Dry January

Well, it’s February. When I originally created this I had big plans that I was going to post something every day detailing my latest foray into sobriety, encouraging others to get involved and finally begin their own self-healing process. Of course, things rarely work out as planned.

In the past when I put the devil’s lettuce back in the crisper, I’d find it difficult to sleep through the night, though the tradeoff was an avalanche of ideas flooding back into my body that I’d excitedly document. A reasonable tradeoff for a couple weeks waking up at 4:20 AM and having nothing better to do.

This time around…not so much. I blame that partially on having moved down to legal, lower grade dank (seriously, there’s no point in legalizing weed, the 2018 Farm Bill and exploitable loopholes thanks to idiotic politicians already took care of it) and partially on my ongoing obsession since September 2023 to fix my fucked up body. But, I did come away with a few themes and perhaps at least one takeaway to help me navigate February and beyond.

Week 1 - Detox

Detox, uh, sort of sucked. Instead of that avalanche of ideas, I just sort of felt shitty for the first week or two. Even worse, I no longer had my crutch of weed and alcohol to get me through - or, minimally, give an excuse for - the lows.

Of course, prior to Dry January I celebrated Wet December, driven by both daily day drinking on vacation and a variety of low grade weed pens, which I feel manages to fuck up my body just as badly as the higher tier stuff. I think if I had to rank them in terms of how badly you destroy yourself, I’d go:

1. Dabs - as soon as you need to pull out a blowtorch, you might as well be doing tranq
2. Pens - basically dabs but in cartridge form. Apparently there’s something called popcorn lung and, ugh, no thanks
3. Edibles - often touted as the most safe and effective, which is reasonable considering there’s no combustion, but I’m skeptical of how the shit stays in your body elsewhere
4. Bong - I mean, it’s a college classic
5. Bowl - just really combusting the ever living fuck out of that plant
6. Joint - the correct way to smoke
7. Herb Vape - not quite as combusty and better flavor. I’d be open to being wrong about edibles and moving them to the bottom of this list

Week 2 - Cool, cool, cool… our fucking van got stolen

Just as I was starting to feel a bit better one day I took the boys to school. I was like, that’s weird, where’s my wife’s van…oh, there it is, I guess she parked it down the street...also, it looks smaller than normal. Tandem.

A little while later she was about to leave for work and was like “Hey, have you seen my van?” and I was like, “Yea, you parked it down the street…not sure why you would do something like that. Tandem.” She came back inside a minute later and was like “I think my van was stolen” and I was like “Tandem”.

It turns out, yep, our van was indeed stolen. Also turns out, it’s super easy to steal cars…especially Hondas.

Blah blah blah, bunch of nonsense ensued…continues to ensue. Talked to the cops and they were like, “Wait, are you totally sure you didn’t like, just park it somewhere else?”. I was pretty sure we didn’t, especially since that somewhere else turned out to be Northeast Philly. Then the Philly cops were like “LOL, just go get your car, idk”.

My takeaway here is what my takeaway with pretty much all things is: the system is just a rotten, decrepit cesspool and we need to help enable people with activities that provide themselves, their communities and extended communities with higher value activities. Otherwise, there go dem Kia Boys again…for teh lulz.

Week 3 - Work, work, work

As we learned our car was in fact stolen and in fact not parked down the street or around the corner, I was meanwhile kicking off an absurd amount of work that would dominate most waking minutes of the rest of the month. Boring. Though a great opportunity for some floor sitting and core strengthening.

Week 4 - Everybody gets sick. Or, healthy?

With all of that out of the way I was like, guh, finally, gonna get to meditation or whatever the fuck reason it was that I decided to do this dry January bullshit in the first place. Except, no, because next thing I knew, everybody in my house beside me and my middle son decided to get sick. First my oldest daughter, then youngest son, then wife for like fucking ten days each.

For me, I had a little bit of a sore throat for a few hours and a headache one night, both of which I vigorously rubbed out of myself. Beside that, I’ve woken up every morning with a bunch of disgusting mucus that I then extremely attractively expelled from my body.

Which is great considering that, like all symptoms, this is the body’s way of healing itself. For mucus in particular, “contaminants, including pathogens and allergens, are then eliminated along with the mucus”. Doesn’t take a very far stretch - heh - to hypothesize that a large portion of that mucus goo is whatever the fuck I’d been vaporizing the month prior.

Fortunately, I spent a fairly significant amount of time the prior year rubbing the everliving fuck out of my sinuses, gaining the power to breathe through my nose that had been taken away from me due to a childhood of living a two miles away from one of the most polluting refineries on the planet.

What’s Next?

I’m never really sure. My life seems like one endless existential roller coaster. When I wrote the rest of this - which at the time was a few days into February - my plan was to introduce the Connective Tissue subdank to talk about personal and societal connective tissue disorder that’s making us individually and collectively sick, which I’d try to drive traffic toward from a separate Substack instance I create.

My emphasis there would be in discussing ideas and potential new approaches to change the way we’ve always done things for the past 400 years or so and maybe that will still be the focus, though I’m not unconvinced the thing most of us want is to be reinforced by our rigid tribal guidelines and never to fundamentally change until perhaps we’re abruptly forced to do so when the apocalyptic revolution so many are seemingly cheering for finally arrives. Yikes, that was a feisty word salad!
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My most recent existential realization was simply that I need to break my same old angry at authority pattern while doing nothing to change the underlying material conditions…I think I’m finally ready to make change. Also, barring special occasions, I think I’m done with the lettuce and ethanol.

I think for right now I’ll simply post this and return to the basics of trying to find just the next two contributors who can take part in imagining and creating something other than this same old society that seems to be making everybody increasingly sick as we’re told we have no idea why. Maybe we should consider our poor connective tissue?