My Patriotism
A confession about indulging in the new Americana
America has an opioid crisis. So, it was with a patriotic verve that I’d otherwise never felt in my life that I got addicted to Oxycodone.
I grew up in America. I grew up in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I don’t remember the first few years of my life, living with my dad while my mom cleaned up her act. However, from age four onward, living with my own personal recovery spokesperson of a mom, The Program was often my babysitter. I remember the names and faces of more middle-aged AA speakers than classmates from the first, second, or third grade. Newcomers, Oldtimers, Higher Powers, Commitments, Going Out, Coming In, Step-Work, Sponsors, Sponsees, The Valley Club, Keep Coming Back It Works If You Work It, The Big Book, By The Grace Of God; I was learning second sets of weekly vocabulary from tattooed men and women with fucked up teeth and Godzillaian coffee breath who chain-smoked cigarettes and stood a little too close to my mom.
I knew that I was predisposed to addiction, and that addiction was hereditary (elucidated through a genuinely racist example about the Native Americans) before I knew how to Flick my Bic. And yet, like so many other thirteen year-old white (Jewish) suburbanites who listened to psychedelic rock and/or ska, I was soberly anticipating the act of smoking weed for the very first time. I even made a playlist on my first iPod for the occasion, on which I definitely smoked more tobacco and plastic than kush, and did a bit more pretending to be high than actually being high. I was thirteen and the playlist consisted of Sublime, Led Zeppelin, and the hot new mysterious rapper from the far east whose hit single rang in my ears from a trailer to an India-set Oscar bait film, M.I.A. Weed, in its 21st century high-resin hydroponic form, and especially in its 85+ percent pure THC vape cartridge form, is addictive. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
The aforementioned myth of non-addiction has been busted, but I’m still on the fence about the whole “gateway” thing. My transition from god’s green herb to the hard stuff was eighteen years after my first hit, and out of self-destruction, an attempt to hide, to become like Dostoevsky’s underground man (but without the ability to form monologues). Some personal circumstances happened. Oh boy, did these personal circumstances happen. I’ve already referenced what I call my proto-divorce on this blog. Let’s just say that I thought I was getting proto-reconciled and got ahead of myself before it all came crashing down super hard (like the anvil I’ll mention later) and I crashed my brother’s car, stopped driving, started taking a lot more painkillers and benzos, and eventually found the really good stuff, the big O.
Five milligrams. “A dab’ll do ya.” I wrote it down, like a science experiment, but the notes went unfinished because five became ten, ten became twelve-point-five, twelve-point-five became fifteen, fifteen became twenty five, twenty five became twenty eight-point-five, and twenty eight-point-five became an empty bottle. I’m not going to tell you how I sourced the pills, but it’s not something of which I’m proud. Like, I’m admitting this much to you, but not that much.
Oxycodone is a great experience. Do you really wanna disappear? Try Oxycodone!
I dyed my hair in a motel void
Met the coroner at the Dreamgate Frontier
He took my hand and said, “I’ll help you, boy
If you really wanna disappear”
Silver Jews, “The Wild Kindness”
I was out of my fucking mind, nodding off, tapping in and out of consciousness, for a couple of weeks. Thankfully, I had pre-written some blogs and pre-recorded some podcasts before my journey into the darkness had begun. I saw some family members and tried to play it off like I was just stoned. I think it worked. One day, which actually ended up being two days, I ran three F.W. Murnau films in a row off youtube. Expressionist silent cinema was the way to go, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep my eyes open for the full 90 minutes, but the soundtrack of my choosing would continue, and the gaps in time made the expressionist images even more potent. Opioids are psychedelic in an unconventional way, in that chunks of time will just straight-up disappear. To some, this is scary in the way that roofies are scary, but to me, it felt like the world’s slowest temporal pincer movement, one that I could (somewhat) manage. Time is the most elusive of all elements and lends itself to the “trippy”, but I had previously experienced this through the holographic prism of marijuana thought, where now I was experiencing it through the solid cube of oxycodone existence. My legs would lock up, and I would notice that I’d been sitting in one position way longer than I ever usually do before readjusting, and if I was leaning to my right for example, my right arm, right abdomen, and right asscheek would hurt like crazy. My legs always found themselves crossed which contributed to the locking feeling. And so I faded in and out of Faust, The Last Laugh, and Sunrise for two consecutive days.
My other quasi-transcendent movie experience off the ‘ox was influenced by the above Berman quotation, Antonioni’s The Passenger. All I wanted was to disappear inside (or beside) myself as another form of myself. Eddie the Film Critic who was hung up on his previous relationship was null and void. He was worthless and had reached the end of his rope. He found the body of Eddie the Oxycodone Addict and assumed his form. The only problem was, The Oxycodone Addict has a much shorter lifespan, and was already seeing the end of the road. You should not have to see death around the corner to stop a bad habit, but sometimes, that’s what it takes.
Just before re-dosing at 10am the other day, my dad called me to tell me that my late stepmom’s mom (so, my ex-step-grandmother) had called him to let him know that her house was flooding, and it was an “all hands on deck” type situation. So, there I was, gonked and gooped out of my fucking mind, like mega slow-mo type scenes, trying not to throw up while I took a shop-vac to the inches of dirty water rising in the old woman’s house before periodically dumping the vac into the street while the pouring rain came down on me. Joelle Van Dyne liked to get high and clean, but she was on uppers.
I’m on my second day of detoxing from Oxycodone, because I don’t want to die. I want to write.
Yesterday, I vaped a little bit of weed to help me get by the nasty withdrawal symptoms, and I’ll probably do the same thing later today. I’ve read that people who took as much Oxy for as long as I did don’t have to use methadone to get off of it, but it sure-as-hell helps. Unfortunately, I cannot afford any type of clinic/rehab action, so it’s home remedies or bust. Every twenty seconds or so, it feels like someone has taken a giant anvil and dropped it onto my head from two stories above. My stomach feels incredibly uncomfortable. I still can hardly feel my legs. I’m Coming In. I thought America was about psychosis and schizophrenia, but nodding off seems to make more sense. America can admit that it has a problem and that it wants to get better, but it can’t commit to change. I can.
My name is Eddie, and I am a drug addict with two days sober from Oxycodone. My name is Eddie, and I am an American, registered to vote but unaffiliated with any political party. My name is Eddie, and I am a writer.
I hope that you continue to read my work after this confession. You can anticipate more lucid writing in the months to come. Thank you for believing in me, for I have been one hundred percent honest with you on Vintage Violence and will continue to do so in this new era of my life. Think of it as an accountability blog; imagine how embarrassing a relapse would be after I share this? With the thousands of people who hate me, let alone the ones who care about me? Christ almighty, it’s fucking game time!!!
- Edward Elvis Averill, 12/28/2025, 6:45 am
sending love and support your way 🫶
Thank you for sharing, Eddie. You’re a terrific writer and we’re all pulling for you.