Wednesday, May 8, 2019 / Day 1

I feel the need to underline this – I spent 10 hours at adult bookstores yesterday (6 hours of it needed to have been dedicated to work… my job… hours for which I’m being paid) driving back and forth between my two favs cause they’re really close to each other. At one point in the evening the kindly brother behind the counter stops me after maybe the forth or fifth time I’m about to slide my ticket through the card reader at the turnstyle. He looks me straight in the eye and holds out both hands. “Take my hands,” he says firmly. Without hesitation, I put both hands in his. They are big, warm, dry and safe.

“Slow. The fuck. Down,” he commands, eyes burrowing right in. “You wearin’ yo self out! Drivin’ back and forth like a crazy man. You bein’ hard on your body, your brain, your car…”

“I saw you come back in here and I had to tell you this ‘cause I saw a little bit of me in you… This’ll make you crazy… if you let it.”

I think of the night I spoke to one of my oldest friends, soaring on Oxycodone, and telling him to “close the bank” on a crazy restaurant scheme he’d gotten himself in bed with. But I knew even as I said the words that he’d glide right past that warning. And that oversight cost him close to a million bucks! He was on that same crazy bent I was in last night because while I did stop and appreciate for a moment what the guy was telling me (the Truth!) it would have taken a tree falling on my car to stop me. I kept going till after midnight feeling desperate and crazed pacing back and forth behind the one-way glass door. And when I finally got up the nerve to walk out, a feeling of relief blew through me like a cool breeze.

That was unmanageable. Then my HP speaking through the guy at the bookstore. No joke. Not to mention the day I nearly gouged out my eye on the corner of my CR-V’s door panel in the parking lot of my other favorite bookstore and needed 4 stitches…

“This must stop,” I think to myself. Still, as an addict, I know better than to use language like that. This can stop though, but now, for the next hour, maybe till the end of the day…