.
The problem is that you can't use a standard 3–to-5-day opioid detox protocol for methadone because the long half-life and extraordinary potency of the drug mean that it would be unbearable and potentially medically dangerous. So, most programs switch you over to a short half-life opioid such as morphine or Dilaudid (hydromorphone), then taper you off from there (sometimes with a buprenorphine [Suboxone] taper as the final step down).
Unfortunately, for complex and stupid reasons, these programs aren't covered by insurance, for the most part, and they're very expensive. For some of them, we're talking luxury automobile levels of money (from Audi all the way up to Bentley, if you can believe it; some programs cost $200,000 or more for detox followed by weeks of treatment in inpatient and outpatient settings).
The entire methadone clinic structure in the U.S. is meant to keep you on methadone, docile and sedated and memoryless, forever, and sometimes it makes me want to scream. There are so few resources for anyone trying to get off of it.
My clinic doesn't offer support or "comfort" meds for people who choose to come off of it; their only response to dose-decrease requests is to recommend that you don't taper off because most patients who do end up relapsing.
(Just in case you doubted that I am a Millennial.)
So, I'm taking stock of my options and considering how to proceed after the holidays. I've been first in flux due to the chaos of COVID and returning to the U.S. from China, and then in a state of active waiting, for almost two years now, and I appreciate you all putting up with the conflicted, somewhat dragged-down Brian of recent times.
I will say that I feel strong: My head is getting clearer, my emotions are thawing out, and my motivation to get off of this atrocious, lobotomizing substance is very high. I can envision the day when I wake up from a few hours' sleep refreshed and without needing to put any substance into my system, and I want that desperately.
As I've written about elsewhere - in Metha-Don't and Sword of Damocles - methadone and buprenorphine keep you in a kind of purgatory in which you're still chained to an addictive substance to function, which keeps your deeply ingrained addictive processes active (you're always monitoring how you feel physically and mentally, including which withdrawal symptoms you're feeling, when you've last dosed, when you can dose again, and so on). There are physiological shifts that occur that promote anxiety, depression, and insomnia, too.
It's so much simpler, freer, and purer to do it without any substance-crutch at all. It's an indescribably better, more soulful way to be.
It's also a hell of a lot harder.
Someday soon, I'm going to be back to true sobriety. I'm going to get there or die trying.
I can't respect myself for not doing what I know that I need to do simply because of the amount of pain and sleeplessness involved between here and there. So much of what is worthwhile in life is also challenging and uncomfortable.
I will never achieve my potential on methadone. And I don't want to be dampened down on the day that I finally marry Jay when he joins me in the U.S. next year.
So, I need to get off of maintenance as soon as possible. I've done it before, and I can do it again.
***
I didn't have one particular topic that I felt like writing about today, so I figured that I'd share three poems that are special to me.
The first is by a British poet called A.E. Housman, who lived from 1859 to 1936. Housman lost his mother at 12 and had an emotionally turbulent adolescence (although what adolescence isn't emotionally turbulent?).
He then failed out of Oxford, but he went on to become a distinguished poet and one of the top classicists of his time (eventually, after working as a patent examiner to pay the bills, he became a professor at Cambridge, which must have felt like a mega-pwn).*
*There is a word, peripeteia, that means sudden reversal of fortune. It's one of my favorites because it describes my life to a T, and I've always been drawn to historical figures whose lives have taken them through the extreme ups and downs like mine has. There's an autobiographical novel about Michelangelo called The Agony and the Ecstasy, if you're interested in reading about one such person.
In the sixty-three lyrical poems of A Shropshire Lad, A.E. Housman meditated on time and tragedy. My mom, who read Housman during her days as a collegiate volleyball and basketball player - my dad was her basketball coach when he met her :/ - introduced me to To an Athlete Dying Young when I was in middle school.
The first time that I read it, the juxtaposition of the champion runner being carried into town on his friends' shoulders with his dead body being carried in a coffin to his final resting place gave me goosebumps.
I've mentioned elsewhere that I was a morbid little f*ck when I was younger, and I was fascinated by the poem's theme of early death at the height of life.
Part of my preoccupation with death was down to early child environment, no doubt.
After all, Italian Catholics are notoriously dark and superstitious. (I remember showing up to Easter brunch at my dad's mother's house one spring and, amidst the pretty pastel-painted Easter eggs and platters of ham and potatoes, my grandma hugging me, then saying: "Turn the TV on, honey; they're releasing the autopsy findings for that little girl who got ran over by a car last week").
It was a prominent enough preoccupation that a couple of my teachers commented on it, but they treated it as a quirky thing, cute and non-ominous. Which I suppose it was.
Before I get terminally off-track, To an Athlete Dying Young hit me hard and early on in my life. Here it is:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
I reconnected with this poem a couple of years ago after my stepsister's husband died. I haven't written about this before, but Elle lost her husband in a tragic accident.
Mike was out hunting with his dad. He was in a platform high up in a tree, sighting a deer in an adjacent field. He wasn't wearing a safety harness, and he fell out of the stand. His gun discharged during the fall, and he died almost immediately.
His dad, who was his best friend, found him shortly thereafter and cradled his son until the police arrived (they had to treat it as a potential crime scene, which was doubly traumatic for him).
When Mike's dad was finally allowed to leave the scene, he joined the rest of the family at Elle's. My mom told me that Mike's dad kept saying that he didn't want to take off his bloodstained shirt because "it's got my son all over it," and he was afraid that the blood would be washed off, which broke my heart.
Elle and Mike have a son, Jason, who is kindergarten-age and an absolute treasure.
Jason's got precocious emotional awareness - "I'm frustrated that the charcuterie board isn't here yet," he once told my mom, who asked him why he was waiting in the garage instead of hanging out with everyone else inside the house at a family party.
Jason's coming to terms with having lost his dad, and he's doing pretty well with it, by the sounds of it. He knows that it's okay to be sad, and that his Daddy is in heaven with Grandpa Lou, my stepdad. (He's expressed wanting to die and join them there a couple of times when he was really upset, but that's normal).
Elle, too, has had to make peace with an unthinkable loss.
She and Mike had a picture-perfect romance. They had just celebrated a gorgeous wedding on Maui a few months before the accident, and they were well set up for a standard, wholesome suburban life.
As terrible as it sounds to admit it, sometimes it seems like the only romances that truly survive the test of time are the ones in which one or both partners die young. Life has a way of turning even the most passionate romances into something closer to sustained, intimate friendship, and let's be honest: that's a best-case scenario. I grew up around many old-school Catholic couples who slept separately and essentially hated each other.
A hunting accident is almost a retro way to go; these days in the U.S., for the first time since we began tracking these things, drug overdoses kill more people in the 18-25 age-range than car accidents and other tragic misadventures.
As I wrote about in In Memory of Zack B. and elsewhere on this site, I've lost many friends to overdose.
Addiction ensnares some of the brightest, truest souls - "There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice," Abraham Lincoln once said of alcoholism.
Many of them don't make it out of their twenties.
To an Athlete Dying Young helps me to remember all of them at their most vibrant, victorious, and illimitable.
***
Honestly, I feel like every human should read Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran's book The Prophet, which (according to my old friend Wikipedia) is one of the most translated and bestselling books in history.
It tells the story of a prophet who is about to return home after a sojourn in a foreign city. He is approached by a group of citizens, who seek some final wisdom before he departs. He speaks to them of life - youth and age; marriage and children; justice and wrongdoing; sacrifice and suffering; achievement and recognition; sadness and joy; birth and death and spiritual return.
It's a mesmerizingly beautiful work, and at a couple of points while I was reading it, I paused and just sort of soaked up the moment and my body and my surroundings in a mindful manner that I usually can't access outside of meditation. Gibran's poetry gave me the same feeling as when I am camping and take a moment to leave the tent, wander through the woods until I come to a clearing, and stare up into the night sky - that feeling of it's really a wildly amazing thing that I am here, alive and incarnate, in the middle of this unspeakably beautiful and bizarre universe.
Suffice it to say that The Prophet is one of the most powerful poetic works of all time.
If I have a funeral, I plan to have part of the following passage written on my prayer cards:
And he said:
You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; and like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
For all the time I have spent studying death in theory and practice, I still don't have a well-developed idea of what happens after we bite it.
I don't believe in an eternity in which the ego survives beyond death, and I'm just chilling with the people that I loved in life. That view of Heaven, pleasant enough at first glance, seems childish to me.
Plus, frankly, while being Brian has its moments, I wouldn't want to be me for millions and billions of years; for me and probably everyone else, spending that much time as my current, inherently limited self might actually be closer to Hell.
On the other hand, I think that reincarnation is possible but unlikely given the nature of space and time as we currently understand them. I guess the best possible case for me is a sort of returning to the source - "from light to light," as my friend Andrea says. Being reabsorbed into whatever perfect, Godly essence motivates the universe.
***
My final selection is by Aldous Huxley, an English genius who wrote Brave New World and dozens of other seminal works.
Huxley was a pacificist, a mystic, and somewhat of a misfit. He was a father of the countercultural movement of the 1950s and 60s; he tried mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception, one of the most observant and influential psychonautic essays of all time.
Huxley is one of my literary heroes, and in Lightly, My Darling, he advocates an approach to life that feels like it was written as a reminder for me specifically (minus the "darling"):
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
***
Thank you all for accompanying me on this spastic and eclectic journey. Truly.
When I brought this blog online eight months ago, I was a little bit afraid of what my readers might be like (I've heard YouTubers advise fellow creators to never get too acquainted with their viewers for fear of being disgusted by who they attract).
The couple dozen readers who I have interacted with have been incredible people; I cannot overstate how impressed I am with them. They're a diverse crowd from several countries, including the U.S., the UK, the Netherlands, Iceland, Russia, China, and Colombia (I have an unusually international readership, probably because of my expat experiences).
Some are addicts in long-term recovery; some are addicts who have just shot up or who are in full-fledged withdrawal.
Many are parents, siblings, and partners of addicts who are trying to better understand their addicted loved ones. Some have other mental health issues, including dissociative disorders, OCD, eating disorders, and depression.
They have floored me with their insight, kindness, and honesty. I have this "I want you all to meet each other!" impulse, and I'd love to organize a Concrete Confessional e-hangout sometime if there's sufficient interest.
Suffice it to say that I couldn't be prouder of my readership. It makes me feel differently (better) about myself to know that such people read my most private thoughts, listen to me recount my most abject and humiliating errors in graphic detail, and then still choose to appreciate me.
It's almost unthinkable to me. It has been a healing and humbling experience, and I am so grateful.
Please stay with me on this long, strange trip called life.
Let's go lightly, together -
Brian
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