Sunday Whatever Escaping from Prison: A How-to Article By Dale Williams Barrigar

When I attended graduate school for writing in the midwestern USA in the mid and late 1990s, all the best classes and writing workshops were held in bars, pubs, and-or saloons. A slight exaggeration, but only slightly. It was the tail end of an era when drinking and writing, at least in the USA, were still seen by many as activities that go hand in hand. And hand in hand with drinking goes smoking, so most of the drinking writers in the writing workshops were also smokers too, either heavy, medium, or light. The second-hand smoke that was consumed along with the first-hand smoke along with the beers along with the shots of whisky while writing was being discussed in the writing workshops that were happening in the bars, makes me not wonder why I already have Stage One Emphysema nor why I’ve already had a stroke. I’m healthy as a horse otherwise (yes this is possible) and I’ve already done what you need to do to slow emphysema down which is quit smoking. I stopped drinking twenty-one years ago and there is no doubt that I would be dead now if I had not stopped drinking. Three of my writing teachers from those days are dead from drinking and smoking even though, if alive, they would not yet be 80 years old. All three of them died from some combination of chain-smoking cigarettes and alcoholism, the functional, working variety of it, that is. These men never stopped working. But they also never stopped drinking or smoking. And it put them in an early grave, just as it promises to do for almost everyone who goes too far with any of these activities. My fellow students in the writing programs were also alcoholics. One of them I almost married, except that she turned out to be an even bigger alcoholic than I was. It’s sad to see a brilliant brain slowly bludgeon itself into submission right in front of your eyes when you yourself have already done the necessary work that is required to save yourself from a similar fate. Keith Richards quit heroin in the 1970s before it killed him and his girlfriend refused to do so which is why he had to tell her sayonara, beautiful lady.

The question of why so many writers are alcoholics or heavy drinkers or alcoholics who fool themselves into thinking they are only heavy drinkers is hard to answer. Hemingway claimed that he drank at the end of the day because he needed a way to save himself and turn his writing brain off. He made this statement at a time when drinking had completely destroyed his ability to write anything decent at all. He shot himself in the head when things got too bad and it’s very, very, very unlikely that things would have gotten that bad at such a young age if he wasn’t consuming a fifth of hard liquor per day and sometimes more. Hunter S. Thompson was also a hard-core alcoholic right up until the end. Charles Bukowski, surprisingly, spent the last thirty or so years of his life tapering off drinking and drinking less and less, not more and more, every day of his life as he got older. And he did not beat himself up about it if he fell off the wagon every now and then (as long as he climbed back onto it again, which he always did). He knew that he’d never make the age of seventy if he didn’t at least cut back, cut way, way back, on his drinking.

There is a reason why almost everyone at Alcoholics Anonymous is always chugging down black coffee and chain-smoking when such is possible. The reason is that the very, very best way to quit something which is killing you is to replace it with something else that will not kill you quite as fast.

Bukowski gave up hard liquor, and limited himself to only beer or wine. F. Scott Fitzgerald tried the same trick and ended up consuming forty, yes, FORTY, twelve-ounce bottles of beer per day instead. But Buk knew that you can’t take it to that level if you want it to do any good. He limited himself to beer or wine, and he limited the amount of beer and wine he consumed, too. He also, quite early, switched to a brand of Indian cigarette which does not contain nicotine, and he stopped inhaling. When you watch the film of Bette Davis or Pablo Picasso smoking, you can clearly see that they are not inhaling just exactly like they claimed not to be, which is probably one huge reason why they were both able to chain-smoke cigarettes on a daily basis and live fairly long lives at the same time. The reason why they didn’t get tongue cancer instead is not known but not drawing the stuff down into your lungs has got to be better, overall, then nailing both your tongue and your heart-and-lungs at the same time, over and over and over again.

The point is that cutting down or reducing your intake, if such is possible, is, for some of us, another strategy that can be used for all those writers out there who are still dealing with Demon Rum and/or a drug problem of any kind.

If your problem is smoking too much marijuana, switch to edibles and gradually go to microdoses. If your problem is taking too many pills, cut your consumption in half at first. If your problem is hard liquor, stick to beer only, no matter what, and supplement with sugary foods if necessary. If your problem is LSD, use mushrooms. If your issue is too much coffee, like Balzac who sometimes drank fifty cups a day (and it killed him at 51, along with other reasons), switch to tea, or do half decaf, half regular. If your problem is cocaine, I recommend you switch to coffee, endless amounts of quadruple-strength, piping hot, totally black coffee, at least for a while. Hold on tight and wash it down with Coca-Cola if you need to. Then you can cut back on that, too (by mixing it with decaf) when the time is right. None of this is easy to do (at all), and all of it is easier said than done, but life itself is not easy to do, and anything worth doing is almost universally easier said, than done.

TAPERING is essential, depending on how badly you’re addicted. “Tapering” = gradually reducing your consumption, as opposed to going cold turkey, which means suddenly stopping any-and-all consumption of the offending substance. You cannot go from taking twenty benzodiazepine pills per day down to zero overnight, because this will give you a brain seizure, and quite possibly a lethal one. Instead, you need to methodically take less, and less, and less on a daily basis until you are down to taking only a few per day. Then you can think about quitting all of them. Same with alcohol. Do not go from fifteen beers a day down to zero overnight. Take a month and give yourself the time to adjust. On the first night, drink fourteen beers instead of your usual fifteen (you can do it). By the end of the month, you should be consuming two or three beers per night, spaced out, with food. Then you can think of saying goodbye to it all for good. It took me TWO YEARS of wearing hard-core nicotine patches and chewing nicotine gum simultaneously all day long in order to get over my cigarette addiction. The constant buzz from mainlining the nicotine in that way was almost worth giving up the smoking. All of the above is called “HARM REDUCTION” in modern medical parlance. The days of saying that you need to go cold turkey immediately or you should consider yourself a complete failure are over. Tapering and harm reduction are the way to go, and they are, for almost all of us, almost every time, the only way to go.

Cold turkey almost never works. Not long term. Among other things, it is too often based upon an impulsive decision when the subject suddenly hits bottom and has a “revelation” that a time has come for a change. Real change, real, true, deep, lasting change, only occurs with a much more thought-out and deliberate decision than that. YOU NEED TO HAVE A PLAN. You need to plan it out as methodically, strictly, and unwaveringly as you would plan your escape from a prison, if you were in prison and were planning to escape.

A long life is not necessarily the point. But quality of life is the point and should be the point for everyone, with few or no exceptions I can think of.

If the bottle or the needle or the pill are damaging your personality beyond all repair; if one or all of these or other substances are ruining the life you have left and you know it; if a lifetime of low-level, working alcoholism has rewired your brain chemistry so that you’re always half depressed and entirely negative most of the time (not to mention being a pain in the ass to everyone around you even if the only one around you is yourself, on purpose), perhaps the time has come for you to man up (no matter what your gender is) and switch activities. Just make sure to not get addicted to the new substance – or you may have to do it all over again; which would also not be the end of the world (unless you take too much).

INDISPENSABLE ADDENDUM: These days, as in all days, people get addicted to many things. The Smart Phone, Shopping, Food, Television Shows, Computer Games, Politics, and/or Sex (in one form or another, including pornography) are perhaps the biggest current offenders, besides drugs and alcohol. The tapering and harm reduction advice offered above is centered on the drug and alcohol use of creative individuals; but this advice can be transferred to any individual with any kind of addiction.

I can also add that it is ridiculous for people who are addicted to such items as Shopping, Food, Politics, or their Phone to throw stones at folks who are addicted (or have been addicted) to such items as cocaine, alcohol, or marijuana, etcetera. You may think you’re being respectable by being addicted to such “respectable” items instead of good old drugs or alc’ – but the rest of us are on to you.

Dale

Image: colourful leaves, seeds and dried petals in pink, gold and brown from Pixabay.com