Weekly Reader

This week's excerpt from my book, "Blow Up the Outside World" has now been added to that site.

As I've mentioned at length before, the thing's a memoir, and it's written in three separate timelines which run concurrently within the story and detail the time in my life leading up to the decision to enter rehab; the month in which I was actually in rehab; and the several months after leaving the facility and heading to New York to work following 9/11.

This week's excerpt deals with one of the more obscenely stupid ideas I've had in my lifetime -- and believe me, there are plenty to choose from.

By the end of 2000, my drug addiction was already full-blown and I wanted nothing more than to stop. Given that I firmly believed that my wife at the time -- a woman with all the compassion of a brown recluse spider -- would leave me in a heartbeat if I admitted my secret and checked myself in somewhere to get help, I made the ill-informed decision to quit on my own cold-turkey. It's how and where I decided to do this that ranks high on the stupidity meter.

My plan was simple.

My wife Kara* and I had planned a two-week vacation from Los Angeles right around Christmas. We would spend the first week with my parents in South Florida, and the second week -- including Christmas Day -- with her family in North Carolina.

At the time, I was doing drugs two to three times a day.

I brought nothing with me for the trip.

You get the picture.

It took all of about ten hours for me to start realizing the depth of the hole I'd dug. At some point -- possibly next week -- I'll get into the first waves of that particular nightmare. But believe it or not, something happened during the trip itself that made my dire situation even worse.

Detoxing is bad. VERY FUCKING BAD. Detoxing when you return home to find that your parents were forced to sell their very large home for financial reasons, and were now living in a tiny two-bedroom apartment; well that's the stuff of suicide notes.

I was deathly sick for most of my time at home, but I pretended it was simply a bad case of the flu. Somehow it worked.

Today's excerpt is just a few short paragraphs that focus on my state of mind after I left my parents behind and Kara and I entered the second leg of our 2000 Holiday Detox Tour at her family's home in North Carolina.

I couldn't forget my family's situation.

I missed them.

I was ashamed of my condition and felt that I owed them so much more.

My time with Kara's family only added to that pain.

Read on...

*No, Kara is not her real name.

Previous Excerpts:

June 25th, 2006

June 17th, 2006