Getting Clean Again

I’ve got a stressful weekend ahead. I hate it that I even consider it stressful. I don’t have to work, I get to go and see my kids, and my mum and her husband are coming up. They are not perfect, but nice enough and since I stopped using in 2000 they have been very supportive. They don’t know I have been vaping weed for the last couple years. I used to enjoy their company. It hurts a bit that I consider this so stressful.

Since my sober October experiment I have been having breaks from weed. I don’t have the will power to do it when I have weed on me, but it’s easy enough to leave at home when I go and visit my kids for a few days. I’m trying to be more present for them and I think not vaping weed makes that easier. I’m not even really sure, they don’t seem to know one way or the other.

My ex asks me to bring a furniture removal trolley. I’m annoyed because it won’t fit in my car and I will have to take the work ute which will cost me twice as much fuel and I don’t like driving it. I agree to help her out. I’m trying to be nicer, but it reminds me I have to sell it and buy a new one, it’s old and falling apart. I get to Gympie and spend Friday night there with the kids and then all day Saturday while we wait for my parents arrive late Saturday afternoon. I do my best to be present, bit it is so hard. I just want to read, play on my phone, watch TV, go for a walk, anything but be present and intimate. I love them, but I can’t get out of my own head. I can’t pay attention to them and trying to do so is like nails down a black board.

I lie in bed with my disabled 14 year old son. He doesn’t talk or have much movement and he likes me lying in his bed and listening to music with him. I lie there for 5 minutes and find it challenging. It’s not just boring. There’s something on me that wants to run. I want to be on my own, yet I love these kids. Maybe I should have bought weed. I could get really stoned and lie here with him. I would enjoy that more. I will bring weed next week. I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to leave it at home. Oh, that’s right. I don’t want my mum to see me stoned. She saw that poor teenager trying to destroy himself on drugs. I’m not smoking anywhere near as much as I did back then and not drinking alcohol or using heroin, but if she sees me stoned those painful memories will come back up.

I take the girls, my 11 year old Harmony and 8 year old Pearl, to the local swimming pool. They play in the pool with the other kids they know from the neighbourhood while I read and listen to a podcast isolating in peace. My landlord turns up with her grand kids. It reminds me I need to clean that place up so I can hand back her land and stop paying rent. I leased some farm land off her 10 years ago and built a dodgy farm shed that I used for storage when I had my business up this way. There is just rubbish and odds and ends left. 

My parents arrive and we have dinner in the dining room of my sons disabled accommodation facility. It should all be very nice, but something’s wrong. My 11 year old Harmony bursts into tears because she misunderstood the instructions my mum gave her helping her serve the pasta, and my youngest Pearl is running around everyone at the table being a spaceship. I think she is just acting out how I feel. It half amuses me because I can see how much it annoys my mum. There is no way me and my brother would have been allowed to behave like that. We finish dinner and I’m relived it’s over. I only have to get through tomorrow morning with them and then I can make an excuse to head back to my place in Redcliffe, a 90 minute drive south.

The next morning whilst sipping my morning coffee I get a video message from a neighbour of my farm shed that has been destroyed by the overnight storm. Damn, that’s a weird coincidence. I go and check it out and the roof has been ripped right off, trusses and all. Ok. So God removed half of it for me. There are sheets of iron and debris all over the place. I do a quick clean-up to avoid getting in trouble with council and head back to the family

I spend the morning with everyone and head off after lunch. I feel guilty. I could have stayed there for the rest of the day. It wouldn’t have been that hard. I’m not even escaping to get wasted. I just want to isolate – of course I’ll vape weed while I isolate. As I’m driving down the Bruce Highway I see dark clouds in the distance. Damn I have to drive through that. Maybe I should have stayed. The rain comes heavy and the traffic grinds to a crawl near Aussie World. Damn this is boring. I should have bought some weed. I hear a loud bang. WTF. I hear another. And another. Oh fuck, that’s hail. Oh fuck, that’s heavy hail. My windscreen smashes. Damn. The hail continues. Drive you fuckers, I want to drive through the storm. The traffic completely stops. I’m in this little tin can being bombarded by meteorites. Maybe it was good I didn’t bring weed. Smash another crack in the windscreen. And then another. Fuck, if this keeps going they’re going to eventually come through. I look around and everyone’s windscreen is smashed. Mine is actually the least damaged. No one’s windscreen has completely caved in. I feel a bit safer. The storm passes and I continue home peering through the cracks in my windscreen.

I wake up the next morning. I do my morning routine; yoga, meditation, coffee, journal. I don’t want to work today. I am exhausted by the weekend. I look at the weather report – it looks good. I’m taking acid and 2CB and going to the beach. I do a couple hours of work and ring my mum. Since she is in town she may want to visit me. I don’t even want her to call me while I’m tripping. We make plans to have coffee at 10am the next morning. I tell her I have a busy day ahead and better get to it.

I take about 225 mics of LSD at 9.30am. I prepare for my day. I chop up plenty of weed for my vape, put on sunscreen, fill up some water bottles, and get the 2CB tablet out for later. I plan to take that after the acid peak is over at about 3-4 hours.

I drive to the beach and start walking. The come-up is a bit tough. I feel guilty for using this drug to escape. The denial is starting to crack. This is the first time in 2 years that I have consciously taken acid without the intention of expanding my mind or asking a question. Today I am using it to cope. Cope with my isolation and not being able to give or receive love. I recognise I can’t connect with other people so use drugs to cope and attach to my thoughts. What the fuck am I going to do? Now I know why I am doing it.

I grew up in an environment where I was neglected and controlled by my primary care giver. I desperately wanted her attention, but she was unavailable. My dad died just before I turned 4 while she was 8 months pregnant. When I did get her attention she used control to cope. She did everything for me accept give me any emotional intimacy. Whenever I asked for help she would do it for me. Whenever I didn’t mimic her morals and values perfectly I was given the shame face. I desperately wanted a sense of self and the only way I could do that was to push her away – but I so needed her love. The suffocation wasn’t worth the love. I learned to attach to my thoughts. My dreams and fantasies kept me company. They were reliable and wouldn’t let me down. My first year at school I had no friends and I would walk around the grounds at lunchtime looking for my father’s face in the daisies on the grass.

By midday the confusion of the come up was starting to pass. I took a couple hits from my vape as I overlooked the ocean and the world took on a cannabis hue. Maybe I am making too much of this. Maybe I just need a girlfriend. I’ll be in Bali with Ruby in a couple weeks and then in Thailand with Snook a couple weeks after that. I continued to walk and felt very strange. My body felt like it was being controlled by a puppet master. My arms and legs were being moved up and down without me feeling in control of them. Wow, this is fucking awesome as I had another couple hits from my vape. I love LSD. I knew you wouldn’t let me down baby.

Now in the peak of the trip I could think clearer. I thought about the hail storm the day before. I went completely back into the emotions of being stuck in the car while God rained thunderbolts of ice down at me. I imagined the scale of the universe and me as just a hairless ape with an over developed frontal cortex flying through space on a tiny rock we call earth completely vulnerable to the elements. I wasn’t afraid. It was exhilarating. Then I saw the image of the storm ripping apart my shed. A wild tornado full of ice making its way across the fields and smashing into my shed ripping it apart like paper. An all knowing all powerful God is a chasm to far from reality for my brain to accept, but the power of coincidence, the power of the natural universe… Did God just tell me to clean up my past. The farm shed I needed to get rid of, the car I needed to replace.

I continued walking and meditating on these thoughts. The beach path ended at the headland at Whitecliffe Pde and I had to walk along the road for a few hundred meters as I made my way back to Margate. As I was coming around the bend, the colours of the houses and parked cars bright and shiny. I imagined myself in a racing car hugging the corners. Walking along I imagined harnessed in, travelling as fast as the car and my driving capabilities could handle, one slip and I was off the side of the cliff injured severely or dead. This is my life isn’t it? You have pushed it with sex and drugs right up to the edge. One slip and I am gone. What if I get the obsession to drink alcohol or use heroin? I mean it hasn’t happened for the 2 years I’ve been getting out of it, but I don’t know if I still have that power that has kept me abstinent from these drugs for the last 18 years.

Ok, calm down Nicky boy, there is no reason that you would use those drugs that you know will kill you, you don’t even want to let alone likely to get an obsession, lets relax and enjoy the rest of the trip. You still have the 2CB in your pocket you can take in a couple hours, the come up is over and the trip is really enjoyable now. I will consider getting clean tomorrow if I still think about it.

I went and had some lunch, repacked my vape and continued walking the Margate – Redcliffe strip. The wind had died down and it was a beautiful day.  With my belly full I sat on the seat outside the Redcliffe surf club overlooking the islands out in the distance. I considered getting clean again. I considered the three men I respected that were clean. Uncle, Slender Buddha, and the Falcon. They were all married family men and all were very dedicated to NA. They attended regular meetings and were there to help out the newcomer. It was a pretty simple formula and they all had a calm and peace of mind I wasn’t envious of, but thought would be nice to have one day. One day when I had calmed down from my travelling debaucheries. I still wanted the single life. I had had so much fun travelling Indonesia, Thailand, and Eastern Europe. The chase of sex had been so consuming and so much fun I rarely missed drugs when away. And when I came back to Australia I had my weed and psychedelics to keep me company.

I would like a life like theirs one day; grounded, love of family, I could go to NA, if I was clean I would have a lot to give. But I don’t think I can get clean now. I don’t think I can stay single and live my debaucherous ways clean. I haven’t finished that stage of my life yet. Sex is such a big part of me and I missed out on getting all the girls I wanted in my teens because I was such a hopeless alcoholic and then I missed out in my twenties because I was such a hopeless addict. The last 4-5 years I have worked out how to get my needs met sexually, no longer in this country, but overseas I can live the playboy life I was robbed of because of my addiction when I was younger. I wonder when I will be ready to hang up my boots.

I considered the parallel of when I was 18 and finished high school. I tried really hard in year 12 and was able to get a reasonable result and accepted into a science degree at Melbourne university. I was going to become a scientist and create the next designer drug. After a dedicated period of study for year 12 I couldn’t face up to another 4 years of school. I tried to go to uni, but I couldn’t apply myself. If I couldn’t find anyone to smoke joints with in the park I would go home and smoke bongs. I truly believed I had a party in me that I needed to exercise. I thought if I partied enough I would be able to settle down eventually. I travelled Australia and had a lot of fun – at least the bits I remember. I ended up in rehab only a year later beaten and ready to give recovery a go. Was this the same?

I looked at my watch and it was 2.15pm. My 2CB wasn’t due until 3pm. Says Dr Nick self-prescribing his psychedelic medicine. It wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but I had worked out how much more I enjoyed it just after the peak of the acid trip. I decided to walk back to the car, repack my vape, and walk back towards the pier at Woody Point where I could take my little purple pill that was pressed into the shape of a meditating monkey.

I got to my car, sat in the drivers seat, turned the ignition to get the aircon cranking, then proceeded to back out of the carpark. I was now completely in control of the trip. Everything looked so interesting and driving was easy and fun, I felt like I was on a ride in an amusement park as I drove up the street. I could almost hear the clackity clack of the roller coaster tracks as I drove up the hill. As I got to the top of the hill and started to drive down the road turned into a liquid silver river and my car felt like a boat sailing down the stream. Damn, I love LSD, mind you it did take me 5 hours to get to this part of the trip that I loved so much.

I crossed the main road and turned into my street. I looked around and thought. What the fuck are you doing? Why are you back at your place? You were meant to just pack the vape with more weed and go for a walk. You idiot, you only turned the car on to get the aircon working. What do I do now? I don’t want to go home. Fuck, I suppose I drive back to the beach again. You’re way too high to drive, but I don’t want to be stuck at home. Fuck it, the beach again it is.

I did a u-turn and headed back the way I came. I was driving back to the beach and admonishing myself for being so crazy and driving so out of it. You’re 44, your idiot. I wasn’t concerned of my driving ability, despite thinking I was in an amusement park, I was confident of my ability to navigate the roads and traffic in this condition, but if something bad happened, like someone ran into me I don’t know how I would cope dealing with the other drivers, or God forbid the police. What if someone ran into me and I was injured and ended up in hospital in this condition – that would suck.

Man, you’re 44. This has crossed a line. A felt a swell in me, an energy deep inside, but long forgotten, it was a commitment to get clean again. I knew what this was. This had happened before. November 1999 after a three year relapse I sat in my dilapidated house with my fifieth bong for the day. This isn’t working, I thought, I’d be better of clean. The feeling hits with a thud. The power of commitment is heavy and doesn’t feel like it comes from within. Could it be God, could it just be evidence and enough humility – the last straw that finally breaks the back of denial.

It happened with cigarettes too in 2000. I decided to quit tomorrow and thought a prayer before bed wouldn’t hurt. As I sat to pray I was overwhelmed by the power this commitment was going to have on me. Shit, this is really going to work. I still wanted to have my last smoke so I stopped my prayer and had my last durry. It tasted like shit and then I prayed for God to give me the strength to give up – almost 20 years later I haven’t gone back to cigarettes.

Now in 2019 was I going to commit to being clean again. What about the old man vaping his weed on his balcony with a little LSD lab out the back? Dude you were lucky to last a couple years. This isn’t sustainable. The reality if committing to getting clean again is shocking. I’m really about to commit to getting clean again, going back to NA, total abstinence. I know I may not stay clean at my first try, but if I commit now, that is it, I will be on the path of total abstinence again for a long time, maybe even the rest of my life.

I held back the commitment as I was getting to the last hill before the beach. I’m really doing this aren’t I? I’m committing to total abstinence and the NA program again. The tears start to well up as I drive up over the hill and see the ocean before me. And then the music track comes on that was playing when the ocean turned into a Polynesian Goddess and I found love https://redpillrecovery.com/2019/08/15/step-6-ridden-with-defects-blame-and-finding-love/

The damn broke and the tears started to flow. I’m really doing this. I’m really getting clean. Tears streaming down my face I noticed the irony being so high on acid driving to the beach to vape weed. If I was really committed I would throw this weed out and start from now.

I parked the car, packed my vape, and walked the ocean that had healed me dozens of times. I pondered the reality of getting clean. I don’t have any physical habits. I can wake up and be clean tomorrow. But I have to change my sexual behaviour. My latest idea was to recruit girls from Thailand and bring them to Australia on student visa’s so I could pimp them out on Tinder and SugarDaddy – what could go wrong with that? I envisaged an apartment with a couple young hotties that I could go over and do bad things to whenever I wanted and have gullible middle aged white men foot the bill. To be honest, I still think it’s a solid idea, but it is going down a dark path. What sort of an example would I be setting for my daughters? What sort of an example have I been setting for them even without going to that extreme? They see me with different girls every other week. The bad boy that takes drugs, travels half his life, and always has a new girl half his age – usually from some third world country.

Not only do I have to change my behaviour for them, but I won’t be able to cope with the ups and downs of the single life without my drugs. I have given up on dating in Brisbane. It was fun at the start meeting heaps of girls and having lots of dates, but the handful I got to fuck compared to the effort I put into the hundreds I approached didn’t seem worth it. And I had spoilt myself in Asia fucking the hottest girls half my age from a fraction of the effort. Girls that I would have considered hot and out of my league in Brisbane I now had very little enthusiasm for. Even when I won that game like only a month ago I fucked a very reasonable 30 year old Columbian a couple times I met from daygame. It was very meh. My stints with SugarDaddy sites in Brisbane were so debaucherous with sick damaged girls that it turned my stomach to think of them – and there I was thinking it a good idea to turn innocent Thailand farm girls into that.

My answer was to travel overseas and be a playboy getting high on sex addiction and then come back to Australia and channel that addiction into drugs. I couldn’t imagine being clean in my celibacy in Australia. I then considered all the men I respected in NA that had time up. They all had wives. OK, fuck it. I’m going to get a wife. Now at the Redcliffe point, I looked out, the ocean glistening, my heart excited with the prospect of getting clean. If you want what they have do what they do. I’m going to get a wife too. A really hot young one that will be my maid and sex slave. Ohhhh, that’s exciting.

I head back towards the car to re-pack my vape and remember I have a 2CB pill in my pocket. If I am serious about getting clean I really shouldn’t take this. I pack my vape and swallow the 2CB pill and then head off for a another walk, this time towards Woody point. I was thinking about NA and it’s similarities to a cult. It was a group of severely damaged individuals that meet together to find purpose through common bonds and a higher power. These addicts, nearly all of which came from dysfunctional childhoods missed out on the developmental stages afforded to functional households that foster healthy empathy, compassion, love and trust.

Most were abused in some way be it sexual, violence, emotional, or just plan neglect. Not only weren’t they not given unconditional love, so important for early development, they had their trust broken over and over again. The life of drugs soothed the pain, but turned them into, and often worse versions, of their abuses and trust breakers. By the time they made it into NA their emotional and spiritual bodies were husks. They had been beaten by life, mostly from their own behaviour, into a state that was ripe for brainwashing.

Like the lost soul that found the Children of God or The Manson Family where they were shown love, compassion and belonging for the first time in their life, the broken drug addict a week clean out of detox finds the only place that has ever told them you are the most important person in the room and to keep coming back. These dregs of society, the most self-centred, drug addicted, criminal, unemployable, abusive, burdens on society come together and find love amongst each other like they have never found anywhere else. To say they are ripe for brainwashing by this power is an understatement.

On the positive side having their brain washed by the dogma and ideology of NA is the least of their worries and in nearly all cases the only thing to save them from themselves and their spiralling path of self-destruction. One could say they need a good brain washing.

As I make it to the Margate beach picnic area I feel the 2CB come on, my soul bubbles and the shades of light and colour take on a brighter hue. I consider the cult analogy further. It’s a love cult. The most unlovable people get together and love each other. The misfits find the love and belonging that alluded them their whole lives in the greater community amongst each other. I’m going back to join the love cult. I have to let my guard down, I have to let love in and out of my heart for these horrible recovering addicts, these dregs of society, these burdens to civilisation, that I too belong too. I am no better than them. My net benefit to society is still in the red. I have taken far more than I have given. Maybe with the help of these deplorables can I start to be a net positive contributor to society.

Then I consider that all the cults and religions for that matter have a charismatic leader. NA doesn’t have such a leader. That is odd, I think. Then I realise that clean time is the leader. I walk up the grassy hill and sit at the picnic table. I’m super high again. Looking back down at the ocean in all its splendour, shimmering with light that looks like energy directly from God. “Clean” God’s voice rings in my ears. “Clean” I hear and feel in every fibre of my body. The afternoon light shines on me warm and vibrant like Gods love. I am connected. I am connected to the firmware of the universe. “Clean” the God we worship at our little meetings. We go around the room and say our names and how long we have been faithful to our charismatic leader clean time. “Clean” I can feel the power of my savour. My savour “Clean”. My new God.

As I sit on the picnic table bench overlooking the psychedelic ocean. The ocean that healed me through all the journeys of the last couple years of my psychedelic psychotherapy. The healing and forgiveness of the abuse I put myself through with heroin and other IV use in my 20’s, the grief of my son’s illness, the emotional flashbacks and CPTSD of my childhood, and now finally God has come back (a God that I don’t believe in) to fill me with the love and worship of being clean. Being totally abstinent from all drugs and being part of NA. I bask in the glow of love and hope – fuelled by psychedelics. It’s time to get clean again. Tears roll down my cheeks as I surrender to the love cult. As I surrender to the recovery model of total abstinence. I will be clean again. I will have a higher power and live a clean life with love from other recovering addicts. Now completely committed to NA I continue to walk taking another couple hits of my weed vape, looking forward to getting clean – tomorrow.