Knackered’s Learning Curve with Benzos

   Hey there.  Knackered here.  When I first found this site and logged in, I had an immediate connection with all of you.  I felt your pain and knew immediately that we had much in common.  This was not the case, when it came to the steep learning curve required to keep up with that special language of ‘Benzo vocabulary’. What’s followed has been a continual education when it came to ‘Benzo words’, that has taken much longer and is still going on every day.

   Things like akathisia, Benzo belly, kindling, GABA, inter dose withdrawal, and neurotransmitters were all a bit of a puzzle to me.  Sometimes I could figure meanings through context clues, but more often than not I had to ‘minimize’ BB and search out the meanings on Safari.

   This has all worked to not only understand the posts and replies.  It’s also given me something that I could intelligently use to feel like I had some insight into a world that has been with me for nearly three years now.

   Through the years, it’s been harder and harder for me to keep up with the newest in what I refer to as ‘Chillax’, or in other words, trendy street speak. Even that word sounds trendy to me. Although I’ve never ran with a crowd that fancied this stuff, I’ve tried hard to keep up so as to not sound too much like a nerd.

   Groovy was a big one that kids brought back from the summer when I was in middle school.  Later on everyone wanted to ‘ramp stuff up’, and cool things became ‘rad;’  As a teacher for years, I thought it essential that I not only figured out the meaning to this stuff, but made a real attempt to somehow fit it into my vocabulary.  I’d like to think that my students thought that I was cooler when I managed to fit this slang into my daily conversations.  Outside of school, grown ups just didn’t really appreciate the effort I made to look ‘with it.’

   As I’ve grown older, I’ve still tried to input new lingo into my speech, but I’ve had to listen carefully and try to mimic new and strange vocabulary and the way that it fits the context of life.  I’ve even tried to challenge myself by seeing how many new words I can find and use appropriately whenever I got the chance.

   Too much of this gives me a headache, so this year, I’ve limited myself to just four that are newbies to me.  These include, in no particular order of significance: bougie, charcuterie, Heliborous and Hori-Hori.

   You’re probably ‘down’ with these examples already.  While shopping in the garden center, my wife introduced me to Heliborous.  It’s just a plant, but the word sounded so great as it rolled off my tongue” hell-i bor-ous.  I just love the sound of it.

   While visiting my daughter’s garden, I spotted a dagger like thing sticking out of the ground.  I asked what it was and she informed me that it was a Hori-Hori, a Japanese gardening tool perfect for extracting weeds and planting things.  When we returned home, I asked my wife to find and order one on Amazon.  I’ve haven’t planted anything with one, but I love the way it pulls weeds.  And it’s great at transferring that Benzo angst into something that doesn’t belong in my front yard.

   It seems like everybody but me knew what a charcuterie board was.  One of our relatives calls often to tell us about the parties she hosts by just setting out the board with those packages of appetizers you can buy at the store and an open bottle of wine.  I can’t eat that stuff and alcohol has been off the table for years due to the Benzo calamity.

   I’m still not quite sure what bougie means, but Wikipedia says that it’s a good thing when referring to innovate home design, but a bad thing when referring to a person. Go figure.  Better stay away from using that one for awhile.

  Just for kicks, let’s try putting all this together into a conversation that we might have with one of the neighbors over the fence.  It might go something like this:  “Say what have you been up to today?  Well, I’ve been Hori-Horing around the yard while I nibbled from the charcuterie board on that bougie patio we just poured.   I did it all just for the Heliborious of it.

   I bet you haven’t thought about your taper much at all while you’ve scanned through these ‘pearls’ of nonsense.  Taper on, dudes.  Righteous.