Thursday February 27, 2020

                                                  "Hot Coffee & Cold Beer."
                                         

     Writing came into my life in the early 1970s. By the close of that decade, I had long been writing letters to family and friends back in Iowa. I had learned that some of them had kept my epic letters as keepsakes in shoeboxes and dresser drawers; and still others had shared those stories to the amusement of others. Writing, by then, had just started impacting 'future me' in ways I would never think possible -- this, I think about now in my retirement years.

     During one of my first unemployed winters, I holed-up on my farm and began living a hermit's existence on a 24-hour basis. I saw writing as a way to cope with the isolation from TV and technology (meaning before the days of desktop computers and cellphones) and the inactivity related to it. I started what became a series of journals I titled, "Hot Coffee & Cold Beer," and began writing in-depth about my life, writing everything that came to mind from depravity to beauty, hatred to admiration, dark to light; I tried to leave no stone un-turned. Sometimes I'd write for eight hours beginning at three in the morning, or just whenever my mind was too active to sleep -- accumulating roughly 3500+ handwritten pages. It consumed me; I consumed it---and so may have wrote myself sane. Maybe.
  
     Writing all that winter helped my state of mind. I didn't do drugs to speak of, although I did try to get high one evening, with little success I thought. After visiting a local gentleman for some pot, in a tiny apartment above a smalltown laundromat, he suggested we mosey up to the American Legion for a few beers, and it was there I realized, to my great concern, I was without legs nor any visible means of physical support that would get me to and from the mens room from where I, stood?
  
      Admittedly, I was drinking heavily too that winter, a continuance of the lifestyle I had created prior. During the spring and fall, I worked for an agricultural service business where, seasonally, we worked seven days a week, twelve or more hours a day. As was custom, excepting Sundays, we'd go to the bars afterward to let off some steam, where I would try to keep in step. I enjoyed beer and occasionally getting drunk with friends, but I didn't like the hang-overs. That's when I learned that the mantra of the local boys with whom I worked, was "Party til you puke--then drink some more!"

     I felt I was separate from them in that respect, as several had been drinking alcohol since before they were teenagers and still thought it glorious to get wildly drunk. I hadn't started drinking until I was the legal drinking age of twenty-one, nine years earlier; I was already an old man in comparison.

     It was during that winter that I realized, that should I continue down this path I was traveling, I'd become a serious alcoholic, a phenomenon that haunts both sides of my family tree and vigorously stalks the willing. I began to loathe not remembering when or how I got home blinded by alcohol, the sobering possible consequences of my behaviors weighing heavily on me, but not heavy enough to make me stop. Fortunately, repetitive, self-induced physical and mental pain didn't make sense to me any more and I began listening to my inner voice. One particularly memorable night, with my face against the red brick wall of the old Red Owl Store building in Roseau, right on Main Street, something inside me said, 

"You gotta stop this shit or it'll kill ya."

     So I quit for quite awhile, aided in part by an older cousin's wife, who persuaded me to go to Northland College in Thief River Falls where they lived and live with them a semester, which is quite the switch in itself, going to college to stop drinking, not learn to drink.

     I eventually recognized that alcohol abuse is the loss of self-control, that same stuff my folks modeled in almost everything they did, including their use of alcohol, and what I learned to use to temper mine, though a life like that, in some circles, is considered dull. This is where writing comes in to fill the void and my loss of self-control isn't abuse of my senses or self-esteem.

     

       After an uproariously fun speech in Composition and Speech class about house flies, during November, in which I released a few hundred reconstituted flies into the classroom from a one pound coffee can, and then passed around homemade "Kill 'em Yourself," flyswatters as part of the solution, the teacher excitedly stood up, pointed at me and said, "Now he's a writer!" making me someone whose speech the teacher and fellow students awaited from then on. Hoo yah!

    
     So I see my primary addiction as the impulse, the drive I have to write; and is probably the single-most behavior that had set me apart from my co-workers at the toy factory too those many years ago.

     If I was alone and idle somewhere, my face downcast toward my hand atop a desktop or similar surface (long before the days of cellphones), people likely knew I was writing. For almost a year,  after college, I had written a newspaper column in the Roseau Times-Region specifically for the toy factory where I worked. Many people, including the higher-ups, knew this but there were always those who will find fault with another's behavior or whine about ill-perceived favoritism.

     At one point, I got into quite a jam about it at the factory, even to the point of 'earning' a corrective action from a leadperson, which I rejected,  and then wrote a lengthy defense proving, not only that I could write a decent sentence, but that I had done all my assigned work on time; cleaned my work area worthy of their inspection should they doubt me; and helped others if they needed my assistance. I may have suggested I could do worse with my idle time, like go smoke somewhere, stand around and talk, or leave the building and grounds for a few minutes to go uptown; at least I remained in my work area so they knew where to find me.

     After some consideration, the corrective action was withdrawn, and while short of an outright apology, the manager good-naturedly gave me a lined notebook for my use. I went back to writing in my free-time; it's just what I did. Being a writer, even not a very famous one, was just who I was. I couldn't help it. I was out of control, observing and writing things like this:

     "At settlements on the northern prairies, lights come on at sunset. A pink-orange haze rests on the horizon below a distant mottled veil of dark gray-blue clouds, trees but silhouettes. Rooftops of houses, and walls of metal buildings reflect artificial light. A half-moon hangs from the lip of a single oxbow cloud. The sky darkens into a deep dark blue as it climbs into the heavens. A car drives by, its taillights as moving red dots.

     So it is of small northern border towns whose populace watches TV, or snuggles down to sleep against the pressures of a new workday tomorrow -- or perhaps, sleep forever. A breeze whispers in gusts, papers near me flutter. Quiet ensues and all seems natural in this stolen moment. I could just as well be in the doorway of a cabin on a lake, or in the woods, as be standing on this electric forklift at work."