Took What It Took

Sometimes I wish that I didn't have to go through some of the bullshit that I went through growing up and I'm using that term loosely - a lot of my growing up came far, far after I was . . . you know . . . grown up.  But I wish I could have danced around the painful stuff, the bad decisions leading to crappy outcomes, avoided them altogether.  I wish I had been spared from life's ups and downs.   I feel this way particularly when I see someone else making bad decisions, when I know that this person is going to suffer because of these bad decisions.  And I'm especially insufferable in my smug, condescending way those times when I'm right - it doesn't take a lot of life experience to be able to develop enough insight to be able to say: "I bet your work life and your family life and your interpersonal, inter-policial relationships would improve if you quit shooting heroin or drinking your breakfast."  This isn't particularly profound stuff.  I suffered mightily for a number of years because I was making decisions that were in the same emotional ballpark.

Yet, here I sit, pretty content with who I am.  I don't mean to suggest that I'm anything but a work in progress but at least I've elevated myself from some kind of sub-mongoloid species up to more of a human being level.  And I had to go through what I went through to get to this point.  I think some of my strengths came from fighting and slaying these demons.  I needed this experience to end up where I am, I needed to fall flat and fall flat again.  I'm not sure, however, that I needed to fall flat quite as many times as I did - I am a slow learner.

The scary part is that some of us fall extremely flat.  Pancake flat.  Road runner smooshed by a steamroller flat.  A good friend of mine got the call recently about a relative, a young guy in his early 30s, who fussed around with prescription narcotics once too often.  Just because they come in a little bottle from a real pharmacy, filled from an actual prescription written by an actual doctor, doesn't mean that it's OK to crush them up and melt them down and stick them in your vein.  

I wonder sometimes if we drunks handle death a little better than the general population because we see so much of it?

Barely 30.