DOPE

It occurs to me that maybe this thing that you can’t stop doing
has nothing to do with weak character.
Maybe not a single thing at all to do with original sin,
demonic oppression,
gross laziness,
or your piteous lack of self-control.

What if it has to do with being human,
primate,
mammal,
vertibral,
carbon-based,
sentient?

What if it has to do with the irrefutable fact that
our brains are wired to do things
without our conscious permission,
because it’s the only way such complex organisms can
do everything we must,
and inherent in that complexity are glitches,
because perfectly-functioning machines are the
business of Hollywood fantasy,
not life on this planet?

We have these beautiful, grotesque, inscrutable brains
that fire up limbically when primal needs must be met
and cerebrally for the times when options are appropriate,
especially in we who have evolved
into analytical beings
(which we must, of course,
to beat ourselves silly
over behaviors that
our cats just plain old revel in).

It’s just the way we are.
Driven by
sometimes dueling,
sometimes collaborating
nervous and endocrine systems,
our brains firing signals to guide our behaviors,
based on the chemicals flooding our bodies,
and making our choices seem
very limited, indeed.

Maybe it has to do with
your brain being wired and fired a little bit
differently
than the brains of people
untouched by addictive tendencies.

Maybe the size of that entire group is hyperbolized anyway,
since most of us hide
what controls us for as long as we can,
erroneously assuming we are alone and
shun-worthy.

But don't we all have the
neurons firing signals to our brains,
and neurotransmitters communicating and
creating neural pathways that become
mighty bridges over time?

Mighty, mighty hard-to-tear-down bridges,
even with the biggest of psychic bulldozers,
so amazing is the power of our brains.

We all have the dopamine rush.
Were amygdalic,
basal ganglianic,
electrically-charged,
synaptically triggered,
fueled and re-fueled by the
dopamine rush.

The dopamine rush.
It makes your brain feel good
when you travel those mighty neural bridges in
the way you’ve set them up to be traveled
by the behaviors you’ve come to even predict in yourself,
albeit long after your reptilian brain,
(I call mine Liz)
already knew you’d be indulging in this way.

There’s a reason your mother
calls the hippies
‘dope fiends’,
but she probably doesn’t know that
she is one too.

Maybe she doesn’t know about the dopamine fix of overspending,
she only knows that it makes her feel good
to head to the mall when dad calls to say
he won’t be home for supper.

He won’t be home for supper because
the gambling boat dopes out his mind
and comes even before family…until the guilt,
which magically goes away with a shot or two
of Jack.

The cynical bartender knows,
but he doesn’t care because he's watching the clock,
counting the minutes until he can get home
to his porn girls,
who are so much easier to deal with than
real women who want real things.
Besides, it's so much more of a rush this way,
that real women don’t do much for his libido these days.

He never has to look into the eyes of the
girls on the screen,
but if he did, he wouldn’t see much.
Most of them only make the movies after a
snort, or a swallow, or a needle in the arm, because
this job…even THIS job is worth it for the dope.
The dope.

And the man who made them stars
thought he’d only make a movie or two,
until the paychecks rolled in,
smelling like freedom from the welfare days of his youth,
and now he couldn’t stop if he tried.

His little girl stays with her grandmother most nights
while he’s working,
and doesn’t mind much because
most of the time she can find
Oreos and ice cream bars and Mountain Dew
in grandma’s kitchen,
and when she takes them to her room and eats them while watching TV,
she doesn’t really think about missing dad.

And, so, I’m thinking that
maybe we’re all really
very much the same.

Whether we challenge our
human tendency toward screwing it all up
with the ridiculously hard first step of
telling the truth to someone we love,
showing up in a musty church basement and
saying our name out loud,
going to a grain elevator for a first weigh-in on a scale that won’t break,
making the shut-off-the-internet call,
cutting up the credit card,
or checking in with our suitcase
at the front desk...

We all have our dope.

And, I’m thinking that maybe,
instead of a curse,
we could start seeing it as
another thing that makes us very much like
everybody else we've ever met.

And, maybe, it’s one more reason to
reach out our hand to
the nearest fellow-fienders we encounter,
and tell them that they are not alone.

And ask for help when we need it.

And hold on to each other’s hands
as though our fragile, flawed,
marvelous, miraculous,
incredible, one-and-only
lives depend on it.

Because, maybe they do.