One minute, I'm a tragically average, fair and freckled eighth-grader with algebra homework. The next, I'm one who has swallowed liquor. I'm a rebel. I'm a line-crosser.

When you're in the clutches of a drinking problem you don't really sit around thinking, I should really knock this shit off and go get my Eastern philosophy on. On your to-do list, pursuing a higher state of consciousness doesn't really rank. It's more like, put on Led Zeppelin 4 and hand me some of that Root Beer Schnapps.

An addict newly separated from their thing, whether it's drinking, drugs, throwing up ten times a day or anything else is like a person with no head. Your entire identity goes M.I.A. once you're no longer doing it.

I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other.

I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.

This is a good place," he said.
"There's a lot of liquor," I agreed.