Force

I met my mind shortly after I met a guy named Force. He didn’t really have anything to do with that meeting, as he wasn’t there when it happened, and his company wasn’t the type of company in which such things happen except in opposition to, or by accident. He wasn’t dumb, he was just young, and liked telling stories about ‘railing’ chicks at parties. Railing is parlance for having sex with, I had him clarify, and the fact that he was in rehab with me was sound evidence that there was a lot of cocaine at these parties, and he attended a lot more of them than his parents were willing to tolerate.

Force, predictably, gravitated to the group of guys that I now affectionately recall as ‘The Meatheads.’ The rehab had a glorious gym, and I went there almost every day. There is something very confronting about running towards a mirrored image of your underweight, hollow eyed, and sunken cheeked self that exposes the flight from a catastrophic past into the eyes of one who’s vision is beginning to clear enough to see behind in horror and regret into-in my case green-path of recovery and hope. If Force ever thought things like that he never mentioned it. He never cried either, which was the opposite of me who cried whenever I thought of anything or spoke, at least for a while. Anyway, meatheads don’t bother me. I think they just need guys in their lives who don’t step back, don’t name them Force, and don’t eyeball them menacingly.

My roommate eyeballed everyone menacingly. He couldn’t help it. He had a wandering eye, a stitched on nose, and battered knuckles. He slept for two entire days before he was able to rise and join me at dinner, and when he did, the Meatheads came and slid in across from us like it was fucking high school. Not my high school mind you, but hollywood movie football scholarship high school. I nodded at them. Michael did not. The lady on my left, a leggy and somewhat tottery supreme court prosecutor who admitted to being a whino, and who RECOGNIZED my roommate, of all things, and the white-haired, quite rich, ex-military CEO across from me, who, it turned out, liked spirits too much, and occasionally shat his diaper, both shifted uncomfortably, and tried concentrating on their meals.

Charles, the involuntary primus of the squad, was blind. He had not always been blind, that unfortunate condition being the sum of getting shot in the back of the head with a crossbow bolt while sleeping on his couch. Drugs were involved at some level of that strange equation. Charles was also 5'6”, 220, and used to teach ju-jitsu to the armed forces. In the dark. His squat was much heavier than himself, and very deep. Charles being blind gave Force an in, in that he could be his eyes, not that he needed them to find a guy like Michael, who didn’t just look menacing, but radiated menace in the way that only a man that was savagely beaten by the belt and fists of an alcoholic Irish father-whom he still couldn’t help but idolize-for most of the days of his childhood, then spent his adulthood building towards a career as an ‘independent collections operator’ for various motorcycle gangs, could.

Some tentative yapping and chirping ensued, and I watched in fascination because I’d never seen anything like this before in real life, an actual male dominance ritual, just moments away from butt-sniffing, chest-thumping, and food-throwing, not to mention actual violence. It was amazing, but not as amazing as when Michael dropped his fork, glared at every antagonist, (I think) raised a finger, and said, “Don’t wolfpack me.” I have often thought about that moment, and what I saw in Michael’s face. It was a lot. There were many primal instincts written upon that visage, that brutal mask that I came to love, after a fashion: terror was one, then rage, then savage control, then acceptance. Then the simple warning. Now under scrutiny of the helpless ‘hall monitors’, the Meatheads asked me if I was coming with them as they scuffed and scoffed in efforts to save some face, and got up to leave. I remember frowning and saying, “No” because I thought that was a weird question, and I wanted to eat, and get to know the guy who had been sleeping in the next bed and oozing from an infected needle wound in his leg and taping the gas fireplace timer knob with electrical tape so it wouldn’t tick down. Our room was sweltering, but I didn’t want to usurp his thermal authority until I knew him a little better.

He looked past me and said, “Hello, your honour.” to the lady on my left who, she admitted later, was trying to hide behind me, then turned his gaze to me and said, “Stay away from those guys.” I said, “I’m just eating, man.” He kind of smirk-snorted and said, “Yeah. Me too. Fucking starving. What day is it? How long was I out for?” “A couple of days, but I don’t know what day it is either. You’ve changed your bandage a few times-I helped once-and you taped up the timer for the fireplace. Where did you get the tape?” He raised his brutal face out of his plate and kind of smiled at me sardonically, shook his head and said, “Fucking addicts.” Everyone at the table nodded in solemn understanding, and if they didn’t, they should have, and strange friendships were born.

Said new friendship with my roommate was tested with a rather feeble show of machismo several days later when the Meatheads boxed me in under the smoking pergola and asked me where I stood if something went down. Squinting as an outward show of memory spelunking since I hadn’t spent all of the intervening time thinking about Michael being scarier than all three of them, I asked them what they were talking about. They wanted to ‘take Michael out’ for some reason, and I said that that didn’t seem necessary.

And that was the end of it, all of it, the whole drama. There were no more confrontations in the gym or the cafeteria. I laughed at the past event in the company of everyone that had been involved, just not all at the same time, and I muscled up at the rate of 3 pounds a week until I left. The food was amazing.

Over the following weeks people came and went, and everyone told their stories the best that they could. They were all tragedies, but people who are fighting for their lives can only succeed if they search for humour and beauty as hard as they did for their last hit and don’t shy away from the obvious parallels. We all truly wanted to live, but not all of us did. So we sat in circles for the tellings of the most awful stories, and we often asked, “What the fuck was I thinking?”, to gales of laughter, or in silence so profound that we could hear tears impacting denim, and the solemn passage of tissue boxes, all of us knowing, somehow, or from long experience, that the answers are far too complex to even comprehend in six weeks, or even sixteen years, which is how long ago it was when I met the entity formerly known as The Bell.

Once you’ve met someone named Force, it’s impossible to not think about them-especially if you met them in rehab-when you’re thinking about actual force, which I was doing earlier today as I mused about war, politics, and Hooke’s Law, and started this whole thought train a-chuggin’.

The strategy around the use of nuclear weapons, otherwise known as Nuclear Deterrence, is similar to the strategy surrounding punching someone in the face, or any other application of force. It’s scary, and no one really wants to throw the first one, but that’s probably better than NOT being first, but who knows what state you’ll be in by the time the last one is thrown. Maybe no one will even survive. Just look at the world right now. Harsh and brutal truths are everywhere, but most people are only listening to the liars because they are the loudest, and no one wants to be in the middle because both sides will mock at you and hold you in such contempt because you won’t subscribe to anything but what you believe is the greater good, or even your OWN good, because they won’t read a book or listen to an opposing point of view in search of some value, some common ground, some seed of truth that could obviate the need for violent action and abuse, be it physical, mental, or emotional.

It’s good to be powerful, and it’s good to be influential, but nuclear reactions can power an entire city, or annihilate that same city and everyone in it, and influence can lead millions to peace, or incite them to war, Like a compass, power and influence are only worthy if they are not interfered with, and are able to lead to truth and to peace for everyone that actually wants that for everyone even while knowing that it can never happen. A compass needle only points North, and in doing so gives context to all other directions of the rose if it spins freely on the pin in the center.

I’m a late bloomer. I’m supposed to be that way. I woke to my adult mind at the age of 33, in rehab for crack, and, after a year of sobriety, drank heavily for a dozen years trying to put it back to sleep because I didn’t want to do all the work that properly not being able to pick a side that isn’t hateful and oppressive forces me to do. I have to do my best to understand what the truth is no matter where it takes me, and I need to do the toughest thing of all first, and figure out who I am so I can set the pin for a while and get my bearings.

As an INFP, I am literally engineered to develop my self control, my rational mind, my flotation devices, late in life, and until then struggle against drowning in an ocean of feelings, hyper-awareness, and imagination which, if you lean as far to the turbulent side of the type as I do, means that the waters are rough, for me, and those around me.

I woke up where I stood, at the point of a triangle defined by myself, a cheery supreme court prosecutor who couldn’t get enough wine, and while seeming very British, wasn’t, and a Scottish, left-handed, whiskey-guzzling architect who’s shirts, despite all efforts at tucking, straightening, and buttoning, seemed to instantly revert to a state of ‘I just woke up on the office couch.’ They were waiting for me to finish what I was saying, which I did. I can’t remember what it was, but I had their rapt attention because it was good, it had value, and a kind of power that I hadn’t noticed myself having before. It made me giddy because I was saying good stuff and I wanted to be heard some more.

I realized how raw and under prepared I was during that first year of not drinking or doing drugs, and it was made plain to me that words I’d say required the sober backing of a character that I hadn’t yet grown to have any credibility, so I hid in drink for 12 more years before I tried again, in earnest, to find sobriety, and THEN quit drinking, which actually worked. That’s how rough and scary it is to accept that you are important, that you matter, and that you are enough, that you are worth fighting yourself for until you no longer have to.

The hardest thing in life is to accept (I could leave it at that) first, that you are powerful, and next, that you don’t know what to do.

I say a lot of things that I don’t clearly see how to represent. I also read about topics that I don’t fully understand, and store a lot of information that I don’t know what to do with. I act like a much better person than I feel I am, and I feel that way because I act like a much worse person than I actually am, sometimes, but less and less, and I keep trying, and working, because I need to know, and because I want to believe.

I’m a mediator.

That’s my role, to talk about coming to understand.