On McMindfulness and the "Sober Curious"

March 11, 2020

A year back and we're on vacation up to northwest Arkansas, a nice cabin in the middle of somewhere outside Jasper. There's a small river offshoot that runs through the property, past a horse pasture and the contorted husk of a mid-century Chevy Impala that was probably a victim of the geometry of those hill roads.

It is spring break and it is full of that Ozarks lushness that gets crammed into your eyes and nostrils until your head's stuffed with it. My own head is full of a loud ringing sound as well, a sudden bout of tinnitus that I have chalked up to the weather and maybe the pollen.

I've decided to try to practice some form of mindfulness meditation on this trip. I spend every hike through those hills trying to remind myself to practice awareness of everything from the pinball ricochet of my thoughts to the gossiping of the white oaks.

I do a decent beginner's job of it, but the ringing in my ears makes it difficult. I discover that mindfulness of an unpleasant distraction makes me more aware of its unpleasantness. I assure myself that it's probably sinus trouble and will pass in time. The meditation is going well, under the circumstances, and so I continue it when we get home. Things go pretty well that second week, too. Until the anger starts.

The anger seems to come from nowhere, not unlike the ringing. It's a small, petulant thing the color of an old bruise. It mewls and sulks and only hollers when it feels safe doing so. But it is persistent. For weeks, it hangs on and fires off at anything at all, even a poorly-timed question from a child.

I practice as I have been trained. I am present for it. I try to dwell in it without judgment. I view it as an opportunity to learn and grow. I issue apologies as often as needed. But it keeps up.

I have never walked this ground before, but my studies have familiarized me with the map. I have been warned by monks and nuns that this sort of thing happens. When you calm the waters of your mind, you see more clearly the garbage you sunk below the surface. This is all to be expected. But I draw the questionable conclusion that the best way forward is to force a smile and continue on, hoping I won't yell today. My blood pressure keeps climbing and I chant "all is well".

It's not until the strain gets bad enough for me to hit my knees and let the words "All right, motherfucker, enough" escape my lips that I start to find relief. Following that curse, circumstances begin to fall into place. Suddenly I'm hearing what I need to hear when I need to hear it. My honesty with myself has opened the path to the work that I need to do now.

I do not get relief from the tinnitus, however. It's steadily worsening, going from a simple ringing to a loud ringing to a crickety metallic buzz that, on its worst days, is nigh at a dull roar.

Sleep is abandoning me, too. I do not realize it consciously, because I've been frogboiled on it for so long, but sleep no longer brings rest. It is a dark and dreamless hole that I fall into at night and claw my way out of every morning, wondering why eight solid hours feels like two too few. It comes and goes, though, and like I did with the anger, I assure myself that it's all fine. The buzzing and the tiredness are well within tolerable limits.

Within six months, I'm curled up in a ball in the guest bedroom while my wife holds me. I am wracked with sobbing and asking why it won't stop. I confess to her that I want to die. I am well past five years sober. I have literally prayed for death, but I do not desire a drink. I hold onto that like it's my mother's wedding ring.

Sometime before that, I'm on a FaceTime call with Lance and Patrick. Lance and Patrick are brothers in recovery. Lance is recovering from alcoholism and painkiller addiction, and today he's also recovering from a major foot surgery. Which means he has to take painkillers. To heal his body, he has to feed the voice in his head that wants him dead.

Lance is smiling. He is sitting with good posture. He is talking as we have taught each other to talk. He is looking deeply into his situation and is attempting a calm and positive outlook. But I can see that he's in the shadow now. It's a grey veil that blurs his face. He'll have to wear it until the drugs can stop. I can see it working on him. His three means of defense now are his training, his higher power, and his time spent in the company of other addicts like us. He has no bank of serenity to draw from.

I don't really worry for him, at least not consciously, because his actions are all correct. He is doing exactly as he has been trained to do. But he is withering and will continue to wither until it passes. When it does, the light goes back into his eyes and a knot turns loose in my gut.

Somewhere around then, I've gone down a rabbit hole of web essays with titles like "The Dark Side of Mindfulness". These articles are written by dabblers who have uncovered the terrible secret that meditation works exactly as monks and nuns have been saying it does for centuries. They are shocked to discover that not all medicine is anesthesia, that feeling better is not the same thing as getting better. Some of them appear to have even bailed out on the verge of a major breakthrough, simply because they had no studies and no teacher to encourage and explain.

"The antidote to suffering is more suffering", I forget which monk said, and my experience has borne this out. Meditation is not always serene. It uncovers and provokes. And even in post-meditation, I find my practice provoking me, keeping me off balance, transforming stone to sand and once-treasured joys into bittersweet memories. I kind of hate it, until I realize that it is alive.

I give in to uncertainty and gamble six thousand dollars on a treatment for my tinnitus and sleep problems. The treatment is proposed by a dentist who claims to specialize in something that is not an officially-recognized specialty. I tell one of my doctors that I fear I've wasted a lot of money on snake oil, but I'm desperate and out of ideas. He tells me that nothing in the treatment I've described sounds off. "Even the snake oil guys have gotten more evidence-based," he says. That helps some, but I also reflect that if I didn't have six thousand dollars to gamble, I'd be well and truly screwed. I feel almost guilty for having the money. The part of my brain that wants me to die insists that the only outcome I deserve is to discover that I've been had and will have to spend the next 40 years trying to find ways not to kill myself.

It's my turn in the shadow. I think of Lance and I start coaching myself through it. I keep doing what's asked of me. I make my appointments and go home worried. I tell my wife how I'm feeling. I exercise when I want to hide. You don't have to feel it, I tell myself. It won't always be pleasant. You just have to do the next right thing. The experience is like driving at night, unable to see beyond the limits of my headlights and trusting that the map isn't wrong.

While waiting for one of my treatments, I'm skimming the news and I read an article about the "sober curious" movement. This sounds like it is, for at least some of its adherents, rooted in real concern, but it also smells like the latest paleo/keto/coffee-with-butter trend to make the online influencer circuit. It's chic, and it's trying to separate itself from the stigma of those of us sad sacks who are sober because of a problem. Half of my brain applauds any alternative to the cultural cornerstone of booze as a necessity for adult human interaction. The other half says yeah, well, fuck you, you bunch of amateurs.

In my lifetime, I have given up drugs, smoking, drinking, and meat, in that order. I've given up every one of those things because of pain. I treasure every sacrifice and the spiritual path they support because they are bolstered by suffering and bafflement and joy, because they have built me and keep me alive. They are my offering to that which is greater than me, for the hope of awakening and a chance to help drive away the sorrows of the world.

But I find that my diseased ego is twisting even this to its purposes. It is stuffing these sacrifices into the Story of Me, the means by which it keeps me confused, frightened and asleep. My sacrifices make me more. My awareness makes me more there. My resentment is filled with images of vapid, waifish white women in yoga pants. It takes my noble, enlightened mind a few days to find the courage to unpack the shittier implications of that.

When you have to do it the hard way, it can be tough to find compassion for those who don't, and even tougher to find compassion for those who could use the hard way but who never seem to suffer enough to need it. I reluctantly gave in to sobriety and stepped onto the Buddhist path because the alternative was insanity and an early death. How easy it is to feel safe six years later, to recline from this vantage and mock the Chads and Beckys. To forget that I'm no more awake than they are. That I'm sicker than most of them.

Forgetting is so easy, even after dozens of jaw injections, minor surgery to the underside of my tongue, endless nibbles of progress and henpecks of worry. My ears are still ringing, but most days not as badly. Sleep is sleep and headaches a fraction of what they were. Never mind that none of this is actually over. It's better enough that I can pretend I'm in control. Why not give myself a medal and a veteran's parade?

That smugness is my own pair of yoga pants. My spirituality may not be the light and airy spirituality of the tourist, but without vigilance it becomes my own paleo path, a mere self-improvement project. Pain and provocation are the only things that keep me honest, because at bottom, I'm a tourist too. I'm just a little better at blending in with the locals. If I want to settle here, I need to do what every good tourist should do. I need to shut up and listen and keep exploring.

Toward a Unified Theory of Community

July 11, 2019

[Warning that unpleasant depictions of human and animal deaths follow.]

It is last weekend and my wife is asking me to kill a snake. A decent-sized garter snake has gotten bound up in netting we'd thrown over a volunteer blackberry vine she found in the backyard. It is cruelly contorted and mostly dead. Flies are gathering.

I take it into the side yard and fetch a shovel and a five-pound sledge. I lay it where it can feel the sun one last time. I pick up the shovel and recite the Five Remembrances of Buddhism:

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

I place the shovel tip directly behind its head. It isn’t moving much, just the occasional shake of the last two inches of its tail, the sum total of its body that is still free.

I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

I stomp down on the shovel as hard as I can. Its body convulses once and stops.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

I worry that the job isn’t completed, so I use the sledge to drive the shovel deep into the ground to be sure.

All that I hold dear and everyone I love is of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

I toss my tools aside and squat over the snake to be sure the job is done. It looks to be free of its pain.

My actions are my only true possessions. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

I tell the snake goodbye and apologize for such an ugly end.

It is the night before I will kill the snake. I am reading a 20th anniversary edition of Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh. Thây says this:

There is a deep malaise in society. We can send email and faxes anywhere in the world, we have pagers and cellular telephones, and yet in our families and neighborhoods we do not speak to each other. There is a kind of vacuum inside us, and we attempt to fill it by eating, reading, talking, smoking, drinking, watching TV, going to movies, and even overworking. We absorb so much violence and insecurity every day that we are like time bombs ready to explode. We need to find a cure for our illness.

For less than a year now, I have been studying and practicing Buddhism. It is a path I did not consciously choose. I appear to have tripped and fallen into the arms of its inevitability.

Like so:

It is barely 2014 and I am tired. I am tired of feeling wrung out. I am in a United Methodist Church I do not wish to belong to but continue to attend out of a sense of family duty.

I have been reading essays by writers like Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction and Russell Brand and Roger Ebert. I have watched an opening monologue that Craig Ferguson gave after Britney Spears' public breakdown. These people are sharing their addiction recovery stories. I am paying attention.

Ebert knew a woman in his home group whose higher power was the radiator in her apartment. Brand writes of the experience of walking around every day with a voice in your head that wants you to die. I have been collecting their stories, turning them over and over in my hand like river rocks.

I am burned up and burned up and burned up and longing for it to end. But I am starting to feel less alone.

And it is here, in this church I don't want to be in, on this day. This is the final notice. Today the pastor shares her story. She tells the tale of how her father went from being a pillar of the community to eating out of garbage cans.

I am in the soundbooth at the back of the sanctuary, looking down at her from on high, and from my vantage I can see my path to those same garbage cans with clarity. I can see every step toward ruin, every tear. I am finally able to admit that I am an alcoholic. It will be a number of days before I will introduce myself to a roomful of strangers as such, but I now know that it will happen. And I am relieved and terrified.

It is February of 2014 and I have dragged myself through the door of my first recovery meeting. I am shaking and my eyeballs are dogpaddling. I sit next to Alfred. Alfred is wearing cufflinks, which I didn’t expect to see, but the cufflinks are less of a surprise than the laughter. I hear the laughter and I realize that I don’t know what is going on, but I want more.

Brent is the first person to give me his number. He will become my sponsor and lay a lot of the foundation for what is to come.

It is 2017. I have been sober for over three years and Patrick and his wife have invited us to dinner. Patrick is a fellow alcoholic and asks me if I'd like to tag along to eat dinner on Wednesday nights with his friends before going to the evening men's meeting. This question will come to touch every millimeter of my existence.

It is last spring and I am walking the dog with my wife. I tell her that I need exercise, but I want to do something I can incorporate into my spiritual practice. Something to help me practice mindfulness of body. She invites me to join her and the kids at Unity Martial Arts, a dojo that teaches Cuong Nhu, a Vietnamese martial art. Vietnam is the country that gave birth to Thich Nhat Hanh and nearly killed my father.

I start taking classes immediately and am sideswiped by a loving community of practice I had not had eyes to see during the years I had been driving my son there. My ritual had been to walk him in, sit at a table, and wait out his class while reading a book and listening to white noise through my earbuds.

Now I am standing in the dojo, wearing a gi that needs hemming and self-esteem that needs letting out. I learn one block, one hold, one correction at a time that this is a community largely built on touch. There is an intimacy to this place that has been lost to much of the modern world.

It is 1963 and the Bodhisattva Thich Quang Duc assumes the lotus position in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon. Other monks pour gasoline over his body. He lights a match.

This is not an act of suicide. It is not even an act of protest. He is trying to turn the heart of Diem, South Vietnam's Catholic president, who has been persecuting the majority Buddhist population. If Thich Quang Duc cannot achieve this, he hopes to start a conversation about love and compassion and human rights.

He burns without moving or making a sound. He is dead within minutes. People prostrate themselves before his charred corpse, which has toppled backward into the street.

It is 1966. Thich Nhat Hanh has been exiled for trying to bring peace to Vietnam without taking sides. He will not be allowed to visit his home for 39 years.

It is 1967. My father has been drafted and will be sent to Vietnam. He marries my mother in a hurry.

He will later return home to a country that worships the gun and speak to me often of the heroes he served with who would not fire one. He will not often speak of the death he waded through.

It is 2018. I am sitting in the small room next door to where I normally attend recovery meetings. It is a dingy, badly lit room with a reminder on the whiteboard not to leave food out, because there is a rat problem. I have described this room to my wife as the sort of place where a person can get the DTs without worrying about bringing down the general aesthetic.

Patrick is there, and so is Lance. I have loved them for a year now. We are doing a step study, and we are recording our talks. There is urgency to our task, because Lance is leaving for Texas in the fall.

Lance is talking about his ego, his carefully constructed identity. I have a flash of insight that the idea that we call Lance, the ideas that we call Patrick and Matt, do not exist. They are mere concepts.

Later that night, I walk my dog and have an experience of emptiness of self. This experience is not hollow. It is not the emptiness of the void. It is a glimpse of who I am when I set aside the story of Matt. It is the emptiness of a room cleared in anticipation of a gathering, a party. It is an emptiness of warmth and light, an emptiness that is full. I do not know it, but it is the moment I become a Buddhist.

I have full awareness in this moment that this is only a glimpse, one given by grace. It exists to point the way. It fills me with the most curious mixture of longing and peace. Like a good addict, I will chase this feeling like yet another fix for quite a while before I realize that I've missed the point.

It is 2016 and I am discussing my spirituality with my wife. I am not yet a Buddhist, but I tell her that I haven't really been a western-style monotheist for a long time, that middle age has found me largely pantheist, maybe, or I don’t know what.

"Yeah, me too," she says.

"Wait, then why exactly do we go to church?" I ask.

"Can you name me one other community organization where people of different backgrounds and beliefs come together to discuss things that are really important, and to help each other out and hold each other up and learn from each other?"

"Yeah, sure," I say. "AA does that."

"Well, I'm not an alcoholic," she says. "What am I supposed to do?"

It is 1995, the year Living Buddha, Living Christ is published. The Dalai Lama has publicly identified the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second-highest position in Tibetan Buddhism. He declares the new Panchen Lama to be a six-year-old Chinese boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima.

In three days, the Chinese government will arrest the boy and his parents. They will never be seen or heard from again.

It is I don't know what year, sometime before 2014, during the blur and blackout of it all. She is standing before me as I sit in my chair with my whiskey and my laptop. She is all but pleading for me to let her in. I am wishing that she would go to bed and leave me in peace.

It is 2017. 150 Tibetan Buddhists have self-immolated like the Bodhisattva Thich Quang Duc in the past 8 years. 86 monks and nuns have burned in 2012 alone.

The Chinese are not satisfied with taking Tibet’s land. They know that Tibet is a boundless community, so they have been striking at its heart. 150 people have burned themselves to death to try to stop it.

It is a Sunday and I am in a mostly empty sanctuary. Our church, which was already in decline, has been poleaxed by a scandal that wiped out a decent chunk of the ministerial staff and half the congregation.

This scandal, and the destruction left in its wake, have left me fully dedicated to a church for the first time in my life. My theology is not theirs, but I cast that aside as I later would that shovel and hammer. I know a community of the damaged when I see one. These are my people.

The UMC has assigned us a new minister. He is yet another older white man, and I have my doubts.

Two days before, I was reading a book by Sri Ramana Maharshi that Lance recommended. Sri Ramana told me that the language that the great Self speaks is silence.

Pastor Roy steps up to the pulpit for his first sermon. "The language of God is silence," he begins.

It is late 2014. I am nearly a year sober and finally understand how fully I had left my wife and children in the cold. I realize that I had everything I needed right in front of me, the whole time. More importantly, I realize how much they needed me.

My wife's heart is vast. Her back is strong, and so are her arms. And I couldn't see them.

I am gutted with shame. But it is not the shame of before. I don't whip myself with this shame. I make it into a vow. For her. For my children.

From now on, I am for them. I am them.

The shame will be my guide on this path. My sentence is to carry it, to learn how to transform it. For them. I begin looking for a way.

I am so sorry.

It is a few months ago and we are driving home from Unity Martial Arts. I tell my wife that I am thinking of dropping Sensei Paula's power class. She is surprised. I explain to her that I am the only man in the class, and I worry that the mere fact of my presence changes the dynamic. I worry that the women are less at ease with me there. She says this:

"You are a grown-ass heterosexual white man with a job and a family, and every Saturday people see you come to a class taught by a woman and a fourteen-year-old girl. They see you call that woman and that girl 'Sensei'. And that matters."

It is September and Lance is leaving for good. It is my wife's birthday. Patrick and his wife invite us all over for dinner.

I am mourning, and I am worried for him. Moving sometimes kills alcoholics. We've all heard stories or seen it ourselves.

We talk as I have learned to talk, as Lance and Patrick have taught me to talk. We talk about fears and resentments and love and compassion. We talk of surrounding ourselves with others. They have been teaching me how to transform my pain into love.

But the waves of this pain are big, and my anchors are my family and my recovery. My wife encourages me to keep putting myself out there. Patrick jokes that if I move away, he will stop making new friends.

Three months later, he tells me that he is moving to New Orleans.

It has taken me 15 years to make friends with whom I can speak like this. It is hard for me to get out of my own way. So I am not just mourning their loss. I am wondering if I will ever make a local connection like this again.

It is 2019 and Dean is taking me under his wing.

It is 2019 and I meet David, who is the only other Buddhist I know in this town, and the only Buddhist alcoholic I know on the planet other than Lance.

It is 2019 and I’m finally connecting with Marc, who is trying not to die of cancer.

It is 2019 and I am realizing that these people and countless more were already here.

It is four weeks ago and I am at Unity Martial Arts, and Sensei Paula is concerned at a lack of new white belts coming in. New people are not just important for business; they are also important for the life of the community. She is asking us for ideas.

I realize that I have an instinct for joining communities that are struggling to grow.

I am paired off with Terri. We have been told to do pushups face-to-face while complimenting each other.

"I love that you come to class with painted toes," she says.

"You have helped me feel at home here," I say.

It is one day after I began writing this essay. It is a Sunday. The sermon topic is "Our Oneness". The offertory hymn is "In Christ There Is No East or West."

I am beginning to have a deeper appreciation for the openness and subtlety of Pastor Roy.

It is the fourth of July, and I am at another early morning recovery meeting. I am looking at old text files on my phone.

I find a suicide note that I don't remember writing. A suicide note composed in a blackout.

The pain is sudden and vast.

But when I regain my breath, I am grateful. Because I know what to do with it.

I am going to tell people about it.

It is last Saturday, and my father is helping me load Patrick's U-Haul truck so that his family can make their final journey south and leave Arkansas behind forever. Experience has given me faith that I will not lose touch with them, and so I am at peace. I am able to focus on what is best for them, rather than what is best for me.

Two members of my Wednesday night recovery group show up to help, Tim and James. James is my sponsee. He has nearly four times as much sobriety as I do, but he asked me to be his sponsor. This request has floored me.

I am glad that Dad gets to meet James and Tim. I love it when my family meets my family. We hug and laugh and share our stories of the week. Before we leave, Patrick holds me tight and asks me if I know that I am his brother. I tell him that I know, that I love him, that he will carry me with him to Louisiana.

Afterward, when we are back at my house, sweating and tired, Dad asks me if any non-alcoholics have ever joined the group.

"You mean like faking alcoholism to join?" I ask.

"Yes," he says.

"I've never witnessed it personally, but it does happen. Kurt Vonnegut had an uncle, I think, who faked alcoholism most of his adult life so he could be in the program."

My heart leaps at learning that my father has entertained such an idea. I would not wish my disease on him for anything, but I long for him to know this kind of fellowship almost as much as he does. He's hungry for it. Most men are. I start trying to figure out ways to make that happen.

It is now. I am reading Thich Nhat Hanh. I have been wondering what life as a monk would be like. I have already made vows, vows to my wife and children that I would never want to break, but I wonder if, in a different life, I would be making refuge vows.

On initiation into a monastery, a Buddhist monk or nun vows to take refuge in the Buddha, to take refuge in the Dharma, which is the teaching of the Buddha, and to take refuge in the Sangha, which is the monastery and the community of other Buddhists.

Thây says that practicing mindfulness in everything is nearly impossible outside of a traditional Sangha. The pull of the world and its practiced distraction is too much. He says that at home they have a saying, that when the tiger comes down from the mountain, the villagers will kill it. I think of the snake, twisted into a geometry of agony by a net whose only intention was to keep the birds off the blackberries.

But Thây also tells me that I am not to leave my existing community of faith. He tells me that this is my Sangha, my roots, and that I must never abandon my roots without cause. I have already come to this conclusion, but it is good to hear it from my teacher.

I know that I have at least three Sanghas now: My family, my recovery family, and my church. I wonder if the dojo is a fourth. Every step down the path of the bodhisattva, the path that chose me, has been one more blow of the sledge, driving me deeper into their soil. I know almost no other Buddhists in any of these places, but these are the places where I am needed. Lives are quite literally at stake.

I cannot become a refugee elsewhere. I have to build the refuge where I am.

I have no idea how. It is likely that I will fail.

I think that I am going to try.

I am disposing of the snake's body. Like a good alcoholic, I am second-guessing every choice I made. I am trying not to wonder how long it choked in that net.

I walk upstairs, forgetting Thây's instruction to practice mindfulness with every step up.

My son is in the dining room. He looks relieved. "Thank you for doing that,” he says. “I bet it wasn’t fun."

During my time in recovery, I have had a few moments of speaking without being conscious of what I was saying until it was done. This is to be the first time I experience one of those moments with my family. I think I say this:

"Actually, I'm grateful I got to be the one to do that. That snake could have been caught in a lot of people's yards. Most of them wouldn't have cared, or would have been disgusted. Some of them might even have been amused. But it got caught in our yard, and so I got to be the one to end its pain and wish it well. I think that that is a sacred duty, to let the living live and to help the dying die. Killing that snake was painful. But it filled my heart."

I am not surprised to be saying these words, but I do not recognize them as coming from the same man who wanted to be left alone all those years ago. I think of everyone who put those words into me, starting with Alfred and his cufflinks, and Brent and his business card.

My son is not yet twelve. I think he hears me.

It is two Sundays ago, and I am feeling very serene and fulfilled. I am grateful for the people in my life, for the places my path has taken me, for the communities that have taken me in. I am driving to Kroger to do the weekly shopping.

I pass a woman slumped on a bus stop bench, bags around her feet, soaking her t-shirt in the 90-degree heat. Her face is slack with exhaustion and dread. She is alone.

There's Even a Character Named Kegelface

March 14, 2014

So today we're going to talk about comics and spacetime and butt stuff and addiction and Willem Dafoe and did I mention butt stuff.

(Some NSFW pics follow, so, you know.)

Lately I've been making woo-woo eyes at Sex Criminals. The comic book by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, not actual registered offenders.

That's not my favorite cover. This one is:

Fourth printing cover of Sex Criminals #1

The premise is this, in a nut: A young couple discover that when they rub their no-no places together and make the big ugly wow face, they temporarily stop time. They pop a wahooney together, the world freezes around them, and for a time they can go anywhere, do anything. They decide to use this talent to rob banks.

It's to save a library. They're not jerks or anything.

I've giggled like a goddamn loon, reading this thing. It's stuffed with joy from both ends. For instance, there's this particular romp through a time-frozen porno store:

There's Suzie's girl's room sex ed:

I want to know what the three-second rule taco is

And there's even a sex advice column in the back.

Wherever two or more of you are gathered in my name...

But that's not why I'm bringing it up here. I'm bringing it up because I'm not a careful reader, so it took me a few times reading the first issue before I realized that Matt Fraction's not really writing about 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME PUBE. He's doing something a bit more subtle.

Here's Suzie going into what she calls "The Quiet" for the first time:

Pretty normal response even for those of us who can't stop time with a tub faucet or battered lingerie catalogue. But Suzie's fascination with masturbation goes well beyond the usual teenager's, because for her there is of course more there there. There's a refuge, a country to explore. And she needs that refuge because, well, her dad died and her mom's an alcoholic now.

This is the one place where Matt tips his hand and shows us what he's really holding here:

Our bodies, the quiet, our alcoholic moms, ourselves

Let's back up for a second and talk about Philip Seymour Hoffman. Russell Brand wrote this after Hoffman was killed by his heroin addiction:

The reason I am so non-judgmental of Hoffman or Bieber and so condemnatory of the pop cultural tinsel that adorns the reporting around them is that I am a drug addict in recovery, so like any drug addict I know exactly how Hoffman felt when he "went back out". In spite of his life seeming superficially great, in spite of all the praise and accolades, in spite of all the loving friends and family, there is a predominant voice in the mind of an addict that supersedes [sic] all reason and that voice wants you dead. This voice is the unrelenting echo of an unfulfillable void.

Addiction's a bitch to pin down because yes, it's a physical illness, but addicts use for psychological reasons too. It's an anesthetic, a way of hiding from whatever part of their lives or themselves they find intolerable. Taken to its logical conclusion, it's suicide by shelter.

Booze and drugs are a comfort, a respite. One that to a certain sort of person with a certain sort of brain suggests it could be more than that, maybe even a solution to their problems. Then it fucks everything up, which amplifies the need for further retreat, which means you use more, and round and round the garden like a teddy bear.

Suzie and Jon each find and retreat into The Quiet on their own. Then they find each other, and now they have someone to share it with. The love affair with their hiding place is renewed and grows stronger, even seems healthy. They go every chance they get. Then comes the day they figure they can use it to solve their problems. You see?

Matt's writing about his own addiction here, dressing it up in a Star Trek redshirt and a garland of anal beads. The story's really about about hiding and enabling, looking in the wrong places for solutions and finding only more reasons to hide. It's about being hooked.

Stuff like this is why I keep coming back to comics, why they continue to matter so much. There ain't that many places in Very Serious Litchracha that problems with this kind of weight get processed through very childlike (if R-rated) play. And make no mistake, for all the boobies and boners, this story has a child's heart at its center.

It's tailor-made for my twitchy, addled brain, and I know it's the real thing because I always feel grateful to have read it. So you should too.

We goan pitch a wang-dang-doodle all night long

Also? Glowing dongs.