Joined: 14 Jan 2005 Posts: 175 Location: Tampa, FL
Living Out of a Box Posted: 11-08-05 10:33am
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.
