Well, bummer. Ideally, of course, clean, sober and unmedicated is the way to go. The doctors have a vested interest in keeping you medicated. I know that getting off the meds is fraught with danger, so must counsel against anything drastic and unadvised, but you need to keep that goal in mind and get a psych who'll work with you in that direction.
My own "rock bottom" story: At college in August 1979, I unwisely combined psilocybin mushroom tea (of which I'm sure I drank about a half-gallon) with Bolivian flake cocaine, and was crazy for about 10 days, until friends contacted my father, who sent my brother to get me. I then spent a month in the psych ward, where I was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. But I was undoubtedly a complete basket case, especially after they dosed me with thorazine. On release, I was prescribed stelazine (a milder anti-psychotic), but never liked the "numb" effect and wasn't very scrupulous about taking it.
So after a year of getting my shit back together, I returned to college, still kinda spacy (in fact, my nickname was Spacy Stacy) but I managed to make Dean's List my first semester back. One of the courses I aced was Intro to Psychology, which is where I learned that long-term use of anti-psychotic drugs leads to a neural disorder known as tardic dyskinesia. I completely quit the stelazine, immediately.
Insofar as I thereafter felt any need for a "tranquilizer," booze always did the trick. It wasn't until after I graduated and got busted for DUI in 1985 that I took a mandatory DUI education course and realized that, if I wasn't an alcoholic by definition, I was certainly headed in that direction. So I cut down signficantly on the booze and, after I married my wife in 1989, just about quit drinking altogether.
The great thing about having a history of serious substance abuse is that it makes you feel a lot less guilty about smoking. Yeah, I know cigarettes will probably kill me someday, but that's a small price to pay for the soothing mood-stabilization effect. Sorry, but I just can't handle the stress of a nicotine fit.
While heroin addiction is a completely different thing than my own experience, nevertheless I would offer a few points of advice:
1. Eat well and get your sleep. While I'm capable of getting jacked up on caffeine and nicotine and running with four hours sleep for a week, eventually that induces a hypomanic state, restlessness, irritability, grandiosity, etc. Sooner or later, your neural system needs to crash and recuperate. You'll note that Hunter S. Thompson -- who survived more serious substance abuse than any other modern journalist -- was always a believer in a big breakfast: Eggs, sausage, hashbrowns, juice, toast, etc. A fine example.
2. Get some exercise. I hate the whole concept of "exercise." But if I have access to a pool, I love nothing better than swimming laps -- always the backstroke, which is the least stressful way to swim. Otherwise, because I don't smoke in the house, I get my exercise by pacing around the backyard.
3. Find an outlet for your thrill-seeking tendencies. High-speed driving and fireworks are my favorites. Deadline reporting can also do the trick. The addictive personality is pre-set for thrills, Did you ever notice how Hunter Thompson was always experiencing crises on deadline? He'd procrastinate as a long as possible until the final rush to deadline required almost superhuman speed. Typical thrill junkie, you see -- fits in with his driving, guns, etc.
4. Get a good woman. This is what makes your atheism so unfortunate. What you really need, most of all, is a fine upstanding Christian woman who won't put up with your self-destructive egotistical bullshit.
5. Don't hang around with losers. Associating with drunks, dopeheads, etc., is just an invitation to trouble.
Anyway, if in 20 years, you're a semi-respectable citizen, you'll be better off than if you were a burnt-out loser. Or dead. Date: Monday, December 20, 2010, 4:13 PM
Why is it that half of the fucking conservative bloggers are ex-punk rockers or graffiti artists? And by half I guess I mean a couple that I've been talking to lately.
Nope, wasn't pulling your leg. I'm now on Suboxone maintenance.
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Robert McCain <r.s.mccain@att.net> wrote:
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Dude, I still think you're pulling my leg. Nevertheless: Having come of age in the '70s, I did damn near every drug I could get my hand on, but never once messed with needles. It was something of a cultural byword of the era -- captured in songs like "The Needle and the Spoon" -- that the one thing you never wanted to do was to become a junkie. The hard lessons of the '60s and all that.
Whatever you smoked, snorted or otherwise ingested, you never wanted to get *addicted.* The whole point of getting high was to be cool, and being a junkie was definitely not cool.
So with that '70s background, when the Great Suburban Teen Junkie Epidemic of the late 1990s made headlines (e.g., Plano, Texas), I was just like, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Did nobody warn those kids?"
And then there was the classic lesson from the 1980s, captured in the maxim of Robin Williams: "Cocaine is God's way of telling you you've got too much money."
Well, that was Back In The Day, and I married a teetotaller who keeps me in line. As to alcohol: I am a social drinker, and therefore drink only beer in a bottle. You can count your beers. After you get that cheerful two-beer buzz -- relaxed and mellow, somewhere around .04 BAC -- then you slow it down and pace yourself, so as never to reach actual drunkenness.
This is important in the DC social scene, where much of the most important business is transacted at receptions, happy hours, etc. Unfortunately, too many young people come to DC without losing that collegiate Let's Get Totally Hammered style of drinking, and you'll see them get embarrassingly sloppy two hours into the open-bar reception. "Another Jack on the rocks!" they'll yell to the bartender. Their friends will have to drag them out before they make complete fools of themselves and, as they leave, they'll see me still with a beer in my hand, going strong. "Damn, that McCain's a party animal!" But I never get past the two-beer buzz.
Oh: And always drink beer in a bottle, because if it ever comes to a fight, you've always got your weapon handy: "Puerto Rican switchblade."
Not that Beltway think-tank wonks, lobbyists and journalists are prone to bar-brawling, but you never know.
Date: Monday, December 20, 2010, 11:05 AM
The fuck have you been? Look at those old videos.
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:20 AM, Robert McCain <r.s.mccain@att.net> wrote:
A HEROIN ADDICT? WTF?
Subject: Re: Truce
Date: Monday, December 20, 2010, 12:33 AM
Sir-
I believe the protocol would be for me to buy you shots of tequila or something else of similar stoutness. I'm at a bar at the moment indulging in some myself. Yes, I will keep all of our communications confidential. You may publish whatever you like, and I suspect that some years down the road you might be rightfully inclined to do so. Or perhaps not. If you do, though, I merely request you give me your word as a gentlemen that anything published will be published in its entirety.
1. This is not really true. You don't know what I've been doing in recent months aside from a fraction of what is publicly known.
2. Certainly. But I'm not after further VF bylines. I will not write the magazine ever again, nor will I be writing for many others, if any. The reason for this will become apparent at some point in the next year.
3. Well, I'm not going to be participating in any other group blogs anyway. I did so for reasons that differ from the reasons that others generally have for doing so and have ended that phase, obviously, under circumstances that quite characteristically differ from those of others.
4. That is always an option. There are several reasons that I will not be taking that option. And I don't know how you view me exactly, but the fact is that I do not approve of the "horse race" stuff. Stacy, this sort of thing is destroying our country. It is not just unseemly, or "one of those things," or a necessary evil. It is destroying the country. And it is not destroying it in a good way, in the sense of bringing down the current regime. It is destroying it in a manner that leaves the lives of our military men - and the women and children who inevitably suffer in any war - at the mercy of Thomas Friedman, William Kristol, and whoever else is provided with a fucking megaphone by virtue of the flaws of our system. In the past, I made my money through that system, even if I tried to throw in some vitamins in doing so. I will not do it again. I am a criminal at heart and by genetics and environment and, in the past, by action, but I will
not participate in that process. If we're going to have a constitutional republic with the most powerful military in history and our finger in every pie, we need an informed electorate, and that electorate needs to be informed on the fundamentals, not the process, and for the purpose of informing them, not for the purpose of our own well-being. As it is, I think the American people have lost the right to make such determinations by virtue of their vices, and I disagree that any man has ever had any "right" to relieve others of their own rights, even if a large number of other men agree that such rights must be seized.
All in all, I understand the gist of what you are telling me. I am wasting time by engaging in silly blog-o-battles. I can absolutely understand how someone can come to that conclusion, and I appreciate you taking the time to advise me in that context. But there is more going on here than meets the eye, as is always the case. In regards to Project PM, the blog network is not the actual purpose. That is a means to an end. The end I can't tell you - I literally cannot tell you because I don't know yet what will this lead to, but suffice to say that I am doing something and if you are interested, you can get a sense by putting some pieces together. I will also answer any direct questions you ask me. Incidentally, I will not be including the chapter on you in the book when it goes to press with the new publisher - I have broken off with the original publisher, which has been fucking me over since I was 23, and Barry Eisler has gotten me an agent - and I
made that decision after our most recent conflict, as it would not be ethical for me to attack you without also referencing every bit of full disclosure that I would be forced by ethics to note, and I wouldn't even know where to begin going into that without boring those who are not you and me. There are also some practical reasons, but I ignored those until now.
At any rate, I believe I sent you the manuscript months ago so that you would have a chance to challenge anything written about you therein in advance of publication. Donald Douglas tells me you didn't receive it. If that is the case, let me know, and I will send it to you for you to read and thus better understand why although I appreciate you taking the time to give me advice, I cannot take most of it. Whatever you think of me - and much of the criticism is accurate - I am just as dedicated to what I think is right as were my brother, uncle, grandfathers, cousins, and friends who joined the military to fight for a better future. I couldn't join because I was arrested on my 18th birthday and spent much of the time since, up until a few months ago, as a heroin addict. I would have been thrown out in short order even if it were otherwise. At any rate, it is my opinion that I have the same natural right to fight against every form of tyranny as do
those who do so with the approval of that government which is itself the greatest source of tyranny under which the American people have suffered, to various extents, for several generations now, under the misguided concept of "majority rule."
May you be blessed by any and all things that are capable of bestowing blessings, and may you continue honestly on your own path to the truth, and may all of us seek to correct our own sins even as we attempt to correct the sins of others.
On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Robert McCain <r.s.mccain@att.net> wrote:
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It's not my place to advise you, BUT . . .
1. A byline in Vanity Fair (even the online version) is a helluva lot more valuable to you, career-wise, than anything else you've been doing in recent months.
2. You could probably get a lot more VF bylines by writing stuff that was more general-interest current-events/politics than by chasing after your own pet peeves and doing "inside the blogsphere" stories.
3. Rather than trying to bigfoot it in someone else's group blog, why not focus on building your brand with your own individual blog? Starting with a big fat "zero" on the Sitemeter might seem like a step down, but lots of people do it every day. And assuming you could build traffic -- I imagine you'd get occasional links from Sullivan, Greenwald and others of the atypical Left -- it would enhance your value as a freelancer, since you would be able to deliver a ready-made readership. Using your personal blog as a repository/outlet for your *idiosyncratic* work would sort of free you up to do more mundane reportorial journalism without feeling that you were losing your voice.
4. In case you haven't noticed, 2012 is an election year. About a dozen Republicans are seeking the nomination to challenge Obama. You've got an agent. You're a contributor to Vanity Fair and other publications. Uncompensated travel expenses are tax deductible. Do I have to add up that equation for you?
If you could suppress your intellectual disdain for *mere politics* -- and also suppress your appetite for playing "gotcha" -- there is a helluva lot of fun to be had in covering campaigns from the horse-race perspective. "Punch a hat-pin through your frontal lobes," as HST put it.
Such a course of action, it would seem to me, would be more fruitful as a professional endeavor for a young writer than the speculative project of building some kind of super-aggregator. Of course, schlepping around to Rotary luncheons in Iowa and New Hampshire might not be your dream job, but the mismatched quality of the assignment would in itself have a certain novelty appeal, don't you think? It would be a challenge, an experience and a potential growth experience: How does someone with your background go about doing deadline reporting in a competitive news environment?
Of course, if there is to be a truce, you'll have the common decency not to mention that I ever made any such suggestion. This e-mail never existed. And if I see you at CPAC -- or in Des Moines or Manchester -- you owe me beers.
-- RSM
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Subject: Truce
To: "Robert McCain" <r.s.mccain@att.net>
Date: Sunday, December 19, 2010, 2:19 PM
Under the ever-shifting and wacky circumstances, I will not be filing a libel suit against you next week as originally planned as I obviously have a shiny new conflict to play with and anyway I hate courts. Suffice to say that Johnson is getting my full attention; you once compared me to a Maoist interrogator, but you never went so far as to claim that I might actually be worked for the state that Mao founded, for fuck's sake. And as of last night several commenters there were discussing the possibility of alerting the FBI to the allegedly illegal activities that they have concocted for me through the traditional deductive process of the circlus jerklus, which is fancy Latin speak that you Southerners would not understand.
Regarding your latest post, Charles never ended up getting very involved in Project PM, largely because I recruited several experienced programmers who were interested enough to develop the software component on a voluntary basis, rather than for pay as would have been the setup with Johnson.
Merry Christmas to you and your family.
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302
| -- Regards, Barrett Brown 512-560-2302 | -- Regards, Barrett Brown 512-560-2302
| -- Regards, Barrett Brown 512-560-2302 |