Spifflicated: A Family Memoir (1)

Glaciers cut into a land mass in the last Ice Age and form a massive river, eventually forming an east-west dividing center for a nation. Ten-thousand years later, a newlywed couple aching for adventure pilot a houseboat down that river and they begin to learn of each other's heart and spirit.

The husband helps lay the footprint for massive American government-inspired interventions on two other great rivers in the west, diverting their natural flow for the common good. Men find work and self-worth in a Great Depression. Nature no longer takes its course, it takes the husband's course.

Micro-organisms die, millions of years of gravity and geologic pressure morphs them into a black gooey liquid that can power houseboats, motorcycles, transport ships, Navy battleships and a 1941 Chrysler Piece of Shit. In the heart of that same Great Depression, a farmer with faith, finds this liquid below his wind-swept High Plains pastureland.

The discovery allows the farmer's son-in-law escape from the tyranny of work, freeing him to live a life of generosity and goodwill. It lubricates his benevolence.

A volcano in Alaska is uplifted by tectonic pressure. A few epochs later, a young wife smokes a cigarette in the shadow of the tallest mountain on the continent and uses a World War as camouflage to leave her feckless husband.

As the son of the couple grows up among the streams, valleys and mountains in the Pacific Northwest, he recognizes his parents' shortcomings and finds his center within himself. In his own devices, in structure and process. His center becomes escape and in adolescence, devises a Two Point Plan, which he executes flawlessly, setting him up for a lifetime of rationalizing that 'I know best.'

At the end of his life, the Two Point Planner with a single vertical crease between his eyebrows, begins to feel, just the tiniest bit. He shares his childhood with his eldest son and the lights go on, man-made obstacles are removed, and things move incrementally, naturally, a few inches back toward the center.

Every family has ways of being, idiosyncrasies, and dysfunction. Readers will see themselves and those they love in Spifflicated. Mike Matson goes upstream in his own family and finds awareness and forgiveness.

Spifflicated is a haunting, sweeping story of one family's genetic predisposition to alcoholism and addiction. Creatively employing geography, geology and theology, Mike Matson captures the true story of his father's upbringing with alcoholic parents. It will resonate with anyone who has wrestled with addiction - or loves someone who has.

At the end, with his son, some of the walls his father spent 80 years building came down just enough to allow for some insight into his upbringing. The essence of those visits is something Mike Matson had long suspected. Both his father's parents were alcoholics. The deeper they dived, the more Matson learned about his father's parents and his childhood.

In his recovery, Matson has come to believe in the genetic predisposition aspect of addiction and alcoholism. The researchers say alcoholism often skips a generation. Line Matson and his father's parents up side-by-side and the similarities are frighteningly uncanny. A recovering alcoholic, it's been 25 years since the author's last drink.

There is a popular theory in recovery that to fully recover from the effects of alcoholism, the alcoholic must replace the obsessive behaviors in their life with their spiritual opposites. Many believe without such spiritual help, true recovery is impossible.

In his own recovery, Matson has become aware of what drives him. His grandparents and his father lacked the wherewithal to understand the forces at play. It's not that they weren't smart enough, we just weren't there yet as a culture and society. The culture stigmatized alcoholism as a moral weakness. It was not a subject for polite conversation. For any conversation.

Two generations later, our society has evolved to the point where we know more. There is more knowledge, information, and insight. We understand more. In his recovery, Matson would come to learn there is an enormous chasm between self-driven and self-aware. Spifflicated takes place in that space.

The conversations with his father rekindled Matson's erstwhile inner journalist. He did the research, dug up the facts, and interviewed those with active memories of his father's parents. This allowed him to hang some truth on his suspicions and construct an accurate timeline of their lives. Spifflicated is a creative non-fiction family memoir, covering a 25-year period: 1931 to 1956.

Non-fiction, because the truth is so colorful. A houseboat honeymoon down the Mississippi River from St. Paul to New Orleans in the heart of the Great Depression, a cross-country motorcycle adventure, on the front line of FDR's New Deal projects, evacuation from Alaska in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, his grandmother's "Rosie the Riveter" experience, life in the foothills of the Cascades, a move to Kansas and the largest-producing oil field in North America.

Creative, because Matson allows the reader to understand the alcoholic mindset, as well as a glimpse into the self-perpetuating behaviors of this disease. He writes about his family through the lens of forgiveness he learned after sobriety.

Spifflicated is Matson's interpretation of their lives. Twenty-five years after his last drink, he shares 25 years of the lives of those from whom he sprang, whose DNA and blood he carries.

With the exception of one year when he followed a girl to the Twin Cities at age 20, Mike Matson has lived his entire life in Kansas. He returned home that same year after she dumped him for a Stallone wannabe.

"Stay away from her or you won't have any teeth to broadcast with." Okay, Rocky, you win.

Throughout a career in journalism, politics/government and advocacy, Matson has written many words over a host of media. Spifflicated is his first actual book.

Today he manages messages, systems and expectations. He lives where he was born, in Manhattan, Kansas, with his wife, Jackie.