Tag: AA

Google Maps

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What gives you direction in life?

I cannot use the daily prompt tag very often because I did 99% of them last year. Please follow me if you’d like to read more. You can also keep up with me on Facebook, where you can interact with me, other readers of the blog, and great authors I’ve come to know in my time as a Facebook creator.

I have had both Android-based and Apple phones. Either way, I use Google Maps because I find it superior. I don’t know why. I just like the interface better than Apple Maps, and Google maps does the same thing on my watch that Apple Maps does, which is to buzz my watch when it’s time to turn. If I have my headphones in, there’s no need for it because the turn by turn navigation is in my ear, but when I don’t the haptic feedback on my watch is actually better than an audio alert.

I started out with my literal answer because the prompt reminded me of something Kathleen told me, the story of her college interview. Now, Kathleen (like every person I’ve ever dated) was incredibly smart. She was a business major at University of Houston, and ended up accepting a position at ExxonMobil in Global Information Systems. That’s how I moved to DC in the first place. Basically, the last person you’d ever think did something like this, which only made it funnier.

Kathleen was trying to get into Simmons, which is a women’s college in Boston on The Fenway. They are known for library science, I believe, but it wasn’t her interest. She wanted to live in Boston on The Fenway. I would like to point out that she DID get in after this, she just didn’t graduate there.

The interviewer asked her what she would bring to the college, and she said, “the blanket my grandma gave me, probably my pot-bellied bear (stuffed animal)……….” I was CRYING, shaking with laughter and so was she because of course she laughed about it in retrospect.

I don’t know everything she did end up taking with her to Boston, but she did take me (later on). She was supposed to graduate in the class of 2000, which she did, just in Houston. But her best friend was still graduating from Simmons that year, so I got the grand tour. The school’s address is literally 500 The Fenway, so we had access to everything right in our backyards. I loved Boston and wished I could have stayed longer.

I remember one souvenir I got that trip- a Harvard medical school sweatshirt for my dad. I didn’t go to a class at Harvard, but I did sit in on one at MIT. I think it was a math class, but I’ve slept since then. Whatever it was, I did not understand it. I don’t remember it because there are no “good lines” to connect me to it. My brain works through echologia. If there’s not a valuable thought or idea attached to a memory, it fades because I don’t repeat it in my head. In my head, good writing runs like a tape.

I can remember snippets of my dad’s sermons and it has been 29 years since he’s done a single service (not counting weddings or funerals). He will do those if someone asks him. As in, when you leave the church you stop doing active ministry, but they don’t take away your ordination. He can still sign legal documents as the officiant, etc. He left the church the summer before my 17th birthday, and went into medicine as a second career until he “retired.” In quotes because his philanthropy work takes up a lot of time. I tend to confuse people when I say I’m a preacher’s kid, because they don’t know my dad as a Rev. Meanwhile, I only had one grade school year in which he wasn’t a pastor.

“Can we cuss now?” -Lindsay L. Lanagan, 1995

I cannot say it was a different direction for my life as well, because like I said, I was almost 17. Not enough time for things to change drastically in terms of what I would do once high school was over, etc. I think those things would have played out the same, because being ADHD/autistic of course I didn’t plan anything in advance. I just took the basic entrance exams for junior college in Fort Bend, then transferred to UH. I’ve never even taken the SAT.

It just occurred to me to say out loud that I tend to have a delayed response to stress, thinking I’m fine until I break apart into a million pieces. It puts my behavior over the last 10 years in stark relief, that I’m fine right up until I’m not. That I will not explode because I am intentionally trying to hurt someone. I don’t realize that I’m overwhelmed, overstimulated, and at my breaking point.

In high school, that presented as a migraine that wouldn’t go away and landed me in the hospital for four days. The only reason I was mad about it is that I had to take my finals, because I had a good enough average to be excused and then I had too many absences. It wasn’t bad, though, just an annoyance at having to go to school longer than my peers. I was freaked out because I wanted to be at home with Meagan, because she’d gotten into University of New Brunswick and was leaving soon….. Another reason I had a full blown migraine. I was melting down due to stress and grief.

Dating a Canadian was really hard, because there was something so FINAL about her going to school in a different country. I knew she was never coming back, and I was right. She has never moved back to the US. Although what I can say is that researching immigration wasn’t wrong, and that I would have been happy if I’d done it even if the relationship had still failed. I have spent enough time in Ottawa with Meag to know I would have liked living there. But honestly, the more I researched immigration, the more final everything became because an autistic 18 year old cannot handle the logistics of an international move. I was overwhelmed by details from the beginning.

In terms of direction, what I knew is that if I wanted to go to UNB as well, I had to like the school on its own merit because people break up. So, I sent for an information packet and got an interactive CD-ROM that included a tour of the campus and some games to get you familiar with living there, like a scavenger hunt. It’s the most clever and creative recruitment tool I’ve ever seen anyone do, and WAY ahead of its time because it was basically the precursor to things like interactive web sites. I didn’t get anything like it from any of the other schools to which I applied, but does it surprise you that UNB got me by giving me something I didn’t have for my computer?

Do I regret not following Meag back to Canada? My perspective has changed. It’s a mixed bag, right? My answer today is very different than it was before the 2016 election, but even as a teenager I agreed with Canada’s socialist policies. People who say “socialist” like it’s a bad word because conservatives have convinced them it is. Meanwhile, Alberta has a thriving oil economy just like Texas and yet the people of Alberta still have nationalized health care and Texas has a lot more money. There is still income disparity, but no one is left to die on the streets. You can have capitalism and socialism.

Ask Deadpool.

Knowing what I know now, I would be horrified to change a thing that would have altered the course of my life away from eventually coming back to DC. The way it happened is just too oddly specific to recreate, and while my life would have been great as a Canadian, I would have kicked the shit out of myself for not going to Portland. If I hadn’t given up on immigration, I wouldn’t have met Dana.

Meeting Dana altered the direction of my life the most, because I’ve lived in Portland twice. I had to move back because I missed her too much; my girlfriend was way too jealous and possessive for me to have any friends. I mean it. She was emotionally abusive, and though she never punched me, she punched through a wall in my apartment (NOT HERS) when I told her that Meag was coming to stay with me……. Even when I didn’t say “Meag is coming to stay with me and we’re going to be alone in my apartment digging up old memories.” It wasn’t some sort of game. I said, “Meag, her partner, and their little girl are coming to stay with me.” She was still apoplectic and told me that it was inappropriate and I should have asked her if they could spend the night.

We didn’t live together.

We’d been dating three months.

And on some level I still thought I was an asshole and she was right. She said something to me that I’ve forgiven, but I’ve never forgotten.

She said something about not feeling secure in our relationship, that I was really committed, and then said “you look like such a flake when you haven’t finished your degree.” She was a middle school counselor, and it was like she’d never seen anyone with ADHD before……… And she’d never pulled that card before, it was just politically convenient and she knew it would hurt.

It hurt because she knew I was brilliant. She knew I’d turned down an internship with the Human Rights Campaign writing national Sunday school curriculum because she didn’t want me to go. She, like me, thought there was something so FINAL about going away, as if three months was enough that I’d just say “I live here now.” It might have been, but it wouldn’t have been “I want to move back to DC without you.” I felt secure in the relationship, not in Texas. For her, those two things were one and the same. I have several friends who are engineers and manage to have great marriages despite being asked to travel for work, often longer than three months. If that little time apart destroys a relationship, then it wasn’t a real relationship in the first place.

It changed the direction of my life, the giving up of that internship to kowtow to my girlfriend’s fears. Dana put the kibosh on that real quick. She was the one who put the puzzle pieces together and saw how I was being manipulated before I did. Dana’s former partner was an alcoholic, and so was my girlfriend. She could tell a lot without me having to say anything.

I don’t have a problem with alcoholics and addicts. I have a problem with alcoholics not admitting that even though they don’t drink, they’re still dry drunks. As in, the problems that made them drink haven’t gone away and they still exhibit the behaviors of someone who drinks, like manipulation, isolation, etc. I am not saying that if you have problems with alcohol, then you are emotionally abusive. I am saying that I do not have time for alcoholics and addicts who think alcohol is the entire problem. That the only thing they need to do is stop drinking. They don’t have to have therapy, they don’t have to go to meetings, they don’t have to do anything besides not drink.

So, you have a sober person who, for the first time in literal years is feeling real emotions again, and they don’t know what to do with them. Whatever drove them to drink or use is still the monkey on their backs and the ghost out to get them. They’re actively running away from their emotions because they’re not used to them. If you have an addictive personality, you have an addictive personality. That’s why so many former drug and alcohol users start smoking half a pack a day, drinking coffee as a water substitute, and/or you’ll never find something sugary that they don’t like. They cannot be addicted to the things they were in the past, so they find new ones.

But please know that I am not speaking from personal experience in an arena where it’s all about personal experience. I am not trying to speak for an alcoholic or addict, these are just observations I’ve learned from being a coworker in the kitchen and having had friends go through the recovery process. Having an addict living in your house gives you a front-row seat to how that brain works, and it is not so dissimilar from ADHD. If you were neurotypical before you started drinking, there’s a possibility your thought processes will go back to normal. Unfortunately, neurodivergence may be your new normal because the alcohol gave you so much dopamine that your brain cannot possibly keep up. It cannot produce more dopamine than what you used to get from the alcohol, so your brain just sits there and screams. It is possible that you have accidentally induced bipolar disorder, or that you were self-medicating to manage bipolar disorder you didn’t know you had.

Chicken and egg debate on bipolar vs. addict. We’ll never know, but it’s extraordinarily common.

From my perspective, an alcoholic and a bipolar person are perfect for each other because they present so similarly. However, that’s dependent on a lot of factors….. The biggest one is that half of the couple realizes they’re bipolar and what it does to you, and the other realizes they’re an addict and what that does to you. You have to speak from a vulnerable place and know you are capable of being wrong. Red flags are only problematic if you’re managing someone else’s. Knowing you have red flags and saying “I’m working on it” is completely different than trying to hide them and hope no one notices.

Your life becomes more manageable when you realize that you’ve been acting egocentric, and find something to get it out of the way. When you are no longer the center of your own universe, things look very different. “Egocentric,” however, cannot be equated to “selfish.” Plenty of people are egocentric because they feel that asking for things is putting someone else out. Being that shut down is egocentric because you have stopped participating in a give and take, making people guess your needs….. Often, when angry, blaming another person for everything you failed to tell them. In no example of any behavior that I’ve given on this Web site am I immune to being part of the universal “you.” The only behavior I don’t have is drinking too much on a consistent basis. If I feel any amount of hung over, I pull back more. For instance, if I had four drinks over the course of an evening with friends and I felt hung over the next morning, the next time I’d drink three. What I’ve discovered is that the best answer is not to drink at all unless it’s a once in a while treat. Because I’m a blogger/diarist, I absolutely hate losing control. I can tell I’m feeling tipsy when this monologue slows down, and that’s not a good thing. I need every bit of creative juice I’ve got.

I have learned that you do not want alcohol to numb your inner monologue unless the play is shit.

The play is the thing.

The Woke Mob and How to Join

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Be queer and concerned about someone trans, apparently.

Also, when someone says “don’t call me a drunk,” the right answer is not “but you are a drunk, Daniel.” Probably not my finest moment, but I didn’t think about it because the friends I have who are drunks have been sober a long time…. Which made me sound like I was an expert punching down at 101 over there, but it just didn’t register.

Once he’s admitted he’s an alcoholic every day until May, then at 30 meetings in 30 days, and then every meeting for the rest of his life, maybe he’ll have some compassion for why saying “you are a drunk” didn’t phase me, but probably should have because I didn’t realize I was dealing with an AA newborn. I have done that, I have been the newborn while my friend was getting treatment, but we were learning together so that I could support her and be knowledgeable while doing so…… I’m more like the convert who’s mad there’s not a group for people who don’t have addictions and yet still can’t get their shit together.

At least, that’s what I thought until I remembered there was such a group for people like me.

To say that I have been to a few more AA meetings than he has is correct. However, I’m just a normie who goes to open meetings to support her friends. I’ve never actually been through addiction as a patient. Just as one of the people they delightfully injure until they realize they are doing it…. and let’s get real, some never do. I just have to lick my wounds with Tall. Mustache. Fishing Hat. There’s got to be a DC version somewhere. There’s a version in every AA and Al-Anon meeting in the country.

I cut The War Daniel off after he went vitriolic and broke up with me. Again, I didn’t break up with me, he did… It’s not that I don’t want to reconnect later. He just needs to sit his ass down for a while. Maybe he’ll change his mind when he realizes that I am not a threat, and neither is the “woke mob” mentality that’s been served to him in NE Texas and not its actual definition. He was fine and wanted to learn everything about everything until five minutes before “Son Of’a Bitch, Everything’s Real.” He is somewhere between it and DENIAL (Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying).

Daniel has no idea what I’m doing because he has been blocked on Facebook, and I have no idea about him. I didn’t do it to avoid him. I did it to avoid making things worse. He says it’s over. I say “you’re in rehab.” I do not believe that you can make a decision like whether you want to get married, travel the world, or even get a major haircut without letting your brain clear out from that. So, I’m giving him until January next and say “you can always come home again.” He can, but if he has no interest, I can’t help that. In fact, I am helpless here. He means too much to me to turn back now. It would be a loss like I’ve never felt before, and have already been mourning because I don’t know whether it’s real.

I just don’t think it’s possible to go from wanting to marry someone one day and wanting to break up with them the next unless your nerves are so fried that you can’t handle anything of substance. Despite it, we are in a large argument right now that will not resolve because neither of us will give an inch because we’re both right. I just happen to think I’m a little more right than he is.

He is correct in thinking that rehab is a big deal. He is incorrect in saying homophobic shit repeatedly and getting called on it repeatedly because he does it repeatedly.
Now we’ve gone from the proverbial “baby, I’ll try” to “you fuckers don’t even tell us the rules.”

We did.

You just threw a bitch fit about it.

Daniel’s point, and I get it, is that he’s a white, cis, straight male who’s about to enter rehab and he can’t handle all this. He’s correct about the rehab patient thing. If he pretends to be a white oppressed male one minute longer than he needs to get well, my boot will leave tracks on his ass. He needs me to back off. I can roll with it when it’s just me. I’ve been taking shit like that my whole life, starting when I was 10. It’s not that people do things on purpose. They do things that they’ve never been taught are wrong and then don’t remember. Then, they’re offensive all over again and I have to endure that pain another time. If you don’t catch it when it happens, then you’re really screwed. There’s even less chance that someone will remember what you said if you ask them to recall something. There is no way I could put Daniel through any of that unless I was punching down.

Punching down is a relatively easy concept, but I can’t explain it in English. We don’t have two verbs to tell people about yourself. In Spanish, there are two. “Ser” is “to be.” It’s for things that cannot be changed, like being black or trans. The other verb that also means “to be” is “estar.” Estar is for a transitory state, like hungry or crying.

“Estoy cansada” is correct. I am tired. When I wake up after a nap, I won’t be tired anymore. Daniel might not have thought this in reality, but he handled my situation as if being queer was a transitory state. That I could give up being so angry. The problem was that I wasn’t agnry. I was annoyed. Again, nothing new. Just hard to keep it under wraps all the time because Daniel isn’t even the millionth customer. That had to be ten years ago. I am not angry. I am exhausted, and there is a world of difference. What I have learned so far is that I will bend, but I will not break.

Here’s the line in the sand, and it’s easy to draw it because I’ve left as much room for him in my life as he deserves…. a chance to redeem himself. Rehab grace only lasts so long before Sweetpea begs to be let off leash. She sent me a picture of herself the other day. She doesn’t play video games at all……. and the picture of her was *Alduin* (incidentally, she doesn’t know it, but I am very much like Paarthurnax).

Like I said, I can take it when it comes to me. It’s just that he has a trans daughter. So, he does twice the irritating shit that he used to and is even more angry that he has to adjust. Apparently rehab is also going to fix homophobia, transphobia, and aggressions toward both. He sees me as the enemy now, when all I’ve tried to convey is the normal amount of “hey, that hurts.”

When Daniel and I first started talking, I thought he was fine. He wasn’t. The medication he was taking to control his cravings, plus the one beer he was drinking a day to make sure he didn’t accidentally commit suicide kept him stable.

So, I was on board. I’ve been down the rabbit hole of addiction with friends several times before, and my ex-wife got a DUI years ago, so not only did I learn about addiction and the brain, I also drove my wife around for three months until she got her license back. This was torture for two reasons. The first is that I hate driving. The second is that I hated Dana more than usual when I was driving. I’ll just let your mind wander on that one.

We’d spent a lot of time talking about the TV show MASH, because Daniel was a Navy hospital corpsman embedded with a team of Marines in Kandahar during Operation Enduring Freedom. His stories are just humbling, and always make me cry… just thinking about the sheer number of times I’ve almost lost him is enormous. Thinking about his service record is intimidating. Sometimes I think “why would somebody like him love somebody like me?” I’m not being down on myself. It’s just that you have to dig under the war hero stuff to make it make sense. He’s a writer. You can tell that clearly.

My work in progress is set in Viet Nam. Obviously, I have friends who are soldiers to help me with patois, but it would be nice to have a coauthor on the project who actually knew what he was doing with that kind of dialogue. The most frustrating thing about being married to a Marine’s daughter was all of the acronyms. No one can penetrate all that without private lessons, and no one gave them to me.

They were very content to let me go on not understanding their conversations. Dana and I were together almost eight years. In all that time, I have learned that a PX is like a Wal-Mart. I am sure that I could do better if I dug deep, but tax free means something. Maybe not for candy and sodas, but you can get things like TVs and gaming consoles. Again, not free. But a major discount. Anything else I picked up was from context clues, and here is a big one.

Flying standby.

My guess is that even Daniel hasn’t thought of this in his “you fuckers” haze, but he can show up at any base in the entire world and fly standby to anywhere else. If Cora and I are invited, we can go with him. We cannot go unaccompanied anywhere, but that really doesn’t matter. I don’t want to go anywhere without him.

I was starting to be glad that Sam was a hit and run, because I saw so much potential here. We planned all kinds of trips, from Helsinki to Cairo to Phnom Penh and back to wherever we’ve chosen as home. As I was telling Cora, “I’m fine with living overseas or staying in this area. It’s just that we can’t live in Texas anymore.” She’s trans, and they’re losing out on nearly every right imaginable in the State Leg. I will probably go to a Molly Ivins level of batshit crazy if I think about it too long, so let’s move on.
Daniel thinks that I wake up every day to wrestle the devil du jour, and while it’s an interesting phrase, it’s bullshit ALL DAY. He’s not the devil, and I’m not the “woke mafia” of legend. I’m trying to keep him from doing irreparable damage to our relationship, and more importantly, the one between him and his daughter. I do not want to be the cause of Daniel losing his daughter, and if he keeps it up, that’s what’s likely going to happen. Cora is going to be just as angry as I was, and it will not go well for Daniel.

But I cannot tell him that. I have told him. He has heard me. He is too overloaded to change right now. I have to be brave and hope that he’s willing to change later. I cannot hope that he cares enough to make amends, but I can hope that when his brain chemicals are level, he realizes that he betrayed his daughter and the woman he wanted to marry by saying that he already had new friends now that accepted him for exactly who he was.

Life is not black and white. There’s so much gray area here, because normally I wouldn’t put up with any of this. It’s that he doesn’t live in the world of awake yet. Alcoholism was keeping his night terrors at bay. Sobriety has made them rise from their graves. That is conjecture, but it has happened to my other AA friends.

I also think that I have been too flippant because I have so many AA friends that it didn’t occur to me that Daniel had never been. I’m sure it was annoying because I was talking like he’d been in the program for years and it was like, five days.

But the point still stands.

At this moment, Daniel does believe that he has hurt both me and Cora. He just doesn’t register our pain as valid. His is much more important than ours whether we think so or not.

It’s why I’m trying to be so kind and loving, and have my anger moments, but let them go. I wouldn’t even have posted anything about this except that Daniel is being stubborn and not talking to me at all. It was time to prepare for the end of the relationship on Stories after I’d had time to process it on my own. In fact, I’ve been processing so much that the only thing I can come up with is just to let it lie. Don’t respond, don’t talk, don’t breathe where Daniel is concerned. He’s got too much on his plate to worry about me, which was his point originally (even if the execution left A LOT to be desired).

He also knows that the reason this is a big fight is that he didn’t just offend me. I am not the only queer person in his life, and not only did I jump in for myself, I interrupted years and years of family-entrenched behaviors.

As the interrupter, I became the enemy.

I’m used to it. I’ve only had one relationship where I really got along with my girlfriend’s parents, and that was Kat’s. I don’t think they ever believed Kat was bi to begin with, and I have to say that I should have agreed with them. It would have explained so much. However, I would not have met Dana, and Dana opened a door for me that taught me how to think in a different way.

I just feel as if I shouldn’t emotionally bleed out over this, because he doesn’t deserve it. He would if we’d been together long, but we weren’t. The difference between me and him and everyone else is that I’ll wait for him.

I bet that seems surprising.

Too much other shit going on to explain everything in a way that wouldn’t “out” other people, so I won’t. All I have to say about the whole situation is “thank God for grace.” I know I am capable of it, I hope that The War Daniel is, too.

I know for certain that if he was able to disconnect that quickly, it would have been a horrible relationship. Any time we needed to talk about anything, he’d fold into himself and become a brick wall. I’ve been in that relationship before. I’m tired of it. I want to go back to the lovebombing, because I believe that’s the person Daniel really is, and the person I’m not talking to is the one who is alcohol-deprived, miserable and lonely as much as he says he has new friends.

If there’s anything I also know about Daniel, it’s that he does want to learn. He won’t be happy staying in a place where everybody is just like him. Where he doesn’t learn anything about how to love a trans woman properly through listening to both of us (trans pain and queer pain are alike and specialized). He doesn’t spend any time with Robin DiAngelo. He doesn’t have to sit through the thousand lectures I’ve heard over my life in order to become this “woke mob” unto my own. If we have an incompatibility, it is this. It’s not that he can’t or won’t learn, it’s that I’m so far ahead of him that he can’t listen to me anymore. He just thinks I’m pedantic, meddling, and the kid was fine til I came along.

I have so much more power than I thought.

That being said, I won’t grieve long. Even if I did everything to the worst of my ability, one fact remains. I got Daniel to rehab in the first place. The reason the relationship could die is not because I don’t think I’ve met the love of my life. I have, and I know it. There will never be another War Daniel in my life, so I hope that this one remembers to check in. It’s that he cannot continue to make me a part of “you fuckers.” I get that he’s angry. I even get why. I don’t think that expecting Daniel to understand that I’m hurting is invalid during treatment. Again, though, I can’t count him out. Rehab is such a tricky thing. You know an alcoholic/addict is sick, but when do you start holding them accountable for all of their words? I am weighing whether I am hurting myself for a goal that will never come.

I don’t think he’s done anything that says I won’t love him.

Yet.

He is The War Daniel, but if I have a character, it is Rory the Roman. It will take as long as it takes, possibly centuries. He doesn’t know what that means, either.

But I’m betting you do.

CIA, MI6, and MiB

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I can’t find it.

This has never happened to me before in terms of writing. Ever. I’m a blogger, right? So I’ve hit post and never had to search through a directory tree in 20 years. The worst part is that I’m fluent in DOS and Linux, so I know how to do all the shit that would compare and contrast documents…. and it didn’t even occur to me to do that with my writing until right now.

I even have a pen pal that I’ve known since Jesus was a boy and I know to create different subject lines so that all our crap doesn’t mix together, like separating personal from professional (editing vs. friendship, really… not for this, for my books…. this is graffiti with punctuation [cracked me up in Contagion]).

Today I started with creative writing instead of memoir type stuff because every time I write about my life, blowback comes from somewhere. So, no more about that. I’ll write about things long enough in the past that they don’t matter anymore, or put up fiction. If I write about a decision that is currently being made, there are just so many, many people who have an opinion that is either stupid or invalid.

Let’s start with Daniel.

I would marry that boy like yesterday. I still feel that way even though right now he is acting like a jackass by being a doctor and a patient.

Now, why would I know what his motivations are?

If you have to wonder, you’re not my friend.

How do you know that I don’t have years and years of experience with addicts?

I’m a line cook. I’ve wondered if people relapsed to the point of wondering if they died and that’s why they didn’t show up today or give me a call.

I’m not laughing.

If you are, you’re not my friend.

How do you know that I’m building a family too fast?

My daughter is trans and 24. The reason I call her my daughter is not because she actually is. It’s that her biological mother is straight and I’m both bisexual and genderqueer. I get it, where her mom and dad are blind. I am giving her the relationship I should have gotten.

If you have to wonder, you’re not my friend.

None of you have ever asked if I had friends who I’ve married in terms of loyalty and confidentiality so I have people that hold me together. I have friends in multiple places who support me and I can reach out any time, day or night, because it might be 1100 there. My friend Suzanne is in Aberdeen. I wake up at 0400. I have coffee, she has tea.

Since I’ve never gotten asked that question, I feel like it’s necessary. I have friends who have supported me for years and years now. I don’t need a romantic partner. I want one, but I don’t have to have one to function.

And finally about this topic, if you know all of the above, than you’ll know that my absolute best friend at one point was a severe alcoholic and now she’s one of the most successful people I know. All of you who are so incredibly worried about me can stop now.

Even if Daniel broke up with me every day from here til kingdom come, I wouldn’t believe it until January 2024, which is the conservative estimate on how long it takes his brain to clear. Right now he’s finding out that life is rough without medication to control cravings and all that shit.

So if you think for one second that I thought this would be easy, that I’d have it made in the shade, or that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. Daniel was in a bad place. I sold him a fantasy to give him the courage to get to rehab. He did. My work here is done. But that isn’t the whole story. The whole story is that I love him more than anyone on earth, including me. He just doesn’t know it, because his brain is dopamine-starved and using every trick in the book to try and get him to believe that he’s a worthless piece of shit.

Here’s the thing. I sold him a fantasy to get him to rehab. I want to make the fantasy real so we can be done with rehab and off to living in Fez, Cairo, Casablanca, wherever. I don’t care. Just anywhere to get us somewhere cheaper. The US is bananas. I didn’t fake him out. I didn’t do anything but promise him a fantasy that was doable if he would only get his shit together.

Every addict in the room is quietly nodding. They might not agree with what I did, but they will also tell you to do whatever you have to do to get your partner into rehab. WHATEVER. So I did. I got him there. Whether he comes home and still wants to marry me is up for grabs. But does it really matter?

I GOT HIM TO REHAB. I MADE SURE HE WAS GOING TO LIVE. I HELPED SAVE HIM.

The rest is totally up to him, and I’m going to let him figure out all that. He’s the one in therapy most of the day, so I think I can move on to something else. They’ve got him. I can rest until May.

And I will, because I’ve already got two best friends who love me enough to marry me, but not enough for the fun stuff. That is for the love of my life if he decides he wants it.

Again, none of this comes from a place of “he’s going to screw up.” Addicts, raise your hands. Who among you got through the last drunk and getting into rehab without fucking up some relationship or another?

I thought so. I can hear you choking with laughter from here.

Now that I have explained myself and hopefully shut the shit down (can I get a witness? HELL YEAH!), it’s time for today’s lesson on metaphor.

Men in Black II is a documentary.

K was a designation in the British system of intelligence. If you’ve seen the more recent Bond films, K has not been in use since WWII, I believe. However, it’s the rank above M, played by Ralph Fiennes and Judi Dench. You don’t see C in movies very often, but my biggest example of who C is comes from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I can’t remember whether C is the bad guy in that one or not. I’ve slept since then. No UK disrespect meant. The C I’m talking about is basically Stephen Fry in Doctor Who.

Q means quartermaster. In MiBII, this is like the scene where K says, “guess I’ll have to buy The White Album again.” That’s because Q is representative of an entire department of people. In the US, it’s called the Office of Technical Services. Back when it was OSS and CIA hadn’t started…… chefs and cooks, sit down. You’ll need it……. Julia Child worked for OTS. She developed shark repellant. Why case officers would need such a thing is where I draw the line in terms of research.

Z is probably also a rank somewhere, but to me it refers to the decryption of the Zimmerman Telegram in 1917. That was the first time in modern history that signals intelligence (SIGINT) was useful on the world stage. Interestingly enough, the guy that played Z (Zed) was in my grandfather’s class in high school.

In terms of rank, I’m not sure where Zed falls. My guess is that he’s C.

C was named for Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming. If I were to compare him to an American, it would be “Wild Bill” Donovan, because he’s the one that started OSS to begin with. Cumming managed to wrangle together MI6, which is why the head job is named after him. I’m honestly not sure who he would match in today’s CIA, because they don’t publish how they do things. For instance, are people like John Brennan C, or is C under cover and people like Brennan are just figureheads?

Damn, Gina.

If you got that joke, you can stay.

If you’re wondering whether I just like Bond and spy shit or if I have a direction with this, yes to the first and still working on the second.

People have no idea why I like spy stuff. At 18 I wanted to be a trumpet player in the Airmen of Note. I didn’t care that the Air Force was basically a group of people standing next to the military. I just wanted to play.

I didn’t get to, which began my lifelong obsession with books and movies where people fought each other without using violence.

And then CIA appeared on Doctor Who, and it was all over for me. Of course I can love Everett. Of course I can love The Doctor when Richard Nixon asks him how he’ll be remembered, and of course The Doctor can’t say SHIT, and just says, “Oh, Dickie. THey’ll never forget you.”

Of course I love MI6 and CIA. They’re basically the closest thing to magic we have on this earth, and as I was telling my friend Zac, “it’s like science fiction because they already know the new technology coming out, but they can’t tell us about it.” It’s real in the way that real magic occurs.

MiB training even reflects real life. Jonna and Tony Mendez both write beautifully about taking their subordinates to Georgetown and giving them a head start while they make everyone and no one makes them. Jonna was even the old guy….. Chief of Disguise gonna Chief of Disguise. Can you imagine being a case officer and finding out your boss was Tony Mendez, then stayed in long enough to have also had his wife as a boss? That’s magic.

Like taking an American and a British intelligence agency and filling it full of aliens and putting a Burger King in the lobby of the spaceport.

In terms of the actual training at MiB, case officers in VA had to lose themselves in Georgetown and try to pick out who was watching them. J shot a little girl alien because she was carrying a chemistry textbook that was way too advanced for her. It’s the difference between life and death, that noticing things.

Down to a Lay’s potato chip bag life and death.

That Burger King isn’t really a joke, either. If you look on CIA’s web site, they’ll tell you they have a Starbucks at Langley and it’s one of the busiest in the world.

I have also found a place for The Hot Sheets that’s really friggin’ funny. In my head, The Hot Sheets are the Presidential Daily Briefings.

I swear to Christ, you just cannot get photographic journalism better than this. Even Shane Harris couldn’t write something this good (teasing him because he’s the local National Security reporter at WaPo and has been on Maddow several times). I don’t stop hoping, though. Pro tip, Harris. Memorize it.

Zed, think about it. I could be Agent H………