Nature/Nurture

    Let's play "Blame the Parents". Let's play "Blame the Blame Game". Let's play "I am Virtuous and True". Let's play "Screw You".

    I can't blame my parents for much of anything, I guess. They did the best they could. My mother was sixteen and my father was twenty-one when they married. They grew up as they raised us kids. They both lost their fathers in their early childhoods.

    Alcoholism is in my genes and in my jeans (excuse the bad pun on the nature/nurture controversy). Alcoholism was inside me at birth and the world I grew up in was awash in alcohol. Regardless: the progression of alcoholism is slow and torturous.

    Sober today, I have learned to grieve the death of my old and drinking self and celebrate the emergence of this new frontier, sobriety. My old self may have died for all sense and purpose, but my disease will never die. The zombie-killer lives within. Waiting to strike, to catch me off guard.

    But I cannot be off guard. The zombie-killer awaits. This is but a daily reprieve.

    Have a nice day, Mother-Fucker. See you in my dreams.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 68)