Ray in Exile

Who woulda known that being unemployed would mean even LESS free time?

I got laid off from the last gig at the beginning of the year. From the same company that I first blogged about back in 2004 when I had about ten readers. Fast forward five years and I'm back to having, oh, about ten readers. And most of those are just people who accidentally left me in their feed reader when my blog withered and then cratered in '08.

Fortunately I just got hired again. Not starting til the 15th, so you'd think I'd have lots of free time now that the job search is over. You'd think.

Anyway, those of you who haven't figured out how to delete me from your feed reader are probably having PTSD flashbacks since you're probably seeing reruns of the part of my archives from the week of Katrina that I have been able to restore and republish. More coming at some point, in roughly chronological order.

Meanwhile, in the Newly Published arena, I have a story up online at the new issue of Ghoti Magazine, Issue #21. Click the link, click on the microphone, click on my name, read. It's easy.

I've also got non-fiction tentatively scheduled to come out this summer online at The Northville Review.

And at some point I'm appearing, along with Master Folse, in a T-P article about "the real people behind the characters of Treme".

And finally, hopefully this summer, I've got work appearing in a new anthology from the Broken Levee Books imprint of the wonderful Chin Music Press.

That is all. I'll keep you posted. I just ordered HBO, so hopefully lots more here as Treme winds up. I imagine I'll have opinions.

Tomorrow is Daddy Christmas Day with the kids, a peculiar holiday familiar to all single dads. This year is not my turn to have them on the 25th, so we're pretending that tomorrow is really Christmas. In fact, we've been pretending so well I actually found myself wondering about where the midnight Mass is tonight. Santa is making a special stop; I think he might have been here already, the stockings are full and somebody's already been into the cookies and chocolate milk we left out (burp).

Being back in Austin we've been reviving some of our old Christmas traditions that are different from the ones we had in New Orleans. We went out to Elgin to cut down our own tree, the same place we've been going since Liam was a toddler. We stopped at the 290 Cafe for our Chicken Fried Universe, but unlike past years we didn't see the eerily Santa-like biker dude having breakfast at the counter.

We went to the Zilker Trail of Whatever It Is This Year, and though the tree was as fabulous and as dizzying as ever, the scaled-down event was kind of a bummer. And tonight we swung 37th Street; I had heard that a lot of the original residents who started the wacky lights tradition there had moved, but I wasn't prepared for how much of a let-down it was. Half the houses were dark, several were for sale, and only two or three houses were making an effort at anything spectacular.

I think the kids are learning a little bit about how you can't ever go back. The Austin they left three years ago doesn't exist any more. There are more and more condos. Old traditions are dying. Austin is the kind of city that will break your heart if you're the kind of person who likes some things in your life to be timeless. Watching this city change is like losing body parts a little at a time...lose a finger when the Trail of Lights goes...lose a foot when 37th Street goes dark...I lost half my heart and Austin lost most of its soul when it tore down Liberty Lunch to build an office building. Nothing stays the same. Things change so much faster here than they do in New Orleans.

But tomorrow we'll do our standard stuff. We'll unwrap presents and listen to Christmas music. We'll eat too much candy in the morning. We'll have friends over later for Christmas gumbo made from the turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving, we'll watch football if we can find somebody who's got the Saints on, we'll go to a couple of dinner parties. We'll have pie.

And then Sunday they'll go back to their mother's until next year, and I will learn the beginnings of a brand new tradition. For the first time in my entire life, on Christmas Eve, I will go to bed in an empty house, and when I wake up Christmas morning (or afternoon, depending) it will still be an empty house. I could go to New Orleans to be with family, but I have to be back the day after Christmas and the short visit isn't worth the expense. And as I learned over Thanksgiving last year, being around other people's kids on a family holiday when my kids are far away doesn't make that holiday easier to take; it makes it harder.

The trick is to soak up enough holiday joy and kid time tomorrow to tide me over until New Years. I hope it works.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

OK, so I really didn't expect anybody to comment. That was all just padding to make my "hey, look what I noticed!" thoughts fill out to be long enough for a blog entry.

Y'all should read the story, though. And Catch-22. And Kevin Wilson's short story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, which is ever so slightly to the real side of Murakami and (dare I say) almost as heartbreaking, and which I would have stayed up all last night to finish if it wasn't for the damn antihistamines knocking me out again and which I would probably finish tonight except that both kids will be out at parties which means I have a good three hours to myself to frickin' write for a change, if I don't squander it on Modern Warfare or something.

My editor-minded friends are always getting on me about run-on sentences, but they're fun and they keep me warm in the winter when I don't have any warm-blooded small animals around.

I read David Foster Wallace's short story "Incarnations of Burned Children" after reading about it in a blog entry (I think) by brilliant short story writer Kevin Wilson.

Wallace was clearly insanely talented and this story is one of those that tumbles rapidly downhill, taking you on a ride so fast and so relentless that you don't have time to see the surprise heart-wrenching twist near the end until it explodes in your chest.

Which is an apt metaphor, because today while sitting in traffic, for no reason at all it occurred to me that the plot of Wallace's story is essentially a retelling of the climactic scene in Catch-22 where Snowden spills his secret to Yossarian.

Which makes me wonder...is this story less brilliant because this widely known twist of plot is reused and reappropriated? Or is it enough that in the telling, Wallace makes it his own? And is Wallace's story brilliant simply because it is told in a new and exciting manner even though it largely leaves unaddressed Catch-22's moral message of the material nature of man and the value of following your survival instinct to ridiculous lengths?

Discuss. Or not. I have to catch a bus.

In my head the story is beautiful, it flows and aches with sadness, but on the page it's drunk and stumbling, stammering over simple phrases, tripping over its own shoelaces, knocking over chairs, talking too much too loudly and then lapsing into awkward silences, never finding the right words and finding too many of the wrong ones, the ones that have been used and used and used up. It's been on paper in many forms for more than two years, and so much time has passed that some of what used to be fiction is now memoir, yet much of what used to be memoir still resists any attempt to mold it into fiction.

Hemingway was once challenged to write the shortest possible short story, and he replied with

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

Yet I have as many or as few words as I want, and I have a thought, but I cannot cross the distance between the thought and the arrangement of words that would do justice to the thought.

So I keep writing crap, and I wait.

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me..."

There was this thing that happened on the night of August 16-17, 1987, if you're old enough you might remember it, called the Harmonic Convergence. It was a night in which eight of the planets of the solar system were all going to be in alignment, and it was heavily hyped in the New Age community as a cosmic event that signified an end to centuries of war and the beginning of a new era of world peace, and hyped in the mainstream media as, well, a lot of hype. To me and my friends in college, it just seemed like a good excuse to go out into nature and get blasted out of our minds. So we piled into a friend's pickup truck with some food, a lot of beer, a decent supply of "other things", and our favorite road tape which had the Velvet Underground's banana album on one side and Dream Syndicate's Days of Wine and Roses on the other, and we drove on out to Enchanted Rock.

The park was packed, no camping sites at all, not that we had brought tents, we actually had no intention of sleeping. We set about getting mind-altered in a manner befitting a Timothy Leary-like change of consciousness event, and then a few of us started hiking up the rock, no flashlights, just the moonlight.

About halfway up, I stopped to rest with somebody, and we sat down on a rock and looked up at the stars. Or rather, up at the sky. And after I minute, I realized what it was I had done. And I said to him, "I wish I hadn't taken that a little while ago", and he asked, "Why?"

I just remember sitting there being filled with sadness. I used to go camping a lot in my teen years, went back-packing once for a couple of weeks in New Mexico, but I hadn't done anything like that in a long time. And I told him, "I haven't been away from big city lights for almost ten years, and I'm finally out here in the wilderness and there are probably billions of stars and I bet you can see the Milky Way, and I know that it's beautiful, but because I went and artificially fucked my head up for the night, I can't see them because my vision is crawling all over the place. I can't see the real stars, all I see are shimmering hallucinations where the stars should be."

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me. But it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world..."

And I've been thinking about that night recently as a metaphor for the whole of my drinking life. Because what I've found lately, especially in the past year, is that what keeps me sane and what keeps me sober and what keeps the voices out of my head, keeps the inner conversations from spiraling into a pit, are those moments when I stop and notice, really notice, something beautiful in the world.

Jupiter has been visible in the night sky for the past few months, and almost every night I'll look up at it and go, "yep, there's Jupiter". But more and more lately, I'll look again, and I'll just stare at it, and I'll think, "damn...that's fucking Jupiter. That is so awesome."

Little things like that are everywhere. Watching an old black man catch a giant catfish in the Mississippi at sundown while a giant Norwegian tanker silently powers upriver in the background. Sitting in the Houston airport waiting for my flight connection, watching the sun go down and noticing that as day turns to night, the three-dimensional skyline turns flat and two-dimensional, and the airplanes flying inbound and outbound become just blinking lights moving in lines across a flat plane. Poking through the leaves of my garden with my kids and finding two huge squashes ready to eat, and seeing a couple of bees working in the other blossoms. Cooking dinner or watching a movie and having one of my kids just walk up and give me a huge neck hug, for no other reason other than that they feel good and they're glad to be with me.

I didn't used to get the God stuff that they talked about in "the Program". Prayer doesn't work for me. I don't feel like there is anyone listening, really, at least not in the way that, say, Christians do. But I do feel like there is a benevolent force in the universe that wants me to be happy, that wants me to do good for others, and that wants me to be sober to the best of my ability. And my version of prayer is to notice all of the beauty, whether awesome or simple, that is all around me, and fill my soul up with that goodness, so that when night rolls around and I'm alone with my fears and anger and resentments, there's no room for them to get in, there's no room for them to spiral, because the goodness and happiness that I've soaked up that day crowds them out.

That's how my good days go, anyway. And there are more and more days like that, more than there have been in my life since I was a little kid. Even with all the external stuff pulling me in the other direction, the bad days are fewer and fewer.

You can call it hokey, you can call it "American Beauty spirituality" if you want. But it works for me.

And what this has to do with drinking is that alcohol did to my happiness, my real happiness, what that other stuff that night in 1987 did to my ability to see the stars. It's like the drinking put this sheet of bubble wrap in front of my eyes so that I couldn't really experience good and beautiful things as they were, I could only view them through the blurry and skewed and hallucinatory viewpoint of an alcoholic mind. The irony is that some of why I drank had to do with real fears and anger and resentments, and yet the drink prevented me from experiencing the things that could help me work through them; it just tamped them down where I could ignore them. And so for twenty-five years of my life, I chose to treat the symptoms of my life by drinking, not knowing that the treatment, the alcohol, was preventing me from seeing the cure.

I like it better the way it is now.

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me. But it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world.

But don't worry. You will some day."

Ray, alcoholic. Six years today.

And happy birthday, Professor, wherever you are.

When I revived the blog, I went back and reconstructed some of my old sobriety posts from the archives and reposted them. Some of you might have seen these come through as reruns if you're using a feed reader, and if you weren't reading my blog in 2008 or 2007 or 2006 or 2004 they might look new to you but they're old posts. For the near to medium -term, check the dates on anything you see coming through, since it might be old stuff. And it'll definitely be surreal if I dig up the early Katrina posts.

As a matter of fact, I won't be hitting another sobriety birthday until tomorrow. That is, if I don't go out at lunch today and buy a bottle of Maker's and spend the afternoon sitting in the park talking to my imaginary friends.

"You were inside, I was outside. You were supposed to keep in touch with the blog. I kept asking you if you were gonna write again."

"Wasn't lies, it was just... bullshit."


So, yeah, I've taken the ill-advised step of trying to kick start the blog again. And I find myself in another part of the world. And I find myself in a beautiful house. With a beautiful...uh...garden. And you may ask yourself: well...how did I get here?

Same as it ever was.

So most of you know by now that my family shrunk a little last summer. I am now happily ensconced in single-dad land, waiting for all the paperwork to finally make it official.

I am also, due to the twists and turns of the custody process, no longer raising my kids in New Orleans. We're back in Austin. It wasn't my idea, and was not totally my choice, but my kids and I are happy as bugs here right now. We all miss New Orleans, and I'm sad that I won't be able to raise my kids as New Orleanians, see them graduate from my old school, all that. But they spent enough time there that they've got the bug, and I'm sure life will bring them back around that way often. And in the meantime, we've got a lot of life to catch up on after years of not living it to its fullest.

Sorry to disappoint, but I seriously doubt the divorce will be much of a topic of discussion here, and I won't be entertaining such discussions in the comments, so this blog will probably be a lot less confessional than it used to be. Despite that, I hope that I can still find a way to make it personal and engaging.

My blog will stay at this location, although the title bar might change from time to time depending on my mood. Maybe at some point some of the archives which I corrupted last year will be able to be salvaged.

It feels good to be back. It feels good to not have to limit my sharing to 140-characters, or to squeeze them into a Facebook YouTube link with emotionally relevant subtext.

I am Ray From New Orleans, In Austin, In Exile, and the future feels fucking awesome from here, even if I don't know exactly what it looks like.

"Too much living is no way to die."

Annual report, year 5 A.D.

Lost three friends to the grave, much too young. Lost more friends to circumstance.

Made new friends, really good ones, and reconnected with old ones, really good ones.

Lost some family. Got tighter with other family. My kids and my siblings and my parents rock.

Watched friends go out, get drunk, come back. Watch friends go out, get high, not come back.

Did not drink. Did not consider drinking. Did not have weird dreams about drinking.

For the whole year.

Which is something, I suppose.

When I was at zero, five seemed unimaginable. Now it's just another year.

P.S. Happy birthday, Professor Morris. I'd give it all back to be able to stand you a round of Jameson.

"You're barmy, that's what. Staying out all hours. Gettin' up to God knows what. Dressing like a bloody freak. Stand still when I'm talking to you! I wouldn't be at all surprised if you're on drugs."

"I'll tell you. It's somebody, like you, who doesn't know where his mind is. Bloody split personality. Half your mother's family were the same. That's where you get it. Your Uncle Sid was always trying to kill himself. And when he did it was a bloody accident. He never knew what he was doing."

1979 was the year that Quadrophenia was released, when I was 15. I idolized this film. For obvious reasons...the music, the fashion, the rebellion. And for reasons that I didn't think anybody else really understood like I did. Split personality. One minute fun, the next moody, and the moodiness would drive friends or girlfriends away, which would make me clingy, making them run further away, making me moodier and angrier and more and more lonely. Even when I had a girlfriend, I felt isolated, like it wasn't real, like I didn't really deserve this. And if they dumped me, I would obsess over them for years. More often, I would dump them first, reject them before they could reject me. It's a useful defense mechanism. Attack before you can be attacked. Ask the Germans. 1940. A banner year.

1979, coincidentally, was also the year I started drinking. Heavily, from the very first night. I did not "experiment" with alcohol and drugs, I said "gimme!" And if you believe what some people tell you, the year an alcoholic starts drinking is the year that he stops developing emotionally.

Last week I watched Quadrophenia with my daughter, thinking I was just passing on one more bit of musical history for her so that she can be the hippest musical kid in school (it's working, so far). But as I watched, I realized I was not watching an image of my teen angst years. I was watching my current grown self on the screen, being amped up one minute and depressed the next, taking anger out at rejections, real or imagined, wanting to be part of something larger than myself and finding myself isolated at every turn, angry and confused and not knowing how to figure anything out.

Two weeks ago I almost relapsed. Not even because I wanted to get drunk, really. I was angry about something. Something stupid and petty, I don't even remember what it was. But there was a half-empty bottle of wine on the counter and I picked it up, took the cork out, and smelled it. And then I put it to my lips. Thinking, "this'll show 'em." Like I could prove a point that way. I could show "them" (whoever "they" were) that I'm serious, about whatever the fuck it is I'm supposed to be "serious" about. I used to do that in my drinking days. Drink "at" people. Drink to show 'em. And I was daring myself to do it, curious to see if it was as dangerous as it's made out to be, curious in the way I was curious about letting go of the handlebars on my motorcycle last year.

I tipped the bottle back, and the wine hit my lips...but I didn't open them. And I pulled the bottle back down, and wiped my mouth. Put the cork back in the bottle, and put the bottle in the pantry out of sight. Then I called somebody, 'cause that's what you do in AA. You call somebody. I called a person who was once a temporary sponsee of mine who is currently stronger and wiser than I have been in months. The student has become the master.

And I'm hauling my ass back into meetings for real now. I have friends in the program now, friends who I know from outside activities, so it's easier to stay connected. It's kind of ironic; I get called "rescue hero" by a couple of people I've helped in the past year, I get called "fireman" by somebody who knows about my secret dream of wanting to be a volunteer fireman. And the other day in a meeting, a chick there who I didn't even know said she thought I looked like the sponsor type, like the kind of guy people must ask to sponsor them all the time. When inside I still feel like a messed-up kid half the time.

Four years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning, I drank the last drink of my life (a pint of pink lemonade and vodka that was about 2/3 vodka) and cried my eyes out to my wife about things in my past I'd never told her about, at least not in detail. That really was my last drink. I've never relapsed, and I don't plan on doing it any time soon. And today I will get a new little AA chip (why don't they call them doubloons here?) with a big Roman numeral "IV" on it.

If it's true that your emotional development freezes when you start drinking, and starts growing again when you get sober, then today I turned 19. I feel 19. I feel like a confused teenager on the verge of young adulthood who is only just now starting to figure out what is important and what is just distraction. What parts of my past are worth hanging on to and what parts should be traded in for something else. And it's high time for me to drive the Vespa GS off the cliff and walk away from all that mods and rockers nonsense, and grow the fuck up.

I'm Ray, and I'm still a motherfucking alcoholic.