Fear and Loathing in Moab, Utah
Andie takes a trip to the desert with her puppy and finds that things are not how they seem with a former friend. The consequences test her resolve to stay sober more intensely than ever
One morning, I woke up, clear-minded but in a manic way, when the urge to get a puppy overwhelmed me. It pounced on me exactly like how a puppy would.
100 days before this dramatic urge hit me in the guts, I had taken the most significant step I could in saving my life, by quitting drinking, and while life without booze was a lot more fun than I had ever expected, it was also quiet. I was empty. I needed something to care about.
I started my journey with a Chiweenie. His name, for our one night together, was Bernie. And he was disagreeable. He did not agree with the concepts of human touch or basic decency. I decided that we weren't a good fit when I woke up to him peeing on my forehead. Did you know that it is impossible not to scream WHAT THE FUCK when you are getting peed on? And did you know that opening your mouth while you're getting peed on is not a good idea at all?
The following day, I took Bernie back to the rescue and said he wasn't a good fit, but I did not say why, because I still wanted nice things for him. He just has kinks that I do not, and there is no shame in that. I asked if any other puppies were available and the rescue lady then irrevocably changed my life by handing me Sadie.
Sadie and I took one look at each other; all she had to do was lick my cheek, and I fell instantly in love. Unfortunately, for anyone I had ever said "I love you" to before, it now meant nothing. I had no idea what love was until the moment Sadie booped me in the nose. Love is love is love is nose boops.
I met Justin on Tinder a few months prior and liked him immediately. He had a dangerous look in his wild blue eyes, and we were super punk rock and talked about anti-capitalist stuff like all the time. If he wasn't 6'3 and I could've somehow reached him, I would definitely have tried to make out with him.
We met during my rock bottom; I was circling the drain at the lowest point of my life, missing out on entire weekends, just drinking away and chain smoking on the couch while I wallowed in my own misery.
You know how type 2 diabetes is self-inflicted by your lifestyle? That's what I was doing with alcohol; I was giving myself type 2 depression. One time, I woke up on Sunday night and could not remember the entire weekend. I knew I had just sat on the couch and got wasted through it, there was no question that I had done anything else at all other than watch Rick and Morty, eat weed, stare at my phone, drink vodka, light a cigarette, look at my phone, repeat, but as I got ready to collapse in bed, I could not bring to mind one single defining moment.
My habit at that point was to visit the liquor store 3 times a week or so, and walk out with 1.5 litres of Seagrams Vodka, which I mixed with LaCroix, because it the healthiest way to drown. Beer would bloat you, wine hangovers were too intense, so if I were to continue drinking myself to death I was going to do it the healthy way, with clear liquids only.
Anyway, let's go back to my infatuation with Justin. Even though I was crushing pretty hard on the guy, and I was so much more into drinking that I would even flake sometimes on him to just drink alone instead. I was already at peak loneliness, and my alcoholism was advising me to isolate even further.
When I wasn't catatonically impaired, we went painting together; that was our thing. And it meant so much to me. I was getting to hang out with a fringe-genius-artist-punk-rocker, he felt like a little slice of home in a tech-bro-cowtown. He lived in a van that he had outfitted to become solar powered, he paid for everything in cash and kept off the grid as much as he could, that was already way more interesting to talk about then widgets and apps and hedgefunds, which is what I assume all the tech bros and cowboys talked about when they went out painting
We'd go into the mountains and paint simple landscapes. He would do impressionism, and I would do happy little trees, always looking at our canvases but never at each other. Occasionally, I would watch him get really angry at himself for making a mistake that I would not be able to detect. He would get, like, actually angry, which I would excuse by just shrugging my shoulders and thinking "gosh he is just so hard on himself, what a perfectionist" so turned it into another thing I admired about him. Or at least I told myself I did, while excusing it.
It was while I was driving home from painting in Leadville that I started taking the idea of sobriety seriously. In my skull there was a stormy cluster of clouds, but the sun broke through for a few fragile moments; when I gave myself a gentle suggestion that perhaps a sober mindset could end so much of my tragedy, and I finally believed it, as I was driving down the mountain pass, concentrating on navigating between 18 wheelers bombing down I-70.
I concluded that the most important reason I had to go sober is that I would no longer be a scumbag. I really didn't want to be one anymore, and Justin directly inspired me to no longer be one by showing me some of the other amazing things I could be doing with my time instead of drinking, like just going outside and looking at stuff. That was so simple and so much better. What if I just simply went outside?
While I worked at getting sober and began to enjoy not being hungover every day, Justin picked up his van, cleaned off his paintbrushes, and headed for his new parking spot in Moab, Utah.
I had Sadie for just a few weeks when I decided to go see Justin in Moab, where he was living in his van, and mountain biking, and painting and living the perfect anarcho-dirtbag lifestyle.
The first few months with a puppy are insane. It was almost as if everyone who has ever raised a puppy was exactly right, yet somehow I did not listen, which is kind of a theme. Anyway, Sadie and I were having trouble with potty training: she didn't know how to tell me, and I didn't know how to listen. At least her sharp puppy teeth were teaching me detachment from all material objects. I also learned to be patient on a deeper level than I have ever practiced before. I learned patience for every single thing that ever has, and is about to happen.
I had to develop patience of the existential variety because the first time I felt myself get angry at her, I got a stomach ache. Puppy-time means that every single task takes approximately twice as long to do, which was obviously stressful, but I had never been more essential to something, which made the stress wonderful, but messy. So messy.
I was so excited to introduce Justin and his black shepherd, Oso, to Sadie. I was gonna introduce one best friend to another, we all would go paint, and then I would try some hiking in one of the most stunning landscapes in America. As a bonus, Justin was debuting his pieces at a local gallery and giving a talk afterward. And maybe after we hang out for a little while, he would notice how much work I had done in my first 60 days of sobriety, and then he would make out with me. What an absolutely solid plan. Air tight.
The drive into the desert was intense. The only other time I had driven through Utah was when I left Portland to start my new life in Denver two years before, and as I drove back through the same rolling green hills, I reflected on all of the loss and wreckage I had left in my wake, as if by driving back towards the NW I was confronting those memories head-on.
I was thinking about my status as a perpetually single person, and couldn't shake the idea that I had become such a weirdo that I had painted myself into a corner and was undateable. All of the relationships I had ever been in were total failures. I wondered what, if anything, I owed to my ex-husband as the memory of the last time I saw him, wiping tears off his chin while waving goodbye to my rear-view mirror, as he stood on the porch, next to my old dog Martha, intruded it's way into my brain.
Obviously Martha could not understand that this departure would be the last time I ever saw her, since their next move was to England. I don't even think Martha knew what England was. Would Martha remember me if I made it to the UK before she got too old? Oh, ok, there it was, that started the tears, and I needed a good healthy cry. I needed catharsis.
No one had told me that in the first 100 days of drinking I would be entering a into a sunken state and I just would not feel anything for a while. It was strange, but since I didn't have an opinion about not having emotions, on I went, seeing but not feeling. Except for when feelings hit me in the face and I fixated on weird hobbies like trying out baking, or making cast iron skillet pizza or podcasting.
It dovetailed with me listening to Eckart Tolle's book The Power of Now, in which he states that mindfulness and full awareness can be the tool humans need to bring ourselves enlightenment. That's quite the lofty goal. How do you reach it? By becoming nothing. No thought, no feeling, all consiousness. I bet it took exactly 10 minutes for someone to use this idea for nefarious reasons.
I think Eckart's ideas have some merit though, I had never considered the idea that I had several layers in my being, and that my thoughts were not neccesarily me. I liked that idea, that I was not my thoughts, because I hated my stupid idiot thoughts, so if they weren't me, maybe that meant I wasn't a stupid idiot. And maybe, if I am worried about having stupid thoughts, it wouldn't be any loss to me or society at large if I just stopped thinking about them.
He helped me understand why I got caught up in compulsively pouring vodka down my neck even though it was no longer giving me a buzz that anyone could ever describe as being "fun" or "vaguely pleasant". I suppose if you could say that I was "building a tolerance", if you're boring, but I liked the idea that I was dealing with an interdimensional shadow of pain that was living inside of my body, and would keep fucking me up until I confronted it.
In my early life, I got hurt, like we all do. My pain was due to abandonment, and after the first wave of pain passed through me, I got stuck in the second wave. It's like, when I fall down or Sadie headbutts my nose, there's the initial sharp impact of pain, but then you brace for that second wave, where you get angry about the injury, and if you don't move on then you might become a loveless middle aged recovering alcoholic sobbing for no obvious reason on the I-70 Eastbound.
While drinking, I was experiencing the second wave of pain all over again, every day, and the craziest part is that the initial pain which led me to this cycle didn't even exist anymore. It had ended years ago but I was too drunk to notice. And I needed the pain, I loved it, because it kept me drunk. My ego wanted me to be drunk, so it hurt me in order to entice me to drink away the pain it was causing. What a brilliant cycle.
Somewhere, somehow down the line, I had stubbed my toe, and every day that I was drinking I was kicking the same doorway that I stubbed it on. The pain I was running from was in my head. I was stuck in processing. Never developing. It was time to develop.
Those were the wild realizations I was beginning to understand on the freeway, and as I was getting ready for a new adventure in previously unseen part of the country, I felt myself beginning to soften and unclench.
I met up with Justin right before his art show started, and something was weird, but I chalked it up to nerves. Later on I figured out what it was: he didn't greet me with any warmth, it was detached.
I perpetually wondered if I was putting out vibes that made interactions with a lot of people, not just Justin, awkward, without ever wondering if maybe I was choosing to spend my time with people who were actually awkward themselves. Maybe my taste in people was the actual red flag here, because as Justin and I were having breakfast the next day while we were getting ready to paint, I found out I was not having any fun.
The art show the night before was OK. I don't really understand impressionism, I don't understand why I have to blur my eyes to enjoy a painting, but it was fun, I guess. I sat in the back and watched him and wondered if anyone in the audience was rich. The theme was death. Or at least that's what I hoped it was, since everything he showed us was dead, including a gray whale he found washed up in Baja. I imagined his artistic process of waking up at dawn every day in one of the most beautiful landscapes in the Americas, in order to paint a corpse, and it did not exactly fill me with joy.
We met at breakfast and he was being obnoxious. He was talking too loud, making jokes that weren't landing and sometimes I tried to talk but the conversation was static, and instead I just listened to him rant and wondered if this was why his ex-girlfriend no longer spoke with him and what would happen if I communicated solely by body language. So I crossed my arms and let the air stay silent in the moments after he would Maybe that was the moment our friendship died, or maybe it was the moment he scoffed at me when I said I needed to get some hiking boots, as if I was some sort of poser for having arrived in Moab in Chuck Taylors.
"What kind of shoes you get should be determined by what you are going to do after you hike Moab? Are ya gonna go bouldering? Haha can you imagine YOU, bouldering?"
"Yeah, I'm not there yet, but I'm out here trying to get comfortable with hiking and with Sadie."
"Ha yeah, you aren't there yet"
I uncrossed my arms specifically so that I could recross them. Was that even a joke?
The realization that Justin was so stuck in his own pain cycles that my presence made me an intruder came to me during the walk I took after our fight.
We had finished breakfast, and we were in front of his van, getting ready to drive out of town and paint. Sadie and Oso were doing alright, they didn't really seem to care about each other, Oso didn't really care about much actually.
"How potty trained is she? Is she gonna piss in my van? This is my home, this is Oso's home, if she pisses in here it's gonna mess up Oso's whole deal, and why isn't she potty trained yet? How old is she again? Like 8 months?"
"Sbe's four months and I don't want to lie Justin, I can't guarantee anything, I mean she's just got a small little puppy bladder"
"Oso peed on my floor once, maybe twice, and he never did it again. I think you're too soft on her. She needs to know that her life will be easier if she does things your way."
"Yeah, I know I'm a softie. I'm working on it."
"You don't want her to get hurt because you were scared of disciplining her, do you?"
"No dude of course I don't. I've only had her for a month, I'm learning, she's learning."
"So is she gonna pee in my fucking van?"
"I hope not!"
"That's not good enough. Look, you aren't even paying attention to her."
God, why was I working so hard on myself if this was how I would be treated by people? What in the fuck happened to this guy? Why was he hanging out with me if this was already such an ordeal? And, was he correct? Am I the asshole? Was my existence a burden on every single person I have ever interacted with?
"Ok, well, I'll hold her in my lap; she's never peed in my lap before."
We made it about one block in this uneasy truce before Justin made a gesture with his arms that hit Sadie in the face. Sadie thought that Oso did it, so she nipped at Oso. It was a standard corrective dog nip, it means "watch out" in dog, and neither dog escalated, but Justin sure did.
"She can't do that here, in Oso's house! She can't nip Oso like that, that's some bitch shit right there!" he said, not to me, not to Sadie or Oso, but seemingly to the air, while he grabbed Sadie by the scruff, pulled her off my lap, and pinned her to the ground.
She yelped, and I watched. I don't know why my heart wasn't racing. I got higher hits of adrenaline waiting to go on stage than I did at this moment, stuck in the van of a person who I used to trust, and I watched him lash out at my dog. I watched him get angry because he was angry, I watched him feeding his own misery.
I mean I had only listened to about 45 minute of Eckhart Tolle on the drive out and I knew this. I knew that alcohol had trapped me in a feedback loop, and my liberation from it cycled me into another positive feedback loop, and I watched the obsessive and intrusive thoughts from my prior loop fade away as I settled into the recovery one. If I, a total dumbass, could see that we are trapped in loops which validate our behaviors which keep us stuck in those loops, then how come Justin couldn't?
Justin repeated that line about Sadie pulling some bitch shit, almost verbatim, and pinned her down, again, Sadie was crying more loudly than I have ever heard her cry at the time of this writing "She doesn't mean that she's just pretending, I'm not hurting her," he said as he turned to me, waiting for my reaction.
I just sat there. I didn't say anything because I didn't have anything to say. I guess I went into a state of shock. I receded. I went into a space where I was simply a body, covered in meat, and then forced myself to re-animate and react.
I silently grabbed Sadie and climbed out of his van. Justin, oddly, offered me a ride back to my car. "Uh I'm gonna walk'' and that was all I said. I wish it was the last thing I ever said to him. I was in Moab to paint and to hike, not to witness a grown adult man have a total meltdown projected onto my dog.
I visited Justin because I loved him and wanted him to love me but instead, I watched a man show me that he was too trapped in his anguish, and I didn't feel safe, and all I could say was "uh I think I'll walk"
And I did, I walked to the nearest coffee shop, and I just sat there in shock for a minute. I planned my next move. And I coveted a drink for the first time in weeks, and I reflected on how deeply alone I was. Which made me want to drink more.
The Beast was louder than I want to admit. It reminded me that I was more alone than ever, in the middle of a desert, and the only person I knew out here had turned into a villain. No one here knew I was sober, no one here knew that pouring a beer down my throat would be a slow-motion suicide attempt… besides, it reasoned, what if I could change my relationship with alcohol? What about harm reduction instead of abstinence? I'd been so good for so long. Surely I could have a drink for these reasons?
God, I wanted a drink so bad. I wanted a drink and a cigarette and I had some trauma that could totally justify all of the reasons in the world to relapse, people would forgive me. I needed to get the fuck out of dodge and into the wild, so I took Sadie to the Hidden Valley Trail, and we walked around in absolute awe as we stumbled our way through this sweet potato pie-colored slice of earth. It was a light, easy walk, no major hills, just a little sand in new hiking boots, just a soft and easy way to get to know the silence.
I started to trust myself a little bit more as I hiked some unstable grounds, but then I came to a point where I was climbing above a river, and had to turn back. The angle of the ground was too sharp and I feared sliding down and falling it. At that point, I didn’t feel like the earth ever supported me and didn’t trust gravity. I turned back and didn't chastise myself, I was just proud to have found something that pushed my limits. I was happy to be scared because that meant I was living a life and not just existing through one.
We happily tracked our way all around that area for the day, I barely thought about Justin until he texted an apology. "What I did wasn't nice, that wasn't nice at all" and I thought ok maybe we can work on this and meditated on what this friendship meant as I climbed and crawled around all of those orange rocks.
I just didn't have an opinion about him. I was emotionless. The oddest thought occurred to me while I was trying to figure out my next move. It asked me, "Why are you so scared of your power?" and the closest thing I had to an answer was, "Because I don't know."
It came time to meet with Justin, and our tentative plan was to make a stir fry, and then we could go paint the sunset. But first, we had to discuss what happened.
I drove back to where his van was parked, he was 10 feet away, as the sun was setting behind him, he was backlit and his face was a shadow, it felt less like a reconciliation and more like a stand off.
"I don't think you realized it, and I didn't want to say this at the moment in fear it would escalate things, but Sadie nipped at Oso because you gestured and hit her in the face"
"No, no that's not what happened, Sadie bit Oso because she didn't respect his space!"
Talk about projecting our own situation into the dogs. Justin thought I was an intruder. And this was going nowhere.
"You got angry, and then you got angry because you were angry, and this had nothing to do with the dogs."
"No, I mean yes, I told you I know I lost my temper. I got angry because you weren't watching her after I told you to! You're too lenient on that dog!"
All of a sudden, my guts woke up and started checking in with me. "How do we fix this?" They asked. "Do you want to fix this? This was supposed to be fun. This isn't fun."
I listened to Justin repeat himself; he thought I deserved his oversized reaction because otherwise I wouldn’t take care of Sadie. I rolled my eyes and then I said "you know what? I'm gonna go."
And I left. And he texted me that what I did wasn't cool and I was just trying to avoid things and I wrote back "No, I just decided I was no longer interested in a friendship with someone who doesn't even enjoy me as a person".
And I walked the Moab trails for a second time that day, and watched my little 16 week old puppy be fascinated with every single leaf and bite at literal tumbleweeds floating down the dusty outback and I thought about how out there in the red clay plateaus, I'm more alone than I've been, but less lonely than ever. This was the most remote landscape I had ever viewed and less people were around me geographically speaking then maybe ever, but I felt no lacking in their absence. I was alone but not lonely.
I had let go of a toxic friendship instead of continuing a codependent pattern. Letting go of a false friendship meant I could walk a few more miles on the earth without feeling like a burden. It was a bittersweet type of self-care, like getting a hug from a cactus.
As soon as I settled into my shitty hotel for the evening, my Alcoholic Banshee screamed more loudly than she ever had before. She made some excellent points about how delicious an IPA would feel after the stressful day I had just endured.
The voice inviting my relapse was so loud and I didn't have anyone to talk me out of it. I wouldn't be able to call anyone if I wanted to since the cell phone service was total ass.
All I had was Sadie, and she looked at me with her head cocked to one side while her ears tilted; one perked and the other flopped, and I knew that Sadie saw me for who I am, not who I was, and who I am is someone who never had a drink during Sadie's lifetime. Yeah, It was only four months, but also the world was entirely different with her in it.
And that thought kept me going for one of the most crucial shifts I had experienced on this sober journey: I was no longer attached to who I used to be, I was finding out who I was becoming. I threw a lot of garbage out in the desert, and ummm today? I just hit 955 days with no alcohol. Tons of weed of course, but no two years, seven months and 12 days with no booze would never have happened unless I fell in love with a silly mutt at the first boop.