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“I wish my partner would die.”
The gruesome, shameful desire uttered faintly through hopeless lips, the unexpected authenticity of an exhausted heart. She looked up slowly, terrified to see the reactions of the people to whom she had gifted her trust, afraid that her new admission had crossed the line of relatability to something unthinkable.
She saw nodding heads. Lots of nodding heads.
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The divorce rate in the United States has been reported in the 40-50% range for as long as I’ve been paying attention. That range is too low.
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The boathouse in Wash Park has a long and storied history. I mean, it must, right? I’ve never looked into it, but it looks old, and it’s definitely the anchor of the park, the neighborhood, maybe the whole southeast side of Denver. It is the hub of the Independence Day bicycle parade, couples get married there, and it is an easy meeting spot for people walking together in the park.
But it doesn’t house any boats. Maybe they store the floating plastic paddle swans under it in the winter, but for all of its iconic grandeur, they ought to have an old Mississippi riverboat cemented into the lakeshore next to it.
A riverboat would make a nice backdrop for homecoming dance pictures for the high school adjacent to the south side of the park. We are in the midst of a universally acknowledged, social-media-exacerbated, mental-health epidemic, so the homecoming dance sounds like a great way to encourage our young people to spend face-to-face time together. And it is. I am pro hoco. But as I leaned on the boathouse Saturday night, trying to stay out of the way and not brush against any of the girls who seemed to have shopped for dance gowns in the lingerie department, it occurred to me that the predance picture ritual might not be helping.
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I bought a rubber stamp from a door-to-door rubber stamp salesman once. It was early in our whole grain bread bakery career–maybe 2005. He was wearing a suit and tie long after Friday business casual had seeped into the other four days of the week. He carried a brief case that he opened on our bakery counter. It didn’t actually have briefs in it at all. He had dozens of rubber stamps in little molded foam compartments. He had big stamps that said, “PAST DUE,” in all caps, and small round stamps that said, “Have a nice Day!” in letters arched around a smiley face. He had stamps with rotating numbers so you could adjust the date, and stamps with custom corporate logos. Of course, he had bottles of various colors of ink, and ink pads with lids to keep the ink from drying out.
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“What did you say?” he asked. I repeated myself, to which he wondered, “Why do you do that?” Then the budding signs of curiosity were interrupted. A distraction. The inquiry was not interesting enough to come back to it.
Just like I often feel, the topic felt insignificant.
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I made my kids watch Beautiful Boy, the 2018 Steve Carell and Timothee Chalamet movie about addiction. I also made my kids watch a CNN documentary about the internet-induced proliferation of pornography. My alcoholism was traumatizing to my wife and kids. I can’t erase the past, and I refuse to ignore it, so the only thing I can do is be a cycle breaker. But as my kids will tell you, the most traumatizing thing I have done to them might have been making family movie nights out of Beautiful Boy and a CNN porn documentary. To make matters worse, Chalamet’s character has the same name as my oldest son, and when my hair was shorter, I was constantly told how much I looked like Steve Carell. In fact, someone once brought me a life-sized cardboard cutout of Steve Carell promoting The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and I was once chased down a city street by a man screaming, “Hey The Office! You dat guy!” I have not shaved or had a respectable haircut since.
In spite of the trauma my insistence on confronting addiction with my kids has caused, I still feel like it was the right decision. We didn’t talk about this stuff when I was a kid – not in school and not at home. Nancy Reagan insisted that we, “Just say no,” to drugs, and there was a PSA where a fried egg represented my brain, but the only messaging around alcohol that I can remember was that we had to be sneaky until we were 21, so my friend, Brad, and I buried a styrofoam cooler in the woods behind his house and covered it with a piece of plywood with leaves glued to it.
Is talking about addiction with my children hard? Yes, absolutely, but it is also as important to unwanted-consequence prevention as talking about vegetables and condoms and exercise and seatbelts and identifying the arrogant stupidity of the sharp bulb.
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Confidence comes from doing the things that require a little liquid courage without the liquid courage.
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How do you know if you need a few drinks to talk to women when every time you are in a situation conducive to initiating a conversation with the opposite sex that situation carries with it an expectation of alcohol consumption? I don’t remember needing liquid courage when I was a drinker, but I also don’t remember socializing sober.
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It’s hard to see my sins repeated by the generation that comes next.
That sounds like some lofty, holier-than-thou proclamation about society. But it’s not. I just don’t care that much about society anymore. It causes me deep pain to see people I love, people I have watched grow up, steer into the same lane I chose in my 20s.
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I listened to a podcast interview of Anne Applebaum, a journalist and historian who has been, for the past 35 years, studying and writing about how budding aristocracies grab power and, eventually, destroy economies. I learned a lot and found the interview both fascinating and terrifying. But I missed some of what she said because I was distracted. I was distracted pondering the fact that I don’t have 35 years.
I study and write about intimacy and addiction. In 35 years I’ll be in my late 80s, and no one wants to read about sex from a person approaching the century mark, although Betty White cracked sex jokes all the way to the end. But I’ll be an old man, not an old woman, so where she sounded spunky and vibrant, I’ll just sound creepy and perverted.
The clarity of permanent sobriety is mostly a good thing. But the clarity brings with it a growing sense of lost potential. Like what if I started my half-century quest for knowledge in my 30s instead of my mid 40s?
When Sheri saw the “For Sale” sign in our front yard as we pulled into the driveway on Saturday afternoon, it choked her up. We’ve been working so hard to get ready for this, but preparation doesn’t dismiss the emotions when they come. I took a video of our house – this inanimate object, this material possession – when it was painted and staged and as clean as it has ever been, and I was surprised to have to fight back tears as I narrated the ways we used each room over the past twenty years.