This is a podcast episode that you can listen to above, or with these links. Or you can read this episode as a piece of writing below.
Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic
Episode 5 (out of 10) - Side Effects A.K.A High School Part 2
Subheadings w durations
Technical vs Creative (4.01)
Rock Music (4.25)
90s (3.34)
Ironbark (2.12)
Cultural Rifts (6.52)
A Boy Finds His Veneer (7.12)
Escapism (6.06)
Delinquency (7.37)
Wounded (3.17)
Altered States (2.07)
End of High School (3.59)
In this episode
Rock music! The 90’s sells us anti-authority sentiments. School camp has Stand By Me vibes. I exist in a veneer of shame. I find booze! I become a delinquent! I bend reality around my insufficiencies. I seek altered states of consciousness. High school finishes with a barf and a whimper.
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic is my memoir of growing up with a body that was not east to inhabit. It will be released an episode each week for a few months. Citing neuroscientists, philosophers and modern-day poets (rockstars) and exploring the 90s popular culture that shaped me (its music, movies and video games), Shedding Skin is a rollicking, humorous ride of self-analysis about the confusion and alienation of growing up with chronic health battles, the disorientating effects of coping mechanisms (like alcohol and drug dependencies), and my eventual flailing attempts to understand how to live a deep life whilst struggling with new parenthood.
.
Shedding Skin was long listed for the Richell Prize for emerging writers in 2023
Chapter 5 – Side Effects (High School p 2)
Were you neurotic as a child?
Did they come around and watch your style?
Did you have plans to be a star?
Did you have plans to become more than you are?
More than you are,
More than you are,
More than you are now?
More Than You Are by Grinspoon (1997)
Sung by Phil Jamieson
Technical vs Creative
I realised my aptitude for technical tasks when I got my first degree in ‘VCR programming’ by teaching myself how to tape episodes of this amazing new cartoon that I loved called The Simpsons. Anyone who remembers these unwieldly VCR devices will recall the thrill of playing a tape the following day and determining that the correct episode they wished to record the night before was actually recorded, because programming these devices could be its own kind of nightmare.
Did you have the TV tuned to the channel you wished to record, or did someone change channels before the recording started? Did you get the obscure US date format perfectly correct? Ha, you screwed up and forgot about the 24 hour time format! No X-files episode for you.
Years earlier we got our first personal computer, and from that moment I was hooked. I subsisted on a strong diet of Pacman, Alley Cat, Outrun and Prince of Persia in the 80s, and this only grew to a youth happily wasted on Wolfenstein, Golden Axe, R-Type, Lemmings, Myst and Doom in the early 90s. Not to mention all the Sierra ‘quest’ games – Police Quest, Space Quest, King’s Quest. I spent an inordinate amount of my youth playing a game called ‘Alone In The Dark’, a gothic horror mystery game involving solving puzzles and mythic riddles whilst wandering a haunted mansion.
It was a full-time job to try to illegally copy, install and run these games, swapping them between friends. The immense problem solving required here would lead to my future vocation as a network administrator / IT guy. Time well spent.
Initially music was not my thing. My sister did piano lessons and I used to tag along and sit in the waiting room. Perhaps this set back my growing passion for music by a few years because it’s one thing to learn to play an instrument, it’s another to have to sit and listen to someone else learning. I contented myself by reading the poster there over and over trying to decipher it:
Gone Chopan, Bach in a Minuet.
Whilst waiting for the person murdering someone with a piano down the hall was finished so we could leave.
In my head, I was not a ‘creative person’. There were other people in the world that were creative, see them, look at their crazy and wild expressions of their emotions and feelings and their raw humanness and how art and music and design flowed from them with ease! But I wasn’t one of them. I was logical, good at computers and video games and problem solving. Basically, I was a nerd.
Music changed all that. Like a coked-up rock star trashing his hotel room, music, and specifically rock music, kicked the door that was containing my need to express my experiences creatively off its hinges, exploding out into the night looking to party.
Rock Music
One day in the early 90s something happened that changed my life – such a clichéd thing to say, but clichés are clichés because they are true.
My sister, bless her, handed me a cassette tape with Joe Satriani’s guitar instrumental Always With Me, Always With You on it. The song was released in 1987 (but I didn’t hear it until at least 92 or 93) and is a very 80s article. The rhythm track was recorded on a drum machine, and Joe’s soft, climbing arpeggio backing track lays the foundation for his simple and clean soloing. It’s a beautiful and relatively slow instrumental rock guitar song that launched Joe Satriani into the big time - complete with a black and white music video of Joe jamming in the desert with the smoke and wind machines cranked up way too high and a young Jennifer Connelly dancing around wistfully for some reason.
Prior to this I would listen to the B105 radio top 20 countdown on weeknights lying in my bed, grooving to Ride on Time, confused by the lyrics in Under The Bridge and haunted by the eery mandolin and existential words in Losing My Religion.
Then came Joe Satriani. This song completely blew my mind. I couldn’t understand what this thing was - this ‘rock guitar sound’ I was hearing. I listened to that song every night for a whole year in my headphones, distracting from my burning body. When those first 3 electric notes would wail over the backing track, his guitar would speak to me. It would make me feel, probably for the first time ever and dare I say it, cool.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but the early/mid 90s saw the release of a flurry of the greatest rock albums ever made. I would discover them all later in the 90s and these albums by bands like Metallica, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Rage Against The Machine, Faith No More, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Tool, even Gunners and Greenday (and more) would help me erect a protective wall around myself to bolster my vulnerable and burgeoning teenage state and allow me to disappear into sonic worlds where anger and frustration and expression was not just tolerated, but encouraged. These men (yes, they were mostly men, but my first CD purchase ever was Mariah Carey so that evens it out somewhat) would spit fire and aggression and passion whilst emoting on things as broad as love, sex, death, suffering and addiction. They channelled existential themes into patterns of vibration for my aural consumption - I could scarcely understand what was happening, but I knew I liked it.
Soaking up the energy, the visceral and vigorous pulsing weight this music provided, the powerful heft and auditory substance that battered down across my cochlea’s and into my skull, permeating my body, I could escape. I could ride the lightning of electric guitars and thumping bass and pounding drums on sonic journeys through emotion and expression and creative force. I had found Rock and Roll, of which Lester Bangs says is not so much a musical form, but ‘an attitude’. (36) That’s exactly what it felt like – listening to this music, I liked myself just a little bit more. The miracle of newly invented portable music devices like my trusty Sony Walkman meant I could be accompanied sonically to and from (and even during) school.
Music allowed feelings that felt prohibited. It was the kind of mystical salvation I needed to sooth my inflamed and confused soul.
You're almost on your way
To popularity
And we'll teach you to play
With icy stare
And punk rock hair
With beatnik flair
We'll take you there
Buy Me A Pony by Spiderbait (1996)
Sung by Kram
90s
Another thing that may have messed up my sense of what was real, culturally valuable, and authentic was the 90s was a time when authenticity in the guise of 'realness' was packaged up and sold to ‘the youth’ via mass marketing.
Grunge music exploded out of Seattle, every single teenager wanted a piece of it because it was raw, unfiltered, grimy, and real, or at least more real than the slick, happy pop culture that it was subverting. Suddenly grunge, it’s music but also its aesthetic, was everywhere, making millions and millions of dollars. This counterculture, the one that purported to say ‘fuck you’ to all the corporations and the greed of the 80s, became the biggest market imaginable for those same corporations. Skate brands, surf brands, soft drinks companies, record labels, music festivals, you name it, they rushed to sell the teenagers of that era the aesthetic of coolness which was substantiated in a rejection of mainstream cultural wholesomeness. You could buy jeans that already had holes in them to pair with your old looking flannel shirts that were bereft of cleanliness.
We were being sold a safe, sterilised type of nonconformity designed to help us a) express whatever outrage we may have had banging around in our heads about how our boomer parents were raising us, and b) part us from our money.
Did our generation really want or need these things, or did they want to reject the very corporations that we felt were controlling the world? Either way, we bought all the shit they sold us. Or as Rage Against The Machine sang – They say jump and you say how high? You’re braindead. You’ve got a fucking bullet in your head”. In my literal teenage head this song was about being shot in the head in a driveby, but the bullet in the head is metaphorical and refers, of course, to conformity).
Just do it, said Nike. Just do what – exercise? Become a better person? Or just buy their sneakers?
There's a scene from the Simpsons episode Homerpalooza that encapsulates the vibe of this era perfectly. Some sarcastic teenagers are attending one of the late 90s mega music festivals (brought to you by Pepsi and Reebok or something similar in Simpsons land like Duff beer) and as the next act gets on stage, one of them laconically drawls with as much apathy as possible:
"Ohh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cooool."
His friend turns to him, "Dude, are you being sarcastic?"
"I don't even know anymore."
Everything was ironic, subverted, undermined. I was constantly and successfully being parted from my money at the video game arcade Timezone, seeking adrenaline playing Raiden, Mortal Kombat and Alien vs Predator, and at Granny May’s, a kitschy 80s style gift shop, seeking the dopamine hit of useless collectables and trinkets to fill up my bed side drawers. Consuming was a way of understanding my life.
Ironbark
One of the best times of my schooling life was when our year 10 class spent 6 weeks living at a farm called Ironbark. The opportunity to spend half a term living the farm life and less with our heads in books was a big part of the reason my parents sent my sister and I to St Peters. We cooked our own food, milked cows, did early morning runs, built fences, cleared lantana, and did orienteering and bush hikes. I got the fittest I’d ever been during those few weeks of early morning jogs, despite them being a living hell to begin with - even when I missed a week of them after huge gaping sores got infected on my legs and a local doctor said I should enjoy some sleep-ins.
One of the biggest events we undertook was the ‘4 day hike’. All students chose a group of 4 or 5 friends to hike with, walking approximately 25 kilometres per day to pre-organised camp sites and sleeping out in the wilderness, cooking our measly rations on an open fire. My family time as a camper came to the fore, lighting fires and using maps, and despite barely sleeping and often being exhausted in the heat and attacked by mossies overnight, it was a peak adolescence experience.
Reflecting on that time of teenage comradery is bittersweet. There was a certain coming-of-age Stand By Me vibe to those long days walking in the beating sun, helping each other navigate barbed wire fences, grass sticking out of our mouths, arguing about which route to take, swearing and shouting and laughing as we struggled with our big backpacks up over bare mountain ridgelines and down through gum tree filled gullies. We were no longer boys, but were far from becoming men, as yet untainted by the afflictions and addictions of young adulthood that were waiting for us just down the road. 2 of the guys from my 5-person 4-day hike group, my comrades on this one-time outback adventure through the twisting turning valleys of our burgeoning teenage-hood, would suicide in their 20s.
When your day is long
And the night, the night is yours alone
When you're sure you've had enough
Of this life, well hang on
Don't let yourself go
'Cause everybody cries
Everybody hurts sometimes
Everybody Hurts by R.E.M (1992)
Sung by Michael Stipe
Cultural Rifts
I continued to notice the mismatch and ever-growing gaps between what my culture was asking of me, and what I was feeling inside. As the high school years rolled by, I seemed to add more and more things to my growing list of perceived cultural allergies. They weren’t literal allergies of course, it was a deep part of me that existed prior to thought and intellectual understanding, my intuition perhaps, that kept itching to make me pay attention to things even when I didn’t understand them. The itch was, as always, excruciating, and I didn’t have any meaningful way to satiate it, and like the parents of a newborn, no words to describe it.
My allergic responses were pointing to a question - what exact way of living was my culture trying to pass on to me? What wisdom was to be handed down to this skinny, white skinned, middle-class westerner with all the luxury and privilege of a stable home and a world class education so he could live a deep and worthwhile life?
This is what I felt I was being told loudest and most repetitively of all:
· Do as you're told, you'll get in trouble if you don't (defer to authority, don’t think for yourself)
· Act 'this way', even as the people telling you to act ‘this way’ don't act ‘this way’ (hypocrisy)
· Ignore the aforementioned hypocrisy, you're too young to understand and when you're older you'll get it
· That most communication is strategic or tactical (as opposed to open, honest or vulnerable)
· That most communication (parenting, schooling, marketing, governmental, religious) is to get you to be a certain way (authoritative and controlling)
· The way you actually are is in many ways deficient (partly true, but generally false)
· Learn things via the education system exclusively so you can get a job when you're older (value yourself exclusively by your place in the future labour market)
· Getting a job and having money is the thing that you need to orientate yourself towards first and foremost - it solves all the other problems you might have (hmmm)
· Don't let your 'feelings' spill out all over the place - people don't want to see that. It's best if you keep your feelings to yourself. Most people don’t know how to express them constructively anyway, and you won’t be shown how to do that either (feelings should be hidden, vulnerability avoided)
· Many of your feelings are 'wrong' or an ‘overreaction’ - try to gain control by limiting them (contain the internal sensations by controlling your external actions)
· Hide yourself in order to play-act the way a human ‘should’ behave (again, contain the internal sensations by controlling your external actions)
· The main goal of life is to be 'happy' - if you're not happy, then try to become happy!
· Happiness comes from the security that a job and money can provide, but also all the things your culture is trying to sell to you that you can buy with that money
· Your culture will sneakily try to sell you shit that is very, very bad for you and even addictive, but by design it won’t be easy to tell what’s good for you and what isn’t, so you’ll get caught in a loop high jacking your limbic system and have to work hard to not become addicted
· In a culture that promotes addiction, if you happen to become addicted, you will be cast as a failure
· You're suffering? Oh, we don't have any framework that can help with that, best to keep it to yourself, nobody likes it when people complain all the time!
· If something is bad for you, simply imagine how much worse it could be and use that to make yourself feel better (feel guilt and shame about your suffering because many people have it worse than you)
· If you're afraid or have fears about doing something, overcome the fear and, like a Nike advertisement, ‘just do it’ (more toughness)
· Fear is weakness. Emotions are weakness. Suffering is weakness. ‘Strength’ is aspirational
(Ok there’s one more but I just want to pause and recognise that’s a long list of semi-cynical takes on what the world was – but remember this is simply how I felt at the time, not an accurate representation of the world and not necessarily what I think about it now)
And the last one:
· No one wants to hear about your illnesses
More on that last one: people want you to be well, they have the best of intentions for you, they are not cruel or evil. But if you are not well, or if your illness goes on longer than they expect, they can’t really hear about it – their ears close over and they look away and they find your struggle too much to hold. In some ways it uncomfortably reflects their own struggle - we are all vulnerable biological systems trying to understand what life is, and people don’t want to be reminded of this. Also, because many lack the framework to understand what being constantly sick might feel like. There is a gap of understanding.
Keep quiet about it – it’s personal. It’s private. It’s awkward. It’s a bit embarrassing. It’s a bit shameful. You’re on your own with this one.
OK, so that is a long list of cultural grievances! I hope some of that landed with you, and if not we had different journeys through adolescence, which is fine!
There were so many more specific examples of the dearth of preparedness our culture was setting my generation up for – our school didn’t show us how to use a condom, or how to do a tax return, or talk to us about drugs and addiction (it was a simple prohibition - ‘don’t do that, and if you do, you’ll be expelled’), or talk about sexual consent, or talk to us about how to have an intimate relationship, or talk to us about tools to manage mental health, or ask us anything about how we felt about anything at all. No adult ever spoke to me about altered states of consciousness – despite it being obvious they were all chasing them all the time. My parents never spoke to me about any of these things either. And if instructions where given, if a way of being was presented, it was always a one-way transmission, not dialogic, as if the opinions and the intuitions of the adolescents wasn’t a factor.
As Taylor Swift puts it in her 2020 song Cardigan – “When you are young they assume you know nothing”
So much of this was normal, teenage confusion and disaffection and not specific to me, I get it.
I got my head done
When I was young
It's not my problem
It's not my problem
Song 2 by Blur, (1997)
Sung by Damon Albarn
A Boy Finds His Veneer
There is a mind-made human phenomenon that involves our inability to see past our limited experience of the world, so I’m going to evoke a concept and name this occurrence ‘The Veneer’. (I can hear the collective cringe of the worlds psychologists at my amateur, made-up word for Freud’s superego, or Timothy Leary’s ‘reality tunnels’, further expanded upon on By Robert Anton Wilson, but hear me out).
What is the Veneer? The Veneer is the ‘way’ that you see the world. It’s a force field of perception, a framework of experiencing reality that has been build b our mind as we grow. It allows us to exist in a complex world and not be floored by awe and wonder at every turn, overwhelmed by the fact that we are having any experience at all. So the Veneer orientates us towards action, to enable us to get things done and to get on with the task of surviving. The veneer builds up over time as we grow and we adapt to our specific nurture and cultural environment, however it does have the outcome of covering over the majesty of life and making everything feel ordinary, normal, acceptable, understandable and unsurprising – even dull.
Aldous Huxley called it ‘the doors of perception’, and framed these doors, as a metaphor for our own minds, as ‘restricting valves’, (42) limiting what we experience so we have the possibility of understanding it.
The veneer is the ‘shyness’ (and the fear) in once bitten, twice shy.
It self-denial as a protective mechanism. It is fear, trans-morphed into a way of surviving in a world that can take much away from us and cause us much pain any tick of the clock. In absolute layman’s terms, it is something that our mind does as we grow to partly close us off to the world. Neuroscientists might call this a reduction in neuro-plasticity, which is our brains ability to be open, take in new information and create new neural connections. The veneer is the ‘old dog’ in the proverb ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’.
When you watch a toddler, it becomes clear that they have no veneer, they move from moment to moment as if they are on acid, amazed and confused and overwhelmed from one minute to the next about what they are experiencing outside and inside, with little continuity of self. Their senses are jammed open, sucking in raw data from the world to vacuum up the patterns and structures their brains need to lay down to make sense of what is happening to them and what their life and reality ‘is’.
One minute they’re screaming at you and spitting food on you and the next they need you to comfort them for their outburst. This is why routine is important to developing minds - they are at the whim of their emotional reactions to the world, the untrammelled force of their feelings, hence need an already mature mind (parents/guardians) to create the structure for them. The structure they need to safely develop exists in the minds of the people around them because their own minds are still developing. As parents, we are their brains outside their brains.
In his book How Minds Change, David McRaney notes that we ‘start our lives awash in unpredictable chaos’, with everything being ‘noise at first’ to our brains. As we grow, our ‘brains notice the patterns in the static, then they move up a level, noticing patterns in how those patterns interact’, until ‘the regularity of our perceptions becomes the expectations we use to turn that chaos into predictable order.’
So, the veneer is the ‘predictable order’ our brain creates, a heuristic use to label and comprehend the world, break it up into parts so we can understand it and make predicionts so we know how to act.
Our minds create a model of the world based on our experiences, and the model ends up becoming what guides us, not the actual world, which is much too complex.
It’s a slightly different way of thinking about Glennon Doyle’s ‘taming’. Our own minds, guided by the firm hand of our cultural norms and its patterns, create a cage that they lock themselves into to ‘get through’ and reach for the future. This veiled, preconceived life exists in the mind before it is found in the world, as if the rigid mind is co-creating its own experience, because the thing that is finding the world, bringing it into being, is the very mind that holds the preconceptions.
William Blake explains it like so: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is. Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his caverns." (43)
Meaning, purpose, values, wonder, awe, flow, psycho-spiritual understanding, healing, awakening, even religious tendencies, transformation – the extra-ordinary elements of human existence - these things exist behind the Veneer, and one has to peel it back and peek inside or underneath or through in order to experience them.
Einstein put it this way by saying a human being “experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.” He goes on to say that this ‘delusion’ “is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires”. (44)
Waking up to and freeing ourselves (in however limited way) from our own Veneer appears to be one of the greatest experiences a human can have, and as a species we have been having these waking up experiences for eons. All religions and all philosophies speak to these occurrences. It’s Christianity’s “I once was blind, but now can see”. It’s Buddhism’s ‘Nirvana’. It’s Hinduism’s ‘Moksha’. It’s Taoism’s ‘the way’. It’s the enlightenment of Samadhi – a state free from impeding emotions. It’s literally heaven on Earth to be freed from the restrictions of our own minds! It’s something like 'one mountain, many paths'. (45)
Einstein again -
“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
My own awakening wouldn’t happen until a few years after I met my first-born son, when everything in my life changed radically and I went through a series of catastrophic and enlightening events (chapter 8!), but back in late high school, my Veneer was all consuming, just patterns of thoughts of my disastrous body and my obsessions and being constantly stuck in survival mode, burning up my cortisol and leaving me constantly exhausted.
Escapism / Alcohol
Eventually, finally, I discovered something that would allow me to release the pressure valve and vent the frustrations I had about my ‘cultural allergies’, express myself more and break free of some of these mental shackles that I had developed as a ‘horribly oppressed person who was loved and had everything materialistically he needed’. At the time, this felt like a powerful technology to lift the Veneer from my eyes and experience human life in more of its totality – more fun, more connection, more freedom. Unfortunately, that ‘something’ was a culturally encouraged, but addictive, emotionally suppressive and carcinogenic neurotoxin that causes chronic dehydration, disrupted sleep and gastro reflux - more commonly referred to as alcohol.
It’s not an accident that an alcoholic drink is referred to as a ‘spirit’ – it changes you psychologically, pleasurably suppressing your thinking, egoic brain and creating in you an ethereal, floating sensation, as if you become inhabited by some form of ulterior life-force. Much like the pesky ‘I’m not going to sleep’ demons that occupy our children before bedtime, alcohol imbibes adults (and rapscallion teenagers alike) the chance to cast off their usual sense of the world and revel in an altered state of consciousness, granting them short-lived freedoms from their normal, steady, oft serious and comparatively heavy mental states. Humans and alcohol have been long time bedfellows.
The first time I got drunk was in the vacant block overlooking the Brisbane river next to my friend Will’s place in the picturesque suburb of Chelmer. This gigantic and steep double block complete with an empty pool for skateboarding and a hand-built cubby house down by the mud flats was our solace from home life, a place to hang out and escape our siblings, build campfires, and eat junk food. Standing in our cubby house on that historic afternoon, the 3 of us swigged on an oversized bottle of champagne, passing it around with enthusiasm and all taking turns to exclaim “I can’t feel anything”. And I really couldn’t feel anything - right up until the ground kept rushing up and hitting me in the head. Staggering around this bush block we laughed and bumped into each other, unaware of the colossal forces we had unleashed on ourselves, both genetic and cultural. The 3 of us would share many an intoxicated adventure over the ensuing 4 or 5 years and at least 2 of us would go on to become addicts.
I woke up in the early morning light on the grass in Will’s backyard, got up and walked the 3 minutes back to my house wondering why my head was throbbing so much. What was this feeling, this mixture of nausea, mental fogginess and tightness in my skull? I didn’t understand - I felt great from the fun night I’d shared with my mates, but my body was trying to tell me something, it was telegraphing a message that seemed immediately obvious but would take me 20 years to decode –alcohol and my body don’t mix well. I was 15 years old.
My parents were away for the weekend, but my wise older sister smelled me from a mile away and brought a tetra pack of pineapple juice and placed it next to my bed where I was magnetised. She saved my life that day.
But wow, what a substance. Alcohol! What happened back there? Booze did! Where can I get some more? Don’t worry, it’s everywhere – this isn’t the 1920s in America!
Under the influence I was still myself, but I was able to be away from myself, existing on a slightly different plain, one that wasn’t grasping at and holding my body and mind as tightly as ‘normality’ did. There was some freedom there in those dizzying states, some release and some ‘un-caging’.
Looking back to the first few times I drank alcohol, there is a sense of fate inherent in those experiences, as if we were meant to become entangled and destined to form a long, fraught friendship, lady liquor and me. We would get up to many adventures together over the following 2 decades, like two best buddies always looking to reminisce, but eventually our relationship would become stale, one-sided and ultimately sour to the point where we could no longer spend time together. It was like slowly realising the good old days we were always trying to recreate weren’t that good after all.
The fateful part of my relationship with alcoholic was perhaps written in my genes, as there is a long history of alcoholism in my family. I never met my Grandfather on my Dad's side, but my Dad's mother would drink and instantly turn nasty, the deeply held parts of herself comprising of her cruellest criticisms, judgements and anger unleashed by the power of the spirit. I never met my Grandmother on my Mum's side, but my Mum's Father was an alcoholic and would drink each night, and especially on the weekends, flying into terrible rages. Years later when we used to visit him in his retirement home, I recall a sullen, unhappy man stuck in a room, all the joy seeped away from his life and replaced with a discontented bitterness.
My Uncle, my Mum's older brother, was an alcoholic too. His name was Jimmy and he was a larger than life character, big into the gay scene in Sydney in the heady days of the 80s and 90s. He quit drinking in his 40s by entering Alcoholics Anonymous and became a huge champion of this system of sobriety, helping many dozens of people in his community through AA until he died of complications from HIV when he was in his 60s.
There were plenty of other people who drank a lot in my extended family. As for my immediate family, alcohol was a constant element in any sort of ritual throughout my life - dinners with my parents’ friends, any sort of celebration, funerals and ANZAC days and when our dog Monty died, visits to my cousin's house on weekends, camping trips and BBQ’s - I cannot recall a single event for our family over the first 2 decades of my life that didn’t involve alcohol in some form. Now, I’m not saying there was a lot of alcohol, or even too much, it was just always there, always present – it was the way that my family honoured the ups and downs of life.
I use public toilets, and I piss on the seat
I walk around in the Summertime, saying, "How about this heat?"
I'm an asshole
Denis Leary, Asshole (1993)
Delinquency
As we hit full teenage-hood my friends and I were becoming the epitome of young male delinquency. Bereft of any meaningful rites of passage passed to us from our culture, other than our newly found love of alcohol, we forged our own and they were chaotic and often destructive.
Sneaking out of our houses at night, we roamed and owned the streets of our little urban patch of Southwest Brisbane. Chelmer is a suburb surrounded on 3 sides by the mighty girth of the Brisbane River and split down the middle by a train line that punctuates the river to the North across the Walter Taylor bridge into Indooroopilly. Our hang out was on the ‘low side of the tracks’ (designated by the Eastern side of the train track where the houses are generally cheaper and the flood risk is higher) but far from being any sort of ‘wrong side of the tracks’ urban ghetto, Chelmer’s socioeconomics’ where firmly planted in the middle class with large houses, plentiful parks, charming local schools, and bike tracks all along the winding river. It is a beautiful blue-riband suburb stacked with classic style Queenslander houses on stilts, especially on the West side along picturesque streets like Laurel Avenue, but even on the East side where I lived.
It quickly became obvious to us that after 830pm at night you would never see a single person out on the streets other than on the main roads that ran North/South through Chelmer and Graceville. The warm glow of living room TVs was the only sign of life emanating from the high perched Queenslander houses, leaving an entire maze of built urban blocks and streets, parks, riverside carparks, sporting areas and bike tracks free for the local youth to take over as they pleased. We’d pack our backpacks, wait for our folks to go to bed, and creep into the night, linking up together at our predetermined rendezvous point and look to covertly alter our consciousness in any way we could.
We would steal beers from fridges underneath the houses on stilts and sit drinking in the park. We would light fires and make match bombs and explode them, terrorising letterboxes. We would create smoke bombs with cut up table tennis balls and set them alight and watch the toxic smoke pour out and fill the valleys in the parks where we hung. We would run across the Indooroopilly rail bridge at night, waiting carefully for a gap in the trains, knowing that if one arrived whilst we were mid-crossing it was a long way down to that brown shadowy river below.
The Chelmer sailing club on the banks of the river became a place to sneak around, careful to conceal our arrival by avoiding the sensor lights that would flood light into the carpark. There was never anyone around anyway, and we would play music through some computer speakers and my Sony Discman, spinning these shiny new music storage devices called ‘CDs’. Staring out across the wide brown river high on joints or bongs, on still, clear nights, the trees on the far bank and their perfect reflection in the water created the illusion that a giant suspended tree-ring was orbiting in space above us. The flying foxes flapping overhead, and their doppelgangers reflected in the water, contributed to the spell that we were gazing on some cosmic or mythical planetary scene.
We never talked about our families. The sense was we all needed to escape them in the way that all teenagers want to escape and subvert authority.
For a period, I felt shame that the well-manicured parks of our neighbourhood turned from places to meet mates to play a game of touch footy until the sun went down and we could see our hot breath in the chilly air, into places we befouled with late night debauchery, drunken stumbling and alcohol induced retching. We torched the bridge back to the safety and innocence of our sheltered preteen existence like the swear words and outlines of dicks that we torched into the grass at the local sports fields. The 7 eleven up the road from our house where my Dad and I dropped in to grab a cool drink after a trip to the tip was the place the weekend before I had staggered into with the munchies near midnight to scoff a hotdog. A picnic spot we had walked through as a family years earlier was now the place my friends has spent a confusing night on LSD. The Sherwood Arboretum, a spectacular and beautifully manicured public garden where we used to ride bikes and feed the ducks became a place to meet up to buy weed. The carparks along the river once great for skateboarding practise, became places for dutchies in borrow cars, and our cubby house down by the mangroves became places to drunkenly hide whilst dodging cop cars driving past. It was as if we were subconsciously but systematically soiling the safer places of our pre-teen youth.
Were other 15-year-olds as obsessed with fire? What where they doing to satiate their inner tumult if they weren't out at night burning letterboxes and exploding soda bulbs? And what exactly did we want that turned us into insano pyromaniacs? The best word I can find is connection. Or softly attended understanding.
In The Moral Landscape, author Sam Harris explains humans as 'not merely atomised selves enthralled to our self-interest, but social selves disposed to serve a common interest with others'. (46) When that common interest isn't apparent, when we feel a lack of connection or an anchor to a community, the self-interest component inflates and can become all consuming – atomisation begets atomisation, we feel alienated and so drive ourselves further from what we really need.
Out there on the streets, together drunk and high, we were aimless and impulsive, seeking feelings of invincibility like gods of the urban malaise. We sought and found escape from the teenage burdens of our lives and the limiting and oppressive forces (perceived or actual) they contained. One of my friends was explicitly escaping a tyrannical father – he would go on to become a drug addict in his early 20s. I was escaping my health and loneliness and that ever present confusion of being a weak boy in a strong man’s world, endlessly chasing altered states of consciousness to escape our confused minds. The Eagle’s said it well however, ‘you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave’.
I smoked cigarettes for about 20 minutes back then, and by 20 minutes I mean a few months, and by a few months I mean mainly at parties with older kids in order to look cool and fit in. The idea that a person who is so allergic to the world that he can barely suck enough breath into his lungs to oxygenate his blood to begin with would inhale toxic smoke with addictive chemicals down his already inflamed and asthmatic windpipe for some sort of social cache would be laughable if it wasn’t so downright deranged. Waking up the next day with the feeling of having inhaled a wet blanket put an end to this ridiculousness quite quickly, and the search for external validation went on.
Now you do what they told ya
Now you’re under control
Now you do what they told ya
Now you’re under control
Now you do what they told ya
Now you’re under controooooool
Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me
Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me
Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine (1992)
Sung by Zach De LA Rocha
Wounded
As I worked my way through my final years of high school, music and alcohol regularly combined to offer the perfect foil to the deepest parts of me – that I was lonely, felt isolated and that I felt compelled by deep psychological currents to hide from others who I truly was by hiding my diseases. ‘Being seen’ was my core wound, so I hid behind loud guitars, bourbon and marijuana smoke.
I was in some ways the puppet of my own loneliness. In this state, my unprocessed or misunderstood feelings, the part of us Sigmund Freud labelled our ‘shadow side’, was projected outwards into the word which in turn then shaped my reality.
I staggered through the final year of high school in a flurry of last minute studying for tests, lying about ‘kissing a girl at a school dance once’ (I never went to a school dance, and forget about losing my virginity or even kissing anyone, nary a girl even so much as touched me during high school, and who could blame them), organising parties at my house when my parents were off camping for my friends and I to get wasted, and burying deep inside the excruciating shame of wanting to have a girlfriend whilst hating myself so much that it was never going to become a reality. So, you know, completely normal teenager stuff!
Alcohol eased these tensions in the moment, and I became more and more drawn to its power and energy. I liked who I was when I was drinking and supressing my nervous system more than I liked myself when I wasn’t. Ernest Hemingway used to “drink to make other people more interesting”. I used to drink to make myself tolerable to me.
This is the perfect breeding ground for addiction, the itch of a better me always tempting a scratch, just a cola Slurpee spiked with Bundy rum away. I was yet to determine that on a long enough timeline, alcohol reaps what it sows - with interest.
Gabor Mate, says about addiction that “"Far more than a quest for pleasure, substance use is the addicts attempt to escape distress” and that the self-medication of these substances is an ‘emotional anaesthetic’ often with the primary object of ‘easing psychological discomfort’. (32)
My unceasing capitulation to the incessant physical itch continued, and in part paved a path for my submission to the ever present and tempting itch of gratification in all its forms - sugar, and now alcohol and drugs. I was modulating my state to sooth my triggered nervous system. More than that, I craved an altered state of consciousness. Whatever got me there, I would end up yearning for, if I could leave my body for a time, I was in.
Un retrospect becoming addicted to ‘leaving my body’ seems, a natural, if not eventually destructive, response.
Altered States
We sought out altered states of consciousness. Constantly.
Once I had my driver’s license, one of the first things I did was load my friends into Mum’s Nissan/Datsun Bluebird station wagon and drive out to the Samford valley to covertly pick magic mushrooms from a local farm. I had thoroughly researched everything about taking mushrooms, information gleaned from bright florescent websites with flashing ads accessed on the family PC over our 56.6kbps dial up internet connection – but only in-between my sisters’ friends constantly calling our house and disconnecting my browsing session
My 2 friends and I had a big dose, and the night was the most magical experience I’d had up until that moment – a mystical world hitherto unseen opened up to us, a peek at the cosmic source code as the harsh and strictly physical realm of our normal, waking perceptions melted away to reveal a domain of swirling colour, impermanence and glorious connectivity. The problem was that to our teenage minds, taking mushrooms was simply on a spectrum of the altered states of consciousness that we were seeking – we just wanted to get wasted, and didn’t understand anything about the power of psychedelics to heal and make people whole. When the night was over, we confusedly looked at the gigantic bag of left-over mushrooms, knowing that we were completely fine with tossing them in the bin because we had no desire to do that again for a long time. It was in many ways too intense to understand. So it was back to our usual, dependable elixirs – alcohol and marijuana - the go to escape apparatus from our bodies and minds.
It never occurred to me that it was possible to use altered states of consciousness to heal myself and become a better person - I thought they were for running away from myself! This is one of the many paradoxes of substances and consciousness. It is possible to ‘get away from yourself’ to heal, you just have to know how do it.
End of High School
In our Western civilisation when we reach an important milestone or complete some sort of long-term goal, it is customary to honour the hard work and sacrifices made with a celebration where everyone gets really shit faced. I had dragged my fatigued and inflamed carcass through the trials and tribulations of high school, and was ready to emerge if not lonely, exhausted and fairly disillusioned, with at least some positive outcomes from this process – I had many good mates and had done reasonably well in my schoolwork (for what that was worth) especially considering the ever-present burden of my health.
Our year level hosted a gigantic party after our formal at the sprawling estate of one of our fellow students. I didn’t have a huge amount of fun that night. I got a bit drunk and a bit high, but mainly sat off to the side, bending reality through the prism of my pain, the ever-narrowing spotlight of my attention firmly focussed on my hurt at never being ‘noticed’ and not having anyone from the opposite sex interested in me. The skinny, smart-assed little stoned boy who was 17 but looked like he was 12, watching on as other couples hooked up and paired off, lunging at each other with all the grace of inebriated teenagers in heat.
The Beastie Boys Intergalactic played through the night, as did The Offspring’s awful Pretty Fly for a White Guy and Fat Boy Slim’s dance anthem Right Here, Right Now.
What sort of raging darkness or bottomless loneliness did my fellow school friends carry with them into the great unknown of post school life? I don’t know. For me, it was the sense that being undesirable meant I was deeply flawed. I never found the courage to ask a girl to dance, hold hands, kiss or to 'go out', and likewise I was never approached by anyone to do the same. My teenage hormones were scuppered by my wonky, baby-faced looks and my torn skin. How I longed to be touched – not even sexually (I seemed to have a reasonably low sex drive, convenient when you aren’t ‘getting any’) - but just lovingly touched, comfortingly held, embraced by another who could see the valuable ‘me’ that resided in the unsightly body.
The last time I saw 2 of the people that I went to school with, one was bending over a bin and retching, his bright red face contorting as his body twisted and emptied his stomach like a squeegee mop. The fact that I never saw him again means that whenever I picture him, it’s with this beetroot-faced grimace, forever destined to binge and purge in the ether of my memory banks.
The other was a girl who drank so much alcohol that she passed out quite early in the evening – not an isolated incident. As the sun rose and the all-nighters, myself included, sat around mumbling and eating cold pizza, she awoke, still heavily intoxicated but elated that she was now conscious and still ready to party, just like we were still playing Donkey Kong and the goal of the night was to simply survive until the end. Like a stop-motion animated skeleton from a Tim Burton movie, her wobbly frame arose and, barely conscious, she started shrieking about herself in the third person.
“Grado’s got form! Grado’s got form!”.
We all watched as she raised her arms up in triumph at her perceived staying power and began staggering around the tennis court, oblivious to the broken beer bottles scattered all over that were slicing up her bare feet. Nearby a person spoke
“Someone should stop her”.
Others nodded.
The paralysis of their own apathy and exhaustion at ‘surviving’ this night, and the entirety of high school, keeping them firmly planted where they sat, watching on as this deranged spectacle unfolded.
I’d say Grado had about as much form as any of us as we signed off on our formative school years with a barf and a whimper.
Or as Fat Boy Slim put it, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.
.
.
Thanks for reading episode 5 / 10.
If you would like to support my work which is free to access, you can donate here at Buy Me a Coffee
Find me at sheddingskin.substack.com and on Twitter/X @nick_gilpin_
.
.
Vids, Links and References
Click below for the page of all the links, clips and references for this episode:
S1 Ep05 - Confessions of an Itchoholic