Scrawls from Detox

'Confidential (or) Red Velvet Room'
by Ralle (oil on board)

 

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This is an interruption of astroPPM's

normal service. You will be returned

to your normal solar systemic

contemplations at the end

of this Message.

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A few words from the swaddling middle of the nebulous cloud people call 'detox.' I’ve been spending my days trying to tell myself that everything is all right. And it is.

But it isn’t.

Allow me to explain. For instance, I know perfectly well how to take care of myself. Right now, I have every confidence in myself although I seem to be afraid that time itself is going to stop.

You know...just stop.

I’m not sure it’s going to happen. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't going to happen. If it was a couple of billion years from now I'd worry. But it isn't then, it's now.

And yet still...I'm afraid. And frightened is a terrible thing to be.

I've known about being frightened for a very long time. Heck, I was frightened early and thoroughly, and haven't ever gotten past it, try as I may.

But that's different from what I'm going through at the moment. Withdrawal from one drug in combination with a deft switch-o/change-o of chemical substances to a second drug....? 

It turns out that's a little tricky. And our bodies get very hinkty when we screw around with their chemistry.


Plus I didn't come into this feeling all Zen and peaceful. I know one story of someone who binged before doing a chemical detox and (according to them) they paid.

Me, I just took the deteriorate-as-you-go path...which turned me into an emotional Klein bottle before I took my chemical plunge.
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 The question with a Klein Bottle is whether they're holding stuff in or exclusing

it out. They would also seem to answer the old question about the liquid

container being half empty or half full once and for all.

(Drawing credit: Klein Bottle by Tttrung, July 2006)

 
Yes, it's the thing which ended me up in the current prison of ghastliness, but it's still different.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

 I understand that what has happened to us in the past is over. I also understand that because what happened destroyed my boundaries - particularly those which have to do with time in the finite sense most other people conceive of it as, I'm one of those people who stands on the brink staring into the abyss...well aware of what it is and equally well aware of the fact that other people haven't got a clue as to how scary 'scary' can really be.

Bless 'em. Bless all those people for all they don't know. May they never encounter it, may they never learn just how powerful power can really be.

I’m not alone in my terrified psyche, but I understand that any and every time we mess with our brain chemistry, we pay a price. The common form is inebriation – we all know the evils there, and that’s bad enough. But what I’m doing is transferring forms of inebriation – and that’s a process which is like getting sloshed around in some brain chemistry-filled bathtub.

I’m safe, I’m warm and cool as needed. I’m not very hungry (a common withdrawal thing, I hear) but I’m pretty robotic about making sure a can of soup gets consumed and something added to that.

Just think….with all of this hassling, I’m still one of the few truly privileged humans on the planet.

Also to think – by US standards I’m pretty darn poor.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

So I’m spending my days trying to be productive in whatever way I can manage it. I have a few friends who seem to be ‘withdrawal-proof’ who find it not offensive to be in the company of someone standing under the sluice of a brain drain.

I have two planets in Scorpio: Saturn and the Moon. They’re in the first – most physical and personal decan of the sign. While putting up with the nausea, headaches, body pain and lack of focus (total. It’s like having my attention span melted into a tub of hot cheese and topped with….) I still wonder what everyone else is experiencing as the solar eclipse is closing in.

And just wait…the Sun enters Scorpio next week.
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Sunrise over the South Pacific as photographed by ISS Expedition 35

(Photo credit: NASA-JPL, May 2013)

 

Okay…so where did I put that planet? I really should try to stay ground. (Or maybe just get grounded, yes.)

Hopefully this will all end at some point…there must be an end to the withdrawal thing, right?

Please tell me that there is!

I now know why some addicts turn and run at the mention of detox. What I don’t understand is why anyone who gets through this would go back and put themselves in a position where they might have to do it again?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Somewhere inside this mess, I’m sure I’m sane – if thoroughly strange. In a sense it reminds me of a couple of years ago, when after getting baked in an MRI for just over three hours (you'd think someone would realize doing that to a human being isn't a swell idea...) I emerged unable to speak and really pretty much think.

It’s called aphasia, and it’s also pretty bizarre. I was lucky…I recovered within a couple of hours. But wouldn’t you know…? As word got around my circuit of friends about what had happened, a couple of them said they would have given good money to be there when I couldn’t speak.

That’s right – they wanted to tell me a couple of things in a moment when I couldn’t have a thing to say about it.

(Sadists.)

Then again, as the person whose PTSD has managed to make her - at least for twenty minutes (which counts) - into one of the monsters which gave her PTSD, life is obviously an obtusely grand game of what you don't own about what you can't own...that can harm others.

And that, in turn, will deepen the deep mistrust you hold about being you - the person in whom was instilled a shard of darkness when you were too young to know that certain kinds of darkness are a bad thing.

I don't know that I'm ever going to let myself be close to anybody ever again. Even trying sounds like a stunningly bad idea. If I can arrange it, maybe I'll go live where I can't possibly PeeTSD all over anybody else.

(Yes, I'll make sure I can upload blog posts to continue my work. I get it...work is my thing.)

Drowning in the pudding of real self-recrimination while caught in a whirlpool of aberrant chemistry...I don't recommend any it. I've seen plenty of shows on people who get forgiven their vile behavioral behaviors, I just don't suspect that will happen here. That's maybe because...well, when you've done something you don't respect yourself for, everyone else looks worthy of forgiveness. You? Not so much.

My awful lead-in to the detox doesn't make withdrawal any easier. Then again, one's own personal Hell is not supposed to be a five-star resort, merely practice for some main event beautifully and evocatively provoked in some singularly Dante-esqued manner.

The set dec better be good if it's going to come up to par with the soulless soulful misery of self-immolating maceration in spiritual, energetic exile.

My very particles hang, condemned.

I have been rightfully rejected and there is no self-redemption. Some things we claim. Some claim us. I'm done with trying to claim anything as it's been apparently and abundantly proven to me that it is not mine to be owner, but rather to be owned by.

Abandoned, the karmic creature crouches by the side of the highway, waiting.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

But there is good news. The last time I tried to quit taking dronabinol I was stopped cold about 4 days into the process.

We’re past 4 days now. All I have to do is deal with a couple of weeks of feeling like a towel which has cleaned 10,000 cars then been rung hard, run under a couple of trucks and a steamroller and left to mold and become a shadow of its former self, lost and forgotten under the front porch as winter swept in.

Got the picture?
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 Falling Star by Witold Pruszkowski

(1884, oil on canvas, currently housed at Poland's National Museum in Warsaw) 

Maybe more importantly…aren’t you glad I wrote and scheduled a stack of posts before I started this?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

I now return you to more normal digital programming. We’re almost at the end of Libra now…which means that after the next few rounds of dealings with others we’re going to move into an intensely personal phase involving being exposed to our innermost relationship with Self.

You call that Scorpio.
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