Origin
The work I still know how to do
Where I actually am
I am Greg Smith. Journeyman lineman. IBEW Local 602. Back in the Houston heat after a stretch I do not dress up. The body is here. The ticket is here. The old loop is not gone just because the truck is loaded.
What the day did
I learned this trade young. Bare-hands certified early — 558 — and the work got in my hands before I had language for the rest of my life. The line does not care how you slept. It cares if you did the job.
There were good-money years. Pennsylvania. A business that paid. Whitney. The kind of living people point at and call made. The ground under it did not hold.
Then the spiral had a name and a pattern. DWIs. Years of drinking. The nights stacked up. Five rehabs. I say chronic relapser because I will not sell the first-clean-chapter version of this. I have been through the door more than once.
Austin was the part where the floor went. After treatment I was still homeless. I asked for food. I asked the union. I asked for a bed. Asking is not the pretty part of how I got through it. It is the part that kept me here.
Tonya is not a lesson I tacked on at the end. She is my wife. She is in it too. School. Recovery. The book we keep saying we are going to write. Mom, dad, Liz — the ones who did not drop me when I had given them reasons.
Early August I came down to Houston and went back on the books. Pad-mounts. URD. Underground. Tools in the truck. Sleep that has to be managed with a machine or the next day starts already thin. The CDL is still out there. Eligible now. Not done.
Alignment
- On path: telling this in my name, not as a speech about “a gentleman lineman.” Putting the work and the marriage and the asking in the same paragraph.
- Drift: none I can name for this morning except the old habit of waiting for a cleaner version of the story before I start it.
- Repair: keep the next entry about a real day — clock, body, Tonya, whether I picked up a drink or did not — not another origin lecture.
The knot
How I got through it is not a single turn. I lived. I went back to work I know in my hands. I told the truth to people already in the room. I treated the union card and the CPAP like they belonged in the same sentence as staying sober. That is the whole miracle and it is not finished. My head can still slide. Success can slide me. Exhaustion can. “I can handle a little” can. So this page exists for the days that will not look like a book chapter.
One next honest move
Write the next one off a real shift or a real night — what happened, what pulled, what I did with it — and leave this origin post where it is.
I am not healed. I am here, and I can still do the work.