Punch Drunk Sober

Routines can become dangerous.

Getting ready in the morning provides my best example. In order to get the kids to school and me to work, the timeline of activity is rigid. No room for error. 

This is one reason why routines can be so useful. We become accustomed to the chores, the responsibilities, the minutiae. After a while, doing these things becomes mindless. We have the road map to work memorized. We know to the minute how long it will take to get dressed and eat breakfast.

This allows the mind to wonder. We can think about things other than our turn-by-turn directions. It’s been a powerful creative tool for me, in fact. Once I got in the habit of dicing potatoes as a line chef, some of my best ideas came to me while my knife cut and quartered.

It also allows the mind to crave something more.

And as one who suffers from addiction and alcoholism, my cravings are deadly.

This can’t be all there is, it tells me. 

At the crosswalk, a sort of deja vu sets in, only without the mystery of where I’ve seen him before. I saw him yesterday, in fact. I see him everyday, crossing the street when I’m making this left. It doesn’t leave me awe-struck. It makes me feel stuck, as if time where a ticket booth and my life an endless line.

Our mind can wander so far from shore that we forget how nice the beach is. We begin to think that the mundane stuff, the routine, is less important because we do it everyday. The important stuff can’t be this trivial, right?

Take a recurring debate I have with my wife. 

If you’ve heard David Gray’s This Year’s Love, you can join in. I’m convinced that Gray sings, “This year’s lovin’, it’ll last.” My wife contends he sings, “This Year’s Lovin’ in a list.” Either version would work for the song’s general feel, but Gray’s crooning is too affected to distinguish “it’ll last” from “in a list.”

We’ve had countless debates, provided alternative interpretations on the rest of the song and its meaning. Now I know what you’re thinking, Just Google, right? GTS. Google that shit. Well, my wife and I prefer to argue and speculate. We once spent an entire dinner conversation searching for the name of the actor who played Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I guess we both prefer to speculate what could be rather than search for what is. You can’t trust anything you read on the internet, anyway.

Speaking of drifting too far from shore. What I meant to write is that the subject of David Gray’s lyrics are a routine debate for us. And sometimes routines need to be broken.

A week ago, that song played as my wife was delivering our baby.

Not your typical procedure, this labor and delivery thing. In between contractions, she’d say that the song is about a list of everything there was to love in the year. A contraction would come, and then I’d argue that, in the song, the love referenced was meant to last the rest of the year. Then another contraction would send her rocking and moaning in the pain of it all—the excruciating, unbearable pain of it all.

I don’t think we’ll debate this one again. 

The birth process is a blistering reminder of how precious life is. No matter what has happened in your life or whatever has happened to you, someone loved you enough, without ever meeting you, to go through that. And what’s more, the fact that you survived that is a staggering miracle. I couldn’t help thinking as I supported my wife, there are so many ways for this to go wrong. I’m glad I chose to debate David Gray lyrics with her rather than share my inner thoughts. But think about it. It should not be a shock when something goes wrong with childbirth. The real surprise is how this complex and dangerous system of muscles and movements ever results in something good to begin with.

Such realizations break up your monotony like geodes: crack open the bland surface and there is a brilliant and sparkly world inside.

It’s like this.

I was driving back to the hospital the next day to pick up my wife and newborn child. I spend my life driving to pick up children, shuttle them from this place to that. It’s all part of the routine, but behind the wheel that morning, it felt like I had never driven a car before. I wasn’t reckless or lost or anything. In fact, I knew where I was going with more certainty than I usually have behind the wheel. But something was different. Viscerally different.

I don’t know if I can pinpoint this phenomenon. But I do know that before I went into the hospital to pick up my newborn, I danced to the brass band on the corner and gave them the money I had in my wallet because Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” had never moved me quite like that. I know that, later, I offered to sit and have coffee with the Jehovah’s Witnesses that knocked my door because, while Baptist, they offered me a wonderful excerpt from the New Testament about the importance of humbling yourself. I also know that in the first literature class I taught upon returning to school, the students were leaving me genuinely awe-struck with ideas that I hear from students every year when we read these Hemingway short stories. If someone was begging, I would have given them my car if it weren’t the only way to bring my newborn home.

What do you call that?

I probably sound high to most of you. Like that pothead who roasts a bowl and then wants to ramble on about the creative genius of introducing aliens to the plot of Dude, Where’s My Car?

I think, despite being clean and sober 11 years, I was high that day. It felt as if God had set a blanket over the world, laying a brand new texture over an old surface. And yes, lack of sleep could have been a contributor. An insomniac spree landed me in the psych ward, after all. But, at some point, explanations must fall short. We are humans. As such, we need to know what mysteries still exist.

Look, this is hard. 

There is a lot that is getting put on hold at the moment. I am a ghost on social media, I know. And I miss the people I correspond with there. That will change, one day soon enough. I haven’t made any headway in publishing this novel I’m pitching. Things will be locked in a stand still for quite some time. So why is this rambling and ambitious man happier than he has ever been?

There aren’t a lot of easy answers in this life. 

Not to good questions, anyway. 

But every now and then we can see snippets of the divine that leave us punch drunk sober. When I first got clean, I realized I knew nothing. Then I married my wife, I realized I knew less than nothing. With each child born, I seem to grow more and more ignorant of life, the only mystery that matters. I feel like Joni Mitchell singing about clouds. I really must not know shit. The little I am certain of points to a few core facts of my reality. God does not want me to drink. I might miss something. Life is too thrilling for substances.

I used to have a recurring dream. 

I was in a canoe by a peaceful isle, floating up to a cabin. For a while, I thought this was my poetic Shangri-La. I was reading a lot of Yeats at the time and figured this was my Innisfree. I have since detached from the destiny of that solitary figure, finally finding the time and space and inspiration to paint his masterpiece. Instead, I am rooted firmly in family, grounded in my obligations. And still, I am no less inspired.

We are not meant to grin and bear the grind and minutiae until we collapse into retirement. 

Before the grind, the minutiae, comes life! And wherever there is life, you will find jaw-dropping miracles inside of the dull craggy surface. You just need to crack the geode.  

And forget preserving it, hording your crystals for a later date. There’s just no way to bottle up the joy, there are only new opportunities to catch glimpses as it  floats by.

This year’s lovin’ will last whether or not I let it. 

So I better let it.