Day 17: Ride it like a Soldier

All day we are encouraged by the counsellors to give our feelings about everything we say or that happens in the group (I need to be careful not to carry this habit over into civilain life: "Mister Shopkeeper, the way you avoided my eye throughout our transaction (two-litre bottle of Coke and 10 Marly Lights) brought up feelings of rejection for me...").

The other day, pressed to find a ~feeling~ to express on some drug-induced criminal activity, one of my 'peers' reached deep within himself and came up with "Ride it like a Soldier". While this is not strictly a ~feeling~ it made us all laugh - releasing the tension in the room caused by repetition of 'ashamed', 'guilty', 'sad' - and has become a bit of a catchprase in the group.

One of the main ~feelings~ I've been having in the last couple of days is a sense of luckiness. I've been listening to the others' stories and ~feel~ so sad at the places their addiction took them. But I have never injected drugs, been a prostitute, smoked crack in front of my baby, spent eight years in a Russian prison*, mugged an old man in the park, or been though six detoxes and four rehabs - painfully relapsing each time. My family still speak to me and I've not turned yellow. I looked around the room and realised that everyone who had been married was either divorced or separated (and a couple of the others are in abusive relationships). I am not yet 30 and I want to get sober before I get married. I don't want to break anyone else's heart with my drinking.

Some people might use these comparisons to make them think that they are in the wrong place - their problem is not serious enough to be in treatment. But I know that some of these things could have happened to me - I just have less years of it and a more supportive, middle-class background. Although I didn't, I've always felt I could easily become a cocaine addict (which is why I've always conspired to have neither a dealer's number nor any money). I feel am in the right place. In fact, I know.

*But my minor criminal record gives me some rehab cred.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 127-151.
- A street dialect passage from the point-of-view of heroin addict, ending in a gruesome ("one eye it like allofa sudden pops outof his map") death after a laced 'hotshot';
- Introduction to Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House ("the founder, in the House's early days, required incoming residents to attempt to eat rocks - as in like rocks from the ground - to demonstrate their willingness to go to any lengths for the gift of sobriety");
- An amusing industrial accident reminding me of my last job writing about health and safety;
- A pastiche of adjective-heavy bad journalism that gave me a back tingle-sweat as I thought it resembled some of my own writing;
- An involved socio-economic analysis of the failure of 'video telephoning' - cleverly predicting current behaviour with things like Skype and Facetime. ("A traditional aural-only conversation - utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6²) or 36 little pinholes... you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.")