What kind of toast was I?

Admitting that I might need some kind of continuing psychiatric help after leaving Lakewood Rehabilitation Hospital was a real breakthrough for me. I broke through the social taboo of ever admitting that I might need professional psychiatric help.

Don't worry though: My defenses were such that as soon as I discovered a chink in the armor of any professional psychiatric facade, I was quick to see through their shams of perfection. As soon as I would see that any professional person was as human as I, my deduction would be something like, "they need help more than I do" and then I would start missing scheduled visits to their offices and sooner than later stop going altogether.

The present informs my past. I remember standing inside the Rodin Museum, not far from Philadelphia’s Art Museum. Frozen in my alcoholism, like an insect trapped in amber, its destructive powers gave me a certain strength. Entrapment, the permanence of my disease, gave me an insane sense of indestructibility.
Dying from my disease, that is what I might have known of eternity, what I should have felt, if I could have felt. The present informs my past.
There is a connection here. The god of alcohol led me to the god of frozen yogurt. 

   "I feel like a piece of burnt toast dropped on a shag carpet landing butter side up."

   That is how I felt when the Librium wore off.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 55)