May 23, 2007

• Four of the Best Years of my Life

  Three members of my family have birthdays today.  It is the seventh anniversary of my dog Koji’s birth.  He had six brothers and a sister, and the young couple from whom we bought firewood were going to kill all the males because they were getting ready to move and the only pup they’d found a home for was the female.

  Out of a box of seven puppies obviously only about three to four weeks old, too young to be taken from their mother, Doug and I chose the one who moved around the most and cried the least.  The couple said they were part husky and part collie, but as he grew we saw the bone structure of a doberman and the markings of an Alsatian.

  Koji didn’t even know how to eat when we got him.  He’d do face plants in his gruel.  But he finally got the hang of it, and adjusted to the idea that he is the omega animal in a multi-species pack.  He sticks pretty close to the alpha, sleeps on my bed and will go wherever I go if I let him.  Unfortunately, his mom didn’t have time to teach him what to eat.  His dietary indiscretion has given us all a few laughs and some worries, and has torn up his guts on one occasion, but he has mostly recovered from that. 

  He has not, and may never entirely, recover from the post-traumatic stress of being stomped by a moose.  That altered his personality.  The cats used to fish chunks of his big kibble (large breed style) out of his dish, bat them around the floor until they were good and dead, then eat them and he would just lie there and watch.  Now he guards his dish until he’s ready to eat and will not share.  Until each new kitten learns that Koji’s food is taboo, there are sudden charges and mad scrambles accompanied by the scritching of claws.

  He is a perfect dog.

  

  The other two birthdays have nothing to do with being born, but rather with a sort of rebirth.  Four years ago this was the day that ended my soulmate Greyfox‘s last drug binge.  Nobody will ever know all that occurred during the days leading up to that, because he was in an alcoholic blackout, and had just moved into his little cabin at Felony Flats.  After some initial resistance, I acceded to Spirit’s urging and went down there to rescue him.  Fortunately for us both, I had never been to Al-Anon and didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to intervene.

  By using orthomolecular supplements similar to the ones I had used to kick my sugar addiction, Greyfox got off booze, pills, weed and cigarettes all on that same day.   Perhaps even more importantly for his mental health and our relationship, he took an online personality test, diagnosed his own narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders, and agreed to let me act as therapist in helping him to transcend them.  He also appointed me as his AA/NA sponsor after the first sponsor he picked didn’t return his calls, then got drunk and disappeared.

  Both those things:  a spouse or family member acting as therapist, and a member of the opposite sex being a 12-step sponsor, are unorthodox.  We say, as the kahunas do, “Effectiveness is the measure of truth.”  Whatever works, works.  Greyfox’s amino acid, vitamin and mineral supplements worked to get him through a painless, easy withdrawal from multiple addictions, and my determined confrontation of his pathological behavior has helped him make great progress in transcending some personality disorders for which conventional therapy gives a very pessimistic prognosis.

  The two of us celebrate the same 12-step birthday, even though we found our recovery outside the usual AA/NA/DTR dogmas.  We attend meetings occasionally, do twelfth step service work in NA, and I, for one, enjoy the fellowship of dope fiends and crazy people, especially in Double Trouble.  I had kicked IV meth and downers thirty-some years previously, and it was my research into orthomolecular psychiatry and its success at getting me out of a lifelong addiction to sugar, that led to Greyfox’s poly-drug recovery. 

  What his recovery four years ago did for me was free me from the need to grow weed so that he wouldn’t need to spend money on it, and from any desire to use it.  The stuff gave me the munchies and made my abstinence from sugar more difficult, so it was with a sense of liberation that I finally got “clean” of the last of those substances that NA considers “drugs”.  Ironically, though, the coffee in those meetings, and the tradition of “birthday” cakes, revived my old addictions to caffeine and sugar, both of which I had kicked before I started going to 12-step meetings.  Once an addict, always an addict, even in abstinence and recovery. 

  Happy birthday, Greyfox.  You are totally kewl, dood.  So what if I went through twelve and a half years of hell with you.  These last four years have been the happiest of my life.  
  

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