Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

Sometimes a proper, good-old-skull-splitting-dry-heaving-oh-god-I-swear-I’ll-never-drink-again-if-you-just-make-this-stop hangover is actually beneficial to normal folks—they get painfully reminded why they can’t party like that every night, they feel like crap for a couple of days, so they do the logical thing and take a break until next year’s National Amateur Hour rolls around (St. Paddy’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, New Years Eve, etc.) and maybe, maybe they cut loose again. That sort of drinking behavior (moderately sensible) sounds pretty painless compared to the way I guzzled almost daily.

I am glad to see them even if they are terrible players or their art is atrocious, because they are displaying belief in themselves and their ability to create something worthwhile, even if only for themselves. That takes guts, and guts are something I quite admire.

A city’s artists and musicians are the living, breathing chroniclers of its soul,

There is a scientific hypothesis known as the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve that deals with the exponential decay of human memory over time. The forgetting curve illustrates that information that is not consciously reviewed through active recall, thereby strengthening its retention, is lost very rapidly.

Sitting shiva in the dark days of the past is not the act of mourning for lost time or happiness; it is willfully murdering the only chance we ever have to be happy—right now.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

“Of course, people outside find it difficult to imagine what prison life is like. The situation in itself—that is each single moment—is perhaps not so very different here from anywhere else; I read, meditate, write, pace up and down my cell—without rubbing myself sore against the walls like a polar bear. The great thing is to stick to what one still has and can do—there is still plenty left—and not to be dominated by the thought of what one cannot do, and by feelings of resentment and discontent . . .”

Meth allots the tweaker plenty of time to ponder deeply the nature of his own personal reality, and after staying awake for days on end (sometimes up to a week or more), the psychosis that

shrink-wraps itself around his head like some sort of malnourished epileptic octopus must be expressed somehow. Twitching, humming, and obsessively repeating

This is a small, weak-minded, and fear driven manner of thinking and living life. I have never wanted to have anything but a broad mind and a life free of fear, for therein lies the path to growth.

Because I can look myself in the eye in the mirror every day and honestly say to myself: You did the right thing in a really tough spot. You did not break or run away. You are a man of your word. No one, no one, can ever take that from me, just like the court could not have taken it from me even if they had sent me to prison. The comfort provided by the irrefutable certainty of one’s internal rectitude is a luxury afforded only to those who prove themselves able of acting with honor in the face of great adversity; for one must be tested to find out what one is really made of. It is never available to the ever-growing multitude of yapping dogs in our soft and castrated society who constantly criticize what they could never muster the courage to be.