Actual Addiction + Ursine Imaginings
and how I wanna be an apex predator, kind of.
My weekend was unaccountably strange. To the casual observer, not a whole lot actually happened, but unforeseen elements of deep-seated traumas reared up and there was a whole lot of Ian being supportive and hyperdramatic loudness defining too many of my daylight hours. So yesterday I went to the gym to work it all off, but the medicine-through-muscle-building didn’t work for some reason, so I walked to a nearby multiplex-type movie theater and sat in the lobby looking out the window, weighing validity of Cocaine Bear as an art form.
I haven’t seen it. I had enthusiastically planned to, but this morning over coffee Ian mused on the notion that “a bunch of coked out Hollywood execs” put this one together and that’s part of a larger and wildly-not-cool motivation to make cocaine into something funny, and, I’ll add, something that makes you tough and manly. Gross.
None of my dad’s friends will talk to me about who my otherwise legendarily generous, compassionate, and loving father became in his darkest hours, which is to say, the years before he was my father when, in the manner of the men of his milleu, he “snorted half of Columbia,” to borrow a phrase from the one friend of his who will at least allude to that period. (He has his reasons. “Jack had no need for me at that time,” this person told me with deep sadness in his voice. He wouldn’t go into detail, but suffice to say that when addiction had my father in its grip, all of his friends were very, very white and very, very rich, and this guy is neither. After my dad checked himself into rehab and overcame his habits to a heroic and enduring degree, they made ready amends and remained brotherly-close for the rest of my father’s life.)
All I know is that the nose-wreckage began in the wake of my grandfather’s death. The two of them never understood each other, to put it mildly, which, my dad once confessed to me, is why he and I had the iconically strong relationship we did (…do, if you believe in something more than this.) He’d do fatherhood differently, and do it differently, he did. (As an aside, my grandmother found a journal from the early years of her own motherhood wherein she recorded that my father, age six, asked her, “What do I do if I want to divorce my wife? Do I have to leave a note or can I just take the kids and go?” he apparently always knew that he wasn’t the marrying kind but would grow up to be a devoted father).
I wish I could talk to my father about Cocaine Bear. He had a greater appreciation for truly absurd comedies than anyone I’ve ever known (one night, after seeing a comedy with a particularly over-the-top sight-gag ending, we relived the scene on the way home and he started laughing so hard he literally couldn’t drive and had to pull over). But gore was not his thing. Gore was not any of my immediate family’s thing which is why it took me so damn long to figure out that I love horror, but I digress. I would love to know if my dad would see the Cocaine Bear as the crazed ursine release we all need in these unpredictable times or if he would find it a potentially-destructive message that’s less a vehicle for its for its stars and director than it is for the drug.
The first time I saw the trailer, I laughed my ass off at the sight of the bear leaping onto the ambulance, because I can’t imagine a more horrifying nightmare than narrowly escaping a bear who’s already attacked you only to find that you haven’t escaped at all. Laughing at primal nightmares might be the most powerful thing we can do, as human beings. And yes, I also laughed at, “The bear did cocaine. The bear! Did cocaine!” because it was just so phenomenally stupid and frankly I was tired of thinking right-then.
I have hardly any history with drugs. When I was 22 and openly enraged, kind strangers in Iowa City used to hand me pot because I seemed to need it. It helped. My rage was amorphous and ill-directed, and external assistance to seeing that all was actually full of love helped me and probably by extension helped others. But I haven’t smoked since then. I’ve never done hallucinogens or ecstasy because several people have vocally assumed that I’m actively familiar with both, which led me to believe that I don’t need to.
Cocaine has never appealed to me because I’m not a fan of anything up-the-nose. I didn’t think I would confess this to any of you, but if there’s any drug I minorly worried about suddenly getting into as a result of testosterone fantasies fueled by Cocaine Bear, it’s steroids. My personal trainer is steadfastly dedicated to the fully natural muscular life, but as a bodybuilder who’s currently upping his discipline game for an upcoming competition, he’s under new levels of pressure to juice. “They don’t give drug tests for this one,” he told me. “So I’ll probably be the only one in the contest who’s not on steroids.” Apparently they’ve gotten less dangerous, much safer, and as he rolled out this bit of current-body-builder knowledge I said, “But remember that they made them safer because the pharmeceutical companies want to make more money, not because anyone involved in their production gives a fuck about our physical well-being.”
I didn’t confess to him that this reminder was half to myself.
Which is not to say I’d know where to go if I did decide to take that risk. But I do know who to ask, and that’s scary. Well, it doesn’t have to be scary, since free will is a thing, but that’s exactly it, free will is a thing. In the past couple years I’ve made a lot of decisions that, in the back of my mind, I assumed a giant hand would simply block. It didn’t. We really can do whatever we want. Consequences don’t themselves stop actions. Did you know that already? You probably did.
I certainly know it now.
