How to make yourself normal again.

The decision to quit was easy to stick with after the bullshit I had put up with… I was still a mess, but I knew I could stop it. I just needed to stay away from the drugs, and the people who were doing them. I had to change my life.

Which, for a day or to meant sitting in my house, on my own and trying to cut myself off from anything that might lead me back down that path. Getting rid of all the numbers was the first step. I still knew where to score but, well, that was just something I was going to have to fight with will power. I was sure I still had some left…

I figured if I got rid of all the things that would make it easy for myself, I’d save the stuff that made getting drugs a chore for will power to deal with. It seemed like something half resembling a solution.

So, I cleared out my phone, deleting numbers, message threads, and phone records with medical precision.

Next up, the works. I smashed the glass pipe and threw away all the bottles; foil and other assorted accessories I had accumulated over the weeks.

I felt I was on a roll so I cleaned my place top to bottom until it actually looked like a normal room again rather than a squalid pit of fetid substance abuse.

That was the first two hours of my self-imposed exile. 46 to go, I thought as I sat on my sofa and put on an old Bill Hicks special. It was vital that I kept my spirits up. That I remained distracted from the constant niggling thoughts in my head.

I was fine for about 10 minutes… then I thought about contacting Si… No! I stopped myself. No. Not yet. I couldn’t see any of those fuckers. Not while I was like this.

I tried again to concentrate on the video. Thoughts kept flashing back to all the years of abuse… and the girls I had been fucked up with on the way…

Clarissa seemed like a distant memory in this state, all I could think about was Li-Kai. Why? At that moment she seemed perfect. I had emailed her a couple of times while high, and received a polite but distant response. She had no idea why I was contacting her… I guess I didn’t either. I still loved her, of course… if you want the reason, that’s it.

But… I guess I knew, deep down that it was little more than a psychotic love. One that made no sense. The sort of love a stalker might have for a celebrity. One that I knew had to be locked in a box, deep down… And it had been for years now… I guess getting high must have unlocked it. Pushing that back down was just part of the process now.

And Jules. Mysterious, crazy, compulsive Jules. I could have loved her. I guess I did in a way. Crazy girls always did something to me, and Jules may well have been the most insane girl I ever met in my life. But there was more to than that. She seemed almost magical, and that was before we did all the drugs. She… saw things before they were there and understood people in ways that defied common sense. I simultaneously wanted to understand everything about her, yet was terrified of what I might find….

But it was moot. She had made it clear she didn’t want to be contacted, and I was in no mood to try and track her down. Especially when she was exactly the sort of person who would send me back on a fucked up path again.

I was sweating. A lot. I started yelling, “What the fuck is wrong with this air conditioner… 18 degrees?” I threw a shoe at the air con unit. “Fuck off is this 18 degrees. Work you piece of shit.”

A neighbour hammered the wall. I yelled something abusive back at them and sat stewing in my own hatred for a minute.

Fuck it, Beer

I had wisely stocked up on cans of cheap beer for my two-day recovery plan. Between them and the valiums I figured I could fix myself and come out the other side with at least a fighting chance of staying clean.

As I opened up and sipped the first can I tried counting my blessings… the fact I somehow still had a job. The fact I didn’t have to live in the god-forsaken shithole that London had turned into…. The fact that…

I ran out of ideas.

Misery was constantly creeping into my psyche in a way that was hard to ignore. Rationalisation helped: remembering that the horror was self-imposed and to be expected after the punishment I had put my body through. Just remember, it’s temporary. It will get better…

I was fighting. But it seemed like every second I instinctively began an action that might have ended with me messaging an ex, a drug buddy…. Doing something weird that I didn’t want to do. I was intensely aware of my impulsive and compulsive behaviour.

I had to find some fucking control. My leg shook. Violently. I opened and finished another beer. And by the time I finished the third I had already made my mind up. I was going to the pub. I needed to be with people. Normal people. Alcoholics. Good people.

I got on my bike and I rode into town. Back to Bui Vien.

Towards the end of Tet some of the bars had started opening again and the city was beginning to return to normal. School was still out and would be for another week but people were returning and life was starting to make a little more sense.

I drove around for a while looking out or anyone I knew: It’s Bui Vien for fucks sake. Someone would be drinking on a Tuesday afternoon. So I headed out to one of my local haunts and ordered a beer. CNN was playing loudly on one of the TVs and a talking head was discussing the possibility of war.

Evidently there had been a power shift around the world and a number of ultra nationalist politicians had risen to power. I was somewhat aware of the problems of this sort of thing back in the UK but hadn’t really paid much attention to anything political since moving here.

I looked at the man next to me, an American, and said something like “What the fuck is all this?”

He turned to me and said, “Oh, you didn’t hear? Man… The Malaysians have just decided to side with the Chinese outright. Their fucking premier… leader, whatever the fuck you want to call him has basically got down on his knees to sick China’s dick.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because he’s a fucking lunatic for one thing… Trade deals or some shit, I don’t know. But its bad. And it’s just another load of shit… every country in the world seems to be losing their shit. Iran, Israel, Britain.

“America?” I said, unable to help myself from the easy shot.

“Well yeah, damn right America. Our guy’s probably the worst of all of them.”

“He’s certainly a character…. But look, what the fuck does it matter, I don’t see it being any worse than before. Same shit, different arseholes right?”

“Well, not really… Malaysia’s the last country apart from Vietnam and Singapore to be pro-US around here… In the ASEAN countries I mean … OK, Maybe Thailand, but who the fuck knows with those guys…. China are strangling the whole region and if it continues… well, we’re gonna be right in the middle of it.”

“Well… so what, the Vietnamese will just play ball right?”

He almost spat out his beer in laughter….”Yeah right… The Vietnamese HATE the Chinese. Why do you think they’re all so pro-American here? You’d think that after the war they’d hate America’s guts but no. The Americans are Vietnam’s best hope of taking on the Chinese: ‘the enemy of my enemy’ and so on…”

“So… what? I mean, what’s going to happen?”

“Fucked if I know, but it’s not going to end well for anyone. Best-case scenario I suppose is that China leave Vietnam the fuck alone… Worst case scenario… well, do I need to spell it out?”

“I guess not.

“Huh. Well, that’s something.” I ordered another beer. “What do you reckon? Is it likely? War I mean…?”

“Honestly, I doubt it. Most people don’t want war. In fact they’ll do anything to avoid it. And these days with social media and all, you’d hope that it’s harder to lie the people into war the way you used to be able to. But… I don’t know. It’s a worry alright.”

I sat silently for a while thinking about what he’d said. Maybe he was right… Maybe war was a possibility. I wondered about my own emergency plan, in case anything like that ever broke out.

I considered leaving all this behind… Or not… Either way, the situation called for drinks. I ordered a double whisky and drank it fast. Then another. It wasn’t long before the blurb on the television was just noise, but in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but relay over and over again the idea that the world was fucked.

Deep paranoia rattled me. A reckless inability to control my brain was letting all the bullshit come flooding in. I shouldn’t have left the house.

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