Saturday, June 21, 2003

I have had a drinking problem for most of my adult life. This drinking that I've done seemed to have a purpose, and it is connected with my relation with females. It was only recently that I became consciously aware of it's definitive connection with females during my last relationship with a woman a coupla years ago. I think it became conscious to me because previous to meeting this woman over the internet and deciding to move to her place to live I had reduced the variety of my drinking to red wine.

Previous to this I drank anything and everything as it become available at various events. I knew I didn't like beer the first time I drank it. A half can of beer made me sick and I puked for hours until I got the dry heaves. But, since most of the guys in the Navy drank beer and it was considered a manly thing to do, I eventually got used to the taste of beer.

I learned to drink hard liquor in the Navy. I had to try it all to satisfy myself that I was sophisticated about these things. Mostly I drank mixed drinks that were sweet and easy to get down. My first favorite mixed drink was sloe gin and coke. Incredibly sweet drink that tastes a little like my favorite soda pop. By the time I realized I had too much, I already had enough booze in my body to be over the top and quite ready to betray my natural reserve and make a complete fool of myself.

Between not liking the taste of beer and the devastating effects of drinking hard liquor I decided to buy nothing for myself but red wine, usually a very hearty burgundy. Burgundy is sort of so so with me. Usually the first coupla sips of it don't taste too good. It is certainly not sweet enough that I gulp it down like soda pop, and after the first glass it gets to taste a little better. When I'm by myself, which is most of the time now, I seldom drink more than three small glasses and most of the time I don't finish the second one.

I live like a miser and have for most of my adult life. I have issues with money, and if I have enough to live a little extravagantly it usually leads to pain and suffering that doesn't seem to come around when I remain poor. Presently, I live off a small Social Security check that is barely enough for me to pay only for the most essential domestic conveniences. I buy a gallon of wine every coupla of weeks that costs around ten dollars, and normally drink two glasses of wine per day, unless I have visitors, and then I may drink more for the sake of sociabilities sake. I don't have many visitors.

My point is that when I'm alone I don't drink very much. It's when I get involved with other people that the drinking becomes a problem. People usually seem attracted to the person I represent when I spend most of my time alone, and expect me to stay that person because that's what they were attracted to about me in the beginning.

I said that I became consciously aware of this during my last affair, and that's true. That's not to say that I have been unconscious of the fact that most of my relationships break up as the result of drinking. It would be hard not to notice that over the years even for me.

This woman began writing to me off-list while we were both subscribed to an e-mail discussion group. She admired the way I wrote and we started a personal relationship through e-mail. She was interesting to me also. Eventually she declared love for me sight unseen, and since I also felt like I was getting involved, I decided to drive up north to where she lived to get a good look at her. She was/is beautiful. I knew from the getgo that she was too young for me, she is sixteen years younger, but she insisted that didn't make any difference to her because she found it so difficult to find a man who fit her notion of what real intelligence amounts to. Besides, we both have had strong spiritual experiences that seemed to make us birds-of-a-feather.

I think I stayed with her at her place for about a week and come home. Our e-mail relationship continued with more intimacy and feelings, and so eventually we decided to try to live together. I would leave my home and move to her small studio apartment with her two cats.

We had other things in common besides the aforementioned spiritual and intellectual experiences. We both had been married twice, and had lived very active sexual lives of some dubious social worth. Drinking, drugs, and carousing had been a big part of our pasts. We were fairly open with each other about how we had lived, and also about how this seemed to be connected with the influence of other people.

So when I bought the first gallon of wine we both enjoyed it, got a little too inebriated at times, but since we were happy and in love, it just seemed more like a celebration than a going back to our old ways. That came into play when I bought an ounce of pot to carry up there, and we started smoking from time to time. This did seem to come to the fore more as an open issue because she was a college professor, and her reputation was very important to her. She really loves her job. She seems to enjoy being around young people. She has no children of her own and appears to enjoy mothering them.

Then, little things that hadn't seem to have been a big deal at first became more important. She had these two cats she had saved from certain death. She did not allow them out of the apartment for any reason. It was a very small two room apartment with a small bath, and the cats became an issue. I don't dislike cats, especially if they belong to someone else, but I didn't like having to live with them inside the house. At night they got naturally rambunctious, and chased each other all over the apartment including the bed we slept in. One night one of the cats pounced on me with all claws extended and woke me up wondering, "What tha' hell?", and when I threw it up against the wall for it's troubles, our troubles began. She told me I was a cruel, heartless person who had no respect for helpless animals. I told her she was even more heartless for locking them up in her apartment and never letting them act like cats.

I began to realize her intent was to treat me just like she did the cats. I was to fulfill a role she needed played out in her life, and that I would not be allowed to go outside the cage she built for me to act like a normal human. Her extreme jealousy became more and more apparent, and soon enough, openly so. Eventually, she told me directly that she was a control freak, and that it was her way or the highway. I left most of my stuff that I had carried up there to live with her and took the highway.

As I mourned lost love during the aftermath of this failed relationship, and looked back on other failed relationships, it was then I began to see the relationship between them all. The drinking seemed to be based in my childhood.

I didn't know my mother had been married twice when I was a kid, and that my oldest sister was only my half-sister. I found that out in a hayfield while working with my father. My father made the mistake of treating me like his confidant. When we were out working the farm together he liked to tell me about his adventures experienced when he was young. I guess he thought he was giving me advice about the mistakes of young blood. On this particular day, when I was about 15 years old, he was telling me of all the women he had been with before he met my mother. When he told me about this one woman he should have married instead of my mother, and how sorry he had not married her instead of my mother, I became angry, and told him I didn't want to hear all this stuff, that he was talking bad about my mother and I didn't want to hear it.

The work we were doing was pretty tough on both of us. He was raking up and pitching hay into a high-railed trailer, and I was in the trailer stomping it down to pack it tighter, so we could get as much hay in each load as possible. Hay is gathered on the hottest rain-free days of summer, and we were both dripping with sweat.

Suddenly, we were not having a picayune conversation about the lusty adventures of his youth anymore. When I yelled at him to stop saying bad things about my mother he got mad. His face turned red, and he started screaming about how little I understood about my mother and waving the pitchfork at me. That's when he told me about her first marriage. I was totally stunned. I couldn't believe him. I wouldn't believe him. Like most young boys I thought my mother was good and pure as the rain that fell from the sky no matter how mean she could be sometime.

I stood in the trailer holding on the the side rails and just stared at him as he raged about how my mother had gotten pregnant by a drunk, and then tricked him into marrying her so she could get away from the shame of it. Nothing that had happened in my young life wounded me so deeply. I jumped out of the trailer and ran for the woods to deal with this devastating news. He screamed at me to come back and get in the trailer because we hadn't finished the work. To this day I don't think he realized how strongly this hurt me. His pain has inured him to how it might affect others.

I don't remember exactly when I came home again. It was dark. I had cried myself into a great tiredness, and there was no where else to go. While I would out in the woods, I vowed to go find the drunk who had abandoned my mother and kill him. Within a couple of weeks I ran away from home to my grandparent's home in Mississippi to execute this plan.

I couldn't kill him. I got lucky and found him. It wasn't hard. He was the boy next door, and just happened to be visiting his parents while I was there. When I realized who he was and saw what was standing in front of me, a dried-up nothing of a man, I understood why he had left, and forgave him. This skinny little man was no match for my mother, and my father wasn't either. That's when I began to wonder if my father wasn't telling me the truth. They were both victims.

This thing makes me wonder is how much this affected my ideas toward women. Here were these two men who both married my mother. One drank to get away from her harridan ways, and one who stayed and suffered. I seem to get attracted to the suffering a hard woman can put on a man, and the ecstasy of escaping it once I get caught up in their grasp.

Monday, June 16, 2003



My friend Billy came over a coupla days ago. He was distraught. He had an envelope in his hand, and as he came in the door he looked down at the envelope, looked up at me, and said, "Damn people, I think I'm gone kill myself." and laughed.

He had gone to an auctioneering school and then failed the licensing text.

Two minutes later he was hypnotized, and walking around A National Park on the top of Lookout Mountain and looking down on the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee in a state of awe.

After he had refreshed himself there in that place and relaxed a little, I aked him to return to the examination room where he took the licensing test. He told me that he was okay with the way the test was going until he came to the fill-in-the-blank portion of the test, and he froze. Even though he knew the answers, he could not write the words down on the paper. I asked him to fully describe how he felt at the moment he realized he would fail the test because his fingers were paralysed.

He told me he felt totally helplessness. Defeat,shame, humiliation, and anxiety seemed to flood his emotions in that moment, and he felt a disgusting emptiness in the pit of our stomach.

I asked Billy to hold that moment in time, and to search back through his life for other times he had felt this feeling before the test. His eyes became active behind the closed lids and I knew he was seeing multiple events as he contemplated his life.

I asked him to find the first incident this feeling of helplessness happened in his life. He sat silently for a while, and then he said he could not tell me about the first time it happened because it had happened for as long as he could remember.

I asked him to go deeper into state and relax even more, and then to look again for the beginning of this feeling of dread, but to start out at 6 years old and search even more deeply. I told him that he would begin to search more deeply when I counted aloud from three back to one, and then clapped my hands. I repeated this to him several times, and then told him that each time I counted down from three to one and clapped my hands, he would continue his search for the original event he had felt helpless like this, but to search in the next younger year.

I counted down and clapped my hands and told him to look for the first time he felt that way when he was six years old. He just shook his head as he looked at all the times this feeling had wounded him when he was six years old. Billy had a very sad, tormented look on his face during this time. Sitting across the old tool chest I use for a coffee table, I could only feel what he was experiencing. I asked him if the same feeling happened earlier than six years old. He nodded his head.

For brevity, I'll just say that we regressed him back until the birth moment and the feeling still came around.

Since we had already approached his moment of birth, I figured he might want to experience what he might be aware of previous to his entry into the world as Billy. I asked him if he wanted to go back through the birth experience to before he was born. He straighted his shoulders and made his back a little stiffer, and sat erect on the front edge of the sofa. I've known Billy for 15-20 years, and I recognized this posture from a long time back. Billy comes from a Native American heritage, and this erect way of composing himself is his warrior pose.

I had him go through his entire body looking for pockets of tension or nervousness while I counted backward from one hundred, and that as I counted each number he would be able to let go of being Billy for a while. As I counted down on each of his exhales I saw him relaxing and letting go. When I had counted down to one I asked him if he was ready. With his lips in a straight line his eyes smiled out that he was. Immediately, I counted down from three to one, and then clapped my hands as loud as I could to startle him into jumping the broom.

Previous to my loud clapping his face was a composition in nobility and strength. A moment later his jaw dropped, his shoulders sagged, and there was a look of confusion I'd never seen before. I asked him who he was. He didn't know. I asked him if the feeling was still there. He said "Yes.". Even before he was born? "Yes."

I asked him to tell me what he could about the feeling that was part of him even before he was born. He said something was coming for him. He couldn't see what it was, but he knew it was so powerful that he could not put up a fight. He said that if it found him it would have total dominance over him and that there was nothing he could do about it. He said he would be totally at it's mercy and that all he could do was beg for his life. I asked him repeatedly what it was that was after him, and he could not tell me. All he understood was that he sensed that it was after him, and there was nothing he could do but try to escape, and that even to try to escape was impossible for long.

I asked him if that's why he decided to get a body and be a human. He said becoming human was just another place to hide, but not for long, that eventually it would get him. I asked him what would happen if his hiding place was found out. He said it was waiting, that eventually it would get him. I asked him what would happen then. His answer was that he would have to go back. I asked him where he would have to go back to. He wouldn't tell me. Whatever it was he was frightened more than his courage could help him with.

I took Billy back through the birth process as slowly as I could. He didn't say much. I didn't ask much. I told him to remember what happened, and set up a post hypnotice signal so we could get back to it, and eventually I brought him back to sitting on my sofa.

Funny thing, he had forgotten all about failing the auctioneering test. It must not have been all that important.