Personal Journal

When Idols Falter

This is about accusations that Rush Limbaugh has committed crimes in obtaining prescription pain killers.
And about me.

“Adia I do believe I’ve failed you
“Adia I know I’ve let you down
“Don’t you know I tried so hard to love you in my way
“It’s easy to let it go”

Sarah McLachlan
Another in the long line of lesbians that I really wanted to love turned me on to Sarah McLachlan. I was listening to this song, thinking about what it means to realize you’ve disappointed people in your life, and to regret it, but to never be able to make amends.

Being human is so exquisitely surreal. I love it. I intend to thank god when I meet him. I have had a great life, with tragedy and triumph, and some encounters with history that no one will understand but me and my god. I love to cry when my soul is empty, and I love to laugh in the face of Jean when her argument becomes patently absurd, twisted beyond reason and logic to keep her pre-conceived notion justified.

I graduated University of Texas El Paso in 1994, summer, with a 3.51 GPA. I look back on the time between my senior year and the year I left for Colorado as the happiest time in my life, though probably because I lacked a certain maturity for self-improvement then, and I managed to forge around me a life that fostered almost complete irresponsibility.

After I graduated, my Army college money ran out, and I got a job delivering pizza for a local guy. It turned out to be one of the best jobs of my life, ideally suited for me at that space and time. I was a kick-ass pizza guy in that shop. My military bearing kept me doing what needed to be done without being asked. I lead the other delivery guys. Mike, the owner, had a son who was 17 and a bit of a flake, probably too confused to know how to please his father, though he did wish to do so. One of the managers of that shop took to calling me the “son that Mike never had”. It was appropriate. I was everything he wanted his son to be, on the surface.

Being out of school, I started work at the opening, 11 a.m., and left at 8 or 9. And of course I worked about 10 to 12 hours every Friday and Saturday, because those are the money days for a pizza delivery guy. I made enough in tips to pay for my desires, and my regular paychecks covered my rent and few bills. My cashflow was entirely positive.

At that point, my love of marijuana grew into its own entity, and that entity had an appetite. In college, I had started with proscriptive rules. No smoking before 6 p.m. I broke it. No smoking when I walked through the door. I broke it. No smoking before noon. I broke it. No smoking as soon as I rolled out of bed. I broke it.
The only rule I never broke was to not go to college high. That, I never did.

So that voracious appetite for dope was appeased in that year long life as a pizza delivery guy. On Friday nights, I’d even go into the shop high, because it was cooler to wash the dishes when I was floating beyond myself. I drove pizzas around neighborhoods where your kids would play late into the dusk on Friday and Saturday nights, and I was high, whispering prayers to the god I didn’t believe in then to keep kids clear of the road. I paid my money, took my chances, and I came out squeaky clean by the grace of that god, who, I hope, must have some plan for me to give back to the world as part of my penance for such self-centered perspectives.

I was lucky not to screw up, and luckier still to grow. A year or two later, a real job came my way, and I knew I had to be clean. By force of will, I let the dope go. Just let it go, because I wanted a nicer place to live, a nicer car, nicer things, and I began to see the problem with relying entirely on artificial happiness. When you cross the line and begin to abuse drugs, you cripple yourself emotionally. You yield to an inaudible cry from your soul that everything has begun to hurt, every emotion, every thought, and that voiceless spirit craves comfort. It drove me to smoke at every reasonable opportunity, and many unreasonable ones. I had to be high, because not to be was an agony indescribable, a prison of despair that could only be escaped by giving up hope in being stoned, immaculately unalive spiritually.

But I quit, and I went a good 3 or 4 years without a hit, and when I finally did, I could enjoy it again. I could control it and sometimes I still do it, only rarely having any fear that the leviathan will grab out for me again. Even then, I know I can walk away.

The painkillers is another issue. I’m on a muscle relaxer right now that makes my emotions flow freely, that yields to me a deep thoughtfulness that I find very appeasing of my humanness. I know I was taking vicodin when I didn’t need to, because I liked it. I like this too. Is that wrong? Is it wrong to find something you enjoy and to re-introduce it in your life?

I can answer that question. The answer is whether you can hear and listen to the communication from your soul. I can still listen to my soul. And I’ve not told my doctor this, but I’m still in enough pain on some days that the noise of that pain makes me unable to hear my soul. All I hear is its relentless growling in my spine and hips and legs, and I’m trying to mitigate that.

I confess to disappointing myself, failing Adia, and letting her down. And I’ve made my resolution not to with this again. After Tuesday’s workout, Wednesday was hard on me, so I didn’t work out again. Today, again, the claws scrape from within, beckoning the attention of my soul from other matters, and I don’t want to yield to them. So I’m on muscle relaxers, hoping it’s enough.

I also wonder. Would my body conspire with the leviathan to falsely make me feel pain that isn’t real, to give the part of me the makes the decision a reason to get more of the sweet serum that makes all of us feel relaxed, in communion with the whole?
No doctor could answer me on that, and I’ve asked. They tell me they believe my pain is real, and, struggling as I am to find natural remedies, to get back to the person I was who ascended mountains on two wheels, I tend to have to trust myself. I know the past, without need for pain mitigation, was far superior to this one, where it’s a constant factor, something I need to control like I need to control my body’s need for water.

I will keep with my plan, to exercise my way back into control of the situation, and I feel that in the short term, my recovery days after exercise may require some chemical help.

So on to Rush, and the accusation that he has committed crimes to keep himself in painkillers. I don’t believe it, but I don’t want to. I am Adia to Rush. I can’t fathom the thought that he may have let me down. But examining where my faith will go if one of the formative influences of it should falter, I have to remember, failing is the nature of humanness. Redemption requires failing, and redemption is the highest motive of the soul.

If he has failed me, I will forgive him. And I will continue to keep the fire lit that he sparked in me, because that fire is pure, and is independent of him, its source. Naturally, I must understand how the double-standards play out, with Robert Downey, Jr., and Darryl Strawberry receiving their 13th chance to prove that they won’t continuously fail. We conservatives, we’re not entitled to redemption, it is imposed collectively. We must be immaculate, because we ask of others what we ourselves would do (as I have done) when I failed. I picked myself up and learned from my mistakes, and have striven for opportunities to redeem my failure in my own eyes and before my god.

I hope it is not true, of course. But if it is, how is it any different for him than it is in me, the struggle to manage my weaknesses? By virtue of publicity, and the difference in the number of people who hate him, versus the few who hate me.

Once, my mother came out to El Paso in those years, for thanksgiving. I hid my materials and drug supplies in the tiny cabinets above the stove, thinking it would be outside her gaze. Cooking thanksgiving dinner for me and several of my friends, my mom was searching for some supply or other, and I watched as she opened that cupboard. She paused only an instant long enough to see the blue fister waterpipe that we so enjoyed in those days, and she immediately slammed the cupboard shut, continuing her search elsewhere. She never mentioned it. Neither did I.

People should mind their own business. And they should be careful what they wish to believe, because wanting to believe will lead you to compromise your integrity, to not ask questions that should be asked, to let go of objectivity, to be guided by passions, not reasons.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn