Spifflicated is an extraordinary memoir of dysfunction, abandonment, sadness and redemption. Mike Matson captures the insidiousness of the illness of alcoholism in a way only one who has experienced it can. Spifflicated captures one family's journey through heartache, abandonment and eventually, forgiveness. 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.
