15 Chapter 14: Rejection and a Justified Redemption
The weekends spent drunk began to add up over the course of my Grade Eleven year. Mornings after a prodigious bender were no longer spent suspended in equanimous thought, pondering the night before with a neutral, pleasant, retrospective curiosity. I began to search the inner recesses of my mind to figure out why I felt so empty and shameful the night after a drunk and why others seemed to handle a hangover with impunity. Soon that emptiness and shame, guilt and remorse, anger and repression became a buffet of emotions I became all too familiar with. I'd wake-up loathing myself. Doing everything I could to Justify and compartmentalize my behaviors from the night before into a story I could accept, so the demons in my mind could be silenced, or maybe not silenced, but hushed or tamed in some way. My internal destructiveness was never successfully silenced. Were they demons though? At the time I would have told you so.
The thoughts in my mind that would continually criticize me were there because everything I tried to force myself to believe and all of my actions went against all the lessons and morals I had been taught growing up. While I tried to blame society and school for ingraining "false ideas" in my head I now recognize these beliefs as the core of who and what I am. I genuinely tried to coerce myself into thinking that being kind, telling the truth, being impeccable with my word, moderating drug and alcohol use and treating others the way I would like to be treated were simple brainwash techniques to keep society from collapsing.
In my opinion these beliefs are a fundamental part of how I was created, because when I act against these beliefs there is only regret and guilt that is associated with the iniquities. That is why I have surmised that humanity is ultimately good, deeply flawed, but good. We just like to get in our own way a lot of the time; the lump of fuck in our heads misfires in the form of distortion and lies (lump of fuck...pig snorting laugh).
—Introspection—
When I got sober, I thought to myself "who the fuck am I without alcohol?" "What are my values and principles?" For the life of me I didn't know. That is why a 12-Step program was so beneficial for me. It gave me a foundation to build upon, a steadfast reference to refer to when I became overwhelmed or lost. The values and principles that the program offers is a construct I chose to adopt because firstly, I was desperate enough, and secondly, because life is better when I look on the brighter side of things, and in my experience, why live pessimistically when it only brings despair and hopelessness, I can no longer afford to live that way, because who wants to get sober only to live in misery. It's just a recipe for future relapse.
---
Grade Eleven continued to roll-on and I continued to drink every minute that I could. When I was outside of school my entire social life revolved around the consumption of alcohol. The obsession of "when can I drink again" pervaded my mind endlessly, it cradled and shook my consciousness as I stood in my cousin's basement, located in Minto, New Brunswick during the early summer of 2005. My Dad's side of the family was celebrating my cousin's graduation from University.
Now that you can acquire a mental imagine of where I was (what in Puff the Magic Dragons saggy Dragon bosoms? You don't know where Minto is? I just choked on a naked troll toy named hairless; literally those Troll Toys are albino) I'll get to the relevance of the setting. I can't remember exactly how I found out, but I remember hearing, while conversing with my family, that I was no longer welcome to come to Skinny P's Cottage that Summer. Apparently, some of the boys said that they found me annoying; they said that my childish antics and my sense of humor could sometimes be overbearing. This was the first time in a long time that I'd experienced this level of rejection. Even my lifelong best friend Geoff agreed that I shouldn't be allowed to come; I at least thought he'd stand up for me. Skinny told me that it was Johnson who was the ringleader and that he was the one who didn't want me to take part in the cottage outing. That shocked me because I thought Johnson and I had a great connection. A deep sadness came over me. Sitting in the heaviness of the moment seemed unbearable, so I immediately reached out to some other friends to cope with the situation and to dampen the hyper feelings of unacceptance that I had already felt so often. Not only was I a professional at playing the victim, but now I had a concrete reason to sink deeper into that coveted role.
In order to deal with those overwhelming feelings of rejection I suggested a trip to Shediac, New Brunswick to two of my close friends. To my instant elation they agreed to accompany me to Parlee Beach Campground in order to hang out for a weekend during the upcoming Summer vacation.
Before departing on the three-hour trip to Parlee we loaded the car with two twenty-four packs of beer and a bit of marijuana that we had gotten from an acquaintance. When we arrived at the campground we walked into the "Campground Lodge" to check ourselves in for the night. The lady behind the counter took one look at us and then pointed to a sign on the wall to our immediate right. It blatantly stated that there was no alcohol abuse allowed on site and that if there was any suspicion of drunken hooliganism those particular campers would be asked to leave immediately. We looked at one another, grinned sheepishly and then proceeded to choose our campsite. There weren't many to choose from, as it was a fairly busy weekend, we eventually settled down into a campsite that was out in the open. All of us preferred to be in and amongst the trees, but we made do with what was available.
We drove to the site and assessed our stock of poison. Not only did we bring 48 beer, but we also brought a make-shift funnel that we had created at home. We used a variety of different apparatuses from Home Hardware to build it. For whatever reason the funnel seemed to collect a substantial amount of foam, so not only did we chug a whole beer in a couple seconds, but with it came a big glob of foam that made you feel bloated and like you were about to heave and explode a stream of stale bear out your pie hole.
The first thing we did after glaring at our stalk of drugs with sensuality was to take out a portable barbeque and place it on the picnic table, then we set up the tent, threw our sleeping bags and blowup mattresses in beside one another and zipped it up. It would be pretty cramped that night, but each of us knew that come bedtime we wouldn't care. Then we tossed some homemade burgers on the portable barbeque and proceeded to ingest a disgusting amount of meat and bread until we could barely move.
Directly after making all that cow meat, condiments and bread disappear, we swiftly walked to the beach that was about a kilometer away. I brought a football with us; the boys and I took full advantage of the oval-shaped object diving into the water while tossing the ball back-and-forth.
It was a beautiful day; there was a light wind and the beach was covered with women in their skimpy bathing suits, needless to say we were completely content with the situation.
On our way back to the campsite we realized we were a whole lot burnt and definitely highly fatigued. The level of exhaustion we felt upon reaching our site was titanic. Each of us laid down in our sleeping bags, we brought them out of the tent and into the fresh air to avoid the sedentary heat. We tried desperately to nap but were too anxious and excited for the night that awaited us. Eventually, we came to the understanding that we weren't going to get a lick of sleep, so we picked ourselves up and started downing beers like it was our dying duty (bring on the bloat you sweaty goat). After consuming all those beers, we went for a confusing walk in downtown Parlee.
Upon returning to our tent we decided to smoke a little bit of the reefer. That was the beginning of a panic filled mass confusion created by a dangerous level of intoxication. I felt so separate from any reality that I had ever experienced before, to combat the induced state of intemperance, I began to try and find a way to return to a comfortable level of sobriety. My first attempt was to take all of my clothes off except my boxers (I don't get it either) and sprint to the campsite washroom. When I got there, I stuck my finger down my throat and tried to vomit up the rest of the alcohol that was left unfiltered in my stomach. When I sprinted back to where the boys were seated, I looked them both square in the eye and said "what the fuck!".
My buddy who had driven us there was chomping on copious amount of chips and said that he felt like he could speak to raccoons. I looked at him for a moment in confusion and then asked the boys to go for a walk to try to get the blood flowing and perhaps avoid the last hour or two of being completely out of my mind.
The only part about the excursion that I can remember is walking back into the campground by the main gate and trying to talk to the gate keeper. My goal was to walk in a way where I looked somewhat normal. I became even more nervous as I realized that my arms were moving twice as fast as my legs, the gate-keeper laughed uncomfortably as I pretended to be goofing off rather than admit I had lost complete control over my motor functions. When I got back to the campsite my only thought was to lay on my sleeping bag and escape this self-inflicted nightmare.
When I woke up the following morning, I remember crawling out the tent slowly; the heat inside the domed shelter was accenting an already unbearable headache and a debilitating wave of continual nausea. I crawled to the picnic table and sat there slumped over like a defeated pupil, perpetrating a palpable personal pity-party. The other boys packed up the site because I was so hung over and utterly useless. To this day that particular hangover was one of the worst I've ever experienced, and was ever going to experience.
On the way home I requested to sit in the front seat or else I was certain I'd would throw up all over the backseat of my buddies' car. As my friend's vehicle ate up the miles on our way back to Fredericton it came to my attention that this vacation was something that I would eternally regret (I was a bit dramatic) and in no way did it aid in helping me regain that lost sense of self that I felt the boys had taken away from me when they refused to allow me to go to Skinny's cottage. Oh, brains and alcohol and bad choices... good times in the Maritimes folks.
