Rise & Repeat
Pizza delivery guys need more respect. They're the best velociraptor wranglers in the biz.
Alex DeOrio
Today is… one of those days. It’s humid, sticky, gloomy, rainy; all around an ugly day. Throughout my life, my moods have coincided with the weather, and so my current state of mind is self-explanatory.
Since a bullet fractured my sinuses, I’ve experienced respiratory trouble. Today, that means I’m stuffy, feverish and achy. And to add a cherry on top, I’m pretty sure I have an ear infection too.
I’m not used to feeling this way sober. Before I was shot, there was a 99% chance feeling this way would have driven me to self-medicate by dinner time. In a nutshell, today’s not the best of days for me to be sitting in a café writing a blog post. There’s no fluidity in my juices, no snappy buzz humming from the creative side of my brain. Which leads me to the topic at hand: going when the going gets tough.
Almost by force of habit, I’ve noticed I’m constantly nit-picking the ironies of life. One of the biggest I’ve noticed since getting shot in March revolves around drug addiction. Civilians say addiction is beatable. Doctors say it’s a disease. Addicts say it’ll always be there like a form of grief, but that you develop tools and strategies to help fight it and live with it. Somewhere in between all those utterly useless debates is the bizarre fact that somehow, some way, while recovering from what is most certainly one of the most traumatic injuries imaginable, I haven’t had even so much as a craving to go and get high. In the spirit of being truthful, I’ll confess I took a bump of cocaine to help level me out from alcohol while in Vegas for my friend's bachelor party. I’m not letting myself off the hook. But all things considered, if that’s the worst that happened, then I’ll take it with open arms.
See, between the ages of 19 and 35, I can say in all honesty, I consumed enough painkillers, cocaine, Xanax and ketamine to kill 50 people. I even had a brief run with montega during the quarantine as well as after my father died. Turned out whatever I was sniffing wasn’t even dope. It was straight fentanyl. Unbeknownst to me, the guy who sold me the shit was kind enough to add an extra ingredient to the mix called “tranq,” which literally eats away your flesh. Sure enough, I ended up in the hospital. Had I admitted myself a day or two later, they said I would have turned septic and they would’ve had to amputate my legs to save my life. (Hey, no biggie. The bullet took my eye and sense of smell. Losing my legs would have been a cakewalk, right??)
Although that’s the worst it ever got medically, the truth is I've been getting high on everything else day in, day out for almost half my life. I’d use when I had a headache. I’d use when my foot hurt. I’d use before and after the gym or a sparring session. I’d also use on the best days of my life. When I woke up happy. When everything was going exactly as it should. There was no formula to it. No rhyme or reason. As long as money and drugs were in the equation, I was always right at home. Didn’t matter the circumstances.
When I got out of jail in ‘16, I relapsed and nearly ODed within a few hours of walking out the gates. When I got out this last time in the beginning of ‘22, for one reason or another, I put the hard stuff on the shelf, without so much as a mild itch. Didn’t even go back to smoking cigarettes. It seemed like I’d lost my taste for virtually everything. And what did I do? Did I join AA or NA and work the 12 steps? Did I become a public speaker? Did I use this new drug-free way of life in a positive manner to help myself and others? Not even by a fucking long shot.
Before I even got released, I already had a buyer set up for the multi-pound shipment of weed I had left-over, still vacuum-sealed and in storage. By the end of my first week home, I had taken the money from the transaction along with my savings to purchase as much cocaine as possible. With prices being at an all-time low combined with my sobriety, my plan was to raise a significant stash, retire and then invest. Here’s another irony for you: it was this, not years of drug abuse and violent behavior, but this decision I made to rise to the top of the Game - doing the one thing I knew how to do best, that nearly got me killed.
Fast forward to today, roughly 6 months after getting shot in the head. I try to remain humble, try to stay grateful, try to avoid boasting about anything. But for once, I’ve got to give credit where it’s due. I don’t know what changed inside me. But the fact that I’ve been able to get through this disaster without narcotics or therapy or having a complete mental meltdown or even going on a single bender is a phenomenon that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wrap my head around.
And yet in another form of irony, lack of therapy wasn’t even by choice. After 25 years of being forced or coerced into seeing a shrink, from the time I was in 6th grade, I am finally in a situation where I both desperately need and want therapy but can’t fucking get it. The few places that were supposed to help me turned me away because they weren’t “equipped” to handle such a violent crime. Apparently, people like me need to get in the back of the line. Although this isn’t the right platform to express that frustration, it needs to be said in order to emphasize how remarkable it is that I’ve been able to keep it together.
When I got shot, somehow I didn’t immediately lose consciousness. About a minute or two after the piece of shit (I mean the shooter) ran off into his getaway vehicle, I kicked open the car door, pushed my way out, cluelessly oblivious to whatever the fuck just happened. I stumbled out into the pouring rain in the darkness, seeing virtually nothing and balanced myself against the hood of my car. I wasn’t sure if a grenade went off or if an asteroid fell from the sky and landed on me. But somehow, despite my disorientation, I knew I had to keep standing. For some reason, I had this feeling that if I fell down on the street, I would never get back up. I don’t know how long I was really out there balancing myself. Could’ve been five minutes or three hours for all I knew. But eventually a pizza delivery man drove past me, slammed on the brakes, did a u-turn and pulled up to me yelling, “Bro! You need an ambulance?” To this day I don’t even know what the guy looked like and yet he may be the prime reason I’m still alive.
My theory is that something in that fateful moment manifested a survival instinct inside of me that wasn’t there prior. A will and desperation to live that told me I needed to get out and get up! So far, that instinct has followed me through my recovery. And as a result, I’ve finally learned how to face life on life's terms, regardless of how minimal or painful.
So here I am today, with my cousin Eli, sitting in a bland café, tired and under-the-weather, writing away my thoughts and feelings. It’s that same instinct that got me out of bed this morning, miserable and sick as a dog, to the café with my laptop to continue my journey and complete my mission.
Eli Kimbell
Whew. Hard to top that.
Alex and I started our discourse today on the phone, as he was preparing to make the hajj from outer Brooklyn to our café. “Is it raining in the city?” he asked. “Nah…” I said, peering out the window of my apartment at the biblical storm clouds brewing overhead, simultaneously realizing I hadn’t turned a single light on in the apartment since I got up. Today, I am a cave dweller, a hermit. “But it looks like it’s about to rain, I think.” My eye-dar was spot on. Who needs a weather app? And while I’m on the topic, who needs a map? There’s a greater sense of pride in forging your own path than relying on the whims of modern technology to get you from point A to point B. That’s all I’ll say on that for now.
If the beginning of this post seems a bit directionless, that’s because it is. The first thing Alex said to me when I met him at the café today was that he was feeling a little out of it, a little shitty. I’m feeling the same way both physically and mentally at the moment after a long week of sending unanswered emails and playing hard-nosed recreational soccer at 10pm last night. All that commitment to thought and trying to figure out the world and using lofty language to express ideas about trees and nature and friendship and birds and sunsets was nowhere to be found today, both within our thick skulls and outside of them, in the static clouds above the city. Sometimes we all need a break from making progress to recharge, and to laugh at the world if it gives us something to laugh about in the meantime. Goddammit, there I go again.
Anyhoo, the point here is that this is the topic that makes sense for today, because for the most part Alex and I just looked at each other slack-jawed across a café table for the first 15 minutes we were here, internally groaning in an effort to think of something revolutionary, life-changing, engaging to read. Nobody wanted to commit to a topic like “when should you cry? And why is that a bad question?” because it’s just too damn much right now, dig?
So instead we’re focusing on the hard part of all this instead of just doing the hard part. What got us writing, eventually, was a comment Alex made about feeling a bit under the weather. He said that he’s not used to feeling a little shitty while sober. Sure, the vast majority of you who are reading this post are not addicts. But there’s something in that simple comment that I think is pretty relatable to most people, and it’s no dramatic piece of insight. We all have these kinds of days. Sometimes they come in bunches, sometimes they’re one-offs, sometimes they’re only half-days or moments. And we all have the same instinct, and that is to table it for now, close the laptop, slack off, and turn to comfort. Comfort just takes different forms for each of us.
Everything about today screams mundanity, and even Alex’s comment was delivered with the shrouded malaise that a comment like, “ugh, I gotta do laundry today” shares. But what he is talking about, in so many words, is legitimately herculean. It’s the repetition of these kinds of days, when the same thought probably crosses his mind, that is so incredibly motivating. Each of those individual moments thinking about the ease or relief that might come from using again is a marathon. And each time that thought has come since March, Alex has crossed the finish line, completely spent, with his arms raised victoriously overhead. Imagine being locked in an empty room for an indefinite amount of time with only a Four Loko at your disposal. Most of us are going to drink it, eventually.
So that’s why we’re both here today, poppin’ a squat at the big corner table in the café. Nobody else in Hell’s Kitchen wanted overpriced coffee on this dreary Friday afternoon, so we got the good table. We both arrived lackadaisical, with no plan, no decent trains of thought, slightly dazed and dreading the prospect of trying to write anything worth reading. But we’re here, and we’re trying, because we committed to putting a post out every week.
Earlier this week, I came across something Donald Glover said about his success. He said, “people will say to me, why can’t I do what you do?” referring to the steady stream of genius-level creativity he breathes into the world across disciplines and with superhuman efficiency. “And the answer is, you just don’t want to do it!”
We’re here because we want to do it, even when we don’t. Alex is here because he wants to do it, even when he doesn’t. Sometimes it’s easy, but much, much more frequently it’s really, really hard. And if he can do it, I better not be complaining.
I’ll sign off this week with a quote that is controversially attributed to the incomparable Mookie Wilson, of Bill Buckner fame: “When I’m in a slump, I comfort myself by saying if I believe in dinosaurs, then somewhere, they must be believing in me. And if they believe in me, then I can believe in me. Then I bust out.”
This is all really just an exercise in finding your dinosaur, knowing what your Four Loko is, and consistently being able to feel the thrill of dino-back riding before you mount your velociraptor, so that it becomes the comfort you turn to, even if it feels a lot more dangerous and you can’t get the idea of nut-crushing speed out of your head. And at that speed, it’s difficult to think about how a Four Loko might make you feel.