Paper Covers Rock

This giraffe has dirt on you.

Feeling the whimsy on this one

Eight months ago, I wandered into a tobacco shop in South Saint Paul to buy a new nicotine vape. I had recently started working at a Mexican restaurant my friend owned, in their kitchen prepping fruit for sale. This was during the ICE raids, and I was very conspicuous, the only gringo amongst my peers. On lunch, I sat in my car and ate alone, which made people nervous. They thought I was an ICE agent undercover.

I was always tense and uncomfortable, so when I saw a package of pills labeled 7oh, promising relaxation and peace, I bought it. Sure enough, I felt tranquil and talkative, more at ease around others. It was as though warmth and indifference coursed through me. I started buying 7oh daily, eventually spending five hundred dollars a week as my tolerance spiked.

Seriously, I have spent four thousand dollars in eight months on a legal product sold at every gas station in Minnesota. Enough money for a good used car. I also was tired of going into smoke shops every day. I was burned out on hiding them from my girlfriend. I felt embarrassed at having developed a dependency. But I can go easy on myself. I was only turning to something that made me feel better, and didn’t know how hard it would be to quit.

And Jesus tap-dancin’ Christ, it’s hard to quit. My nerve endings were on fire. My legs were so restless I couldn’t sleep, and I felt a desperate sense of doom. The physical withdrawals were tough, but the mental was atrocious. In desperation, I contacted my psych for suboxone. I had read numerous testimonials on Reddit of successful rehabilitation from 7oh using the sublingual film. Within two days of use, I tapered my 7oh use in half, and after two weeks, have quit entirely. I haven’t spent a dollar at a smoke shop in days, my sleep is better, and I’m truly at peace for the first time in months.

To anyone reading this whose situation may be relatable, a few things:

1. Go easy on yourself. Your use is not a character flaw. You are human, and deserve grace.
2. Help is available. I read people saying that Suboxone was overreacting to 7oh and kratom addiction, and advising grinding it out. Bullshit. The former and the latter are partial opioid agonists. Suboxone is perfectly suited to bring relief, balance and peace back to your life.
3. Real strength is asking for help. You absolutely got this.

It pissed rain this morning. Seemed right to draw this.

Soooo cute!

For pie time!

I’ve had more jobs than you. In the past three years alone I have:

Worked in a warehouse that produced tax forms;

Worked as a chemical blender and got an allergic reaction to something that made my face swollen;

Packaged and shipped for a shoe company over the holidays;

Landscaped and sweated for a company across the border in Wisconsin;

Cut fruit and veggies for sale in a Mexican restaurant;

Picked up trash that was strewn around a recycling facility.

In laboring I’ve learned a few things, among them that I shouldn’t be exposed to Xylene if I want to keep living. I’m also pleasantly pleased that my forty-seven year old body can still produce like a person half my age. My steady diet of cheese, potato chips and hummus must have some undocumented health benefits.

I have also learned that I put myself first. No more coming in early, staying late, working holidays. There was a time, not too long ago, when I was the one trying to curry the recognition of management. For years of extra effort exerted, I got nothing: no employee of the month, no promotion. Of all the teams I’ve been a part of, I have never been a lead.

A year ago I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD, which has changed the way I view employment. Unemployment among autistics is depressingly high, upwards of 75 percent in some studies. That I have a job at all is stupendous. I also informed my current boss that I don’t work Mondays. I didn’t provide an explanation or apologize.

Last July I relapsed on meth. Upon reflection, it was when I was desperate, overwhelmed, amd looking for relief. Much of my substance use has been work-related: Adderall to perform better at a sales job; alcohol to ease social anxiety with coworkers.

That’s why I didn’t ask for Mondays off, I declared it. I know enough about myself that I require three days to recover, amd that extra day helps continue my sobriety.

Of all the jobs I’ve had, the bosses whose acclaim I solicited, where are they now? All the time, energy and stress, for squat.

For today, I put on my pants and get to work on time. A year from now, it will probably be a different place.

About a year ago, I severed communication with my parents. This came after a challenging autism and ADHD diagnosis that brought relief, regret, and indignation.

Indignation because I can no longer mask or pretend to conform to some long-dead idea of me. I cannot be anything other than authentic around my parents, for whom an upbeat disposition is an expectation. The damage I suffered from needing to present as ‘on’ at all times is incalculable.

The hardest thing to accept is that my mother abused me, and that contributed to my sexual arousal template skewing younger, which I’ll explain later. Let me state from the jump: my decisions and actions are my own, and I take responsibility. I cannot change my past, I can only process my present.

I also state emphatically the misery of having an attraction to minors. Perhaps the greatest and most inaccurate idea of me is that I enjoy, or at least am not bothered by it. This is not the case. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

My mother interfered with my sexual development in my tween years. First, she interrupted a make-out session to have a talk about ‘the mistakes that can happen in the heat of the moment’, as I stood there with an erection while the girl I was with scrambled to cover herself up.

That same year, my family traveled to Iowa to visit some distant acquaintances. The family had a daughter a few years younger than me, and we sat by ourselves on their back stairs. Out of nowhere, she asked if I wanted to make out, and shoved her tongue down my throat. I felt ashamed, confused and violated. Surely, I thought, she was too young to know how to do that.

My mother constantly violated my privacy. I came home from school on multiple occasions to find my mother, sitting on my bed, leafing through a pornographic magazine I had unsuccessfully hidden. She would want to talk about how ‘the women in the pages weren’t happy’, and that I was contributing to their violation.

The idea that I could have my personal space wasn’t possible. It was early on, in my junior high school years, that she began to think of me as a sexual deviant.

I don’t know how well my parents communicate. My father had a warmth and playfulness, but there was an aloofness; a stoic mask that leveled mirth with bluntness. From as early as five, I became aware of my mother’s vicariousness; how she turned to me for validation and support in lieu of my dad. As the first-born overachiever, I assumed the mantle of peacemaker. Any emotional displays of sadness, frustration and anxiety were verboten. A Nirvana cd I borrowed from a friend had to be returned the same day. I had to tell my friend Matt, with my mother watching from the car, that I couldn’t listen to music that had negativity in it. I was mortified.

Into the fold to soothe my anxiety, I found pornography. Pre-internet, it was magazines, and their power was immediately gratifying. I could exert control over the women in the pages. I could swear at them, flick them off, spit at them, and then try to find a hiding spot to outfox my overbearing mother.

I understand now how primed I was to develop a fixation on pornography, and how, in my under twenty-one years, it came to be everything I sought to cope with serious mental health struggles.

I can also see that my mother was envious of the attention I was giving other girls, and clawed to regain it, in essence wanting me as a lover emotionally, satisfying the lack from my father. My mother’s own adolescence was marred by sexual abuse from her older brother, and her father. Her abuse stunted her sexuality, and partly stalled it around her tween years, coinciding perfectly with my own nascent lunges towards sexual maturity.

This grotesque collision, along with greater internet access, altered the course of my life. Arrests, hospitalizations, homelessness, divorce, bankruptcy, loss of parental rights. Even now, suicide remains a viable option. It is only, and I mean ONLY through my girlfriend’s love that I’m still alive.

So, after all the aforementioned realizations, I cannot continue a relationship with my parents using outdated scripts. Piecing together my mother’s roll in my narrative is only the beginning, and I’m just now starting to process. I don’t hate my parents. It’s far more complicated than that. They themselves suffered trauma they never processed, and handed down what they couldn’t restrain.

I didn’t draw until I got locked-up, in 2018. The prison offered an art program, and seats were hotly desired, with each cell block sending numerous requests for entry.

The art instructor was a big, burly man who used to be a kicker for the Miami Dolphins. He was a very talented painter. Entry into his class was appealing for several reasons.

1. It got me out of my cell for an hour. Early on, when I hadn’t been assigned a job yet, any opportunity to leave my cramped confines was coveted. My cellmate had bad breath. Like, it made my eyes water bad. I wanted out.
2. The classroom felt comfortable. There were potted plants situated amongst the drafting tables. There was music playing,  usually soft and dulcet. The room smelled of aged paper and possibility. The instructor didn’t have bad breath.
3. I saw some seriously talented artists in prison. Anybody with abilities got offers to draw Christmas and birthday cards, portraits, tattoo ideas and other commissioned work for hire. Good portrait artists charged upwards of fifty dollars for their work. In prison, that’s good money.

So, when my name came up to join the class, I accepted. Now, I had doodled before, mostly cartoons for my own amusement. I figured that I’d learn some techniques, and at a minimum, have a reason to leave my cell. It was only a few days into the sessions that I realized I had talent. I could draw most anything I saw, and immersed myself in my sketchbook, burning through hours with a pencil in my hand.

Of course, I was soon offended money to draw for others, and my reputation as a reliably talented artist grew. I’m a believer in balance; that the yin and yang of life is real. I think life said ‘ok, we’ve been kicking you repeatedly, so here’s a gift.’ And that was my art.