Born in a Bar

I visited Montana for the first time in over 13 months in September. Somehow, it’s the longest I’ve ever gone without setting foot in the state, and that despite living some 1,500 miles closer to a Montana border than any time in my adult life prior to 2019.

I have a lot of feelings about traveling out of state on any non-essential terms these days. So, a September voyage to Montana was something that I had been wringing my hands about since June. I didn’t want to be a vector tracking in coastal cooties that the landlocked parts of the continent on higher ground had managed to keep at bay up to that point. The prospect of traveling felt irresponsible when Montana’s daily COVID case count was just in the fifties.

Even as a veritable recluse — and thereby probably an ideal one-off traveler from a public health standpoint — traveling east of Hood Canal still feels irresponsible to me. Before mid-September, I hadn’t left the Peninsula since February and had only briefly ventured to a neighboring town in an adjacent county in June. Even so, the optics of adding to Montana’s inflow of folks from the outside world didn’t sit great with me. But then, days before I was due to start the tri-state haul through what feels like a Buzzfeed list of most harrowing I-90 mountain passes, the basis of why it felt irresponsible began shifting. On September 16, Montana added 220 new COVID cases — a new daily record at the time. That record was then bested four more times in the following 10 days. At that point, I was less concerned about the coastal cooties I might be tracking in from a county that had managed a COVID-free streak between September 11 and October 1. I was more fazed about the potential of transporting pathogens within the state, and bringing them back out with me.

My mental acumen is unremarkable on a normal day, so feeling irresponsible for rapidly changing reasons is enough of a strain on this little goblin brain of mine. But adding to the cognitive dissonance, once I was ultimately entering Montana, I was overcome with relief at the sight of Exit 0 at the Idaho/Montana state line. That feeling itself is familiar, but the next several hours of windshield time may account for the first time I felt both profoundly relieved and ambivalently irresponsible all at once — a confusing combo.

Regarding the familiar sense of relief, that’s something that happens whenever I travel a great distance with my hometown or state as the final destination. I don’t know what this means about my psychological development (or lack thereof) and of course I know states are arbitrary political boundaries. But I think some primal part of my brain senses that if I perish suddenly, I’m more likely to be found and claimed by packmates who recognize my scent if I go out closer to where I was born.

The conditions of this sojourn back to my hometown were admittedly unprecedented for many reasons — some obvious and global, others more specific and hyper-local. But none of that seemed to dull the familiar onset of relief I associate with returning to the place that I know best. And maybe I’m being overly sentimental here, but I feel like the place I know best in turn knows me best, and it has nothing to do with human development there. Like, if somebody visited from the future and leaked the fact that I would die tragically within a 10-mile radius of the confluence of the Gardner and Yellowstone rivers, on impulse, I would probably ask what about that would be tragic.

While relief held up in spite of this mechanical bull of a year we’re living, I anticipated most other things would not. As far as hyper-local circumstances go, something that impacted Gardiner that has nothing to do with the global pandemic, nor with one of Yellowstone’s busiest summers on record, was a structural fire in July. It took out two iconic watering holes in my hometown. I wrote at some length about it after it happened, mostly for my own catharsis. I won’t rehash all of that here, but I will say I was gobsmacked that what I expressed seemed to land with a certain generation of Gardinerites (essentially Yellowstone seasonals-turned-lifers of my parents’ age). I knew the rubble — figurative and actual — in Gardiner would be fresh if I managed to get out there at all in 2020. When I ultimately did, all of two months after the fire, I was struck by how much the wreckage felt like an analogy for the general tenor of my hometown these days.

I have a lot of feelings about bars. I say that as a general statement, but also with regards to specific bars — most of which are no longer in business. In the case of my hometown, the two bars that burned down are on the short list of places that I have no memory of having to walk into for the first time. As with my immediate family and our old Dogshit Alley neighbors, my relationship with those bars predates my memory. Those places knew me before I knew them.

There’s an old idiom that I haven’t heard in ages but hope is still in use: “Were you born in a barn?” I hope it’s still popular enough that this explanation is superfluous, but out of fear that it may not be, I’ll offer this: “Were you born in a barn?” is a teasing insinuation reserved for folks who obliviously leave exterior doors wide-open upon entry or exit. That particular expression comes to mind when I think about the erstwhile bars of Gardiner because the first time it was directed at me, I misheard it as “Were you born in a bar?” This ability to mishear random questions as somehow alcohol-related, by the way, has continued into my adult life. As a more recent example, during an all-staff meeting at an old job, I once thought I heard my CEO ask “what’s our moonshine?” when he really asked “what’s our moonshot?”

For the record, my birth certificate indicates I was born at Livingston Memorial Hospital. But one born to certain conditions has to wonder sometimes. Maybe I was born in a bar after all and my birth certificate was doctored to head off future visits from CPS. Or maybe I was in fact born in a hospital. The odds of either seem equally likely. And much like I wasn’t surprised by the onset of relief in approaching my hometown in September, I’m not surprised to still be contemplating the role of bars in the particulars of my birth. I don’t know if this thing that I would call the “Montana consciousness” is mythic or actual, but I know bars are endemic to it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they’ve become a focal point in Montana’s handling of the pandemic.

Up until about mid-September, as far as COVID situations go, Montana’s was pretty enviable. With the exception of one day in July, the new daily case count stayed below 200. Although there were some notable outbreaks, the state had one of the overall lowest rates of positive cases through May and moved into a second phase of reopening guidelines at the beginning of June. At face value, things seemed hunky dory, but the plot thickens. Under first and second phase reopening guidelines in Montana, bars were able to stay open with indoor service. For comparison, this is a marked difference from the guidelines in Washington, where even on the cusp of the second and third phases, bars and breweries are still only open with outdoor seating.

Well before Montana’s October streak of 600-700+ new COVID cases a day, my mother made the point that two of Gardiner’s few remaining bars getting burned to the ground in July is probably the reason the town hasn’t seen a serious outbreak despite Yellowstone rivaling its own visitation records for July and August, and setting a new one in September. I obviously don’t have the data to prove her point scientifically, but it seems to bear out anecdotally. The park’s seen north of 3 million visitors this summer. Presumably, a significant portion of those folks traveled through Gardiner: year-round population less than 1,000. And despite the amount of nonsensical resistance to mask-wear you might expect based on Montana Twitter’s reports, cases in Gardiner appear to have been minimal, and wide transmission almost unheard of.

That the demise of two Gardiner institutions likely contributed to this outcome has proven a formidable exercise in cognitive dissonance for me. On one hand, I have genuine grief over the loss of the last vestiges of Gardiner as the “veritable shantyville” of yore. On the other, that feels like a small price to pay if it means less Gardinerites of my parents’ age have to get sick and die prematurely or live the rest of their lives with compromised respiratory systems because our individualist sham of a country couldn’t be bothered to do more to protect them.

Even if my feelings were complicated, they seemed to make sense in sequence — the ambivalent irresponsibility, the relief in approaching my spawning grounds, the mild grief that prompted me to once again wonder if I was indeed born in a bar. If I had to venture a guess at what all these preoccupations seem to have in common, it seems like an overarching concern with where I come from and how I’m living my life.

I was recently reading a memoir that paraphrased some timeless Zora Neale Hurston wisdom that there are years that ask questions and years that answer them. You’d think the idea would allay some of my paranoia about the pace I’m able to work through the questions that haunt most of my waking hours. But in some ways, Hurston’s maxim makes me more paranoid that I might not be focusing on the right questions or listening for the right answers. I recognize the flawed premise of a right/wrong binary as well as the hubris in assuming my misdirected attention could be so consequential and deterministic. But still, when I think about what my obsessions boil down to — this outsized concern with something as daunting as whether I’m living “correctly” — it makes sense that I feel some urgency around getting clarity.

But of course Hurston’s right. I think it’s just easy to forget that the way questions and answers interact in real life isn’t linear. As a case in point, during the visit to my hometown, I was taken by surprise with some clarity that was six years in the making. It wasn’t anything I was actively thinking about, but it had everything to do with bars.

As somebody who has as many early memories from inside bars as the derelict apartment I grew up in, you’d think I’d be more torn up about having to go without them for most of 2020. But with few exceptions, I don’t really miss that environment — and for many of the same reasons that I don’t really miss being in public in general. That might’ve been a different story a few years ago, but even prior to the pandemic, I had already begun opting out of mingling in public places frequented by other people because I’d figured out that my mood tended to stay more stable with that stimulation out of the equation.

Without mincing any words, I used to binge-drink a lot. I recognize that statement is by no means unique, but now at the ripe old age of 27, I can see how that behavior combined with my predilection for anxiety, depression, and suicidality had a really extreme effect on me. Generally, I’ve been able to down-regulate and manage my anxiety in my adult life with endurance activity. Manipulating my biochemistry in that way usually keeps me stable, but one trigger that’s difficult to offset the effects of is the paranoia of losing a day of productivity. The root issue there deserves its own consideration, because it’s definitely a product of my personal beasties combined with society’s toxic obsession with output. But in the spirit of choosing my battles, you’ll have to forgive me for focusing on mitigating symptoms for now. The main point is there is nothing more effective at triggering my anxiety and dread response than a hangover.

I’m not proud of how long it took me to figure out how dangerous it was for me to be engaging in a behavior that’s not considered a big deal in the dominant culture. But I’ve also discovered that part of being neurodivergent and a creative person is learning to discern extreme behaviors that are normalized but pretty harmful for me. I don’t think I could articulate any of that at the time I promised myself I would stop binge-drinking, but I remember the events around that decision pretty clearly.

When I was still at the job I referenced in the “what’s our moonshine?” episode, we used to host big annual convenings. In 2018, we were in LA and specifically at the Intercontinental, a hotel that’s modern to an extreme that strains functionality for simpletons like yours truly (if you want more details, just google “intercontinental los angeles elevator” and behold the Tripadvisor reviews). I remember waking up in one of those terrifyingly modern rooms in basically the orientation I had sat down on the bed the night before. Gravity being gravity, my unconscious limbs assumed the contours of the edge I’d precariously passed out on, but the point is I fell asleep on top of a perfectly made bed, my body parallel to the untouched pillows, and I woke up with a faint fever and aches. Our org paid for an open bar at a reception the night before, and while I doubted I had drank enough to have a flu-grade hangover, I pretty much started the day by gaslighting myself into thinking that was what was going on. I eventually made it down the hotel’s riddle of an elevator system and started working as planned. It took only a few hours of aggressive chills, nausea, and fatigue to realize that I either had a bug or food poisoning. I pretty much decided then that in addition to all the other shit that came with the benders — what feels like surgical recovery time, the paranoia around lost productivity, the biochemical mood-dip on top of my baseline suicidality — I was done with the ambiguity. As somebody who only gets symptomatically ill once every few years, I am a giant baby when I do get sick. And I don’t like to be anywhere close to people when I’m ailing unless they’re bringing me provisions, meds, blankets, or puppies.

I never wanted to find myself out in the world again after misreading sickness as a bad hangover. It seemed like the easiest way to eliminate the possibility was to stop with the benders. I swore off the behavior easily enough, but I skipped an important follow-up step.

For the past few years, I’ve been able to articulate why I don’t binge-drink. But last month, I realized I never did the work to heal. I never actually made the effort to examine why I accepted all the awful side-effects as collateral damage of an extreme behavior for so long. I never once considered that a past version of me had an underlying motive for all but poisoning herself on such a consistent basis. And even though I wasn’t trying to, I finally figured it out. I drank because I associated that behavior with the one environment where people were actually honest with me.

It simultaneously breaks my heart and gives me so much more empathy for that past version of me. At that time, I hadn’t yet subscribed to this kind of militant program of candor that I now operate on. I hadn’t really established the rigid terms on which I’m willing to engage with people now. I hadn’t given myself permission to stop engaging with and investing in people that didn’t shoot straight with me. I was starved for honesty, and noticed that people tended to be more real when they’re under the influence.

It’s a shame that I was so quick to write myself off over reckless past behavior. I never considered that my priorities and needs then might’ve been exactly the same, even if they were expressed and sought out in a different way. And I suspect one reason that I sort of bypassed any of the processing when I decided to distance myself from what was ultimately harming me has to do with how reductive our language around addiction and recovery can be.

For how common sustained patterns of binge-drinking are, you’d think that the concept of recovery would be more mainstream and that the language would be nuanced enough to reflect the range of experiences it might apply to. But it’s really not. Unless you can identify with society’s definition of a full-on addict, you’ll probably miss out on a lot of the principles that apply to your situation and can help. At least, that’s true for me. I don’t say that to minimize the seriousness of real addiction, but to suggest that we’d all stand to gain from thinking about sobriety as less of a binary term than a relative one.

Back in 2019, I heard this interview on KEXP Music Heals Day with songwriter Lillie West. Towards the end, she said something really liberating about sobriety that I still think about:

I hope that people know that there is not just one way to be sober… Literally, you do make your own rules. A lot of people don’t drink anymore, but they still smoke weed because it was never a problem for them. I find it annoying that people say that’s not really sober. But to a certain extent, you do make your own rules. And also, you don’t have to be one type of person to be sober.

I think hearing that was when I started allowing myself to understand sobriety as a sliding scale. That was about six months after I’d called it quits with binge-drinking. And while I didn’t use that bit of wisdom and the critical distance to begin unpacking what had driven that behavior, I do think it made me feel like I had permission to locate myself in a narrative I didn’t belong in before. Basically, I thought I needed to be the version of an addict that society tends to pathologize or criminalize to think of my more situational overuse of alcohol as sobriety. But even if I wasn’t self-medicating per se (or at least didn’t think I was at the time) when I was drinking heavily in the past, that doesn’t mean that substance abuse wasn’t a problem for me. 

Like I said before, I wasn’t actively trying to put this all together. In the Hurston construction of questions and answers, questions of my old behavior had kind of taken a backseat in 2020 to some higher-level questions about whether I’m basically living correctly. The fact that honesty was what drove my extreme past behavior was a connection that just unloaded on me out of the blue while I was running an old gravel road from Gardiner to Mammoth. That instantly gave me empathy for my younger self, but when I take myself out of the calculus, what feels awfully tragic and upsetting is that binge-drinking is more normalized than honesty.

I feel like I’ve been routinely made to feel somehow immature or less emotionally intelligent for insisting on telling the truth and expecting it of other people. I’ll never understand why so many adults have been socialized to think it’s tactful or dignified to “manage information,” which to me always just feels as fucked up as it sounds. It’s just people’s cover for withholding information that they’ve preemptively decided other people don’t want or can’t handle. On a basic level, it feels really violent and presumptuous that people feel like they can make that decision on behalf of other people. But it also feels like a real disservice to borderline masochists like me who would rather just get the hard shit out of the way if that spares us the bullshit that’s going to make us feel manipulated and jilted later. My most formative pain has actually come from people censoring the full story up-front. It always stings way harder when the full context is laid bare retroactively. Always.

I’ve noticed in recent years that my frankness alarms some people, and I’m okay with that. To whatever extent I can control it, I want to spare people the kind of pain that’s affected me most acutely. I mentioned that it took years to recognize that hangovers are a huge trigger for my anxiety, but it took even longer to recognize that dishonesty was a mammoth trigger for my suicidality. Disinvesting in people that habitually flake on plans or redact information has been my way of phasing out that trigger. And it’s been liberating. I may only be normalizing honesty in my own little microclimate, and even if that bubble is small and consists of just a couple of ride-or-dies, I’ve noticed I feel so much less isolated. That feels worth stressing: In addition to all the obsessions I’ve outlined here, I know I’ve always been preoccupied with loneliness. And though my understanding of it has evolved over the years, I’ve certainly felt less lonely since shrinking my circle and making honesty a rigid expectation.

Maybe this feels like a stretch, but I think there is some insight worth extracting from the sense of relief I get in close proximity to my home area. Even if the changing character of Gardiner isn’t my cup of tea, and feels subject to human activity, market forces, and even the occasional random fire, it’s clear that I still identify with and feel recognized by the landscape and topography around it. I don’t think I’ve done a great job at extending that kind of consideration to the self-contained terrestrial landscape of myself.

Concerns of loneliness and honesty seem to be endemic to the essential nature of this organism that my birth certificate identifies as Jacqueline Brennan for organized society’s purposes (but this is the same document that alleges that I was not born in a bar for organized society’s purposes, so we should take all of this with a grain of salt). Maybe I won’t always understand how I’m expressing those concerns in real-time. I think I’ll always feel ashamed of past attitudes and behaviors until I can frame them for myself in those terms. And I’m clearly a rookie at this whole healing thing, but maybe this act of reconciliation is what that’s all about. If it is, no wonder we’re so damn good at avoiding it. It’s hard. Reconciling with aspects of yourself that you’ve retired without actually trying to understand them is hard.

Something I’ve been meditating on for the past several weeks came from learning about the complex early seral forests that have come to predominate Yellowstone as a result of the 1988 fire season. These are basically vast forests of dead trees, but the dead biomass has created habitat that’s now vital to the living order. We know that now because we’ve had the benefit of 30 years to observe it. That feels like further proof of Zora Neale Hurston’s incisive observation about the delay between questions and answers. If we think of questions like running experiments, doing research, or just observing, that shit takes time.

It takes time to see how the dead biomass fits into the complex landscape — it’s true in burn areas, and it seems to hold up in the context of a terrestrial lifetime too. Of course, it’s tempting to dismiss the stuff that looks like a clusterfuck. But much to my dismay, healing seems to demand that we confront it as a kind of radical act of kindness to ourselves, and people in our lives by extension. I may never get a conclusive answer on whether I’m living my life correctly, but I have to believe this difficult work is part of doing that.