Hello again! Thanks to all the readers for the fantastic feedback in getting this support group off the ground. An anonymous recovering marker sniffing addict from Georgia (the U.S. state, not the war-torn nation, LOL) told me that he found this page right at the time he was really coming into terms with everyone he had affected during his days "on the pen" and that as soon as he was finished here he was moved to run back to his local Office Depot and apologize to the shelf-stockers he had terrorized over the last two years. Believe me friend, we all have had similar experiences that are humiliating and humbling once it comes into focus the ones we took advantage of. And apologizing to those who we hurt is often the hardest part of this all. When I spent a summer in Wichita, I myself found a gateway to a constant marker-fix in the local OfficeMax. I won't get into too many details about this particular time in my life today, but the short story is that I threatened (and tried-to) break the neck of the floor manager on one particularly ugly afternoon. When I went back there to apologize when I got clean recently, they actually tried to have me arrested and it was an unnerving reminder that not everyone else has yet to come to the understanding which is necessary to begin the forgiving and healing process, which with respect to this particular instance I can completely understand their lingering pain. Undoing the damage years of marker sniffing can do will undoubtably take us a lifetime, but we can take daily strength in the fact that we're going to stop at nothing to spend the rest of our life trying everything we can to undo those very mistakes.
But for now, I'd like to use this space to vent a little frustration with our society around this certain time of year which happens to be known as "Back to School." It should more aptly be described as "The Annual renewal of Kids falling into the sitting traps of a life ruined by an addiction to sniffing markers." For this year's Back-to-school blitz I've planned on setting up at the local Target store with an informative booth letting kids and parents know just how dangerous those brand new markers they just willingly placed in their kids hands really are. The scars across my face from a continuous Sharpie shoved up it can be a very persuasive tool at a time when many parents are unaware of what they're doing. And do you want to know why they don't know? - Because there's no warnings anywhere on any of those markers letting kids and parents know that if you inhale the contents of this marker, then you have just as good a chance of winding up dead in a Staples store as you have of leading a successful life.
This year my fears, struggles, and horrors have been brought to an entirely new level with the advance of two emerging products from Sharpie: the Sharpie Mini Permanent Marker and the Sharpie Retractable Permanent Marker. The 'mini' is marketed as "Small enough to go anywhere" which fits in very conveniently with a life as a slave to the inhalation of permanent ink. The 'retractable' also fits in with this theme of abusing your victims to the point of complete resignation on the retractable's ability to be stored in purses, pockets, and bags without the fear of spilled ink marking your continued reliance on the sweet smell of black ink. I liken these developments in marker technology to the equivalent of Camel installing a cigarette-dispensing toothpaste holder with lighter, so that trapped Smoker can light up a cig just a little bit easier every morning like they're inevitably going to do anyways. Why even give the chance to the Smoker to break themselves of their slavery every morning? Just help them out a bit! /sarcasm
And I'll have to go into this more on another entry, but it is offensive and a downright crime of the continued presence on the marker market of scent-markers. Crayola executives especially should be sentenced to death for their marketing of these scent-markers to children in grade schools, completely powerless to the temptations of a life of marker sniffing. Here's another idea for kids, how about a Coors Light Jr.?!?! We'll cover the bad taste so they love it! That way when they grow up, they'll be completely hooked on the life that Marks-A-Lot has laid out for them. I had an unfortunate time a couple of years back when I was starting to come to the realization that the Markers had a hold on my life, and when I was walking out of Wal Mart on a back-to-school shopping evening I went up and ripped the scent-markers out of a kids hand. The security of the Wal Mart mistook me for trying to kidnap the child, but once I told the mother about my story and about my life she agreed not to press charges and thanked me for keeping her child from harm. You have gateway drugs and then you have drugs that are literally trying to get you to take them. HELLO! SCENT-MARKERS! Give the helpless public a break!!!
I'm sorry that this particular entry is a little more anger-driven and perhaps a little less tactfully presented than my normal composure, I just have a hard time when I think about how many kids are holding a ticking time-bomb in their hands in the form of a seemingly harmless permanent marker.
I promised you another personal experience today and it goes along with the theme of Back to school. My very first year at Undergrad at the University of Kansas State in Manhattan was a year of my life filled with high highs and desperate lows. In my first month in my dorm, I was trying everything I could to hide my addiction to marker sniffing from my roommate, Dan, who I had just met upon moving in. But through the stresses of a day of classes where I was already limited on the amount of time I could commit to huffing, I couldn't even come home and open up a pack of Sharpie Silvers and just take it all in. I had to make frequent visits to the bathroom and study closets where I could only take one marker with me as to not arise suspiscion with any of my floormates or RA. So following a night out drinking with some new friends, when they offered me to join them for Mexican at Coco Bolos I instead returned to the dorm to find the floor asleep or absent. In bad need of a marker binge, I ran through the floor ripping off all of the dry-erase markers attached to each door-mounted dry erase board and hastily binged on each marker I had obtained. The binge caused me to crash before I could make it back to the room, and I awoke at noon the following day covered in blue, red, and black ink, slumped between the drinking fountain and trash chute. When I awoke I panicked, afraid that my dirty secret had been exposed to the floor, and worse, to my RA who could potentially report me and land me in some serious trouble. When I returned to my room my roommate burst out laughing, telling me that I had passed out on my way back from the bathroom, and that some guys on the floor must have found me and written all over me as I was passed out. I was so grateful that my secret was safe I just crashed to the bed and laughed so hard I cried. I wouldn't find out until months later that my roommate suspected that something was wrong with me but by then it was too late. So I'd like to close this entry by telling any of those students moving into the dorms this weekend that if your roommate thinks you've passed out and been written on by someone else when you know the truth that you were the one who consumed all of that marker ink: Tell him the truth. It may be scary, but it might save his life, and maybe yours too.
Regards,
Dodge
Friday, August 22, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Welcome to recoveringmarkersniffingaddicts.blogspot.com!
Hello world!
Welcome to recoveringmarkersniffingaddicts.blogspot.com! As you might imply from the name of this humble site, this is a place for recovering marker sniffing addicts to come and share their feelings, their experiences, their setbacks, and their triumphs. A fellow recovering marker huffer thought that a place to share his poetry would be very helpful and supportive of his and anyone else's journeys to stay clean. So that's exactly what this site is - a place for any and all of us to come and share our stories, our poetry, and our support which we so terribly need. It's simply frustrating how little attention and support is provided to those addicted to huffing markers - from the absence of federal- and state-funded support groups and rehabilitation centers to the lack of prominent warning labels on Sharpie Fine Point Permanent Markers (currently the #1 huffed marker by teenagers in North America and the undisputed gateway marker to the huffing world) - our battle is one that is certainly fought alone.
My hope is that in bringing my stories to the world via this blog, I might inspire someone else out there to be honest about their addiction to marker huffing. My stories will share the highs and lows in an effort that someone else, whose head is currently buried in an EXPO dry-erase marker while staying in the office late after work just to get that unbelievable buzz and rush - will recognize that the life they're leading is just not what it seems, that the high is not worth the sacrifice, and that being a slave to a marker and ink flow is not the way to obtain one's meaning in life.
And the battle to fight this addiction is ongoing. Just today I was in a meeting in the middle of a poorly-circulated conference room when a list of items was brought up by the visiting consultant to place on the parking lot. The second he cracked open that royal blue Sharpie retractable it immediately brought me back to my most recent huffing experience. Following the meeting I was able to restrain myself from taking the marker into my own hands and slamming it up my nasal passage, breathing in its sweet, delicious ink all the way. But I also could not bring myself to leave the room either, as I just hung around late after the meeting, enjoying the fading presence of those unbelievable markers. I knew today what I learned just months ago - that this is a journey that is fought every single day, in battles little and big with setbacks and triumphs that aren't always what they first seem to be. I felt guilty as I sat in the room, within arms reach of the ledge holding the gateway to another binge. But when I finally walked out of that room six hours later after resisting the temptation of dragging my face along the ledge, experiencing the foreplay-like titillation of feeling the plastic cap along my mustache before jumping in head first to an aroma of ink and lust, I knew that this was truly a triumph as I had managed to keep the exposed marker tip from entering my nostril. When you've been where I've been, you'll learn to get by with little victories.
I thought I might kick off this inaugural blog with an experience that is most personal to me: the story of how I became addicted to huffing markers. My story begins at just 14 years old in the setting of my happy home in my hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. The social studies project that I had been assigned required a black border on my poster-board, and paint and crayons proved an ineffective option. A sense of requirement for perfection has been driven throughout my family for as long as I can remember, and we knew that the border to my presentation on the demographics of Portugal needed to be as strong as the content of which it held. So we made a late night run to our local Hinky Dinky and purchased the very first set of permanent markers that I had ever held - the Avery Marks-A-Lot Large Bullet Tip Permanent Marker 24878, Black, package of 2 - and my mother and I proceeded to spend the remainder of that late evening coloring in the border of that pink poster. My mom turned me into bed after 10, but my blood was pumping so hard with the rush of that black ink that once she had drifted off to sleep, I escaped from bed and returned to the den to finish coloring in my poster. I was in love with the texture of the black ink on the paper, and I was enamored with the sensation of the ink hitting the paper and the scent overwhelming my nose. The room that night was striking in its similarity to the stories of first hits by other marker sniffing addicts in it being a dimly-lit, dusty and dry room. As I had closed the door to keep my mother from hearing me, none of the ink escaped the den that night and every single ounce of ink and that pen escaped from its confines of the plastic holder and was dragged across the smooth surface of the poster. And all of the air with which that ink came into contact with rushed forward, onward up the expressway to my skull.
I spent the remainder of that school year turning every single class assignment into a project that I could build a cover page that I could overwhelm with marker. I, of course, only being 14, had no idea of the extent to which I had already committed myself to this dangerous game. But when school let out that summer I found myself being strangely empty inside, lacking something yet I had no idea what it was. That summer was my first spent home alone as my mother decided to return to work and my father spent the majority of that year employed abroad. One of the first afternoons of that summer after watching various MTV, Nickelodeon, and WGN programming, I turned to the computer and our newly found Netscape-driven internet. I remember sitting there, reading various compuserve and geocities pages when a pop up ad occurred out of nowhere, and there on the middle of the screen was a beautiful woman whose breast was completely exposed. My heart raced as I had never expected to see such an unbelievably welcome sight. I didn't want anyone to catch me looking at this beautiful woman, so I went to the door to ensure that it was locked and that the windows were closed. As I bent over to draw the curtain closed, something caught my eye over by my mother's craft supplies. There, next to her various paints, was an industrial-strength, king-size permanent marker by Irwin Tools. I had never seen such a thing before, so I went across the room and picked it up and immediately I was overcome with the strength of its smell. Already aroused by the bared-breast, the second I took that pen cover off my brain felt a pleasure and a rush that it hadn't sensed since school was in session. I spent the remainder of that afternoon dragging that marker across various paper surfaces, my nose slammed against the paper just an inch behind. That summer was a blur, and my mother continuously cursed how ineffective she found those markers to be when she went to resume her crafts, as I had already evacuated the majority of the ink out of the pen by the time she had come to use it. She never suspected that someone may have been using those pens to the point where they were dried at the close of every other day, and instead she continued to purchase more potent, more powerful heavier industrial strength markers. By the conclusion of that summer, at only age 14, I was consuming one Mighty Mark 7000 industrial strength black marker per day. At the conclusion of that summer I enrolled in art classes so that I could continue my dirty marker habit while never being suspected of having alterior motives. In that course, and forever onward, I was exposed to newer, stronger, and most dangerous permanent markers. And my life would never be the same.
I have not slammed a permanent marker up my nostril since April 2008, and with each passing day I know that I have accomplished something I haven't been able to do for 10 years. And that is to go a day without uncapping a marker, sliding it up my nostril, and laying on my bed with my head off the edge, upsides down, letting the blood rush to my head and become exposed to the rush of beautiful, permanent ink.
That's my story, and I look forward to bringing so many more stories to you in the coming days and hopefully years. I hope there is someone else out there that might look at a marker and before they think about removing the cap and inhaling it deep - to think about the road that that very pen might lead them on.
Regards,
Dodge
Welcome to recoveringmarkersniffingaddicts.blogspot.com! As you might imply from the name of this humble site, this is a place for recovering marker sniffing addicts to come and share their feelings, their experiences, their setbacks, and their triumphs. A fellow recovering marker huffer thought that a place to share his poetry would be very helpful and supportive of his and anyone else's journeys to stay clean. So that's exactly what this site is - a place for any and all of us to come and share our stories, our poetry, and our support which we so terribly need. It's simply frustrating how little attention and support is provided to those addicted to huffing markers - from the absence of federal- and state-funded support groups and rehabilitation centers to the lack of prominent warning labels on Sharpie Fine Point Permanent Markers (currently the #1 huffed marker by teenagers in North America and the undisputed gateway marker to the huffing world) - our battle is one that is certainly fought alone.
My hope is that in bringing my stories to the world via this blog, I might inspire someone else out there to be honest about their addiction to marker huffing. My stories will share the highs and lows in an effort that someone else, whose head is currently buried in an EXPO dry-erase marker while staying in the office late after work just to get that unbelievable buzz and rush - will recognize that the life they're leading is just not what it seems, that the high is not worth the sacrifice, and that being a slave to a marker and ink flow is not the way to obtain one's meaning in life.
And the battle to fight this addiction is ongoing. Just today I was in a meeting in the middle of a poorly-circulated conference room when a list of items was brought up by the visiting consultant to place on the parking lot. The second he cracked open that royal blue Sharpie retractable it immediately brought me back to my most recent huffing experience. Following the meeting I was able to restrain myself from taking the marker into my own hands and slamming it up my nasal passage, breathing in its sweet, delicious ink all the way. But I also could not bring myself to leave the room either, as I just hung around late after the meeting, enjoying the fading presence of those unbelievable markers. I knew today what I learned just months ago - that this is a journey that is fought every single day, in battles little and big with setbacks and triumphs that aren't always what they first seem to be. I felt guilty as I sat in the room, within arms reach of the ledge holding the gateway to another binge. But when I finally walked out of that room six hours later after resisting the temptation of dragging my face along the ledge, experiencing the foreplay-like titillation of feeling the plastic cap along my mustache before jumping in head first to an aroma of ink and lust, I knew that this was truly a triumph as I had managed to keep the exposed marker tip from entering my nostril. When you've been where I've been, you'll learn to get by with little victories.
I thought I might kick off this inaugural blog with an experience that is most personal to me: the story of how I became addicted to huffing markers. My story begins at just 14 years old in the setting of my happy home in my hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. The social studies project that I had been assigned required a black border on my poster-board, and paint and crayons proved an ineffective option. A sense of requirement for perfection has been driven throughout my family for as long as I can remember, and we knew that the border to my presentation on the demographics of Portugal needed to be as strong as the content of which it held. So we made a late night run to our local Hinky Dinky and purchased the very first set of permanent markers that I had ever held - the Avery Marks-A-Lot Large Bullet Tip Permanent Marker 24878, Black, package of 2 - and my mother and I proceeded to spend the remainder of that late evening coloring in the border of that pink poster. My mom turned me into bed after 10, but my blood was pumping so hard with the rush of that black ink that once she had drifted off to sleep, I escaped from bed and returned to the den to finish coloring in my poster. I was in love with the texture of the black ink on the paper, and I was enamored with the sensation of the ink hitting the paper and the scent overwhelming my nose. The room that night was striking in its similarity to the stories of first hits by other marker sniffing addicts in it being a dimly-lit, dusty and dry room. As I had closed the door to keep my mother from hearing me, none of the ink escaped the den that night and every single ounce of ink and that pen escaped from its confines of the plastic holder and was dragged across the smooth surface of the poster. And all of the air with which that ink came into contact with rushed forward, onward up the expressway to my skull.
I spent the remainder of that school year turning every single class assignment into a project that I could build a cover page that I could overwhelm with marker. I, of course, only being 14, had no idea of the extent to which I had already committed myself to this dangerous game. But when school let out that summer I found myself being strangely empty inside, lacking something yet I had no idea what it was. That summer was my first spent home alone as my mother decided to return to work and my father spent the majority of that year employed abroad. One of the first afternoons of that summer after watching various MTV, Nickelodeon, and WGN programming, I turned to the computer and our newly found Netscape-driven internet. I remember sitting there, reading various compuserve and geocities pages when a pop up ad occurred out of nowhere, and there on the middle of the screen was a beautiful woman whose breast was completely exposed. My heart raced as I had never expected to see such an unbelievably welcome sight. I didn't want anyone to catch me looking at this beautiful woman, so I went to the door to ensure that it was locked and that the windows were closed. As I bent over to draw the curtain closed, something caught my eye over by my mother's craft supplies. There, next to her various paints, was an industrial-strength, king-size permanent marker by Irwin Tools. I had never seen such a thing before, so I went across the room and picked it up and immediately I was overcome with the strength of its smell. Already aroused by the bared-breast, the second I took that pen cover off my brain felt a pleasure and a rush that it hadn't sensed since school was in session. I spent the remainder of that afternoon dragging that marker across various paper surfaces, my nose slammed against the paper just an inch behind. That summer was a blur, and my mother continuously cursed how ineffective she found those markers to be when she went to resume her crafts, as I had already evacuated the majority of the ink out of the pen by the time she had come to use it. She never suspected that someone may have been using those pens to the point where they were dried at the close of every other day, and instead she continued to purchase more potent, more powerful heavier industrial strength markers. By the conclusion of that summer, at only age 14, I was consuming one Mighty Mark 7000 industrial strength black marker per day. At the conclusion of that summer I enrolled in art classes so that I could continue my dirty marker habit while never being suspected of having alterior motives. In that course, and forever onward, I was exposed to newer, stronger, and most dangerous permanent markers. And my life would never be the same.
I have not slammed a permanent marker up my nostril since April 2008, and with each passing day I know that I have accomplished something I haven't been able to do for 10 years. And that is to go a day without uncapping a marker, sliding it up my nostril, and laying on my bed with my head off the edge, upsides down, letting the blood rush to my head and become exposed to the rush of beautiful, permanent ink.
That's my story, and I look forward to bringing so many more stories to you in the coming days and hopefully years. I hope there is someone else out there that might look at a marker and before they think about removing the cap and inhaling it deep - to think about the road that that very pen might lead them on.
Regards,
Dodge
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