every.single.fucking.day

Twenty years ago today I “celebrated” my 42nd trip around the sun. Why the scare quotes? There are two reasons, really. The first is simple history. My birthdays have never been all that — ever. Where I once had expectations for actual celebration, I no longer do and, ironically enough, I prefer it that way. I have come to see these things as more pomp than circumstance, more superficial than real. The same can be said of most socially created days of recognition, but this day 20 years ago was particularly bad. This day twenty years ago warrants the ”scare” in the scare quotes.

I don’t remember it in any specifics, but I do remember that part of my life — and there really weren’t any good days. Beyond being alive and not incarcerated, life pretty much sucked. I was at the end of a five-year downward spiral that began 25–30 years earlier. The end of the end had already come and gone; I was at the beginning of the beginning — again. I went from a near-death, self-inflicted wreck in 2000, to incarceration in 2002, to a six-month in-patient addiction recovery program in March of 2003 to getting my shit together and going back to school in the fall of 2003 to relapsing at the end of 2003 to violating probation and picking up a new charge in April of 2004 to two more incarcerations in the fall of 2004, finally getting released some time in late September or early October with about 60 days sober (or clean, if that matters to you). That’s a really long sentence and it reflects how long that last year and a half felt — the world’s slowest roller coaster.