Today on The Chorizo Report :

The new housemate Chris is driving me to pick up a carpet cleaning machine so I can ctl-alt-delete the dust and the stench in my new room. As far as I can tell, someone has either spilled two gallons of ice cream on the floor, or murdered a small pet. That would be fine, if they would just clean up once every few years. Chris is one of those meth-heads who just can't stop talking. Even without the meth. Chris wisdom: "I say, if you're going to do a relapse, just start moving out. That way they won't bother to UI you." Chris also says his relapses usually run about a year in length. Ah, sweet mysteries of youth , I think. Three days of that is enough for me. Chris also likes to roll his crotch-rocket motorbikes down the road at 160mph. Different strokes for different folks.

It's true, I had 10 nice months of sobriety then fell into the beer hole while sick, weak and under pressure. Boy, wasn't that was a crap-load of unfun. I was up-front about it though. Although I knew admitting it would likely result in me getting kicked out of Ashar House, as per Oxford House rules, it was the right thing to do. Clearly things weren't right in my life. At the time I was thinking I'd probably go back into Fora Health inpatient for 30 days or so. I even had a suitcase packed in case I was able to move directly from detox to inpatient, but the world rotated in a different direction.

I know, those of you, who are called "normies" by the Addicts In Recovery, are really wondering about the relapse thing. Well let me tell you this. When I'm talking with someone who's In The System, helping people move past their troubles... when you tell them you've had a relapse, there's a moment where they stare blankly into the middle distance. Clearly connecting with a past version of themselves and what happened back when. There's no judgement. No blame-throwing, nothing more than a sigh. "Relapses happen." This is still a surprise to me, as I'm way past sick of the destruction I've caused for myself and those around me. Yet when I talk with the guys and gals I've gotten to know through the Fora experience - relapse is incredibly common. I don't have any real stats to share, but almost everyone I've had a meaningful connection with has had at least one relapse after getting out of the program. Some more than just one. Aaron tells me he had a three-month relapse, and now he's back in in-patient. This getting back on your feet again after everything has gone wrong is incredibly hard and complicated and difficult and lengthy and double-plus not easy.

So a moment to say THANK YOU for all your support. I know you're out there and you're part of making this all work again. ¡A Victoria Siempre!

Down below you can read about the detox experience. It sounds like getting there and doing that should be simple, but ha ha ha ha and yet another ha . I'm sparing you the story of the Oxford House Troubles that prevented me from even attempting the detox for several days. Oh lordy.

In detox there's nothing to do but sleep, sleep, eat and think. I had plenty of time to noodle over what had gone wrong to lead me astray and what needed to be different. I'd gone from being over-busy trying to juggle five weekly commitments to Fora's outpatient program with 11-hour shifts at Autozone and getting out to see Chloe and the continuing stream of Oxford House complications. Once I was able to drop all those treatment events I wasn't doing anything beyond sleeping and working. And that's the catch, just sleeping and working isn't a life. AutoZone consistently scheduled me over the recovery meetings I used to go to and the writer's group I'd been active in. I also found I'd missed running into my pals, which was a perk of being into Fora on a regular basis. I was welcomed back with open arms.

So, on further thought disappearing into in-patient treatment wasn't the right thing. It would just be putting myself in storage for a time, and back to where I started when I came out without having actually addressed the things that needed changing. So instead I immediately signed myself up for out-patient treatment at Fora and dove straight into the crapstream of trouble I'd caused for myself. Sure enough, I was given what's called "a 24". That is, 24 hours notice to get you and your stuff out of the house. However, since I wasn't a jerk about it and also did the right thing by being honest they pulled an administrative trick that gave me a few more days. Still, I had no place to go which meant butt-clenching, aneurysm-level stress. However, I kept my head together, stayed straight and handled one thing at a time. This is where the mindfulness practice I've been working on was very helpful. "Relax, it is all going to work out" I told myself over and over again. And then it was. The people at Fora helped me land a temporary bed at another sober house for two weeks, and from there after a few tries I found a new Oxford House to move into and despite the stress, everything is fine.

Another Ox Haus? Haven't they been deadly stressful? Yessir, they have. It seems entirely wrong that your "sober living" place should be the biggest source of skull-bending stress in your life, but here we are. At my income level there just ain't a whole lot of options. In 2023 I spent a month in a sober house run by a guy who's building an empire of sober living homes. That place was deeply problematic, and I wasn't going through that again. There's some other options I won't bore you with, but this seems the best of a not-so-great situation. So far the new place is working out alright. There's fewer residents, only one guy pushing 70 (and set in their ways) and they are less ossified into having endless unwritten rules you're supposed to follow that they don't tell you about until you've broken them. Seems the new place has had to deal with a string of unreliable housemates and they tell me I'm far better put together than most people they've seen. The new haus also closer in to town, and not in meth-head central which is a nice change.

This was not fun to go through. It's been fun like I imagine chemotherapy is fun. Everyone tells me that relapsing is part of the process and I shouldn't beat myself up about it, but it is hard not to. Everything's better when I stay off the sauce as the stuff does nothing but cause trouble for me and the people who rely on me.

Job hunting again. Relapse caused the loss of my AutoZone job, though that's hardly a tragedy. While not terrible and a great place to practice my Spanish it wasn't the right place for me. "Let's keep making the same mistakes over and over again! We don't have time to fix anything!" Okay, it's your store, not mine. I've found some great opportunities which match my interests, skills and experience. Like manager of the Willamette Sailing Club . Associate Director for Enterprise Development at Central City Concern, and others. Most likely I'll end up taking another blue-collar job that won't be right for me while continuing to look for something that puts my white collar skills to work, but so it goes. Onward and upward, one step at a time.

Thoughts from the Hangover Hotel

They always made it seem like it would be so hard to get into detox, formally known as "Withdrawal Management". You have to be there at 7:30am, no later! (Pity the sleepy drunk) We can only take the people we have room for, go back to your tent under the freeway if we're full! (oops, better be early) No patient parking! (Wait, so how do I get elsewhere if I can't get in? How do I even get there that early?) How do people pull this off? You can't bring anything with you, and you can't leave anything behind. Somehow you're expected to do both.

I can't under-describe the misery involved with this. For the sake of the discussion, let's imagine the skull-scraping boredom of the homeless shelter + the creeping horror of a temp job where knowing the english alphabet makes one an "advanced skills worker" tips a guy into escaping via a relapse and being ejected from the Economic Refugee Camp. Ok, now you are in a motel room and your world resembles a collapsed 9/11 stairwell. Can you pack out of the dry/warm place into the vehicle and be at a detox place at 7:30am? Well, sure maybe. But... you can't leave your car there. You can't leave your car at the motel. What do you do with your stuff? What is a person to do when you get there somehow, and they don't have room for you, but you've given up your motel room and you can't go back? I understand this probably sounds easy to you, from where you're sitting. But you're not sitting in the cold rain in a broken parking lot before dawn biting down on the horror that your life has become.

This time was different, a short max ride and a pal from Fora, Sean, offered to walk me there. If they were full, I had a place to go back to and no car hassles.

We get there. I'd imagined a line of wet, shivering junkies, jerking and coughing in the pre-dawn cold. Wary eyes on each other and the door, dragging on drooping smokes in the parking lot, waiting and ready to pull steel to protect their spot in line. (um, for those who might not know "pull steel" is another way of saying getting knifed over a spot in line.) Instead it's just one guy I don't know and Carson, another buddy from treatment. His girlfriend had told him to shape up or ship out. "Ship out of my own place that I pay all the bills for," he tells me bitterly. "Right after she came home with $200 in cocaine." These are the ties that bind, apparently.

7:30am arrives, the door opens and friendly staff stream out with various tools to see if we're still alive and if we have insurance. Congratulations, they announce. You're all winners! They have beds for us all.

I'm going to mostly skip over intake. You wouldn't do it for fun. You confess your sins to the nurse-person. Here's a bunch of chemicals to help you get off the other chemicals. You turn over all your possessions, clothes and yes... even your phone. Everything. Take a shower. Put on scrubs & flops. Get asked three times if you have contraband you're trying to sneak into detox. I guess that's a thing people do in detox for some reason. Junkie logic, I guess. Then you are through The Door.

Through The Door and into The Crib. Fora Health Withdrawal Management is a quiet warm place where all you have to do is sleep and eat. Welcome back to the womb. Every so often a friendly person comes by and asks if you need anything. Of the 16 beds there are only six patients. When I wake up, the next meal is already sitting on the tray next to me. I swear, this is so pleasant no wonder they make it sound hard to get into. There would be stressed-out yuppies banging on the doors if they knew they could have this bliss. This was detox at Fora Health. I hear the detox at Hooper Detoxification Stabilization Center downtown is a lot tougher, loud and crowded.

Freed from every other concern I was able to sort out my thoughts about what I was going to do. I knew I had given myself a free ticket to crisis-vile in finding a living situation, what to do about that. What had gone wrong to lead me to where I was. What I needed to do to avoid that in the future.

Another thing I noticed I started doing again while I was in the crib was writing down ideas and even hand-wrote most of a new chapter. Two things I had not done one bit of since I had started working at AutoZone. The kind of thing where my brain would wake me up to write something down. That had not been happening in the situation in the outside world.

A dumb situation to learn this, but food for thought. Something to chew on.