Chapter 74

I am an egocentric addict and all i have to show for it is a scaly back and the bone structure of a bear.

I never pictured myself as an addict. I told myself over and over again that I could stop anytime I wanted. That nothing could control me. But I am not in an environment where I’m watched, where I’m being told what and what not to do. I’m free. And maybe, that’s why addict’s sleep on the streets.
And I’m not an addict in my own mind, probably because I keep that part of my mind so well guarded. But then I get drunk, and the mean, soulless part comes out. The part of me that I was in therapy for. There’s no trying to care, when it’s late at night and your blood has been permeated with the scent of liquor and the disntegration of the mind there’s only me and the bottle. And people seem to melt into the background. And I guess that’s a tell tale sign of an addict, when the bottle is your life and your life is spent cleaning yourself up and attempting to put yourself back together again, but then again, isn’t that why they invented Advil?
And maybe those AA meetings or the Adolescent Issues group is to make the addicts of the world sink further and further into denial. Because you get to sit there and listen to how fucked up the rest of the room is, and you can think to yourself that if you ever got that bad you’d stop – but you keep telling yourself that you’d never get that bad to begin with. And you make fun of the people who don’t seem to have any problems at all, because they don’t know what real life is like. You think they live in a fantasy land where love is true and people are good, and I’ll sit on my pedestale and look at the conservative Christians praising God’s wrath as the idiots of the world no better than the gihadist’s fighting for a similar cause – instead of shame they use bombs.
And maybe addictions are to make up for some insecurity. I’m fat, so I’ll get drunk and not remember that I’m not supposed to eat that chocolate chip. Or, my personality sucks so I’ll get high and then everything will be funny. And maybe that’s the euphoria that Adam and Eve fucked up for the rest of us lost souls who plucked that apple one too many times.
And you start thinking about everything in terms of how it will look to every other person in the room. If you are up for every shot will they think that you are hardcore? When you wake up the next morning with that be cool? And when you go through the day you calculate everything you say so that you can come off as either too sober or too drunk but never that middle ground, because the middle ground is where people get lost. And you can only get lost at night when it’s just you and the bottle and the world has slipped away. So I swing on the pendulum between under and over exaggerating my situation. So I can induce sympathy and then deny that I ever needed it to begin with. Such is the power of words.