I’m beginning this from the B Concourse Screen Door of PDX. Supposedly someday “soon” the airport renovations will be complete and we will all frolic in the filtered light and interior greenery of the unruly northwest. In the meantime, Phil Collins is playing in the dining area and clearly affecting everyone. That drum takedown! You can’t help but be pulled inward, for a moment. The next song is Hungry Like The Wolf and the chatter resumes, the clank of cutlery.
I was listening (again) to This Naked Mind last night (two years sober, I still like listening to Quit Lit — it affirms my resolve, increases my sense of moral superiority — I wish I were kidding — ) and the author, Annie Grace, talks about how her drinking career took off simultaneously to her job in marketing, fueled in particular by constant travel and airport bars, where liminal time zones means any time can be drinking time. I have made many, many flight connections in a boozy blur. Staying up all night before an international trip used to be just part of the journey.
I am on my way to Tucson and Bisbee, AZ where I will settle myself into an airbnb that I chose from the wide selection of cute airbnb’s because it had a photo of an angled writing desk — a boon to my back when bent over my iPad, drawing for hours on end, which is what I intend to do in between long desert walks. I doubt I will actually finish the deck in the next six days — I have 8 cards left — but I will come close.
What’s left: the Empress, the Hanged One, the Queen of Swords, the King of Wands, the King of Pentacles, the Eight of Swords, the Six of Cups, the Ace of Swords. I’m working on the Empress now, based on a drawing I did in 2019 when I first started thinking about making a silkscreened tarot deck. I
am now in Bisbee, it is Thursday but I had to check my calendar to be sure. I finished the Empress yesterday — as always, posted to Instagram on completion — and the next card is the Queen of Swords. I highly identify with (/aspire to) this Queen in my current iteration — she is perceptive, discerning, well-boundaried, intellectual and independent, a quick-thinker who minces no words and is unafraid to speak the truth and own the consequences. Among the court cards she is the most intimately familiar with Death, in many interpretations being representative of the widow or the crone.
As I now have so few cards left every time I go to blind-pull the next I am acutely aware of those I leave in the pile: I don’t want to end on the Hanged One (surrender, suspension) or the Eight of Swords (self-limitation). As a meaning-making machine I am already designing the poetics of the full circle and recalibrating with each next card: how perfect to have began with the Queen of Pentacles and ended on the Empress, the mother of them all! until I pulled the Empress. And then, to go from the QoP to the Queen of Swords — what a journey that story tells! but nope. My current ploy involves telling myself that no matter which card is last I, the storyteller, will be able to spin it into something perfectly, positively poignant and correct: even the eight of swords (though I will be urging that card to come forward before the end).
Yesterday I had lunch and a walk around the town’s perimeter with Eva Rupert, whom I met in Boston 24 years ago when she began dating my friend TJ (see below). It was during a sleepless night on Eva’s couch that I knew I was pregnant (the first time) and it was on the same couch that I lived for a month when I returned to Boston before flying to London in late 2000. The last time I saw Eva was in Chicago when she stayed with Aaron and I during a cross-country road trip — or rather, her two young dogs stayed with us while she stayed out all night with Max after a drunken pub crawl involving multiple wigs, one of which stayed with her the whole way home. Eva is a goddamn renaissance woman and when, over lunch, I told her only somewhat-facetiously that my ultimate goal is still to become famous by writing and drawing comics of my weird sad glorious life she was like “oh yeah, I remember… you’re a Leo too!”
Tonight is a full moon in Leo.
10 IDEAS A DAY (things that helped me quit drinking and stay sober)
note: I started a list last week in honor of my 2nd sober birthday: 5 reasons I quit drinking and 5 reasons I haven’t picked it up again: but scrapped it because the reasons are easy (and rather preachy), but the How is where the rub was. Also, a disclaimer: if you drink alcohol it doesn’t mean you have a problem with drinking alcohol. But if you are wondering if you do, you probably do. I did, and I knew I did, but I drank until it was more uncomfortable to keep drinking than to stop. As they say, rock bottom is where you decide to stop digging.
1 — I was truly ready to quit. Since Ben died and especially since moving to Portland (with the exception of a Dry January and a half-assed half-Sober October) I drank nearly every day — out of habit, in addiction, in an attempt to numb my grief. And increasingly, at the end of the evening or the mornings after — because I would never let myself fully attain the oblivion I sought, single and devoted mother that I am — I would feel every ick I was trying to avoid, ten times over and soaked in shame. I had a lot of clarity about what I was doing to myself and how my behavior was out of alignment with my true values. When I decided I was done it was because I knew there was nothing left in it for me to gain but everything to lose. 2 — Paradoxically, I didn’t start out determined to give it up forever. I began with another dry January and reckoned that I would decide at the end of the month if I wanted to keep going. I knew I wanted to want to, so I did everything I could in January to set myself up for a Booze-Wary February (this is terrible, will hopefully come up with something better before publishing) 3 — This included listening to lots of sobriety podcasts and aforementioned Quit Lit on Audible, which did two very important things: 4 — gave me a scientific understanding of alcohol use and alcohol dependency, simultaneously affirming my desire to stop poisoning my body and providing me with a roadmap for what I could expect during the chemical recalibration phase and 5 — let me know that there was a very large and inspiring community of people who had made the shift to sobriety and had utterly no regrets (for a quick fix, google sober celebrities) 6 — I went to a few AA meetings, which — while ultimately not my personal route to sobriety — were an essential support at times when I felt I was the only sober person in Portland (or NYC, where I left Trevor at a bar to go to a 10:30pm meeting in the West Village and bought a teeshirt to prove it and to maybe one day signal to someone rad that I too have been to the coolest AA mtg in North America) 7 — I used an app that I had seen my dear friend Callie post a screenshot of — Callie was a year sober and an inspiration, along with our friend Patrick, both friends from Santa Cruz High with whom I had shared (& often instigated) the experience of many adolescent shenanigans and, later, the loss of Chris, who had been the 4th wheel of our late-90s clown car (and who, not incidentally, died in 2007 as a result of another man’s drunken decisions — alcohol was a factor in at least three of the four deaths that have most shaped my life, none which had anything to do with long-term physical illness). The app showed me how many days of sobriety I had as well as how much money I’d saved by not drinking, and had a forum wherein I could read other people’s experiences and the outpouring of support that invariably followed. 8 — I paid deep attention to my body, to how it felt without alcohol, to what felt better and what, initially, felt worse. Thanks to the Quit Lit Library I knew there was a rough timeframe wherein I could expect withdrawal symptoms in the form of heightened anxiety, disturbed sleep patterns, erratic energy, increased moodiness and so on… and also that such discomfort would pass as my body adjusted to its new normal. I also basked in the absence of any hangover whatsoever as well as the overall better health, wellbeing and body delight that has continued to this day… what I had thought was feeling good was still so far from my current baseline. As someone smart once said, “if it wasn’t worth it I would’ve started drinking again.” 9 — I spent much of those early days dealing with the sensation of constant over-stimulation (one thing that your body does in response to habitual alcohol use is increase the release of stimulating hormones — cortisol, adrenaline etc — in an attempt to homeostasize the depressant effects of alcohol — when you quit suddenly it takes the brain awhile to catch up — hence the shakes and even heart attacks that long-time, deep-in-it drinkers may experience and why the medical establishment recommends consulting a doctor before going cold turkey) by exploring Portland on foot or by bike — one day I left the house for coffee in the morning and ended up eight miles away at the top of Council Crest. I also cried a lot and let myself cry: if one reason I had been drinking was to numb my sadness and rage over the death of Ben (and Aaron and Chris and Kelsey), I knew that to quit meant to embrace the fullness of the feelings that I had been avoiding. In doing so I entered some very, very dark places within myself — and in doing SO, I came through. 10 — it helped immensely that I was in a new city living a new life, that I was financially solvent, that I didn’t have to work full time or be in buzzy situations if I didn’t want to. I had the support of family and friends, some of whom were also on their own dry journeys. I had time and space to grieve, to yell and cry and walk and draw and moan. I had conviction that I wanted out of alcohol’s influence and those times when I wanted to waver I sheltered in stubbornness and a dumb refusal to quit quitting. In other words, I had everything going for me and still it was hard. It is hard to change one’s patterns and habits and proclivities. Our culture is a drinking culture. But women, friends, citizens, my fellow Americans: this is my conspiracy theory: they want us to drink because animals who are busy chasing carrots on sticks will not have the energy to direct their righteous rage and creative force for change beyond the carrot to the master who holds it out of reach.
fuck that. kill the darling!
COMICS ABOUT
As soon as I stopped drinking I started drawing sketchbook comics again: I had so much more time on my hands, and needed something to do with them. Initially I was so accustomed to using the iPad for everything that sometimes I tried to pinch-zoom the paper. But I liked the immediacy of pen and ink, the mark of the mistake, the way it forced formatting on the fly.
& as promised: TJ, making his entrance along with Marcel in panel 9 and Harvard Square. Devo (panel 1) was visiting from Santa Cruz and the arrival of the Raw N Naughty Student Body changed everything about Boston and, as is the way of things, my entire life. I would not now be in Bisbee if we all hadn’t miraculously convened in Cambridge that day. What an incredible world we inhabit!!
DRAWING CARDS
yes, I am drawing cards. so many cards, so much drawing. Next!
INHALATIONS
Printed material, y’all, particularly MAGAZINES. I have had a New Yorker subscription for years, which mostly means that there are stacks of magazines around my house that remain unopened while I read articles that pique my interest online. But recently I have resumed flipping through the PAGES and READING ARTICLES I likely would not have clicked through to. There is much reference lately to the Algorithm and how it limiting it is — if you want to practice disruption, I have some New Yorkers to give you.
Shokuhin Sampuru — Japanese fake food — is fascinating and someday that will be all anyone will be getting from me for Christmas.
My walk this morning was the Bisbee 1000 Stair Climb, which (though solo and uncompetitively completed) was a great 1.4 hour, 4.3 mile workout during which my heart thumped between 93 and 175 beats per minute. Then I took an
Epsom salt bath, lavender scented.
My Subby is my current favorite Substack: real, raw and funny as fuck.
STILL LEARNING
The art of humility and how not to impose my own experience on others… while still believing that such experience has a usefulness and utility beyond my own life. Still practicing! Beginner’s Mind! The fine art of Failure!
And so….
the sun is shining, it’s 3:46pm in Arizona and high time for another walk, this time to visit the Ghost Cats of the back alley of the Silver King Hotel, as recommended by fellow Leo Eva. 🙀
