"The Intelligence of Trees"

   The old sense that children come into this world as blank slates upon which the world will write their story and, in fact, how they will see the world, for me, an alcoholic, became seeing the world not through rose-colored glasses, but through booze-colored bar glasses.

    From utopia to myopia.

    The child within was taken away, my innocence lost in the drink. Adulthood, stunted. thirty years passed. When will I inherit the healer within? Here, finally, traumatic stress and traumatic growth unite.

   This is my sobriety.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 22)