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