It seems a pidgin of mine went through the detox I chair a meeting in the other day. I guess he showed up sometime in the middle of the week. He was discharged by the time I showed up on tuesday. By all accounts he wasn’t looking all that good.

He was sick the last time I saw him, real sick. He had been smoking cocaine and had a stroke. Now apparently he is drinkin’ hard and living out of a box. My buddy tim told me (he saw him in detox) that he told him he was just waiting to die. He figured he didn’t have that long to live and he wanted to leave his son all his worldly goods.

He and his brother jointly own property up north, and he has a fair amount of money in a bank up there. He figured he will just live in that box until his bad liver or high blood pressure, or just another mean drunk sweeps him from this world.

Tim tells me my man has even sat across the street from the detox tuesday nights hiding in the bushes just watching us as we shoot the breeze before we bring the meeting in. To afraid or ashamed to cross the street. This disease is amazing in the ways it impacts us. The way it twists our psyches into grotesque masks of who we truly are.

No matter how imperfect things get in sobriety, they ain’t got squat on living out of a god damn box, 100 yards from the solution, deep in pain and loneliness, stepped in self pity and resentment.

Thank god for the quality of our problems today. They are so much better, and so much more manageable than they used to be.

Richard