I really should be better about posting. My life has recently exploded. Maybe writing/ranting would help. Here's a start:

So... the latest Phil saga.... This all happened while I was on flights from FL to CA. Yay. Had I been living closer (like Atlanta), I could have made a u-turn and gone back. Distance has its advantages. He did make it on Christmas and was well-behaved. I saw him again on Thursday the 27th in the afternoon. He asked when I was leaving FL and I told him Sunday. We had plans for dinner Friday night and he never made it. E's brother is visiting and Terry told me that P hadn't come home Thursday night (I heard this on Friday at dinner). And the previous weekend he had "gone Christmas shopping" and came home 2 days later with no presents. Hmmm... So I didn't hear anything else and Sunday my flight was out of Tampa. I figured he probably made it home at some point. I'm not sure how much I cared.

Sunday night. Dec 30th. My parents were on their way to a Nar-Anon meeting (yay Mom & Dad) when P calls. He says he is having a heart attack. Says he is driving around. He wants to know where the hospital is. They ask where he is and he says he doesn't know. Then he tells them a street (a major street in Sarasota with tons of box stores). They suggest he pull into a parking lot. He claims there aren't any parking lots (uh, see above). Then he says he won't die in a Target parking lot so he won't pull over. Eventually they tell him to turn at the light by a specific landmark so they can figure out where exactly he is. By now they have scrapped Nar-Anon for the evening. They manage to zoom over to where he is and somehow get their car behind him. At a light they manage to get my dad in the passenger seat of P's car. My response when I heard this was, "Oh, great! So now he's f*cked up and driving with my DAD in the car?!" I was not too pleased and probably not too supportive. Anyway, that's not the point for now. So he starts telling my dad that he has been smoking crack. Well, at least we now know what it is. He is ranting. He is having chest pains. He swears he is having a heart attack. (That's one long-ass heart attack!) En route to the hospital he decides he cannot go to the hospital because he is too dirty and stinky (I didn't ask my dad if he was stinky or not) so he has to shower. They go back to my parents' condo and he showers and borrows some sweats (too big) from my dad. They convince him that he shouldn't take his car to the hospital because what if he is right about the heart attack and they admit him, then what happens to the car? He agreed so they drove him to the ER. He was back in with nurses, doctors, whatever. He told them it was crack (he was pretty scared he was going to die). A social worker came out and said, "So, how much do you know about your son?" My parents said, "We were on our way to a Nar-Anon meeting." The social worker said, "Ah. ok." Somehow in the course of things the ER doc "baker acted" my brother. Yep. Something that should have been done AGES ago. 72 hour involuntary lock-up as a danger to himself and others. Psych Ward. No shoelaces. Mom & Dad had to go get him sweatpants with no drawstring so he couldn't hang himself with it. He was pissed off. Too bad. 72 hours without a cigarette might be what pissed him off the most. So P spent New Year's Eve in the Psychward with no shoelaces. Jesus, my family is rich with sit-com material. E told the kids, "Daddy's chest hurt so he went to the hospital by Grandma & Grandpa's. He's going to be okay but he's in a special part of the hospital where we can't visit him." Tee hee hee. Yeah, HE'LL be okay. Right. And those kids? F*cked up for life if they don't start talking about it soon. But I'm 3,000 miles away so what do I know.

E called P's work and said that he was in the hospital with chest pain. He hadn't gone in to work Friday but had Monday the 31st off. Miraculously he still has a job (are they retarded?). Now he is home, saw a therapist Monday, and plans on doing "90 meetings in 90 days." I'm hoping Mom & Dad aren't holding on to this too strongly. My first evening in FL I went to a Nar-Anon meeting with them and someone gave the stat that fewer than 30% of addicts ever go straight. And, of those 30%, it typically is on the 8th attempt. When my parents called me to fill me in on all of this I said, "Good. We are on attempt #2." That didn't please them. I just want them to be honest with themselves.

Back in 1995 when P made the first attempt he told me he was a coke addict. He told other family members he was an alcoholic. I asked him about this and he said that "coke addict" would be too shocking and he didn't want to mess them up. Hmmm.... isn't admitting it the first step? Whatever. Then later he told me he really was an alcoholic and coke was just something stupid and costly he did when drunk, but that alcohol was the real problem. 3 years later I see him in NY and he orders a beer at a restaurant. I said, "A beer? Really?" and he said, "Oh, I'm not really an alcoholic. I'm a coke addict. The problem with alcohol is that if I drink too much, I forget that I no longer do coke and then I make stupid decisions. But as long as I just have a little bit to drink, then I'm okay." So, until he admits -- really admits -- that he is both an alcoholic AND a coke/crack addict, he has no hope. So yes, it is good that he is going to try 90 meetings in 90 days however, I don't have much faith in it sticking because he is too far in denial. And part of that might be denying it even to his own kids.

My mom's mom was an alcoholic. She doesn't really talk about it. Well, if "never" counts as "not really" then yeah, she does not really talk about it. The other day she told me that she thought P should tell the kids. She said that when she saw her mom's weird behavior and mood swings she was terrified that her mother had a brain tumor and was going to die. Remember, this is when "cancer" had to be whispered for fear that invoking the name would bring on the disease. She said when she found out that it was "just alcoholism" she felt a sense of relief because she felt that this could be "fixed." She said that the kids see things are happening and might be drawing their own conclusions. More later on behavior I saw that supports this theory. But P or E or both don't want the kids to "know." BTW 5th graders usually don't still hang on to Santa Claus either. I wonder if grade school teachers look for Santa Claus in 5th grade as a sign that there is trouble at home.

So I haven't called Phil. What do I say? Nor has he called me. I was waiting to see if he or his kids would call me yesterday to wish me a happy b-day but they didn't. I'm not sure what protocol is here. Am I supposed to be the one to call? I thought my b-day gave the perfect way to skip any awkward protocol but apparently it didn't.

It's also interesting to me that he drove from his place to Sarasota for this. Why go to Mom & Dad? Some deep psychological issues there.