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Revisit Sleep and Anxiety and Pain
I went back to visit. To touch the cornerstone of our dorm, the stoner dorm, Merrill Hall. Est 1932, thirty years before I was born. The problem was, I was terribly depressed and traveling with, traveling at the pleasure of, an alcoholic. She’d rescued me from my Mom’s house at fifty. Gave me the shot of adrenaline and sex I needed to motivate myself into the next ten-year cycle.
She was amazing and an unsympathetic companion. She didn’t get it. The prep school had better facilities than her college. What did all these rich kids up in New England have to complain about? Maybe the cold.
The weaving that got us up there for the reunion tour and the quick unraveling that occurred a few months later, well, those aren’t really part of this story, merely the framing for that photograph above of my dorm room. The dorm room that the swimmer and the footballer wanted for their last semester at Exeter. They wanted to sneak out on the weekends through the first-floor window. Dwight and I just wanted to succeed at graduating from our first year at the hardest academic program we would ever be a part of. For the most part, we both, Dwight and I, avoided hard studying, hard schools, the path of most resistance.
In reading about wellness this morning and the use of cannabis as a sort of miracle drug, the framing of dosage and care reconnected with something from this time in my life. I needed the pot to work. I needed my anxiety and inability to concentrate at the higher levels of Spanish and Trigonometry to relax and recalibrate. The sleeplessness was unexpected. A result of the dire situation at home, my dad drinking himself to death rather quickly since he married another alcoholic, and my depression down thinking, tends to make everything worse.
It was bad. Up in the frigid air and snow of 1977, see news stories about the massive snow shutting down most of New England and the brave Exonians still going to class thanks to the maintenance staff. Yeah, thanks a lot. I spent a lot of nights rolling around in my bed worrying. I tried music on headphones. I tried reading in Spanish. Nothing worked. My fabric was weakening, fraying around the edges, heading into the Christmas holidays. Spanish was a bust. I would have to retake it in the Spring. Fuck.
It was my first Christmas away from Austin, my mom and sister were in New York City, so that’s where the cheer was. My mom loved Christmas. She was a devout Christian, and raised me to be so as well. I guess my scholarly enthusiasms outweighed my mystical belief in the sacrament and dusty old hymns. I struck out on my own path. A seeker. Something my sister introduced me to as well. She was always brining new illuminating perspectives and practices into my life. She was my muse, in real life, in real time.
She was living in New York as an artist. Doing whatever it took to get another show, make another rent check, and continue believing in her art. Her creative brilliance. Her massive vision for who she was becoming. She became too much of a comet at some point, over cooked her ephipahnies and began speaking in tongues to horses in the creekbed near her apartment, in the goat barn of a lovely old crone named Mrytle. Mrytle Stedman of Santa Fe and Tesuqui.
Santa Fe has now become a church of sorts. Prayers to the ghosts of Christmases past, loving memories of my mom, my sister, and even my fuckup brother, who snow skiied with us for the last time there at Santa Fe Ski Basin.
New York at Christmas time was magical. Dwight came in from NJ on the train and we spent the day gawking at CBGBs and Canal Street. I bought a crappy knockoff guitar in a cardboard box from a village vendor. I loved that guitar. It’s probably what got me kicked out, but that’s later. Stay tuned.
