"If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month."

-Theodore Roosevelt

No_Rest_For_224_Days_v1.zip

No_Rest_For_224_Days_v1.zip

PS C:\> tar -xf No_Rest_For_224_Days_v1.zip


Application_Install.exe


You read that title and probably assumed something is eating me alive. Afterall, 9 months ago today I blew up my life as I knew it. Grief. Insomnia. A wound that will not close. That is a fair assumption, and it is wrong. What has not let me rest in 224 days is not a wound, it is momentum. It is the version of me who finally stopped negotiating with his own destruction, and now does not know how to sit still long enough to let anything drag him back down. I am not tired in the way you think. I am relentlessly restless in a way that used to be reserved for chaos, and is now reserved for staying alive on purpose.

Everything that was supposed to end me tried. It did not work. Not because I am special, but because something in me refuses to stop moving, even when moving hurts. That refusal has a name now. Restless, in the good sense. The kind that dances on a bridge with a train roaring past behind him instead of standing still and letting the noise decide who he is.

That is the application. The rest is the source code.


Source_Code.txt

The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.


> the title everyone got wrong: false_alarm.log

I filmed this one on the Whatcom Creek bridge, down on the Bellingham waterfront, with a train crossing the railroad bridge behind for almost the entire time. Steel on steel. Sixty million pounds of momentum moved by over 20,000 horsepower of locomotives passing directly behind my back while I moved to a song called Restless. I did not plan that timing. I did not need to. It fit too well to be anything other than the universe underlining a point I was already making with my body.

The song is about a determination that does not give in, no matter what gets thrown at it. About the version of you that keeps standing back up even when everything, and sometimes everyone, tried to keep you down. That is not a metaphor I am borrowing. 9 months ago I decided to abruptly change my life in every way imaginable. The last 224 days of it I have lived my life in a way that reduces my own suffering. Completely sober,

The bridge I recorded the dance on is in the background.
I took this picture an hour after an ex flipped me off and I got hit by a mailtruck on a walk to remember.
Life threw two piles of shit at me that day, I got right back up, dusted myself off, and kept walking.
> Display 202608: RESTLESS_BRIDGE_MP4

A train does not slow down for anyone standing near the tracks. It does not care what you are working through. It just keeps moving on its own schedule, indifferent and enormous. I decided to dance next to it instead of freeze. That is the whole thesis of who I am becoming. The world keeps moving whether I am ready or not, and I would rather move with it, deliberately, on my own terms, than stand frozen on the platform waiting for it to notice me.


> ninety four nights that should have ended me: resilience.sh

People who are meeting me now have no idea what the odds actually looked like. I have already told this story once, about the version of me who attended 94 shows at the Wild Buffalo House of Music in a two year span, drugged and drunk every single time. Bartenders knew him by name. So did the police. So did the psych ward staff. Somehow he never overdosed or ended his life some other way. That guy should not have made it out. Statistically, a lot of guys like him do not.

“The Happy Place” was the other place I frequented.
Usually after last call at the Wild Buffalo House of Music.
Still loaded on drugs and drunk, and consuming more.

I have also already written the honest version of what carrying that history feels like from the inside, the part where none of it was fair and I still had to be the one to clean it up:

I am wildly tenacious in my pursuit of the life I deserve, want, and need. I honestly should be dead from my decisions and behaviors over the years. And yet, every time, I crawl back alive. Stronger. More determined.

That is not a line I wrote for effect. That is the actual mechanism. Cockroach energy, I called it once, and I stand by it. Life stepped on me. Sprayed me down. Ripped off my wings and a few of my legs. Radiated me with its own version of nuclear fallout. I am still here, still standing, still choosing to move instead of stay flattened. Whatever tried to bring me down did not get the outcome it was aiming for.

You tried everything, and I did not give in.

Not because I am unbreakable. Because I have already been broken all the way down, more than once, and I know now that broken is not the same as finished.


> the bridge does not move but I do: momentum.sh

224 days sober is not a number I take lightly, and it is not a number I am precious about either. It is not the finish line. It is proof of a pattern I have run every single day, the same pattern that got me up a mountain I once bled for every foot of elevation on. One choice at a time, repeated until it becomes structural instead of willful.

The sobriety trash can, where it all started in 224 days ago.
The last time I possessed a drug, shortly after the last time I used one.
Cannabis was the final monster that had to go.
In the trash, where it forever belongs.

I have already written about what it felt like to finally get above the fog:

I know how to fly now. That is not arrogance. That is not premature confidence. That is just the truth of what months of brutal, honest, alcohol-free, fully present work has built in me.

Stop fearing the worst and the liminal.
Stop denying the power of change.
Yeah, the worst could happen.
But the best could also happen.
And often does.
Be brave.
Charge the storm.

The bridge I danced on that day does not move. It was built to hold weight and stay still while everything else passes through and over it, the water underneath, the train behind it, the years of foot and automobile traffic across it. I am not the bridge anymore, 9 months ago today I burned it and nearly every bridge I could find to the ground. I do not want to be something that just holds still and gets crossed. I am the thing in motion. I am the part of the scene that refuses to be static.

Shirt seen downtown outside a bar, worn by a bouncer with a beautiful chest.
It should begin with “get clean” and end with “live your amends”.
Try it all sometime, because it does wonders for your life.
Or you could DARVO and hurt everyone involved, including yourself.

That refusal is not restlessness in the anxious sense, the kind that used to keep me up at night bracing for the next disaster. It is restlessness in the sense the song actually means it. A body that has decided rest does not mean stopping, it means finally being safe enough to move freely instead of running from something. I am not running anymore. I am dancing. Literally and figuratively. Every attempt to bring me back down, every ghost still watching from a distance, every version of my own history that tried to convince me I would not make it this far, none of it worked. My determination trumps it. All of it.

So is dancing. So is life.
Stop wasting heartbeats.
Do it all anyway.
YOLO.

I am 2KVYOT3. I am unrecognizable. I am love.


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It was written with care and intention, grounded in my love, compassion, vulnerability, and gratitude.
It reflects my healing, my recovery, my acceptance, and my commitment to accountability and ownership, and to making amends through the way I choose to live my life today.

❤️


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