Surrender Aurora

by W. Strawn Douglas

  I don’t mind surrendering to a group of fellow addicts but caving in to the police and the Republicans sounds like a sin. Bill Murray said, “When I won’t talk to the government it’s called a felony, but when the government won’t talk to me it’s called politics.” To that end I love the company of 60-year-old heroin addicts who got clean years ago. They know the paths I want to walk. I feel life as a nurse will take me to different places than just what the American Medical Association wants me to go in.

  Pop was so poor in medical school that he used to eat oatmeal for breakfast, and steal lunch from the hospital he was interning at, and fry up the morning’s leftover oatmeal for dinner. The tribe of scientists he was part of knew just how far they could push themselves in the raw survival skills they could do. That was harsh and indicative of the slide-rule mindset that was prevalent until the pocket calculator was invented. Alan Turing and the universal machine. Turing’s efforts at creating the world’s first computer brought us to the Texas Instruments calculators we now take for granted. A cool hustle. We are all just hustlers looking for a use for our talents. Those talents are our “hustles.”

  Pop hated oatmeal forever after that. He earned his bacon and eggs after such an ordeal.

  That is the curse I give to all my detractors. Let them eat oatmeal. I have earned myself a steak and though it does not come with an ale, I can survive on my meager rations. As a nurse I will have the option of being the dietician. I will plan a menu of bison steaks and a salad of almonds and dried cherries for all the guests to dine on. To such a fate I will surrender, and yes, that it comes out with no Demerol for me, I will be comforted by the fact it is no longer oatmeal. After I feed the masses, I will have leftovers that are not a dinner of fried oatmeal and a pauper with winning cards. So the game goes on and moves forward.

  To such a fate I can surrender. They will come to the NA meeting with tales of surrendering to a higher power and I will give them a god that is the universe. I can share a rich man’s cup of wine. We will feed the poor and educate a new generation. We will be the envy of the world and my oatmeal will be a New York strip.

  We will get cannabis for the pain patients. I will gladly serve as a nurse in such a world. It gets me my steak, and yes, we will feed the masses, but at a rate that feeds us too. The masses will have their Pinot Noir, their Burgundy, and their Chardonnay. We will have sparkling cider and a Monster Green, or Orange, or Java. We will survive as a small nation does, by balancing the greater powers in such a way that we balance their energies and create a small pocket of neutral space between them, for ourselves. They will have their smoke, and the dust of the day, but we will survive too.

  We will surrender to the needs of the greater powers but we will have our smaller, more substantial victories. All is well in our little corner of the world.

  Free at last, free at last, we will be free at last. There will come a day when everything is free at last. A day will soon dawn upon a world starved for freedoms and liberties to be enjoyed by all of us. To such a world I will gladly surrender. To whom should we surrender? When should we surrender, and on what terms? We will determine our fate and if it is that we should surrender, at least we will cook the dinners and live in the big house. If being slaves is our fate, then let us be house slaves and not have a leaky roof and windows that do not close. Someday we will have houses of our own. Everything in stages, everything modular, everything in pieces. Every day another piece. To this fate we will surrender.

  We will not just be swept aside wholesale. We will have our concessions and our little victories. When once we looked out at a world at war with our petty freedoms, we can now look it in the eye and say, “We control the kitchen now, and we decide when it is a good day for steak, and when it is a day for oatmeal.”

  The day comes nigh that the cannabis is the prescription for many ills. That liberty is upon us now. It is a small thing but it means the door, long shut to us all, is opening just a bit. When we dealt with cop and State, and they said there is no food for any of us, we once tightened our belts and soldiered on, but now things are different. The door is opening, and when we were told to surrender completely, we now can dictate our own terms of surrender, or to never surrender at all.

  The State will need us in this brave new world. Our experts and wise men will no longer be hunted. When Marley sang, “How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look, some say it’s just a part of it, we’ve got to fulfill the book,” then we have arrived, and all is well. We have incurred many casualties but the journey, though hard and agonizingly slow, will have been worth it.

  A trail of tears is now over. We have earned this peace, so rejoice in our new frontier, our promised land.

  We can surrender to god, or to the universe, or to the group, or to the eternal spirit that is perpetuated endlessly. To a State infected with Republicans, the answer is ‘No Quarter.’ But to each other the word is given. We are family and we are the same flesh. We survive as a pack and though we war over who gets to be the Alpha of the day, we still live and die as a collective. We surrender to the survival needs of the greater group. And in doing so we prevail. We surrender to win. Those are the terms of our surrender.

  Blog Post Eleven

  Fritzkrieg

  Dear Sean,

  My old Jesuit Catholic girlfriend Ms. Fitzgerald (We call her Fritz, or Fritzkrieg) is a tough nut to crack. She is a lovely lady but she has expensive tastes. She liked cocaine in her day. She got the stuff for free so who can blame her. She was very Catholic about the whole thing. Very Christian so I would have to say you would like her. Your tenet that Jesus is a Buddhist may help her someday. I find your Irish Catholic perspective to be honest. It’s simple and it does the trick, and especially in this nightmare of twelve-step nonsense that concerns us now. The twelve steps of NA will always bind you, me, and Fritzy, so I feel we can all get to know each other a bit.

  You said you were virtually an addict from the first day you did cocaine. I can respect that. I was always appalled at its expense but I did enough cheap drugs that my mind is thoroughly destroyed. I hallucinate without the right drugs for mind control. I still smoke some pot but I have had to accept the fact that I have a mental illness. I have been ill that way since before the Marines. I have a claim in for VA benefits that hinges on some key points. I was hospitalized before the USMC and they will try to say my illness was a pre-existing medical condition. My case hinges on the idea that the Marines made my condition worse, and that I am no longer employable because of that intensified quality of my illness. My tour of duty exacerbated and increased the degree of my unemployable state.

  Between you and me, those conditions are true, but I plan on getting the VA benefits and using them to make myself employable once again. While I am permanently disabled, I may be able to work part time in the future. If I can get my VA benefits, I may be able to shack up with Fritz. I will be able to afford to go to school and support a family of one simultaneously. She has expensive tastes but nothing I cannot afford. She is well connected so I don’t worry about it.

  My point today is that the book you recommended, Inside Rehab by Fletcher, is great. It clearly reports that scientific remedies are better than twelve-step modalities in treating chemical dependency issues. The older notion that you need god and religion is swept aside as a broom removes sugar from a kitchen floor. I feel your own Catholic mindset will be crucial as I try to dissect the mind of my beloved Fritzy. Like a junkie with a fresh bag of goodies, I report to you that the book is just what I was looking for. Fritz is so tuned into the spiritual side of things that my criticisms must feel like atheism to her.

  My standard format of writing and speaking is the art of the complaint. I complain well. I am superb at crafting a sensible protest. I guess that’s because my best action at seeking what I want out of the world is to complain until I have my needs met. Even my VA claim is a form of that. I could try hard work but I think I will let the VA pay for college
first. Then I will try working part time. As it is said, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” I will endeavor to squeak in just the right way.

  Your Buddhist Jesus may save her someday.

  * * *

  How It Works

  If you want what we have to offer, and are willing to make the effort to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps. These are the principles that made our recovery possible.

  1.We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.

  2.We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

  3.We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

  4.We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

  5.We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

  6.We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

  7.We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

  8.We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

  9.We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  10.We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

  11.We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

  12.Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

  This sounds like a big order, and we can’t do it all at once. We didn’t become addicted in one day, so remember—easy does it.

  There is one thing more than anything else that will defeat us in our recovery; this is an attitude of indifference or intolerance toward spiritual principles. Three of these that are indispensable are honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness. With these we are well on our way.

  We feel that our approach to the disease of addiction is completely realistic for the therapeutic value of one addict helping another is without parallel. We feel that our way is practical, for one addict can best understand and help another addict. We believe that the sooner we face our problems within our society, in everyday living, just that much faster do we become acceptable, responsible, and productive members of that society.

  The only way to keep from returning to active addiction is not to take that first drug. If you are like us you know that one is too many and a thousand never enough. We put great emphasis on this, for we know that when we use drugs in any form, or substitute one for another, we release our addiction all over again.

  Thinking of alcohol as different from other drugs has caused a great many addicts to relapse. Before we came to NA many of us viewed alcohol separately, but we cannot afford to be confused about this. Alcohol is a drug. We are people with the disease of addiction who must abstain from all drugs in order to recover.

  * * *

  James bought Anne Fletcher’s book Inside Rehab and read 123 pages of it before meeting Sean for an NA meeting in a church basement in Rochester. They both sat in the car outside of the church.

  “This is ‘creationist health care,’ ” said James. “This is criminal-grade stupidity. People are actually paying money for this and getting nothing but prayer as a product. No wonder it has such a bad failure rate.”

  Sean smiled and opened his car door. “You noticed that, did you? It’s never meant to work. It’s a complete fraud. It’s just a spiritual wing of law enforcement. Sending people court-ordered to a God-based program is totally unconstitutional.”

  “How did this happen?” James asked.

  “There were a lot of factors. Actually it has evolved fast. Blame the culture wars of the sixties on some of it. Drug use has drifted in and out of the eyes of society for quite some time. A lot of people feel it is linked to the Vietnam War. The whole war was an embarrassment to the Republicans. They got their Reagan-era revenge by attacking the people they credited with their loss of the war. They saw Democrats as being disobedient soldiers who refused to die to stop communism. The soldiers who had refused to die also used drugs. So the Republicans went after all those people who refused to serve as being the ones most deserving of some revenge.”

  James withdrew a cigarette and got out of the car. “This is creationist health care. It’s like Christian Scientist prayer over surgery. When you need heart surgery you get prayer.” He lit his cigarette and said, “I’m beginning to see the light here. There are repeat customers at residential drug treatment getting nothing but prayer and meditation.”

  Sean cut him off and said, “Don’t undervalue meditation. Remember that Jesus was a Buddhist.” He smiled.

  “Oh yeah. Now you are the one getting ridiculous,” said James.

  “But I am serious,” said Sean. “Completely by accident the Twelve Steps are productive. You may only see the godly rhetoric but the steps have been used for over eighty years. Some of them work.”

  “Don’t be absurd. This is a smokescreen. The evidence-based treatment with doctoral-grade therapists works better than the prayer-based concepts.”

  “Then why not get both? We can get the religion and the science too. God made science. I am a creationist treatment supporter. I like religion. Thomas Merton may have been assassinated.” Sean smiled and lit his cigarette.

  “Who is Merton?” inquired James.

  “Merton was a revolutionary Catholic priest. He was electrocuted in the Orient. You should look him up. I am a very Catholic man. We were boys when we last met. It’s been twenty years since we both shared a beer. Now all you get is a smoke,” said Sean. “Care to inspect the state of ‘creationist health care’?”

  James looked at him and continued to smoke. “Sure, I’m game.”

  They proceeded to hug the greeter, a middle-aged stout man with brown hair, a beard, and a camouflage ball cap. He was also smoking. Nearly all of the 15 or so people were exchanging greetings with lit cigarettes in their hands.

  The people laughed and seemed to know each other. James noticed that a quarter of them were women and most of the men had short hair, a very non-drug talisman.

  “So who are you? I am Dale,” said the greeter to James.

  “The name’s James McGregor. I’ve been sober for twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s a start. This your first meeting?” said Dale.

  “You might call it that. I was in a few meetings six years ago but that was court-ordered,” said James.

  “We are all court-ordered here. But it works so who is complaining?” said Dale.

  “Sean! How have you been?” said a young woman, thirtyish and white. Slender and gothically attired in black with beads.

  “Simmy! Good to see you. Meet my friend James. It’s his first meeting in six years.”

  “Hello, Simmy. My name’s James McGregor. Glad to meet you.” James transferred his cigarette to his left hand and offered his right hand to shake, which she grasped. “So what’s the drill here? Seems to be a lot of tobacco. I see a few energy drinks too. You guys push the chemical envelope without doing any real drugs.”

  Simmy smiled. “You noticed that, did you? We get as close as we can to a buzz. Call it old habit. How long have you been sober?”

  “One day.”

  “A beginning is good. Can’t say a day is too short.” She seemed at a loss for words for a moment and smoked her cigarette, blowing out a series of small, mobile smoke rings.

  Sean kept up the small talk with a collection of blue-collar types of both genders. He and James were once princes of the 4,000 but here they were as blue-collar as Dale.

  Simmy talked about her daughter to James. The child was four years old and very inquisitive. Preschool programming meant Simmy could go to school. The mother stated she was trying to im
prove her earning power with an X-ray technician’s degree from the local Vo-tech. James offered his interest in nursing but qualified it by saying school could ruin his Social Security status. They continued to talk until just before 8 p.m. Then Simmy and the others put out the tobacco and walked inside to the ring of tables. They each took a chair and sat down.

  “Welcome to the Saturday meeting of dopeless hope fiends. I am an addict and my name is Merideth.”

  The crowd responded, “Hello, Merideth.”

  The meeting proceeded and James noted the welcome. All interested in sobriety were welcome. If you are looking for a date, please leave. Literature is available. Readings were done. The serenity prayer was recited as a group: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  The group then did the keychain recitation. James got a white keychain for his first 24 hours of sobriety. Simmy picked up a black keychain for two years or more of sobriety. Page got one for one year. Page’s keychain was glow-in-the-dark.

  The meeting proceeded mostly as James had remembered it from six years ago. A tearful middle-aged man recounted getting close to injecting speed and at the last minute chose to dump the injection needle’s contents into a sink. Another woman spoke tearfully about getting her kids back. Dale spoke of letting go from his behavior of controlling his progress through the steps. He felt better about letting God control his progress.

  James thought about his own contention of “creationist medicine” and weighed the claim against these people seemingly working the steps of a program that James found himself trying to dismiss.

  James was taken aback by the sincerity of the speakers and was amazed that something court-ordered, so artificial, could be so pithy and real. Here were people targeted by the state for cultural assassination speaking acceptingly of their fate. Even seeing their fate as the will of God and finding love in their process.

  The meeting closed with a short reading, a group recitation and group hug, and more tobacco.

  * * *

  James woke on Sunday morning and walked the half mile to the bus station. He then got onto the 10 a.m. bus and settled in to read more of Fletcher while the bus made its way north.