Red Like Tango

Category: Uncategorized

  • One.Five Years

    I’ve been clean for a year and a half today. That’s 547 days without using. 548 days ago, I didn’t think I’d be able to go for 1, but 545 days ago, I checked into Teen Challenge Chicago anyway. After 56 days at Teen Challenge (and 2 days of hanging out with Caroline and Alex and Paul), I spent 165 days in the Master’s Touch program at Wayside. I stayed there for another 99 days before I moved out and became house manager at Wayside’s transitional house in Batavia, where I’ve been for 223 days.

    Those big numbers make it seem like a long time, but sometimes when I look at my veins, my heart starts beating and it could’ve been yesterday. It’s close and far away at the same time, which I don’t quite understand. I go weeks without even thinking about it, but when I do, I start feeling crazy again.

    I’m not trying to make anyone worry. What I want to say is this: there, but for the grace of God, go I. I need Jesus very much. Actually, I suspect sometimes that my past is a grace given to me because it enables me to see my neediness so clearly.

    I was relating my story to some friends yesterday and was reminded of the day and time that God just picked my addiction up out of me. For 56 days at Teen Challenge, I wanted to get high. In fact, a couple hours before I left on the 56th day, I was scheming with another guy in the program about how to get some dope. Then I heard about Wayside and I left TC and I spent the night of the 56th day in a homeless shelter. When I got up on the 57th day, I walked past a group of guys who were selling pain pills with money in my pockets. I was blocks away before I realized what had happened.

    Day 56 – Trying to get high.
    Day 57 – Money in my pockets, walking past an opportunity without a second thought.

    Now tell me I had anything to do with that.

  • Don’t You Know Who I AM?!

    If you are in a small coffeehouse with wooden floors and sheetrock walls and you are on your cell phone, you should not pace up and down the length of the coffeehouse in your JCPenney wingtips talking loudly about your business plans. We understand that you are important, and that the call is perhaps important, but we are in a coffeehouse, after all, and some of us are trying to listen to Simon and Garfunkel, trying to build a bridge over our troubled waters.

  • Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

    Dear Sufjan,

    Maybe words are futile devices because you use too much of them. I know I do, so I think I understand the sentiment. I mean, there you are trying to express love, and it’s not happening. Here I am, staring down my screen, reaching deep, nothing.

    That’s it, right? Nothing. That’s what is so scary. The Great Nothingness. The suspicion that way down deep… what? What is down there? Void?

    I sure hope not. But as long as you and I keep covering it all up with words, where are we getting, really? What are we discovering?

    Your laconic fan,
    Ian

  • Processing

    Here are some things I’ve been thinking about recently.

    Using dreams

    For the last year, when I had using dreams, they would be about how I really wanted to use, but I never could. These are similar to other dreams I’ve had where I was assigned a task and couldn’t do it. One time I had a dream that my family was at church and at the end of the service, Dad asks me to go get the van, so I do, but when I get in and start driving, it’s like I’m on ice, can’t go anywhere, and I’m slipping all over the place and then there’s an old woman and her grandson in front of me and I plough over the old woman and Dad’s running up to the car and screaming at me to get outta the car and let him drive and I’m feeling so anxious it’s crazy.

    That dream was at least four years ago, and no, I don’t want to hear your analyses.

    So these using dreams. I’ve had more in the last couple weeks than I’ve had for the past nine months. I mean, every night. Not so much anymore, but it was terrible waking up every morning and thinking I’d ruined everything. And these recent ones were different, too. The way they used to be was I’d either have the drugs with me but no rig, or I’d have it all with me but people would keep walking in and I’d have to shove it in the drawer til they left. I couldn’t ever get high. Now, the dreams are about me having the opportunity – different from having the drugs – and, praise God because this is a new development, I’m praying and asking for God’s help! I don’t want to use in these recent dreams, which is huge, because that means my subconscious is falling into line with my conscious. But it still feels like I’m on one of those moving sidewalks, being pulled to this unavoidable destination at which I’ll get high and fuck everything up. The one redeeming aspect: waking up in the morning and realizing I didn’t.

    Reflections on this last year

    It’s been a year. Sometimes I hear people, after a long amount of time doing something, say things along these lines: “It feels like just yesterday, I was blah blah blah…” That’s not how it feels for me. Well, wait a second. If I think about the details of coming in – driving with Alex and Caroline, walking in to Wayside’s front office and staff telling us we can come back in a little while after we’ve eaten lunch, the elated feeling I had when they said this because it felt so different from Teen Challenge – it seems a little closer, but not much. It definitely doesn’t feel like yesterday. It feels like a long time.

    Those feelings I had

    Things were hazy for me at the beginning. I mean, the longer you’re at a place, the more definition it has. Think about the first time you sat down behind the desk at which you now sit, at your work or whatever. Things were hazy, right? You didn’t know the place yet, or the people. That’s what it was like. I wasn’t high or anything, it just felt weird. I remember odd little details, like this Native American-looking-guy with long black hair behind the desk, whom I now know to be Tom, telling me, “Yeah, no problem, go get some lunch, come back whenever,” and me in my head, thinking, “This place is different and not militaristic,” and Alex and Caroline and me going to eat at this Mexican joint up the hill that was very oddly decorated, me folding and refolding the paper wrapper from my straw and moving my wet-with-condensation glass to and fro on the wooden table, wiping the water trail I’d just made, repeating this ad infinitum, Caroline saying, “OK, well, we should get you checked in,” me feeling reluctant but knowing I had to, driving back to Wayside, Ray and me going back to his office so we could interview, me asking him, “So what is the staff like around here,” him responding, bless him, “Well to be honest wich you Ian, I don’t know that they’re all saved, but I buhleive God is sovereign and there’s a reason they’re here,” and me just thinking, “Wow, I love this place and this man Ray.” It was so different from Teen Challenge, where that question was answered thusly: “Oh, you’ll really like it here! All of the staff have been through the program! They know what you’re going through and they’re really helpful!”

    You know someone’s full of shit when they use italics and exclamation points in conjunction and unreservedly.

    Ray wasn’t like that. And soon we’re talking about how I’m reformed and he’s telling me the director of the program is reformed, that I can choose where I go to church, and man, that was really something. The rest is kind of a blur, except for this feeling: there’s grace here.

    I was staring off into space for a good while, there. Processing is strange and good.

  • Living

    So I moved into that house in Batavia.

    I got anxious while moving, because even though I’d spent a solid month or more in deliberation, it still felt like things were happening too quickly, like I hadn’t been patient enough. Maybe it’s just something that happens when big decisions are made.

    And now I live here. All of my stuff is here. It’s not at Wayside anymore. None of it. Between Teen Challenge and Wayside, I spent eleven months living with forty to ninety other guys. Now, I live with four, and it’s so quiet.

    That reminds me, I haven’t explained the situation into which I’ve moved. The house is for Wayside graduates, providing another, higher level of transition into The Real World. Rent starts out very affordable at zero dollars for the first month, and then increases over the next eleven months to five hundred, at which amount it stays. There are five bedrooms. Mine is the only room, presently, that has two beds, but that’ll be changing shortly.

    Oh yes. Another tidbit: I’ve been made the house manager, effective 7 January 2011. The guys who live here are all fifteen-plus years my senior and have been living here from one to four years (set in their ways, they are) which makes things somewhat difficult, but – and this has been my cry for the last eleven months – nothing worth doing is easy! As the new sheriff in town, I’ll be doing things like making more of the rooms doubles (which I believe fosters community), instituting a regular cleaning schedule (which I believe is a necessary part of mental and emotional health, as well as physical), replacing the cushiony toilet seat (gross) with a normal toilet seat, and maybe even repainting (spice it up a little, you know? It’s a boring pale yellow which could totally be replaced with, oh I don’t know, emerald green).

    So back to what I was saying: It was – is – an odd transition, living with so many guys for so long to living with so few. I mean, I have my own room (until Joe moves in), a place to put my toiletries (other than my toiletry bag), a place to hang my towels (other than on the front of a locker), a door to shut when I’m ready to sleep. I have a refrigerator, a stove/oven, a dining room table. It’s incredible. I’m still giddy about it.
    But it was hard moving out of Wayside, which phrase I never thought I’d utter. It was hard moving away from the guys. There was a lot of emotion in the move. After all the rush of packing things and then taking them over to the new place, it hit me: I’m leaving. And praise God for that! But I invested all this time and energy and emotion into that place – and from that place so much was invested into me – that I’m a part of it and it of me. And now I’m leaving.

    It was heavy.

    I don’t know. Maybe as humans we’re just really, deeply averse to change. (Maybe I shouldn’t make blanket statements like that, should talk about myself and not include you.) I used to be that guy who just loved spontaneity and flying by the seat of his pants, and I’m not anymore because it’s so damn exhausting. I like a schedule. I like to know what’s going to happen tomorrow and the next day. Of course, I can’t really know these things, but you know what I mean. And people who live that way – “spontaneously” – are extra-defensive of their way of life, which just makes me think they don’t want change, either, would hate to make a plan for lunch.

    I don’t think it’s just change, though. I think what’s behind all the heaviness is just that: heaviness. Brilliant, I know. It’s the same old saying-goodbye-pain that everyone’s been dealing with since God breathed life into us, and it still hurts.

    Anyway:
    -Pray for me, and let me know how I can pray for you.
    -Sorry for the parenthetical overload.
    -A good winter’s day to you.

  • Moving

    I finally made a decision, you’ll be happy to know. Well, maybe you didn’t know I was facing one, but I was.
    I really wanted to move into the city, to be closer to my friends and family there, to live in community with them. Before this last few months, I was unable to give anything to them, only to take from. And I wanted desperately – still do – to give back, now that I’m able. On the face of things, great reason to move into the city, right? But something interesting kept happening: every time I talked to someone about it, they would ask immediately, “Oh so you’ll be leaving the Oasis (church)?” To which I’d respond, “Noooo. I can make it out there on the weekends!” I’d then lay out my plans, how I was going to move the students I teach out here in the suburbs from Thursdays to Saturdays so I could come out here Saturday, teach, spend the night, and then be here for Sunday morning.

    A conversation with Alex was perhaps the most helpful. He said, “You know, Ian, the city is a lot different from the suburbs.”

    “You don’t say,” said I.

    He went on to explain, after that sarcastic remark I didn’t really make but added because I like to think I’m witty, that in the city, one can find a church service at any time of any day, that it would be a monster inconvenience for anyone to travel out to the suburbs every weekend. Of course, there are people who do – Hannah, for instance – but on the whole it’s just not practical.

    This was the last of several conversations I had about moving, and, as I said, every last one of these people took it for granted that I’d not be continuing at the Oasis. Even after I laid out my plans for them, they would stare off into the middle-distance, trying but unable to make my plans make sense.

    So what do you do when everyone around you (including yourself, though you don’t readily admit it) is apprehensive about a particular choice you’re considering? You don’t make that choice! At least, this seems the sane response. Mark you, it wouldn’t have stopped me before – several times it hasn’t – but God is changing my heart. (This is happening by such infinitesimal gradations that, to me, it has gone almost unnoticed, would have but for my dad, who directed my attention thereto.)

    So, I’ll be moving to Batavia, which is a mere fifteen minutes from Aurora. The house is in a great location – walking distance from downtown Batavia, which is quaint, and right up the hill from the bike path, which I can follow along the Fox River straight into downtown Aurora. Also, I’ll have, as my mom so delicately and hilariously put it, quiet neighbors, as the house abuts a cemetery.

    That reminds me: I’m going to commit right here and now to use this new location next to the cemetery as a reminder to think much, in the words of Jonathan Edwards, on all occasions, of my dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.

    Next year in Jerusalem!

  • Tension

    I’ve been thinking a lot about tension, about allowing it to exist and being ok with it. As I’ve been thinking, I’ve started to see tension applying to a lot of categories in my life. In fact, it seems to exist in every category.

    For instance (briefly), politics: my upbringing plus my understanding of history plus my beliefs concerning people’s inherent fallenness make me lean conservative, but my bleeding heart (which I don’t consider naïve) makes me lean big government/lots of programs; psychology: how much must I “believe in myself” creatively, etc. in order to come into my own, so to speak, and how much has pop psychology bullshit seeped into and twisted what should be the praise and love of God, familiarity with my position in his family, and total trust in his sovereignty as the ultimate answer to mental health, specifically but not limited to depression and anxiety, which together are the bane of my creativity; music, généralement: tension is the reason I am still more moved by “classical” music, the composers of which were more acquainted and comfortable with tension than most modern artists (other than Radiohead), their music still speaking what words can’t about this life of tension.

    I could go on and on.

    I see tension everywhere – which I only just realized thanks to a conversation with a good friend – so that I’m rarely capable of getting across what’s going on in my head because I run back and forth from this side of the argument to that, never completely spelling out either because, as my mind runs ahead of my mouth, I’m thinking of an apology against the capitulation I’m speaking.

    Questions questions questions, which I’m starting to see as tension tension tension, which I’m finally starting to be ok with, because really, back to the psychology bit, this whole train of thought serves to make me even more aware just how utterly necessary it is to be leaning on and trusting in God – how could I not go insane otherwise? – these mysteries being his, for which I’m so thankful, because I need mystery.

    You’re tired of being in your head? You want to see something new? Following Christ – really trusting and loving him and losing my life to gain it – is proving to be a more exciting life than I imagined existed. Please, I beg you, consider him. Leave for a moment your problems with Christendom and consider him. O, the man acquainted with sorrows knows your pain! He knows about the big insatiably thirsty hole in your being and he stands up and cries, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink!”

    Go to him. Drink.

  • Invierno

    This is the first day of December, and today, for the first time, it snowed. Agreeable symmetry, if you ask me.

    I shouldn’t have slept as long as I did today. There’s something in my bones that can tell when it’s snowing or raining – a barometer, say – and today, my bones communicated with my subconscious like this:

    “Hey Subconscious. Um. You wanted us to tell you when it was snowing. Um. It’s snowing.”
    “Thank you, The Bones. That’ll be all.”

    Then, my snooty, suit-and-tie-wearing subconscious, who had rolled from the computer over to the phone in his too-expensive rolling leather chair, rolled back to the computer and sent an e-mail to my concious:

    “ATTN: Conscious

    Problem: The Bones informed me it is snowing currently.
    Consideration: The Boss likes to sleep when it is snowing.
    Submission: When the alarm sounds, signal The Hands to shut it off quickly, and I shall take him back under for another hour.

    Efficiently yours,
    Subconscious

    sc

    P.S. Absolutely loved that sweet-potato casserole. Send the recipe?”

    My conscious found this submission consonant with his lethargic leanings, and I got up an hour late. I made up for it, though, by working until seven this evening. Of course, you are probably thinking Ian! here you are, writing trite, inconsequential things instead of sleeping so you can be up early tomorrow! Actions! not words.

    Loud and clear. Here I go.

    (He didn’t send the recipe because my subconscious said “shall” instead of “will,” and he felt that needed punishing. Also, the lethargy.)

  • November

    i keep forgetting to carry notecards around with me on which to write my incredible ideas.

    this is a major problem i have: poor memory. a friend told me a few days ago about a conversation i had with her. i stared at her blankly while i desperately searched the reaches of my memory. no dice. maybe it wasn’t an important conversation, but it sure sounded like one. i want to start remembering things again. i was good until the drugs broke me. it’s a horrible thing to have the presence of mind to see memories slip away, to be unable to choose which to keep. but that’s progress in itself, right? seeing it? before, i didn’t realize i didn’t remember. well, i did, but i was too high to care. i guess i do remember more now than nine months ago. i’m just impatient.

    in other news, november was a really good month, and some congrats are in order:

    congrats to my new brother-in-law, for gaining an incredible partner. also for being a bigger nerd than jonathan (earnest basilisk soliloquy).
    congrats to my sister, for taking a name of equal caliber to nix.
    congrats to me, for not getting high in missouri for the first time in several years.
    congrats to nicky and angela, for being the best people with whom to take a road-trip and, duh, be friends.
    congrats to mr and mrs pope, for world’s most outrageous bonfire and world’s most thankful thanksgiving, respectively. we didn’t burn down the neighbors’!

    here’s to the gradual healing of all wounds, by the goodness and power of my Lord Jesus.

  • and just clap your hands

    either i’m feeling a little ee cummings or i’m feeling small, but i just went through and decapitalized my blog titles. maybe it’s an aesthetic thing. maybe i wanted an excuse to use the word aesthetic in this blog because i love a chance to put a and e next to each other. maybe it’s nothing. what i do know is i didn’t have the patience to go through the content and decapitalize. in my more obsessive days, i would have done just that, would not have been able to sleep otherwise. but, thank God, i have some peace again.

    i know what you’re thinking: mm, let’s take a look at your last few posts there, ian.

    point taken.

    now hear this: airing angst, for me, is better than not airing angst, and gives me peace.
    unless of course my motives are wrong. if my motive is shining Light in dark places, good. i’d rather be able to see it than to keep mulling it over without identifying it. i’d rather have it out there than up here. (i pointed to my brain.) but from time to time, i have other motives, not as pure. motives i’m too tired to explore at the moment.

    i’ve been emotional recently. a wreck in the mood for a wreck.