It took about two weeks and 12 blog posts before I started feeling good again. I got back to the park and they still had signs up about cougars, probably would ad infinitum. I realized the bear spray made a sound just like the canister I used to keep our cat Timmy off the bookshelf. I wore it on my hip in a fanny pack like a gun holster. The Charlie Kirk thing became distressing on several levels: first, feeling a “serves you right” attitude when the news hit, then shock he was actually dead, then wishing I didn’t feel so bad about my first, gut reaction. Realizing the way I felt was just another brick in the authoritarian wall, being made to feel less human.

Pressed against the bed like spreadable cheese unable to sleep. Would Charlie Kirk become just another forgotten footnote in history or trigger more death and violence in his absence, a Franz Ferdinand? Like 9/11, an opening for violence on another scale. Not to mention October 7.

The dog was up too, smacking her lips, and I wondered if I’d hear the owl again at 0230h., like if that was its feeding time and it was expecting someone to bring it dinner. Instead it was the bobcat I nodded off to, the look of it in the dark from my last walk to the lake. Not the strut of a bigger cat, but the self-conscious gait of an animal who knows it’s lower on the predatorial ladder. Would not end well with a pack of coyotes.

My friend and neighbor Gregg said on their game cams it was always the coyote around midnight and then the bobcat just pre-dawn, like they worked different shifts.

The bobcat could be seen ambling across the gravel road: first a rabbit in the dim light, then a small coyote, then a cat. It paused many times looking over its shoulder at me, then disappeared.

And I slipped off the ledge myself, into sleep. Was with Dawn at the lake that Saturday in September she asked, would I get help with my drinking? Knowing then I had to stop but needed about a month of mourning first, to get it out of my system. Not sure the exact date in October I quit but it was a Monday, five years ago now. Couldn’t remember the name of that liqueur I liked so much either, which is funny. It’s like I blocked it. At the end I was taking metered hits off that bottle in the garage. I had all the bottles ganged together in boxes, gave most to my friend Mike. A kind of ritualistic thing loading them in the trunk and meeting him there in West Seattle. Plenty of Scotch, tequila, gin. Then all the weird stuff too.

Couldn’t remember the name of that liqueur but remembered well the time I first heard about it, could replay the conversation with a bartender. Then saw the name of it in print in the book The Goldfinch; the kind, older father figure keeps it in his study. Just seeing the name and visualizing the scene reactivated a part of my brain I didn’t want to think about anymore. Some don’t get to choose.

It had been almost two weeks since I’d been to the park. The landscape had taken on a desperate look, a slow collapse. The shade of brown on the ferns was like a rotting apple, how it crumbled inwards. The color of decay.

My dear friend Don used AI and his compositional skills to put some of my posts to music; this is a poem about addiction. The angular poppy vibe of it reminds me of the early 2000s Scottish band, Franz Ferdinand.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, prose

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir