201009
Good old life. Just when you think you have every externality pared down, every attachment whittled away, it whispers in your ear.
"Wrong".
The first two working days of this week have been a breaking wave of memory.
First of all, Sunday night to Monday morning, I realised slowly at first then with increasing torrents of memory, that the guy I've been scoring off for close to a year now was a boy in my class for grade eight and nine at high school. I won't mention the school's name, but it's had its share of settlements for chaplains touching the kiddies, last year a few of its student were arrested for raping a grade 9 Somerville House gal, the same year they enforced a ban on allowing eight students bringing male partners to the high school prom, because, quote:
"...escorting a young woman to a formal was part of the boys' education."
I cannot see how their actions in this matter were lawful, let alone moral.
So you may get the picture that this is not one of those modern-minded independent schools that try to teach kids to grow up to be humans. The only thing I felt during my years there that this school was outputting were machines for generating income, another crop of BMW owners and cigar smokers. Sexulaity was not an option. Heterosexuality was the only tolerated 'choice'.
I have to be fair and state that I had a miserable time there. I hung out with a few other outcasts. Boys who were not considered masculine enough or privileged enough to avoid denigration and abuse at the teachers and staff hands. My main friends were a couple of lads who were labelled 'poofters', a term I did not really understand, except that it meant that most teachers would look away if another student chose to physically assault one. Possibly the school thought that violence was a cure for homosexuality, or in my case, underdevelopment. I was 5ft and 33 kilograms when I was freed from that compound.
Thrive I did not. Parents took me to doctors, bought me cans of "SuperMassiveWeight Gain" (I swear that was its name) which I dutifully swallowed then spent the next day sweating out in nervous fear at school.
Parents have an inbuilt mechanism to avoid the obvious horrors in life I have always felt. I don't think this is a failing in them, rather it serves the purpose that if parents have six kids, and they let one or two get molested by the new stepdaddy, they can ignore it enough to raise the other four. Genetics is all about the averages, never about the individuals chewed up and spat out by its ancient chemistry.
By grade 12 I was self-medicating the only way I knew how. Stealing parents whiskey and spirits and bringing a shot or two a day to school in the lunchbox drinkbottle helped me through grade 12. Grabbing the odd Mogadon (Nitrazepam) helped a little more.
But it did not really satisfy. It took about three years of searching after I left to find something that helped. Hit by a car my helper appeared first in the form of pethidine. And for the first time since grade seven, I relaxed for a few minutes, in a doctors surgery in Taringa, my arm being slipped into a sling for my second of three collar bone breakages in those years.
(I did not see peth again till I was in Cambodia in 93 buying them at a buck an ampoule of a local Vietnamese bird seller. Chinese writing, Russian writing, I was aware that someone in a hospital was going without pain treatment during a crisis because this country was broke and the hospital attendants made more selling me stolen opiates than they did helping those suffering physical pain).
I cried that night in Taringa on the cold stainless steel gurney, not perhaps as others thought from pain, but from relief. I could relax. I could breathe. I could be me for a minute or two, I could stop projecting the false image I had developed in grade eight to offer a defence against my captors.
****
I remember my first brush with cynicism. I stood in a park next to the rowing shed, where I was utilised as a coxswain - my lack of manliness had found an outlet that did not attract criticism. I remember standing there in the last months of grade 12, thinking "One day I'll look back on these as the happiest days of my life". I said it out loud to a fellow inmate soon after I thought it, and that's my first remembered instance of deadpan cynicism. Not sure if they got it or not, but I remember the delivery.
Of course it was not all bad, indeed I didn't kill myself in first few months out of that school as Barry, one of our circle, chose to. When I was in the Supreme Court in 95 facing potential life under the Drugs Misuse Act my parents obtained some reference from a housemaster at the school. I refused to read it, their asking for it had made me view them as little better than collaborators, but maybe in some small part it helped keep me out of prison. Indeed, just the fact that that was the school I went to probably carried some obscene weight, now I think about it. Old Boys Networks have some benefits, like tweaking the law.
****
So as I said, a fellow sufferer from those days has turned out to be the guy who helps me out these days. And now I know it, I see the memory in his face, his mannerisms.
A day after this revelation I received my first diary comment. It seems there is someone out there reading this who is not a schnarb or junkie. Miraculous. She offered helpful advice (the usual dump that gal that I hear so often) and other advice too. She pointed out that my life doesn't seem so swell in these pages. I can understand that. I write usually during withdrawal, as I do tonight - the counter on my homepage has me at 52.32 hours since my last shot, a point at which it is not easy to feel that well, especially on a 20mg metro dose.
So writing in this mode it is easy to focus on the negative. I must exercise the desire to do opposite. I should be playing The Clean not Band of Horses as I write.
So something positive?
Well, the gal who contacted me has given me strength to try to live alone gain. I know I cannot discern co-dependence from love, so I have to accept the opinion of every single person I know who cares for me, who says S is using me. In her way I know she is not trying to hurt, but I guess this is a situation where empathy is not helpful. Theory of Mind may be an evolutionary advantage in some situations but not in trying to leave a co-dependent relationship.
Anyway, I guess that's not so positive, but it is something that gives me hope.The thought that it is not entirely impossible for me to be in a mutually satisfying relationship with a non-drug-dependent hooman bean.
Cripes, sounds like therapy talk. Bet my next posting is full of "Hey guess what? I married Sim!" news.....
Anyway, a busy few days/ Just makes you want to grab life in a bear hug, swing it round and chuck it under the chin, uncle-to-nephew style.
"Aaaah life, you old dog, you can still surprise me! What'd I do without you?"
"Molder." would come the totally apropos, perfect response.