tryingnottowrite.md

A Good Day, A Great Day, A Red Day

by Rick (and a Higher Power I Don’t Fully Trust Yet)

“A new life opens up before you that can be always interesting. Sobriety should give you so many new interests in life that you shouldn't have time to be bored.”

Coulda, shoulda, woulda. Pedantic af, but fine.

The thing is: boredom didn’t hang around long in early sobriety for me. I’m a Meyers-Briggs introvert (INFP), and I learned to be self-maintaining as a kid once I could use the stove without burning myself. These days I carry a laptop everywhere and I’m a huge nerd, so between my brain and my toys, I can usually find something to do.

What really killed boredom, though, wasn’t hobbies. It was the train wreck.

The Slow-Motion Train Wreck Period Vol. 4

Summer 2020 onward: crawling air disaster with some fast-forward moments.

Depressed I wasn’t dead, but hopeful I was at least getting closer.

Then: break ankle.
End up in a sober house in Virginia with a pre-surgery broken ankle and one of those knee-roller things.

Three surgeries. The first two? Dr. Fuckwad made things worse. "I hope you're not thinking of suing me for malpractice..." Why would you even say that to a patient?

"Well... I hadn't, but it honestly sounds like a great idea now that bring it up."

The third: a Badass Named Captain Dr. Richard Derner, trained at Ramstein AFB bolting together blown-up soldiers. He told me I was about the worst case he’d ever had and then somehow left me with a functioning, non-fused ankle. Miracle by way of steel and stubbornness. He even incised and sawed around my Nine Inch Nails tattoo.

And when we were pretty much done with it all, he had his Resident come in for some learning (I was the lesson), and he started with the x-rays.

Resident - "Wow, Mr. Shangle - that's... wow. Car wreck?"
Me - "No. I got up in the middle of the night to pee, and I'm on these diuretics that make me dizzy, and got up weird, and came down on it wrong and crack ow."
"Ouch. Came down wrong, I hear ya... "
"Oh I also told myself it was sprained, and didn't come into the ER for like four days."
"Yow. So as the final move, was your bed positioned on the edge of the 8th story of a parking garage?"
"Funny."
Dr. Derner - "I call him 'Humpty Dumpty'. So let me... try to explain what I did here..."
"Is that a... double-ladder assembly?"
"Triple. It's really more like a 3.5."
"Yeah, right. No such thing. Nice try."
"There is now. He's going to make us famous. When I got in there after Dr... Ass-Head, first I had to remove all the chewing gum and bailing wire he had used..."

Six months on Percs. Managed not to start snorting them. That was not skill; that was grace plus just enough fear.

Minnesota, Mayo, and the Not-Dying Problem

Somewhere in all that, Mayo Clinic says, “Sure, come on out; we’ll take care of you; you know you’ll need to move, right?”

"I thought you only worked on livers if you broke somebody's while removing a railroad spike or some other form of abdominal impalement, and had to give them a new one. 'First, do no harm?'."

"Ha. No. Just stop drinking and we'll take care."

I get a job in Minnesota the same week.
Land at a college for about ten months until mental health, progressive disease, extended insomnia and terminal ennui collide into relapse.

Psych ward: <>. Long time.
Leave the job, go to a sober house in Owatonna to be closer to Mayo.

Almost die there over in mid '23. Fortunately Medicaid had just clicked on the week before. Grace.

Then the dance:

And then: the ongoing Fight To Survive.

Been busy. Who the fuck has time to be bored?

Scooter, Mugging, Meth Psychosis, Repeat

Fast Forward:

May ’25: wreck a scooter at 21 mph during an attempted mugging under the pedestrian overpass at — haha! — Mayo Park at 2AM.

Nothing broken, nothing ruptured internally. Both common ways to die with cirrhosis on board. Lots of gauze. Apparently I'm a Superball.

I get home around 3AM, still leaking, to find a housemate in meth psychosis and all other housemates locked in their rooms.

“Anyone, uh, call the cops yet?”
“Uhhh… I was about to.”
“Yes. Let’s.” "You're bleeding... a lot." "Yeah. I should be at the ER. Make the call, please. I need to take this pizza out of the oven without setting my gauze on fire."

Own worst enemy, sure. But it’s a competitive field in this game.

Diabetic Roulette and Walking Off the Line

Later: I get told I’ll probably slip into a diabetic coma on the job because there’s no food or water at hand on a high-tech assembly line, and I can watch my blood sugar rocket from 50 to over 250 via a little 1990's-era device running Windows CE or something, during a shift, but not do a damn thing about it.

So I leave. And the More Fight To Survive chapter begins.

When I’m not actively seeking my doom (a talent I’ve had since about age 18), I am bizarrely resilient.

Which is to say:

The Meeting With Two Richards

Now I run a meeting that almost no one shows up to except another guy named Richard, so we’re always forgetting each other’s name. Recovering drunks. The damage.

He’s an old-timer. He told me the origin story of, “Make a doorknob your Higher Power” the other night. He’d be a good sponsor. At the moment he basically is a sponsor, and I think he knows it.

We show up. Sometimes it’s just the two of us. Sometimes I chair, sometimes I just sit and let my nervous system cool down and twitch.

We talk about how ridiculous it is to still be alive.
Or really he talks about how great it is and leaves the irony to me. And then we talk about what we’re going to do today anyway.

Good Days, Great Days

A guy named Special Ed told me in 2017 that when I got and stayed sober, there’d be days I’d go out, have a normal day, come home abstinent — and that would be a Good Day.

And that I’d also have days where life takes a dump in my mouth, where everything goes sideways, maybe I buried a friend or a cat, and old instincts scream, “Drink, use, disappear” — and I’d come home abstinent — and those would be the Great Days.

He’s right.

Today, my life is not boring. It’s messy, painful, often absurd.
But if I come home abstinent — or crawl back, or limp, or scooter-wreck my way back — that’s a Great Day.

And tomorrow?

Get up and do it again, and avoid the Mayo Park Overpass. Dragons.

rshangle_sigil