Nobody to Blame but Fleas

For the first week that I lived in my new apartment, I kept cleaning up the same puddle. Every day I would see it form in my floor, every day I would soak it up with a towel, and every day I would think again to myself, “oh, the cat must’ve knocked his water bowl.”  This puddle, mind you, was no where near the cat’s water bowl.  For FIVE DAYS I had the same stupid thought.  For FIVE DAYS I jumped to the same conclusion with absolutely zero due diligence or awareness.  Finally, on day six I mustered a thought that even the most baked of stoners has, which, “hey… wait a second… something is fishy here…”

                It turns out, the AC unit in the neighboring apartment had been leaking through their wall, down the void of our shared drywall, and trickling underneath the molding on my side, where it settled into a dip in my uneven, 1900s constructed hardwood floor.  Please don’t tell my landlord that I could have saved him thousands in water damage if I had the most basic wherewithal to not be a total dunce.  Unfortunately, I am a total dunce.  I may punctuate my sentences with big words, sport charming analogies,  recite the poetry of both Emily Dickinson and Salt N’ Peppa, but make no mistake; I is be a an idiot. 

                My particular brand of idiocy stems from my tendency to believe the simplest explanation for everything.  Water on the floor? Must be the cat bowl.  Lamp won’t turn on? Brand new bulb is a dud.  Not getting any texts?  Phone isn’t working.  If I were more dedicated to the concept of “cause and effect” I would have known sooner that the AC was leaking, the fuse for my East wall was blown, and my only friend is 22 months old and can’t text me from daycare.  I humbly accept my brain’s default blissful ignorance, though.  It’s a welcome change from the past few years where my explanation for everything that was wrong in my life was that it was somebody else’s fault. 

                Blame is a heat-seeking missile.  Its human nature.  Really, it is.  Blame is a hot, toxic, green, glowing byproduct of our internal need to explain, and therefore, prevent, bad things from happening to us.  Seeking the origin of our problems has historically been a wonderful tool.  The caveman’s butt itched, so he wiped with a different leaf.  The Apache were getting nauseated and throwing up red berries, so they started eating blueberries.  Humans honed and harped on the process overtime and were able to explicate major issues: cholera is in the water, plague is on the rats-- nay! The plague is on the fleas on the rats, a line of men with buckets can’t fire-retard a city block—we need trucks and an irrigation system, the girls at the radium factory are glittering and their jaws are falling off—they should stop licking their paint brushes. 

                Of course, because people suck, explanations quickly became blame.  When humans don’t have diseases, chemicals, and beasts to defeat, we get bored and supercilious and start picking fights with each other.  Our panicked thought processes rarely go farther than, “I’m hurting! Who did this?!” Then BOOM, a whole ass Holocaust.  And nobody lays undeserved blame better or more frequently than an addict.  Except Hitler; Hitler was the worst.  The Scapegoating Olympics gives Hitler the gold, addicts get the silver, and then politicians are over in the corner gnawing on their bronze medal because they think it’s a cookie.

                The issue of blame in addiction is so deep, so convoluted, and so complex that there is no way to properly and fairly dole out accountability.  We can, however, chip away at it like flint, until we have a nice, sharp arrowhead that points directly to ourselves.  This leads me to my first point, which is that nobody NOBODY is to blame for an addict’s addiction other than the addict.  NOBODY.  There is no accusation more common or more false, than the offender’s attitude of “I use because of who you are.”  Its just not true.  Again, we revert to the human panic mode of, “I’m hurting! Who did this?!”  It’s fundamentally incorrect and progressively backwards.  Worst of all, it always seems to be directed at the people we love the most, who care the most, who have endangered their own sanity to support us in our worst moments.  That isn’t just the crux of blame, that is the tent of irrationality that addicts exist under. 

                The afflicted addicted are my people, so I have to clarify another delicate, intricate, but imperative point: addiction is not entirely the addict’s fault.  Yes.  I said it. Sue me (jokes on you, I ain’t gots no monies). 

                The humor ends here, though, because this is not the slightest bit funny.  Saying that an addict isn’t wholly culpable for their addiction is extremely bias and confrontational, and I’m aware of that.  I didn’t come here to fuck spiders, I came to communicate the aspects of addiction that are difficult, if not impossible, to articulate.  And if you didn’t come here to fuck spiders, you’ll continue to read, attempt to understand, and then you can yell at me.

                Putting a bottle to our mouth, sticking a needle in our arm, swallowing pills, lying, cheating, stealing, hiding, and blaming—that is all 100% the addict’s fault and failing.  There is no excuse, there is no defense.  The day-to-day processes, tactics, plans, and unbattled impulses of someone in active addiction are unjustifiable and usually include innumerable acts of aggression and neglect.  However, one does not go from zero to pawning the television instantly, and one does not stay in that cycle happily or willingly.  Something inside that person was broken long before they even knew what a cocktail or a crackpipe could do for them. 

                Drugs and alcohol aren’t about “fun” to an addict, remember?  We can dress it up and sell it that way sometimes in a social setting, but that’s just for assimilation.  We go down for numbness.  We go down for indifference.  We go down for ambiguity.  We go down for disorientation.  We go for dead. 

                I knew a girl once.  She was abrasive and opaque, but also sloppy.  We didn’t get along.  She took every opportunity to point out my flaws at a time in my life when I was at the pinnacle of vulnerable.  She too, was an addict.  Obviously.  She sailed in sobriety because she could leapfrog to other vices easily.  She smoked, she hung all over men that were entirely out of her league, her sense of humor was a patchwork of tactless vulgarities, and she wore the skimpiest clothes over her poorly maintained form.  

                Over a period of weeks, her and I were scotch taped together in a therapeutic setting (rehab, ok? I know her from fucking rehab).  Some addicts walk through the door ready to spill their guts and garner sympathy, others need an adjustment period, but eventually begin to allow a productive unravelling.  This girl, however, was exactly like me in that regard: the scary type.  We were in the category of addicts that never opened up about anything.  In fact, the more we heard of other people’s intimate sob stories, the less intimate we felt in the group.  Our demons and their demons were from completely different levels of Hell.   

                Her and I never intended to be near each other, but its impossible not to learn someone in that setting with that kind of proximity.  I was familiarized with her habits and consistencies.  I heard her tell the same jokes and the few tame stories she was comfortable sharing over and over again.  I was audience to her evasive moves and reactions.  Then one day, it clicked.  She wasn’t lazy or gross—no one had ever shown her how to do laundry or dishes.  She wasn’t an eccentric, picky eater—saltines and fun sized candy bars were the only groceries her mother kept in the house when she was growing up.  She wasn’t ostentatious or “slutty”—she didn’t know any other way to get attention.  She wasn’t crass or unaffected—she quipped openly about her three abortions because devastation doesn’t look so damning when its wearing a flamboyant costume. 

                One evening we congregated on the back porch and I read Balzac while everyone else chain smoked.  A lull in the conversation prompted one of the girls to pose a question to the group: “how old were you when you lost your virginity?”

                “17.”

                “15.”

                “16.”

                “20.”

                “17.”

                “Kara?  How old were you?”

                “I was on the Science Olympiad Team.”

                “That doesn’t answer the question…”

                “It does actually.”

                The question finally landed on my cracker eating non-friend.  With a flick of ash over the porch railing, she said, “I was 12.”

                A hush fell over the rarely shocked or speechless group. 

                “It wasn’t my idea, it was one of my Dad’s friends.  I think he paid him like… $300 for me.”

                She was terse and she was matter-of-fact. 

                The last ounce of aversion I had for her immediately lifted.

                Its no one’s fault but our own that we’re addicts.  We drank.  We used.  We handled our problems poorly.  In fact, we made our existing problems even worse by turning to drugs and alcohol.  We started to feel better, then we couldn’t stop, when we couldn’t stop, we blamed everyone around us for our continued problem.  Active addiction is disgusting on every level.

                “You don’t understand what I’m going through.  You are trying to hard to help.  You aren’t helping enough.  You made me this way.  Just leave me alone.  Don’t leave me alone.  Let me figure it out on my own.  You shouldn’t have let me try to figure it out on my own.  You ignored me.  You enabled me.  You like me better when I’m high.  You make me nervous when I’m sober.  You made me feel trapped.  You gave me too much freedom.”  I could recite excerpts from the “Blame Game” all day long.  I lived it.  The people I love lived it.  They didn’t deserve it.  Blame is nothing but a tool we use to keep forcing numbness until we’re ready to look at ourselves in a mirror and put the blame where it really belongs. 

                Though it doesn’t seem like it at times, addicts are still human.  Too human, in fact.  We feel too much, which is why we are so fond of using outside substances to erase any and all emotions.  Its nobody’s fault but my own that I spent years in a bottle.  However, it’s not my fault that I felt so uncomfortable in my own skin that getting drunk all the time was the appealing alternative.  It’s nobody’s fault but the junky’s when they shoot up heroin that was paid for with money stolen from an elderly woman’s purse.  But its not their fault that they care so little about their own life that jail and death don’t scare them in the slightest.  Especially if they were conditioned to feel worthless at the age of 12 when their own father set the worth of their innocence at a meager $300. 

                The simplest explanation, the spilled cat bowl of reasons, for why addicts are addicts is that they are just finger-pointing, careless, reckless individuals with nothing to lose and nothing to gain.  In my experience, that just isn’t true.  I know too much.  I may be a bit slow on the origins of smaller problems, but I’ve had nothing but time to explain the last few years of my life and the choices that I made.  Likewise, I’ve looked at the lives and choices of other addicts and my hypothesis began to form.  Addiction is a sickness: a plague, a parasite, a cholera.  We fall ill and we become desperate to know why.  As long as we blame our family, our neighbors, the food, the air, the world, the Lord, our clumsy cat and every other innocent by stander, we were going to stay sick.  Once we’ve cleaned up the same spot enough times, only to be cursed with the same result… we’ll realize that its time to start wondering about the origin of the water.