We are about to talk about my grandmother, Nanny, who I actually knew very, very, well; but first, this glacier? Yeah. I have no recollection of taking this photograph. I have no recollection of a lot of things, actually…

In fact, just to get the exact location for the byline, I had to ask my friends if they had any idea where we might have been. They did of course, apparently I was the only one who regularly got so shitfaced that I frequently encounter huge gaping holes in my memory. There are days and events that drugs and alcohol have built a wall of inebriation around, and those memories are forever kept from me. They are locked behind an impenetrable cloak of haziness and mystery.

When smart phones finally came on the scene, they were a game changer, because I was then able to piece together the details and whereabouts of my own life (and do it quietly, privately) through a trail of breadcrumbs. These breadcrumbs were, of course, in the form of texts, photos, and geolocation tracking. Golly, this new technology, what a lifesaver!

But this photo was taken with my Nikon, so I had no idea where it was, or if I’d even been to that glacier. Maybe someone else borrowed my camera and took the photo while I was passed out? Yeah. What a fun way to live, eh?

As most alcoholics can attest, you get used to listening to people tell stories about things you supposedly did, but it’s as if you are experiencing it all for the first time. You’ll suddenly realize that you are the main character in their story, even though you have no recollection of anything they are saying. I would find myself getting super invested, like it was a tv drama playing out, and I was trying to guess what he/me would do next.

“Oooh, I hope he doesn’t take off his pants again, everyone at the church mixer would hate that!”

It’s sorta fun, I guess, in a surreal, bizarro, f*cked up kinda way.

About the same time that I started seriously considering quitting drinking, some other developments in my life had me thinking a lot about Alzheimer’s on a regular basis. Both Alcoholism and Alzheimer’s run in our family, both involve crippling memory loss, and neither disease has any real cure at the time of this writing. However, my particular memory loss predicament, well, unlike Alzheimer’s, I at least knew how to solve that problem.

But only if I was willing to give up drugs and drinking ENTIRELY, that is.

I’ve thought about this a lot, and even though one is degenerative and the other caused by consuming excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol, the similarities between Alzheimer’s and blackout drinking are shockingly prevalent. You have missing periods of time in your life, the details of which you are reduced to recreating based on circumstantial evidence and (most importantly) context clues. The day that you sober up after a lengthy bender, you become like Nancy Drew. You’re a detective, hot on the case of Your Own Life.

Okay, I thought I stayed home last night after getting drunk and high 0n crack, but I see there’s a stamp on my hand from a club, and there’s a Whataburger receipt in my pocket for breakfast taquitos.

Peculiar, very peculiar.

And on the receipt, there’s several items that I would personally never order, regardless of my intoxication level, so that would indicate I was probably with another person... But who?

This requires further investigation.

There would be other times that I’d wake up with a feeling in my gut that I did something terrible, but had no idea exactly what that thing might be. That’s the hardest thing to try and investigate, when you suspect someone is mad at you, but you don’t know who, or for what. That's when vague, open-ended texts become your best friend, as you fish for clues and try to piece together the events of your own life.

Other times, the situation might be more dire. When the harsh morning light wakes you up and you see that you are outside, SLEEPING IN A BUSH, figuring out how you got there is less important than just figuring out how to get the hell home. Before too many people see you and ask you questions.

“What were you doing in that bush, Sir?”

“Well, I don’t rightly know. Would you like to help me investigate this mystery?”

Before she eventually passed away, I learned a lot about Alzheimer’s with/from my grandmother. I am all too familiar with how she would try and use context clues to help her figure out what was going on. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

If she suddenly found herself driving a car, based on where she was in the city, and what time of day it was, and what she was wearing, she confided to me that she could likely figure out where she was heading.

She'd think, “It’s 9:30 a.m., I’m close to work and wearing nice work clothes, I must be going to work.” Easy-peasey.

Except, sometimes not so easy-peasey. She’d show up to work only to immediately learn she’d already been there minutes ago at 9:00 a.m. and they had asked her to go to the bank. Oops.

“That was so fast!” someone might say, “I can’t believe you’re back already!”

At which point, I would watch her face as a new set of context clues came into play. In the early years, she’d be able to initiate a quick save, something relatable like, “I’m so scatterbrained, I forgot the deposit slips!” as opposed to, “My last memory is waking up behind the wheel of a moving car, with no idea where I might have been driving to, so I just drove back here.”

A lot of times, with drinking, your mistake will be thinking you are telling someone something for the first time, when in fact, you have both already discussed it together, at length, but when you were secretly high or drinking. Just like with my grandmother in the early-onset years, a context clue like this can often trigger a quick recovery, and you can still save face.

“I know we talked about it already, I just felt like maybe we could talk about it more in depth now…”

When you wake up outside in a bush, there’s very little bouncing back from that. You just have to hope very few people witnessed you sleeping there and hope the ones who did were incapable of recognizing you.

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Ryan’s Landscaping Tip of the Day!

If you have a tendency to pass out in random places, I encourage you to devote a portion of each bed in your yard to nice, soft Monkey Grass. Also, always point your face inwards, towards the bushes of the landscape bed you are sleeping in, not outward towards the street. This is especially important if you are in someone else's yard, you’ll be harder to recognize if your face is nestled in foliage.

And again, hopefully the bush you somehow toppled into is something soft and lovely like Monkey Grass or a Japanese Boxwood and not a pointy, scratchy holly bush, but that’s pretty much out of your control, now isn't it? If you had the wherewithal to be discerning about what type of bush you slept in, you probably wouldn’t be sleeping in a bush to begin with. So it’s a moot point.

Happy Gardening!

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I suspect there is a reason that espionage thrillers remain my favorite genre of filmed entertainment, and I think it’s because I find them surprisingly relatable. On more than one occasion I have been at a drug dealer’s house when guns have been drawn, and twice I have had the barrel of a gun pointed directly at my face. On the most memorable of these occasions, the gun barrel actually touched my forehead.

In scenarios like these, where narcotics are involved and everyone in the room is jacked up on cocaine, the only thing left to do is try and de-escalate the situation as best you know how. (Use your words, Lil’ Pantera! How does it make you feel that you accused your friend of stealing when really you just got too fucked up and couldn't remember where you hid your stash?)

But my absolute favorite spy thriller trope is the one where the hero is kidnapped. They are injected with something in their neck, or have a chloroform-soaked cloth placed over their mouth, then they wake up in a shipping crate or tied to a bed or something. Now it’s up to them to figure out where they are. Are they still in the same city, are they even still in America? Little clues around the room always help them to piece it together.

While I’ve never woken up in a crate or in another country, there have been more times than I can count where I’ve woken up in a strange place and had absolutely no idea where I was or how I got there. This was especially common when we used to party with Rohypnols. You might know them as “roofies,” or remember all the news reports from the 90s which labeled them as the “Date Rape Drug,” due to their despicable amnesiac properties.

Well, for some reason we thought it was fun to take these by choice (and not because they were insidiously slipped into our drinks, like the ladies on the nightly news). The next morning you’d wake up, and just like the captured spy, you'd have to figure out where you were and how you got there.

Frequently, this was easier said than done. Because just like with Alzheimer’s, whole chunks of your memory were completely missing. My blackout drinking later got to this point as well.

You might be thinking that you would have just gotten the hell out of there, and pieced it all together later. Okay, sure, but it wasn’t always that easy. Where is your car? It’s not out front, but your car keys are in your pocket. So that makes no sense. You have your wallet, but where is all your money? Your driver’s license is missing, too. Smart phones weren’t invented yet, so your phone is pretty much useless. You could call someone to pick you up, but first you'd need to figure out where you were.

“Come pick me up, I’m at some filthy crack house?” No, that won’t work.

You’ll have to go outside and walk around looking upwards for a bit, until you find a physical street sign. You know, like a crazy person.

So, just like Nanny, I'd have to try and piece things together, while also keeping how much I didn't know close to the vest. Maybe they were still passed out, but there were likely other people there in the crack house with me, and it’s possible one of them had my money. Or owed me drugs because I gave them my money. Or they have my car, or they at least know where my car is. It’s a tricky line you have to tow, to suss out information that you should know already.

Again, I watched my grandmother do it time and time again. The difference was, in the beginning and then also towards the end, she had no idea what was going on. She would do things she had no memory of doing, so it was as if she was going crazy. She’d “wake” to find things in her house different than they were before, different than the way she remembered them being, so her only logical conclusion was that people were breaking into her house and… changing things. Not stealing anything, necessarily, just messing with things. Messing with her.

However, there was a period of time in the “middle” of her battle with Alzheimer’s where it seemed like the one thing she could remember was that she had a memory problem. And if she wanted to continue being allowed to live in her comfortable house and drive her own car, she needed to hide it. Ah. Another similarity to the functioning alcoholic/addict. Unless you want your comfy situation to change, you need to hide the truly advanced state of your disease.

Suddenly, the spy’s predicament seems like the most straightforward of them all, doesn't it? They’ve been captured, and they need to escape. Also, our spy is always aware that they have been captured and why: crazy stuff, like kidnapping, it just comes with the territory.

Same for me, I always knew that the reason why I was waking up in a strange place was because I was a drug addict. That also comes with the territory. My Nanny, however, would eventually come to forget that she had a problem with forgetting. At which point, the world became a nonsensical and terrifying place for her. Each day, she didn't know what was happening or why. With Alzheimer’s, being confused and having to figure out where the hell you are and what the hell is going on also comes with the territory, but how was she to know that if she couldn’t remember she had a mentally degenerative disease in the first place?

Insidious.

So, as the two diseases progress, inevitably neither the drug addict’s situation nor the Alzheimer patient’s circumstances can remain “comfy” for very long. In fact, usually only the fictitious spy’s life remains unchanged, as he escapes his captors and lives to die another day, lives to go on countless more adventures in countless more episodes. For the rest of us, though, things go from bad to worse; eventually I went to rehab, and Nanny went to a nursing home.

And here we are at yet another juncture.

Even though our symptoms of memory loss and the deterioration of our physical and mental faculties were running parallel for a bit, we all know that an Alzheimer’s story only ends one way. The disease continues to progress until eventually even a person’s involuntary mechanisms such as swallowing and breathing forget what they were supposed to be doing as well, and the person finally shuts down physically as well as mentally.

It is a horrible, humiliating, painful, and undignified way to die. You lose everything about yourself that once made you who you were. Essentially, it is like the soul slowly leaves the body, until only a shell remains. As addiction takes over, alcoholics and drug addicts can meet a similar fate. They can become so eaten up with the substance, and the pursuit of finding more of it, that eventually there is nothing good or recognizable left about the person who once was. They, too, become little more than a shell.

But the alcoholic/drug addict’s story doesn’t have to end this way. That’s the difference.

For the drug addict and alcoholic, there is still hope! That’s the huge, glaring, dissimilarity. Imagine recognizing so many devastating parallels between your grandmother’s condition and your own, but knowing that only one of you had the power to change things. Only one of you had the power to stop the progression!

Sure, neither disease had a cure... and yet, I could make one monumental change, and live. I could make one monumental change in my life and keep all my future memories safe. I could have my life and all my mental faculties restored to me.

I just had to give up drugs and alcohol.

Unless this is the one and only story of mine that you have ever read, then you already know how my story ends. Or rather, you know that I eventually gave up drugs and alcohol, and my life of sobriety began. Yes, like all the best spies, I was able to escape my tormentors, and have lived to die another day. There’s no more sleeping in bushes or waking up in strange places, no more photos in my camera that I have no recollection of taking. I remember everything about my life now in vivid detail, crisper than any photograph.

However, sadly, Nanny passed away before I got sober, so she never got to see me emerge from my crippling shell. But that’s okay, now I can remember enough for the both of us. See, that’s what this entire photography website is about, really, it is a celebration of remembrances, of memories. Because you never know when they will be taken from you.

I want to end by telling you that I have another grandmother, one who is still very much alive. She has lived long enough to see me get sober, and we continue to share experiences and make new memories together to this very day. Indeed, we now share something extraordinarily special together, seeing as how I CHECKED MYSELF INTO REHAB and got sober on July 17th, a date neither of us is likely to forget.

You see, July 17th is my Mamaw’s birthday.

And now it is also mine.