October 06, 2004
#241 :: Cheese with Mouse
The brains of alcoholics are porous, they say - holes develop from the constant pickling, holes that absorb life, intelligence, sense, common decency, self-respect, sanity. About nine months ago, a former best friend destroyed his holes in a head-on collision on a dark road in the Connecticut night. Scott ended 25 years of hard living, bad choices and nearly constant addiction to whatever was at hand - booze, coke, pot, heroin, crack, self-pity - intentionally, I think. My oldest friend in the world (6th grade AV club) and I surmise that Scott pulled his unregistered cheesebox car into the passing lane, saw the oncoming lights not too late, and decided, "Aaahhh, fuck it." So ended the life of a sharp, witty, well-read, talented musician and career fuckup whom we couldn't love any more. We had written him off a few years ago - after repeated vain attempts to help boost him into sobriety - but that wasn't what was eating him. Psychosis ran in the family, and he was too smart for his own good and dead-set on destruction long before we left. I skipped the funeral. Random synapse-sparks connected that ... with this - a lovely toy that occupied my son when he was about 2½. A wedge of pine, cross-drilled like a cubist brake disc, anchors a nylon cord attached to a decorated dowel. The game is to guide the mouse through as many holes as possible before the string comes out, and then rescue him, pulling him back the way he came. Scott never figured out the second part of the game.
Addiction sucks.