thanksgiving

Starting this over again, since this is my longest running blog

i am going to write "In-recovery"

the five characters: Derick (narrator, sex addict, drug addict, alocholic, depressed)

Rob (negrophile, alcohlic, passive aggresive)

Michael (pathelogical liar, hustler, over educated, abandoned)

Chase(says he was healed by god)

Eduardo(blackout drunk)

Sha (anorexic)

Saprina (complicated older sister dealing with an eating disorder)

starting over. 8-21-09

I needed to remember. go back. before the clubs. before the insanity. before my first time. before alcohol and the drugs. Who was I? I didn't have my first real drink until i was twenty two years old. I guess i got tired of being the good kid. the sick thing about being the good kid is that your life becomes predictable. it's so narrrow like a razor blade and if you flinch off the course those around you slash deep. So i just needed to bleed, even if that meant death.

So i went back. before the first kiss. I was always gay. I can't remember a day in my life when I wasn't gay. But gay then, just meant being different. It wasn't about sex. I just knew somehow in my subconsious my life wasn't go to be so simple. I could pretend, but a gay has needs. I knew somehow one day i would need to explore those needs even if I didn't know at five years old weren't those needs were going to be. I just knew, I liked the heat from pookie and i didn't get that heat from tameka.

so, a month from my thirty-third birthday and self imposed exile from my so called gay life, I decided to go back. I got lost, i know that. none of it didn't make sense for me anymore. So i shut up complaining. I get so fucking tired of complaing. I didn't want AA meetings. I didn't want more therapy appointments. got tired of talking to my repetetive friends about their insanity. Sometimes its like a magnetism, this so called gay life. If you don't learn to break free, it will keep pulling in a direction you in the directin in which you never made the decision because you were young, new, was only thinking with your dick and ego.

Miguel was my first kiss and it was awesome. One of the best memories in my life. So innocent. So fifteen years old. So stolen, how i snuck out that night with my best friend to go to that old man's house. I'm probably that old man's age now. Funny. anyways, so i kissed miguel. Sade, so fucking cliche was playing the back ground. I just remember feeling free. I never felt so free with anybody. I had kissed my first girl at twelve and really didn't get what all the fuss was a bout. I even had sex with a girl, it was like a chore. I remember thinking it felt like washing dishes. but with miguel, just him holding my hands made my dick so hard i thought it might implode.

So i kissed miguel, for like three hours. that's all we did was kiss from 4 in the morning unitl the sun rose. We didn't have sex. He stuck his hand down my pants and jerked me off, but being gay and young, that was romantic. I remember before we kissed, he told me to never grow and be gay, and then he kissed me. Funny, i thought at the time that was something stupid a boy tells a boy before he kisses him. It turned out miguel was a 17 year old runaway staying with that old man. He robbed him the next day and disappeared for ten years. But i guess that's when the drama began.

It was my secret. i could tell no one. I could tell my best friend and that's it. And i guess that's when the shift began. I became two people. I was straight A student at school, vice-president of student council. and then I was also the so young gay boy sneaking out my house to go to older strangers house to steal kisses a four in the morning. One life started off as the straight and narrow, the other life plunge into insanity without even thinking.

I now know how i got lost. Well, i think i was lost before that considering the many fragments of my family life. Yet, there was something whole about me before that kiss. I was just Michael.

i didn't belive me

I used to say i didn't care, but i did. I just wanted to feel something. But this post is about me still being here. I had something to say. And i'm still saying it.

today, my life seems a little brighter. i have given away to the fact i'm never going to be perfect. I am never going to be like them. I can't wait to come back to this, as soon as i fine tune soem other things. The thing about me, I work a lot. I have so much energy, i am just learning to balance.

One day at a time

I am beginning to understand the meaning. At first, I was such a bastard. I couldn’t see beyond Friday night. At first I felt it was not a sufficient or substantial argument. I had to question the motive. But you can’t change what you do not acknowledge. I cannot correct that will not be corrected.

I wake up everyday and I say to myself can I make it. I wake up everyday and I say to myself will I fuck up again. Some days I can make until a week, but other days it only last for a couple of hours. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t trust days anymore. I can only take it second by second and the hours and maybe a day hopefully a week.

I do like my sober days. I do like when I wake and everything makes sense. But there is always the pain. There is always what drove me off the cliff. I have to fight it. And some days I’m stronger than other days. Some days I’m so damn weak I don’t want to talk about it. But I always know if I make it though the day, even the ones where I am weak, I can be strong tomorrow.

So it is one day at a time, one second at a time that turn to minutes that can turn to a day that turn to a week, sometimes a month and then years. Getting better is like dealing with cancer. Will it come back? Will it come back? Will this be a good day? Will it be a time when I don’t think about this? As the child said, will I have to deal with this for the rest of my life? As the adult says to the child, will this be the end of my life?

One day at a time, the struggle, the quest, the challenge, the truth.

Uhmm, k, don’t do drugs, uhmm k, drugs are bad, uhmm k

It’s apparent that we live in a hypocritical culture. Parents tell their kids not to do drugs but most have experimented. Are drug people bad people? I remember getting an article from an addict talking about if drug people were bad people. I never read it. I guess I figured I knew the answer.

Lately, the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps caused controversy when a picture leaked him smoking from a bong. It became all about is he a bad role model. It didn’t matter that he accomplished an extraordinary Olympic career, he must be told to be perfect or lose millions in dollars advertisement banked on his popularity.

I had to ask myself, why don’t these advertisers do background checks. It seems to me, anyone sudden celebrity is elevated to role model status by bored housewives. These lazy parents don’t want to parent their own kids rather hand them a television and video game, but get pissed when the surrogate substitute for guidance disappoint.

I don’t think I would care what any celebrity does with his or her life when it came to my child. Those people aren’t gods and infallible. We are all human. Not even heroes are heroes. I love Oprah but she is still a person who shits and I hope wipe her ass, and not the afterlife.

I don’t believe drugs are bad. I know some people abuse drugs. I know some people medicate their lives with street drugs. Any thing on this planet can be abused. Some people abuse food. Some people abuse sun tanning.

I think it’s greed that’s bad. I think taking something so simple to one person and exploiting for selfish need. I also don’t believe addiction is a disease. I’m not sick. I’m greedy. I’m often irresponsible.

I found with liquor and sex something made me feel good, validated, and special and I got greedy. I was like a fat kid breaking into Willy Wonka.

Did the greed make me a bad person, yes and no? I didn’t kill or rob for my addiction. I lied and sometimes stole from love ones because of my addiction. I destroyed my reputation with the addiction. It wasn’t the liquor, drug, or sex; it’s what I did with the liquor drugs and sex.

I once say a show about obesity. I couldn’t’ imagine how anyone could let their life and body get do out of control. Yet, as an alcoholic, my addiction wasn’t always so visible. It only brought attention to itself when it got out of control: running down the street naked, skipping work for afternoon sex parties, cheating, passing out in front my yard.

I’ve never been a functional addict. I’m an extremist. I was like what Charlie sheen once described, if I had one cocktail I wake up two weeks later passed out on in a pile of cocaine and a dead hooker

When I turned 30, I got to a point where I didn’t like myself anymore. I wasn’t trustworthy, I felt like I was flunking the same grade and had gotten to big for the desk therefore had to sit on the floor. I felt I was being left behind in my age group.

Yet, it took me another three years to take responsibility for whom and why I was. I got greedy. It was that simple. If my addiction was a person, it would weigh a thousand pounds. Yet, I’m six feet and weigh about 165 pounds.

Sometimes I wish I was really fat. I am big as a house and then go in for a surgery or something, and lose dramatic weight and then go on Oprah. I would be one of those people with the before and after shot. Yet, as a drug addict and former alcoholic I have no pics of what I was like before. I only have the memories and a bunch of people no longer speaking to me.

All addictions are the same, its greed and that’s one of the seven deadly sins that lead to a life of hell on earth.

Heroes, Victims, Villains or Survivors

It is said life begins at conception. I believe life begins at consciousness. That first feeling you get when you realize that you are alive and one day will die. I remember the feeling the day my father died when I was five years old. It was the first time I knew death. I remember seeing him in his casket and thinking damn, it’s just a body.

I became keenly aware of myself the day my father died. It was the first time I knew I was breathing and that if I stopped I would die. I felt my skin. I felt the air. Every single object around me became real. We spend most of our lives walking around in a routine ungrateful daze. The genius of the human body is that everything is automatic. Our hearts pump without the Manuel, blood flow through our veins, our lungs take in the oxygen. Everything on this earth or universe has a purpose. Everything on this planet is energy, is alive but humans as we know it have consciousness. If I kill a bug is that the same as having an abortion? To say the bug’s life is less than our own is like saying the tree life is less than a flower. It all has purpose. I don’t mean to get all Buddhist but there is life and then there is conscious life. Just because we are born human doesn’t mean that all of us are truly aware.

I thought I was going to die a victim. The fear created anger and the hurt child decided to grow up and hurt others, so I evolved into a villain.

A lot of victims become villains: Hitler, Hussein, King Kong. Lol. It’s the hurt child who doesn’t want to be hurt anymore that seek the most power. It’s external power. It’s a way to control the pain. It’s irrational power. It’s schizophrenic. We human beings are equipped with remarkable ways of surviving. The body learns to repair itself. If one is in pain, the body would shut down the nerve endings in order to survive the trauma. I sometimes wonder if the body was designed after the soul. The soul is also capable of repairing itself. Children born in abuse, molestation refigure the world and learn to adapt their journey towards god. I truly believe the human experience is the journey towards God. When the soul experience trauma, begins to questions its existence and purpose, feel as if God is against she or he, it also rebels. I think true evil is a hurt soul, rejected soul, broken soul, when one feels the light has abandoned.

I felt for a long time the light abandoned me. I would awake and all I could feel is darkness. The sun could be shining and all I could feel was darkness. I was hurt so I grew up to hurt and I did it brilliantly cruel. I was the best at hurting myself. I became such a victim and soon the villain no one trusted, not even myself.

What changed?

Intially I rejected the idea of being a survivor. I remember watching those kids from Dafur have to cross the brutal African night for safety. I thought to myself after everything they had experienced how would they ever be sane, happy. They were kids who saw their parents murdred, mothers raped, had been raped, brutalized by a war they would never understand. It wasn’t something they created but was born into. Yet, they had decided not to become victims. The only goal, short-term was to survive. I could only think the human soul, short term always want to survive. Every animal just want to survive. But surviving for the short term can’t be enough. To live a good life one would have to want to survive for the long term.

I believe short term survival begets victim mentality. Getting high or drunk is just a short term victim mentality, it’s surviving to the end of the buzz and then back to reality. I remember when my apartment in Chicago was broken into how it changed how I dealt with people. My short term survival was to protect my life and make sure my belongings were safe. I called the landlord, demanded better security. I never spoke to strangers for a long time. I developed an angry persona. For the short term I needed to survive. Yet, I knew long term survival meant I would have to learn to trust again.

As a child, short term survival was just growing up and getting out of the hell in which I was born. When I finally made it to college and graduated and entered the real world I hadn’t graduated my short term survival, therefore, continued my short term survival mentality. I understand it now. Like a wounded animal after an attack I just needed to lick the wound for now. Like a wounded animal I just needed to get high or drunk for now. The problem, now became long term. The math or logic no longer added up. What changed? I realized I kept the wounds opened. The abuser, the war had come and gone but I was still fighting it in my mind.

The problem I have with the Jesus saved me freaks, is that once the drug saved them. Who in their right mind would just someone so manipulative. It’s drugs one day and then religion the next day as long as he or she is getting their fixed. I more concerned with “how.”
When short term becomes long term life is suffering. When those hide in the dark to escape and the sun rises the next day and they don’t seek the warmth of light soon the sun doesn’t exist anymore. The sun purpose is so that life can grow. Not much survives in the darkness. Without light everything withers and die.

Intially, I rejected the idea of surviving long term. I felt the world needed to know what happened to me. I felt if I forgot that meant it didn’t happened. I wanted my past punished. Ironically, I was my past I wanted myself punished for surviving.

When I looked in the mirror all I saw was the past. I saw my molester when I was naked how sex became so distorted. I saw all the childhood abuse would I cut myself early in the morning. I saw abandonment when I refused to let anyone in my life, quit a job, became homeless. I knew I could survive it short term. I could survive the short term lust which would probably leave me with a long term problem. I could survive the short term driving drunk and high which would leave with a long term record. I could survive short term suciuide which would leave me with having to deal with life after completely giving up—if I could trust myself again after what I did to myself. The worse was always did to me.

I knew to survive long term meant believing in a purpose. When a tree loses a branch in a storm it doesn’t bitch about it for the next hundred years. It grows another branch. It never loses its purpose to provide oxygen.

My purpose is to create. To write these words. To share the story. That’s my purpose. It was my purpose before I knew it was my purpose. Every time I write I get stronger. Every time I share the story I feel love. Silence is darkness. Silence is short term survival. Silence begets victim mentality.

The greater good: love yourself like a child of god, love someone like a child of god, and love something to survive to tell your journey back to god.

I say god not like religion. I say god like the universe. I say god like how one interrupts their meaning.

What changed?

Now I know what changed. As a victim it was always the question of “why?” Why me? Why did it happen? As a victim I thought if I forgave would make me forget. I didn’t want to forget. I needed everyone to know what had happened to me. As a victim I thought if I forgave that would make what happened permissiable. I didn’t want anyone to think I was every okay. Or that I could be every okay. I thought forgiving would make me a victim twice over. I thought pretending would make me a victim twiced over.

What changed is that I stopped asking why, and started asking how? How I could learn to forgive and be okay for real. How I could be a better person. “How” I could learn to heal, trust myself again and truly love. And with “how” came “I can.” “I will.” “I am.”

As a victim it was always “I was.” I don’t’ think short term survival anymore. I survived ocean and quick sands, now I must build.

To be continued “Long term Survivor and learning to be a Hero”

The hunger

When I was eleven years old I read Anne Rice book “Lestat.” I remember being so transfixed with the longing of hunger that I wanted to grow up and be a vampire. I remember when I was fifteen years old sitting at the bus stop late at night hoping a vampire would find me, turn me and I would live forever. I guess there was something in me that need to feed on others. I felt for a long time I was starving but didn’t know for what. I never became a vampire. I did become an addict for pure destruction.

I never understood why it was a curse to live forever. I thought it was selfishly romantic. I guess it would be a curse to always be hungry and never full. It would be a curse to feel out of control with emptiness. It looked pretty from the outside, Vampires always were good-looking but they were vicious animals preying on the unsuspecting. It was not only to live forever but to kill forever even that which you think you might love.

I avoided alcohol until I was 22 years old. I was always afraid of it. I saw what it did to my family. I can’t remember a family gathering where somebody didn’t get drunk and act a fool. I avoided drugs. I knew too many drug addicts growing up. My mother is still a crack addict. My aunt was a heroin addict. I’ve seen crack addiction destroy good people. I thought I knew better. I thought if I avoided cheap crack I would be okay. I thought if I avoided paper bag malt liquor I would be okay. I thought if it came in a designer glass I would be okay.

My first cocktail, harmless. It was a whiskey sour. A sweet gay drink that seemed harmless as pink feathers blown by a child whisper. I still remember vividly the first sip, how it laid down so warm on my tongue like a sunset in Jamaica. I remember how it slithered down my throat, tickling and landing with a burn in my stomach. It was so instant, that inebriated orgasm, what I thought was an insignificant small death. Suddenly all the lights in the club got brighter. The more I sipped, the more I needed. It felt like happiness. That which was the wasteland became spring again. That which I felt was my cold heart became the fire of hell.

I remember the first time I did Meth. I met some guy at a hotel. He said it would make me feel free. He wanted to do some freaky things and felt I was too unattractively inhibited. I remember taking the pipe, inhaled the dancing ghost. He was right. I felt brilliant.

I was bitten. A supernatural beast seduced me in the night and took the blood from my veins. I was no longer human. I had become an addict. First sip, first smoke, I was an addict. Yet, I was an addict before I was an addict. I had been looking for that hunger my entire life and I found it in a liquor bottle and a meth pipe. I found it in demonic spirits and seductive poltergeists.
Like a vampire I quickly realized that I could never be full. Enough was never going to be enough. I was cursed with a hunger that was completely consuming like a black hole. Yes, in the beginning it was all laughs and giggles, dancing on table, driving fast in red cars, sleeping with so many men, and then I looked in the mirror and realized I was starving. My body was quickly wasting away. I had lost all my humanity. I was only the addiction. I was that which can not be spoken but only feared, outlawed, jailed. I only lived to feed it. I no longer cared about family, friends or a job. I no longer cared about myself.

I guess it began with the pain. It was the bullets of the past that knocked holes through my window letting in frigid rain and wind. I guess I needed something to repair or take me away from the damage.

Truth, what most addicts don’t want to speak about is that pain so we share our conquests and failures in dark rooms praying for the Jesus we so easily killed in ourselves.
The pain, the beginning, somebody got hurt, somebody refused to heal, or didn’t know how to heal. The pain, it’s the only word I can use or should I call it the haunting. It’s the past that refuse to die, how the soul overcompensates and I just wanted to feel good, maybe be loved.

The demons told me they loved me. They made me feel good. I just wanted the attention of false promises. I knew it was a lie but the truth hurt more, so l laid with my abuser thinking one day a fist would be a soft kiss.

The pain, self medication, it’s like pouring blood on a knife to stab again, thinking maybe if I get the knife bloody it get tired but the knife always want more blood.

The pain, I was an addict before I knew I was an addict, was starving before I knew I was starving, to feed on the misery that beget the misery.

The conundrum are those who get to live forever in their head, get high and forget the mirror, maybe that’s why vampire can’t se their own reflection, or why addict can’t se their own reflections living in a world they now longer reflect.

The great story about being a Vampire, even if you got seduced by the dark side you can still be human. What’s great about God, there is always a choice. I didn’t create it, it created me, but I accepted it, thinking it might love me, now I know it doesn’t love me, so I reject it. God will not save me, because that’s my choice. I turned my back on god so I can do it again.
I believe God doesn’t rescue. Jesus died on the cross. God let him die. God will let you overdose. God will let you kill yourself.

I know it’s a choice. I didn’t create it, but I accepted it. I can’t cure it but I can control it. I take the responsibility. I’m not powerless. Every temptation I know is a chance for me to be a better person.

Dead men Talking

I was up late last night watching MSNB “Dead men Talking.” It’s a show about autopsies when people die under mysterious terms. I guess if you’re found dead somewhere, in the gutter, John Doe, overdoses, or something that looks like foul play, you are automatically given an autopsy. It got me to start thinking about my own death. I guess I was disturbed by the nineteen year old who committed suicide. He hung himself in his father garage. I watched as the Doctor examined his young body. How they looked for scars of past self injuries. How they checked his brain for natural diseases. How they explained that he was a very healthy person and it was such a waste. The kid was attractive. He just felt like a failure. He seemed to never get anything in his life right. He had many run-ins with the law, a strong criminal past, tried to get into the military but they wouldn’t let him join. I guess at nineteen he woke up and thought he had screwed up his life. Yet, he was only nineteen. I mean anything is possible when you are nineteen years old.

I understand suicide in a way. It’s a horrible mental affliction. The need to check out permanently. It’s a truly selfish act. Yet, it’s not rationale.

Sometimes life gets very dark and hard. Suicide is like giving God or the Universe the middle finger. It’s a belief that God or the Universe hates you. That your birth was an abomination. No one who commits suicide think that they are going to Heaven. Yes, in certain situations like what happened on 911 the people jumping out of the window so they could avoid a horrible burning death, maybe God forgives. Yet, I’m sure some religious fanatics would love to disagree.
Who knows what God wants? I mean there is the bible and self-righteous preachers but God really is a private relationship. God is selfish. We are said we are made in God’s image. I always say nobody can teach God, they can yell, they can threatened, they can beat you over the head with a Bible, but when I lay down at night, my relationship with God has nothing to do with what I know but what I feel.

When I was a kid in Church I never felt that God. I went to Sunday school, had so many unanswered questions that refused answers. Also, the God of my childhood seemed like the biggest hypocrite. I guess his followers were a bunch of evil bastards. The most evil I would see in my life. If my example of a God who teachers stole, lied, abused, but on Sunday decided to act holy than thou of course my perception of God would be extremely warped. I was also gay, so that really messed my mind up. I knew what I felt but was told how I should feel. I couldn’t understand why a God would make life so damn complicated for no sane reason. I eventually figured all the people around me were the problem. So I gave up on my childhood god.

I believe giving up on God or an idea of a God sent me into spiritual nightmare. I had suffered so much growing up, so I felt God or the universe hated me. If God hated me, I really hated me. And someone would say to themselves, how can anyone believe God hates them. Well there are many religions that teach God hates certain groups of people. They even stand outside their funerals and claim he or she who didn’t live by their rules is going to hell.

Why would there be a hell? Why would God bring a person into the world for such a short life and then punish them for eternity. That’s just sounds crazy and sardonic.
I believe my journey in this life is my challenge of a God. Sometimes I give up when it’s convenient. Sometimes I hate when I don’t get my way. Sometimes I feel like a spoil child with God. I just know there is a death. I guess God in a way is Death and the need to have some meaning to it.

As I watched “Dean men talking” I thought about each individual journey to it. There was a Muslim guy, a teenage girl murdered back in the 70s and her body found over twenty years later. There was a woman who suffered from mental illness and a young wannabe solider who committed suicide. In the end, how you go there is the same.

I also thought about the ninety something woman who died in her sleep. She had been married to her husband for over sixty years. He seemed floored and confused. They say when old lovers die, the other one is not too far behind. I guess life stop having meaning. God changes.
Funny to think that every single person on this planet has a different relationship with a different god. I mean we go to church for community but when I pray I’m not praying to John McCain’s god. When I pray I’m not even praying to my mother’s God. I pray to what I feel will help me. Sometimes it’s the devil. God can be so manipulative. Yet, I know I can’t hide anything from God. I can hide it from my neighbors and friends and family but not God. God is not a liar. God is the truth no matter how brutal.

My journey in this life is towards my own truth. Yes, sometimes that truth wasn’t so pretty so I considered killing myself. Sometimes the truth can be so difficult to accept that I find myself cutting myself in the bathroom drunk at five in the morning. Sometimes my journey is very angry and resentful. Yet, I always somehow learn to forgive myself.

I had a friend who once told me that I shouldn’t always accept everything about myself. I think not accepting yourself is Hell. I know it’s a struggle to accept my weight, height, eye color, job or stale life or sobriety, but it’s the challenge that makes me accept God. I mean, Death is real. It doesn’t matter if I die five hundred pounds over weight or anorexic, it’s the same outcome.
My God now is recovery. I have to wake everyday and pray to Buddha for piece of mind. I guess I messed up again this week, fell off the wagon, started the cutting again, did hardcore drugs and almost drank myself into a stupor. It’s funny, sometimes when I think I finally recovered I screw up again. The never ending battle. Yet, I understand why. I went out to a place I hadn’t gone in almost two years. Funny how the past seem to remember everything. I had to face me again. I didn’t like it. I was trying to explain to an old drinking buddy how I had changed. He started telling me that I used to be a mess. That I was evil and often hurtful. I started to feel insecure. So I drank. And then drank some more.

God I wish I would’ve never gone through the hell I created. Nobody liked that person, not even me. Yet, I was him. I got to accept him and all his flaws. I guess that’s what I liked about AA. I could go there and talk and not worry about being judged. I listen to everyone else’s story but refuse to listen to my own. My journey to God has become that of recovery. Sometimes I don’t know if I am ever going to make it or truly succeed. I see myself on “Dead me talking” having died of a stupid overdose or drank myself to death like that guy who died at 36 years old of serious liver damage. I know some people who say to themselves, shake their heads, and think the guy was a waste of human existence. I pray that he finally got peace. He had a reason to be here. The fact that I saw his story on TV, someone I don’t know, probably gave me another ten years on my life. Even him, the drunk, had a purpose. Even the kid who committed suicide had a purpose. Even the psychotic woman who overdosed on her mental medication had a purpose. Even the woman who live into her nineties and died in her sleep had a purpose. Even the teenage girl who was murdered and buried for twenty years had a purpose. It’s the story.
I know from what I’ve seen in life that there are four types of deaths. People either day heroes, villains, victims or survivors. I came pretty damn close to dying a victim. I was going to allow childhood abuse, molestation and abandonment lead to me to an early grave. That wasn’t until I decided to fight back. Of course I thought fighting back meant getting angry, cursing, fighting, becoming an asshole or whatever. Yet, the anger made me even more of a victim. The anger told me to close off relationship with anyone I thought I loved, admired or respected; even myself. I know that now. The anger is still there.

I know one thing for sure, I will not a die a victim but that takes recovering.
Even I the gay recovering alcoholic, sex and drug addict have a purpose. My purpose is that I tell the story as honest as I can like a spiritual autopsy. Death is the only truth. How we get there is the only truth. God is the journey. I’m not saying it’s easy. Most days I just want to drink, get high and have a bunch of sex. Yet, I sacrifice the temptation to be a better lover, friend, family member, writer, and human being. Today is a good day. I woke up sober, in my own bed, going to the gym, wrote this blog, will clean the apartment and be happy. It’s the good days that mean the most to me. I want to remember as many good days when I die as possible, that’s all I can ask from God.