Playing Addiction Like a Piano, Part 2

When an obsessive-compulsive guy like me puts down the addiction that’s most self-destructive, a few smaller addictions rise up to fill the void.

It’s a lot like playing a piano: I may stop playing the song about smoking or binge eating or consuming alcohol, only to find my hands playing different keys. There was quitting smoking and vaping instead. There was a massive uptick in caffeine to replace the overeating.

Now, after putting away the vape pipe and feeling edgy about it, I’ve turned to something else to take the edge off — Nicorette gum.

Mood Music:

I know it’s not the healthiest thing to do. After all, there’s nicotine in it. But when I look at all the other things I could be doing to take the edge off, it seems the safest choice right now. Eventually, that habit will have to go too. Then … who knows?

Some of you might want to say, “Bill, just don’t do any of it.” That would be nice, but a brain wired with addictive impulses can’t compute that concept.

If that makes me weak, so be it. The important thing is that I try hard every day to beat back the demon, and I’ve overcome a lot: the binge eating, the smoking, the drinking.

Those demons are always whispering in my ear, but I’ve been fighting them off successfully for some time now. The exception is the vaping, which I had quit and restarted. In April I quit again. So far, so good.

You just do the best you can, one day at a time. And so I will.

Cartoonish Joker with a wall of ha-has behind him

August 3, 2016August 2, 2016

Why the Hell Am I Still Sober?

This is the second in a series of posts about navigating through the unexpected. It’s based on experiences I’ve had since my father’s death last year.

A lot of legal paper pushing, hand-holding and arguing has gone into managing the building my late father left in my care. I’ve never dealt with lawyers so much in my life. Sorting out the various trusts, deeds, real-estate negotiations and environmental cleanup tasks has been a full-time job on top of my full-time job in infosec.

One of the lawyers repeatedly marvels at the fact that I haven’t been broken by it all. Specifically, he keeps asking how I haven’t crawled into a bottle of Scotch by now.

Mood music:

We laugh every time he mentions it, but I’ll be honest: I ask myself the same question every day.

I quit drinking on New Year’s Eve 2009, and it’s never been easy. I had reached the point where I felt I needed a glass or two of wine every night after work, and that was well before all the added responsibilities.

This past year, I’ve questioned my sobriety every day, wondering if it’s worth it. Sometimes, I reason to myself that a drink every evening would help keep my nerves steady. And it would give me an opportunity to enjoy myself.

But I’ve stayed sober anyway. And with good reason.

I’m an addict. If I start up again, it won’t just be one glass a night. It’ll be all the time, and I may not be able to stop once I get started. If that happens, I’ll falter in all my responsibilities.

My life may seem messy today, essentially managing two work lives. The people I deal with on a daily basis are difficult, to put it mildly. I often come home with raw nerves.

Would alcohol numb the nerves? Absolutely. But I wouldn’t stop there. I’d want to be numb every second of every day, and that would tank my writing and make me an easier target for those in the business world who want to take advantage of me.

I can’t let that happen.

April 5, 2016April 5, 2016

Layne Staley, 14 Years Later

“What’s my drug of choice? Well, what have you got?” —Layne Staley, Alice in Chains

This week marks 14 years since Alice In Chains frontman Layne Staley was found dead.

Mood music:

Like Kurt Cobain, Staley had a big impact on me in the early 1990s. But while I identified with Cobain’s depression, I identified with Staley for his inability to keep his addictive demons at bay.

I can’t tell you how many times I listened to the “Dirt” album while I binged myself sick. It seems like an unfair comparison, because Staley’s demon was heroin. Mine was compulsive binge eating — a destructive form of addictive behavior in its own right, but not necessarily from the same depths of hell heroin came from.

Staley’s lyrics seeped deep into my soul. When he screamed his vocals, I could identify the pain that came from deep down. I’m convinced that pain gave him the power to sing the way he did.

My writing taps a similar source within me, but the source is a lot more muted, less despairing, because I have something I don’t think he had — faith.

But as a 20-something, I couldn’t tell the difference. I felt like my demons were as vexing as his. When you’re younger, that’s the kind of self-important thinking you get into.

Before I found recovery, my demon would start harassing me long before getting to the scene of the junk. Forget the people who would be there or the weather and surroundings. All I’d think about was getting my fill of food. Then I’d get to the event and get my fill from the time I’d get there to the time I left. I’d sneak handfuls of junk so what I was doing wouldn’t be too obvious to those around me.

Halfway through, I would have the same kind of buzz you get after downing a case of beer or inhaling a joint deep into your lungs. I know this, because I’ve done those things, too. By nightfall, I’d feel like a pile of shattered bricks waiting to be carted off to the dump. Quality time with my wife and kids? Forget it. All I wanted was the bed or the couch so I could pass out.

I imagine Staley felt something similar much of the time, though I’m told by those who have kicked smack addictions that you don’t really care about anything when you’re high, because it’s like being under a warm blanket. The problem is that you spend the rest of your life trying to feel that way, and the only thing that works is more and more smack.

In the end, I know you can’t fairly compare the two addictions. I only know how mine made me feel, and whenever I listened to Staley scream, I felt like someone else got it, and that I wasn’t alone.

Thanks for that, Layne. I hope you’re at peace wherever you are.

April 4, 2016April 4, 2016

22 Years Ago: The Day Kurt Cobain Died

I remember exactly where I was 22 years ago this week, when I saw the news flash about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I was lying in bed, depressed and reclusive because of frequent fear.

Mood music:

I was living in Lynnfield, Mass., at the time. I had a room in the basement, just like I had in Revere. But this space was much smaller — a jail cell with a nice blue carpet. But I did have my own bathroom, which I never cleaned.

Erin and I had been going out for less than a year, and I was waiting for her to come by after she finished work. I had been sleeping after a food and smoking binge and I still had a few hours to kill, so I turned on MTV, which still played music videos at the time.

There was MTV news anchor Kurt Loder and Rolling Stones editor David Fricke, holding court like Walter Cronkite following JFK’s assassination in 1963. Fricke expressed concern that depressed teens who listen to Nirvana might view suicide as the heroic thing to do; the only answer. “This is about your kids. You need to talk to them,” he said.

Erin arrived, we expressed our mutual shock, then we went out to dinner.

Though I was given to depression at that point, it wasn’t the suicidal kind, and would never become that. I’ve always been the type to hide in a room for long stretches, staring blankly at a TV screen, when depressed. Suicide was something I never really thought about at that point. It was an alien concept.

Then, a couple months later, a close friend attempted suicide. Two years later, he tried again and succeeded. In the 15 years since then, I’ve worked hard to gain the proper perspective of such things.

When Cobain died, I assumed he went straight to hell. I never gave it a second thought. Suicide is one of the unacceptable sins, like murder, the kind that gets you sent to the fire pit.

Today, I’m not so sure.

Kurt Cobain was unprepared for the crazy fame and publicity that came his way. He dove into heroin for solace. You could say the whole thing literally scared him to death.

Fortunately, he left behind a strong body of work.

When I listen to Nirvana, I don’t think of Kurt Cobain stuffing the tip of a rifle up his nose and pulling the trigger.

I think of how anxiety, fear and depression are universal things, how the sufferer is never, ever truly alone, and how we never have to be beaten.

I don’t need drugs to feel like Sunday morning is every day, though two anti-depressant prescriptions do help.

August 22, 2015August 22, 2015

Skinny Like A Fool

At dinner with friends one night, a conversation about weight control got started. It reminded me of how hard I used to work to stay thin, and how dangerous some of my methods were.

Examples:

–In my late teens, I got the bright idea that I could party and drink all I wanted on the weekends with no danger of weight gain if I starved myself during the week, often living on one cheese sandwich a day. As a little treat to make it bearable, I chain smoked in the storage room next to my bedroom.

–My senior year in high school I wanted to drop a lot of weight fast. So for two weeks straight, I ate nothing but Raisin Bran from a mug two times a day and nothing else. I also ran laps around the basement for two hours a day. It worked so well that I adopted it as my post binge regimen every few weeks. It lasted into my early 20s.

–In my late 20s, after years of vicious binge eating sent my weight to nearly 300 pounds, I lost more than a hundred pounds through some healthy means and some fairly stupid tactics, like fasting for half of Tuesday and most of Wednesday. On Wednesdays, I would also triple my workout time on the elliptical cross-training machine at the gym. All this so I would be happy with the number on the scale come Thursday morning, my weekly weigh-in time. Thursday through Saturday, I would eat like a pig, then severely pull back on the eating by Sunday. Call it the 3-4 program (binge three days, starve four days, repeat).

–In my early-to-mid 30s, some of my most vicious binge eating happened. For a while, though, I kept the weight down my walking 3.5 miles every day, no matter the weather. I also never ate dinner, but would eat like a pig earlier in the day. This was while I was working a night job, which allowed me to get away with the dinner-skipping part. That worked great for a couple years, but then the dam broke and I binged my way to a 65-pound weight gain by the end.

Today I put almost everything I eat on a little scale and I avoid flour and sugar. I don’t exercise as much as I should, I’m not idle, either.

I don’t always get it perfect. I’m also nowhere close to skinny.

But I’m a lot healthier — and probably a little smarter — than I used to be.

July 20, 2015

The Feel-Good Complex: A Chronicle of Bad Choices

With all the death and drama in my life recently, I tell people that I regret quitting drinking a few years ago. Few things appeal to me more right now than the sweet buzz a bottle of wine would give me.

I have no intention of falling off the wagon. I know where it would take me. But the fact is that I’m desperate to feel good lately. For now, I cling tightly to my vapor pipe. It won’t give me a buzz, but it’s a safer crutch than the other things I crave but can’t have.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/zAK_Qttgp2U

The memories are strong lately — specifically, memories of trying to feel good.

Age 18: I discover an after-dinner drink — Haffenreffer Lager Beer. There are little puzzles under the bottle caps, and your ability to solve them steadily declines with each bottle. I suck down three in quick succession so I can immediately enjoy feeling like I just absorbed half a keg of light beer. I feel good for about an hour. Then I throw up, nap on the cool, bathroom floor and watch any number of tripped-out movies with whoever was still around. I switch to vodka, because it’ll keep me buzzed with less intensity than the so-called Headwreckers.

Age 21: I’m pacing up and down the driveway of the old Revere house in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe. I’m freaking out because I’ve consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself. I call my friend Dan and ask him to come over. He finds me in the driveway and takes me to Kelly’s Roast Beef for chicken fingers. I spend the rest of the night repeatedly blathering, “Heheh. Heheh. Haha. Haha…”

Age 31: I’m at my then-boss’s annual Christmas party. For the first hour I stand there like a stone, not knowing what to say to these people, many of whom I was butting heads with at the office. I’m offered a glass of wine. I suck it down and start to loosen up. I have another. And another. Conversation becomes easier, so I have another. I walk away realizing that enough alcohol will numb that itchy, edgy feeling I get around people. It becomes a habit.

Age 34: I leave that job and go to a company full of young, just-out-of college kids. The company likes to have long offsites where free booze flows like tap water. I make sure to get my fill, followed by my fill of food. There’s nothing quite like a food binge when you’re drunk. For someone like me, it’s heaven for the first hour, followed by shame and terror over my utter loss of control.

Age 39: I’m several months into my abstinence from binge eating. I’ve dropped 65 pounds on the spot and my head is clearer, but the defect in my head is still there, so I look for other things: wine — lots of it. It becomes a necessity every night with dinner.

By Christmas I realize wine is no longer compatible with a clean life — the kind I have to live, anyway. So I take my last sip on New Year’s Eve and put it down.

Age 45: Here I am, sober for the last 5 1/2 years. Life is tough and I miss my wine. So I clutch the vapor pipe as hard as I can, wondering what’s next.

pacman: y3t1 style by eddietheyeti-d6i1t1k — PacMan: y3t1 style, by EddieTheYeti

March 31, 2015March 30, 2015

A Priest Comes Clean About Binge Eating

I’ve written at length about two things in this blog: my struggle with compulsive binge eating and my faith. My faith helps me deal with my demons, including the eating. So when a priest comes forward and admits he has a similar demon to fight, I take notice.

Mood music:

Rev. Ryan Rooney, a parochial vicar at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Parish in Springfield, Mass., did just that in an article he wrote about his struggle. I dug further and found that he writes quite a bit about his journey in his blog, The Weigh and the Truth: A Catholic Priest on a Weight Loss Journey.

In the opening paragraph of the article, Rooney describes a scenario I’m all too familiar with:

A year and a half ago, I would have been sitting down in a room of similar size but crowded with food wrappers and neglected dirty laundry. I probably would have been wolfing down a carton of Chinese food and binge-watching endless episodes of a Netflix drama. I was 200 pounds heavier, stressed, depressed, unsure about my future in the priesthood. My body was slowly shutting down, and I was inching closer toward being unable to dress myself.

I too spent long hours in a room, scarfing down food, ignoring my personal hygiene, and feasting on endless TV.

Rooney met his demon head on. He refocused on his faith and set about losing some 200 pounds. He’s an inspiration.

He’s not the first priest to open up about his sins. My former pastor, the late Rev. Dennis Nason, once went public about his battle with alcoholism. At the time, it was one of the things that inspired me to face my own maladies.

As Easter approaches, I’m more grateful than ever for Church leaders who are willing to show their humanity.

Dream of Sacrifice by EddieTheYeti — “Dream of Sacrifice,” by EddieTheYeti

November 22, 2014

The Lost Generation of Revere, Mass.

An old friend from the Point of Pines, Revere, sent me a note some time ago. He came across my post on Zane Mead and another on the Bridge Rats gang. For him, they brought up more memories of kids from the neighborhood who died young.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/jX-yuZFVm34

I’ll keep his name and certain details out to protect his privacy, but here’s some of what he wrote to me:

I came across your piece in your OCD Diaries about Zane Mead. It stirred up some old memories of growing up. I was actually friends with Zane until I left for the military in 1985. He was a sweet kid with a good heart most of the time. Occasionally he would be angry and self destructive. This was usually followed by an attempted suicide.

I had many talks with him about it. he never would say what was eating at him. Not sure why but I don’t think it was an issue at home. I feel like it was a personal daemon. As you stated, our life’s experiences at the time didn’t give us the ability to see the problem no less the wisdom to offer any real help. I often wonder if there was something more I could have done.

It seemed that I lost a lot of friends over the five years I was gone.

We lost your brother, Scott James, Mike McDonald. Kenny Page. It’s like we lost a generation. For years I thought I was a under achiever in my life. The more time moves on I think we may be lucky for just getting out of the city. Revere was just eating people up back then. Probably still is.

I also read you piece on bullies where you mention the Bridge Rats. I’m sincerely sorry for any part I may have caused in your distress.

Thanks for the memories. Good, Bad and Ugly. I guess they make us who we are.

Indeed they do, my friend.

I had forgotten about Mike McDonald and Kenny Page. As a teen I was so self-absorbed over my brother’s death that I didn’t realize how much loss our generation was suffering. After reading my friend’s note, I thought hard about his points about Revere eating people up. Was there some kind of curse hanging over the city in the 1980s? Were all my adolescent traumas part of that curse? Was my brother’s death and Sean Marley’s death part of it?

If you asked me that about six years ago, I’d have bought the theory straight away. Today I tend to doubt it.

It was a sad and unfortunate period, but it wasn’t a curse. We all had our share of childhood happiness in Revere in between the bad stuff. And I know now what I didn’t get back then: That we weren’t meant to live soft lives devoid of pain and struggle. These things are tossed in our path to mold us into what we can only hope to be: good people. It doesn’t always work out that way, of course. But let’s face it: Has life ever been fair?

As for the Bridge Rats, my memories are fond ones.

The last post I wrote about this gang suggested they were a band of bullies. But if you read all the way through the post, you’ll see some nostalgic warmth in my memories. As I’ve said many times, I was a punk like everyone else. I got picked on, but I did my share of picking on other people. For the most part, the Bridge Rats were a collection of pretty good kids. Some grew into happy, productive lives. Some didn’t.

That’s life.

I recently wrote about the time the Brenners nearly left Revere. There’s no question that for a time, I hated that city and would have done anything to get out.

But I stayed, and good things happened in the years that followed. A lot of good things. Precious, joyful things. I look at my kid sister Shira and the amazing, beautiful woman she is today. Would she have been that way if not for the Revere in her? Perhaps. But living there certainly didn’t damage her.

I’ve said before that Revere is where I survived and my current city of Haverhill is where I healed. That was and still is the truth.

But make no mistake about it: Revere helped make me who I am today.

And I’ll admit it: I like who I am today.

November 12, 2014

40 Years Ago in Amityville

Some of you have seen the “Amityville Horror” and instantly think of it as the story of a haunted house. I never believed it, but I’ve always been drawn to the murders that started the whole thing off.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the murders, in which Ronald “Butch” DeFeo was convicted of killing his parents, two brothers and two sisters. I’ve always had an interest in it because at its bare core, this is the story of a family so dysfunctional it couldn’t survive.

Filmmaker Ryan Katzenbach is about to release the final installment of his film series about the murders, with a huge focus being on the DeFeo family itself: Who each of them were, what they aspired to and what tore them apart.

Ryan released a video earlier in his project, paying respect to the family that bears sharing here:

Coming from a family with more than a little dysfunction, I always find myself grateful after thinking about this story. Family members will yell at each other, hit each other and stop talking to each other, but in most cases nobody gets shot over it. That’s something to be thankful for.

As for the DeFeo family, below is something I wrote about the case in 2010.

The Amityville Obsession

Posted on September 28, 2010

Part of my obsessive-compulsive behavior includes a study of the more morbid pieces of history. The Manson murders is one example. The Amityville murders is another. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the latter.

The match for the fire is a book I just read called “The Night The DeFeos Died” by Ric Osuna. The book goes a long way in crushing the bullshit hoax about the house being haunted. I watched “The Amityville Horror” as a kid and it scared the hell out of me. I’ve had an interest ever since. This book gets into the train wreck that was the DeFeo family. They were outwardly religious and close-knit. But the father was a rage-a-holic who apparently yelled a lot and beat his wife and kids, especially his oldest son Butch, who is now rotting in jail for the murders.

The book also reveals that the DeFeo family had mob connections. The toxic mix of dysfunction reached its climax Nov. 13, 1974. After a night of chaos in the house, Butch and his sister Dawn plotted to kill the abusive father and a mother they felt was an enabler.

Somewhere in the chaos, the story goes, Dawn killed their younger siblings. This apparently outraged Butch, who then blew her head off in anger. Investigators later found powder burns on Dawn’s nightgown, suggesting that she had indeed fired a rifle.

The only one who knows the real truth is Butch. But he has proven himself to be a serial liar, so the truth will remain in his head. My impression is that he got an unfair trial and that investigators covered up a lot of things in order to have a slam-dunk case. That’s certainly an argument Osuna makes in the book.

So why the obsession with this story? There are a few things worth noting:

–I don’t romanticize this stuff. The interest isn’t because of the brutal nature of the murders. I’ve seen the crime scene forensic photos for the DeFeo and Manson murders, and they made me sick to my stomach.

–It’s really part of my fascination with history.

Like it or not, this stuff is part of American history. The Manson story is a snapshot of everything that went wrong in the 1960s, where a counterculture born of good intentions — a craving for peace in Vietnam and at home — lost it’s way because there were no rules, no discipline and there was no sobriety. I agree with those who believe the promise of the 1960s died abruptly in the summer of 1969. I’m also fascinated because it shows how easily seemingly stable people can be brainwashed and controlled to the point where they would willingly heed orders to commit the worst of sins.

–The Amityville story is a case study of what happens when the head of a household abuses the rest of the family. Slap a kid around often enough and you just might turn him into the type of man who shoots heroin and plots the murder of some or all of his family.

It’s the whole cause-and-effect thing that keeps my obsession going.

My own experiences have given me an obsession with the key moments in a person’s life that determine if that person will turn to evil or come out of the adversity stronger and better.

I’m lucky because I’m a case study in the latter category. But I can’t help but feel bad for those who go the wrong way.

Some of the twists and turns are so random.

In the case of the Amityville murders, I don’t believe for a second that the house is haunted. Several families have lived there happily over the last 30 years. Sure, a couple of the future residents had bad things happen to them. But bad things happen to everyone.

You don’t need a haunted house to give your life ups and downs.

Sometimes, all it takes are the ghosts in your head.

Addendum, Nov. 14, 2011:

I recently came across photos of what the house looks like now. It really is a beautiful place. More recent owners have put a lot of work into the house, and it’s bright and cheerful decor almost make you forget what happened there.

April 30, 2014

Addicted to Accolades

Last year, David McCullough Jr. — longtime Wellesley High School English teacher and son of one of my favorite authors — gave a commencement speech in which he told graduates the hard truth: They’re not special.

Mood music:

You can see the whole speech here, but here’s a key passage for me:

In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.

I loved that speech, as did a lot of friends and colleagues. But an uncomfortable truth hit me: McCullough wasn’t just talking about the teenagers in caps and gowns. He was taking about us adults, too.

In this world of Twitter and Facebook, we’ve become addicted to accolades. Not every single one of us, but many of us, myself included.

I found myself thinking about it this week after watching some industry colleagues discuss the notion that our community has “too many rock stars and not enough session players,” in the words of Jack Daniel. In my opinion, Daniel is one of the biggest security rock stars out there.

There are a lot of rock stars in the security industry. Hell, every industry has ’em. I do not count myself among them. Not even close. People like Jack rose to that status by doing the hard work and having the balls to discuss difficult issues in front of crowds full of skeptics and cynics.

I know a lot of session players, too. They shun the limelight and prefer to tinker away in peace.

Though I don’t consider myself a star, I do love getting positive attention for work I’ve done. I’ll even admit I’m addicted to it.

Sure, I value negative feedback as a necessity for personal growth, but I also find it crushing sometimes. Not because it’s unfair, but because I have a big ego.

The bigger the ego, the harder the fall.

I love rock stars, in my industry and beyond. If I ever rate being one, I hope it’s because I did something important, not because I wanted such status. I trust y’all will help keep me honest.

The Book of Rock Stars book cover