12:48 a.m. - 2007-03-30
Trying to understand addiction
On March 22nd my dad died of an apparent drug overdose, a week later he was in the ground. It’s sobering and surreal when it happens, it just doesn’t seem to make sense that anyone could just seemingly disappear or fade away like that. Unfortunately with drug addicted people quick death is, in most cases, a grim inevitable reality. Over the past week I’ve been thinking a lot about addiction, trying to understand it.
It would seem to me that addiction is all about pain. I think that some, lets say, more sensitive people seem to see all of the pain in the world that other less sensitive people don’t see. They feel that in order to escape the endless pain of living they need to submit to the uncontrollable chaos and inevitably that surrounds death. Hunter S. Thomson put it eloquently in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when, as “Dr. Johnson”, he stated that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”.
Addiction burns, addiction is a fire that burns to some extent in all of us but only a few of us ever feed that fire. Addiction is stronger than any drug or vice, addiction is a sheer narcissistic salivating lust that blinds any form of conventional reason and seems to uncontrollably compel us to submit to whatever carnal desire that we choose. You can feel the lust of addiction in every cell in you body. It seems, when in the depths of addiction, as if even your fingernails and teeth are viciously starving for whatever various poison that you have chosen or, depending on how you look at it, has chosen you. Complete and total collapse of all reason and physical well-being is for some tormented souls the only way to find ultimate peace. Its as if this cruel survival of the fittest world we live in is fully felt and understood by these poor souls and they choose to opt out or sit on the sidelines so to speak excluding themselves from the struggle realizing the futility of fighting against a world that will inevitably, no matter how hard we fight, swallow us all back up. Why do some seem to have a natural inclination to poison themselves? Is slow suicide or just simply an escape from a tormented mind? I ask this question rhetorically because I hope that I will never have to walk down the dark path of suffering that leads to the answer.
