One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle of gin sitting huddled over the two-bar electric fire and wrote a poem, one of the few that has lasted...

Some lurid things have been said about me—that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth—that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I’d only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that...

I didn’t chug the hairspray because I’m an alcoholic. I drank it to style my throat hairs.

We do not want to believe that we cannot control alcohol and that alcohol is, in truth, controlling and dictating our lives. When you free yourself of a dictator, like alcohol, the freedom that you experience is totally amazing and so empowering. You get your life back.

One day at a time, sweet Jesus. Whoever wrote that one hadn’t a clue. A day is a fuckin’ eternity

People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of...

If I were to create a word that more accurately describes alcoholism and addiction, I would say it was dependencyism. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? Yet it’s no sillier than the word alcoholism. The reason alcoholism no longer sounds silly to you is because you’re used to hearing it, reading it, and thinking about it.

Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.We could breathe and talk to one another.We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”—Jules Finn

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.

I want to feel calm and at ease. Like someone who lives in Half Moon Bay, California, and makes hummus from scratch. Instead, I feel like I’m a contestant on some awful supermarket game show where I’ve got sixty seconds to hurl my shopping cart down the aisles, piling it with as much as possible...

It is ethanol that everyone is after when they drink alcoholic beverages. That is what gives us the euphoric feeling, and that is what all vendors of alcoholic drinks are selling.

Count Olaf had taken out a bottle of wine to pour himself some breakfast, but when he saw the book he stopped, and sat down.

Mendacity is a system that we live in,” declares Brick. “Liquor is one way out an’death’s the other.

Karl Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”Carrie Fisher: “I did masses of opiates religiously.

Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to...

The door is crackedWe used to meetlike water does landnonot thatmore like when skin touches skinkissing fingertipsor when air escapes a lung and is felt across the worldI’ve leapt over cracks in sidewalksand swallowed away troublesome back painsthat could only be fixed with someone else’s pillsWe met by your house one stray dayand you drove...

You are giving up nothing! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Writhing bodies fused as one on the dance floor, limbs tingling, lungs drunk on the lust-filled air.

I couldn’t stop so I quit.

…there is a saying used in twelve-step programs and in most treatment centers that “Relapse is part of recovery.” It’s another dangerous slogan that is based on a myth, and it only gives people permission to relapse because that think that when they do, they are on the road to recovery.

Alcoholism or addiction is a disease because it fits the definition of disease. It is progressive and chronic, and left untreated, it will kill.

Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.

His eyes are so clear and blue that nothing but clichés enter my mind.

When people who believe themselves to be addicts or alcoholics come under great stress or trauma, they mentally give themselves permission to drink or use drugs as a remedy.

Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can’t sweat the fact that you’ve lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if...

A drinking man’s someone who wants to forget he isn’t still young and believing

I mean, that’s at least in part why I ingested chemical waste – it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less,...

I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves.

Reaction timeTouch the underside of a penny you find on the streetDoesn’t feel any different unless you close your eyesI can taste the copper in my mouth nowseeping from between my teethThere’s an explanation I’m sureall this bloodit’s from all the times I held the glass too closeAnd forgot to tip the dancerA storm just...

The only thing we chase our shots with are high-fives.

When it’s summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. Put The Idiot...

When I walked into the house, I went in search of one of my dad’s bottles. Not that they were that hard to find. He hid bottles all over the house. I knew where they all were. That was one of my hobbies, finding where my dad hid his bottles. It was my version of...

Treatment for dependency at substance abuse treatment centers must change if alcoholism and addiction are to be overcome in our society.

Question for your life: If Ted Kennedy made it to heaven, do you think he’s pleased with the fact that Jesus can turn water into wine?

What was so painful about Amy’s death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don’t pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple; it actually is simple but...

Hit the bottom and get back up; or hit the bottle and stay down.

His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade.

If you can stop using substance or stop your addictive behavior for extended periods of time without craving, you are not dependent. You are dependent only if you can’t stop without physical or psychological distress (you have unpleasant physical and/or psychological withdrawal symptoms) or if you stop and then relapse.

I’m sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, “Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol.” To which I always respond, “I guess that means...

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

Alcohol does not solve problems but becomes a problem in itself

Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn’t matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.

I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He’s this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I’ve always wanted to hear the bartender’s side of the story. What was it like watching this...

I pawned the remote to my misery,trading it in for liquor that was cheap;screwdrivers for my vitamin c,and a little bloodstream to my IV,helping to soothe my lunacy

it does seemthe more we drinkthe better the wordsgo.

Only discovering and healing the root causes of each individual’s dependency puts an end to dependency. One-on-one sessions are key because the individual issues at the core of dependency are just that- completely individual.

Perhaps that was just a hunch.”Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the “nose for news” – an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn’t a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn’t unusual. Most...

But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.

An elderly black man with gray hair said, “Every bottle should come with a warning: ‘This bottle may cause you to lose your job. This bottle may cause you to get a divorce. This bottle may cause you to become homeless.