Whitney Houston's bathroom. Photo taken by her sister in law.
Hey guys. If my bath room ever starts to look like that, would you
please tie me up and take me to rehab. No joke. Hit me with something- whatever it takes!
Although the jury is still out regarding her film "The Bodyguard", nothing seems to me to merit the sordid devastation
which appears to have visited the life of this ailing pop diva. That bathroom looks like its right out
of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", though I don't think Whitney has quite as much soaring vitality
as Hunter Thompson did in the early 70's. That was when he could actually channel his drugged out mode of consciousness
into interesting creative work. Good times didn't last forever, for as we know, he blew his brains out last year.
"Chemicals" are certainly not foreign to my life, although growing up I could never have imagined that one day I might take drugs or develop
an addiction to them. Admittedly, I've never smoked crack or crystal meth, have never done heroin, cocaine or PCP, and have never taken
any of the more exotic psychedelics like ketamine or DMT. That really is a fair amount of ground which I have not covered,
and thankfully so. But by golly, I've made up for it by smoking endless amounts of marijuana and taking (I would estimate)
at least a hundred different kinds of psychoactive pills. Dozens and dozens of antidepressants (old, new, standard and unconventional), opiate painkillers (Vicodin, codeine, Darvocet, Darvon), tranquilizers
(Valium, Xanax, Ativan, Restoril, Klonopin), stimulants (Ritalin, Adderall, phentermine), anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, antiparkinson drugs (not that I have Parkinsons), various novel memory enhancing agents, as well as all sorts of chemical precursors and store bought supplements.
I've also done LSD twice, mushrooms once, and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) many times. And I've used alcohol, of course, the all American brain cell destroyer, as
well as the occasional tobacco cigarette.
Just listing all of these chemical agents is making me a little ill, and I am at present recalling some of my own, personal Whitney Houston
moments. For example: the several times I've been to the emergency room for snorting too much Ritalin and thereby getting high blood pressure
and anxiety, the time I had to go to the emergency room for taking two different but similarly powerful antidepressants in an unsafe proximity in time to each other, this almost causing me to have
a seizure, the time my mom found me bonkers on LSD, laughing and talking to myself, the time I was so high in Las Vegas that I asked my friends if we were
in Cerritos, a city near my home, hundreds of miles away, AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST, the time I holed myself up in a hotel room in Tijuana, constantly taking all sorts
of pills and living in total solitude for about three weeks.
So you see, I have something of a resume, and regarding future intake of substances I have much reason to err on the side of cautious moderation or abstinence.
What makes things somewhat confusing and complicated is that I have suffered from severe clinical depression for over ten years now. It hasn't been easy
and I am what many psychiatrists would call a treatment resistent patient. I'm not the guy you put on Prozac for two weeks and all of a sudden I'm back to normal.
It's taken years to find drug combinations that work for me, and I tend to need high dosages for these medicines to be effective. Sometimes I need to have my drug regimen
augmented by "scheduled medications" (ones requiring special approval before you can get your prescription filled), the tranquilizer Klonopin, for example, or low dosages of Ritalin.
So the way things go I often (or most of the time really) have
to live in a sort of pharmaceutical gray area. I am always trying to make sure that I don't make excuses for myself which will let me slip back into the black hole of abuse, but I also
need to maintain the confidence to dismiss the Puritanical view that all chemical aids to mental health are necessarily wrong. Depression is a genuinely deadly beast,
and I need all of the aids, including chemical ones, that I can get.
But as I said, I must absolutely not fall back into the black hole of abuse. Oh yes. One time I nearly totaled my car while in an "altered state". No further details on that. Just wanted to
share another Whitney Houston moment. At the present time I'm no longer smoking pot and I drink alcohol
only rarely and always on social ocasions. Happily, I am not eating up pills like they are candy (although I do have a weakness for caffeine tablets). My medication regimen is pretty strong and my depression seems to be in partial remisson. This to me is wonderful.
To conclude, please do pray for me, everyone, that I can do my best to "walk the line" as St. Johhny Cash would say (patron of recovering wacko druggies). Pray for Whitney Houston too.
There is one miserable, frightened human being underneath those fur coats, a woman not easily understood when sighted by chance at a gas station in the middle of the night (apparently to buy a candy bar). It is indeed very easy to make jokes about this "cracktastic" superstar, but we should also feel compassion for this poor lost soul who locks herself in a squalid bathroom, hiding behind whatever ruins remain of her once fabulous and celebrated life.
