The Tower Falls...

I knew this was going to take forever. It's been a month now since my last entry, and it's been almost three months now since the experiences I'm trying to recount here occurred. If I don't get this shit out of my head soon, I'm going to fucking lose it all, I just know it. But I'm not going to give up. I have to get this out.

So, February, 2007. We needed to move out of our apartment so that they could renovate it. The company that had bought our building was kind enough to let us live in one of the other units in the building while they were doing the renovation work, so we only had to move across the courtyard. Still, it was absolutely horrible. For starters, we hadn't done any preparation for the move, at all. Being stoned and exhausted all the time, and working 10-12 hour days (when you factor in the 2-3 hours of commuting time), we just couldn't bring ourselves to spend what little time we had to rest each day tearing down our comfortable home that we had worked so hard to make and that we Loved so much. So, when moving day came, we were absolutely unprepared. Daniel was there to help us, but even so, there was no way we were going to get it done in one day. Again, the company helped us out, and provided a team of people at the last minute to help us pack up and move. I cannot convey how traumatic an experience it was to have a dozen strangers speaking a language I couldn't understand crawling over every inch of my home and tearing it apart. On top of that, I'd been doing lines of Ritalin in order to try and summon up enough energy to keep working all day long. Between the speed-psychosis, and the emotional toll of having my home torn apart in front of me, I was a complete fucking wreck. I remember that by the end of the day, the work still not done, I just sat down in the middle of my nearly empty living room and wept. It was not the first time I'd been reduced to tears that day. I was exhausted, and I felt broken and homeless and violated. And it wasn't over. The next day, Daniel and I had to finish the rest of the move by ourselves. In the snow. Swear to gods, it was snowing the whole day. I was terrified and crippled by anxieties too numerous to identify individually. I wanted to die.

The next day was my 31st birthday. It rained ice all day long, and I was trapped in our new apartment, a run-down, broken, smelly hole above the developer's office. Surrounded by random cluttered piles of all of our belongings, my feelings of homelessness and dislocation and nameless, paralyzing anxiety continued. I knew that all of this was for the best, that we would be getting an even better home out of this relatively minor sacrifice, but somehow that provided no comfort at all. I spent the day getting high and holding back tears and trying not to think of the direction my life was headed in. Had this really been what I'd wanted?

I decided I needed to try and make the best of this experience. I recognized that what I was going through was a classic trial or initiation; an experience where the core of Self is tested and assaulted. It is an opportunity like no other for growth and development. And I decided to use it for exactly that purpose; I wouldn't let all this pain be for nothing, and I wouldn't let it all be just for a fancy new condo. I needed it to be worth more. Having my external life completely uprooted, destroyed, transformed, and reassembled in a new state provided a perfect opportunity for me to do the same with my internal life. Making changes to the Self is notoriously difficult, even for the most powerful magickians. Crowley famously struggled with heroin addiction his entire life, and was never able to kick, despite his adamant belief that magick could overcome any aspect of personality or mind or reality. But I theorized that it would be easier to change inside when everything outside was changing at the same time, almost as though I were simply going along with the current of things. It would be easier to think differently and perceive differently and behave differently, when everything around me was different and new, as well. Suddenly being in a brand-new environment would likely change me in some way, as it was, as it does anyone; and if that were going to happen, I might as well try to direct it and use it to my advantage.

And at first, it seemed as though my theory were correct. There were several aspects of myself that I wasn't happy with and wanted to change: my sometimes uncontrollable temper, my violent mood-swings in general, my apathy, my complete dissatisfaction with my job, my need to feel accepted and approved of by my peers, the annoying and embarrassing habit I had developed of twitching and making strange, loud noises whenever I got nervous, etc., etc. But the main demon that I wanted to exorcise from my Self was my constant drug-use. I didn't want to stop using drugs altogether, I just wanted to stop doing them all the time. I still didn't consider myself an addict, but I could tell that I was using way too much, and that it was making my life a lot more difficult than I wanted it to be. So, that had to be the first thing to go. And during this period in our temporary apartment across the courtyard, I did make headway on this one area, at least, even if I didn't manage to affect any of the other changes I had desired. I managed to reduce my drug-use to "occasional", meaning several times a week, but not everyday. I developed a complicated set of rules to determine when it was "acceptable" to smoke and in what ways, and when it was not. A few times I even managed to go a week or more without smoking any pot at all. On those occasions I would usually substitute some other drug, like ephedrine or alcohol or some pharmaceutical opiate, in order to overcome the constant cravings that I struggled to fight. But, still, at least I wasn't smoking pot. I did start smoking cigarettes again during this time period, after having quit three years earlier. I reasoned that no matter how bad anything else I did might be, it wasn't as bad as getting stoned, since that was my main desire, and therefore, anything that helped me overcome that was a good thing. I could always cut down on my drinking later. I could always quit smoking again later. I could always stop using speed later. None of them would be as difficult as quitting pot. That was what I had to concentrate on. Stop Smoking Weed.

Two months after moving out of our apartment, the renovations finished, we bought it from the developer, and were allowed to move back in. I realize now how incredibly naive it was of me to think this, but for some reason, I honestly expected that it would only take a matter of a couple months or so to get our new home completely in order. After it took us nearly a month just to paint the damn place before we even started moving in, I began to realize that maybe I'd been just a bit optimistic on that count. Two months later, when we were still living out of boxes and only had two or three of the pieces of furniture we needed, I had to begin admitting to myself that this wasn't going to be a matter of "move in, set up, and get started on your fabulous new life" like I'd thought it was going to be. (As a matter of fact, it's been just over a year now since we moved in, and we still don't have all the furniture we need, and we've still got a pile of unpacked stuff lining our living room. For the record though, we have come a long way since then, and the place really does feel like our home now. Just a home with a big pile of stuff in it.)

I had been struggling very hard with my addiction when we moved back, and through that struggle, had come to admit to myself that yes, it really was an Addiction. I was an Addict. That had been easier to accept than I'd expected, but it didn't make it any easier to deal with, either. Every waking minute of every day (and most of the sleeping ones, as well), I wanted to get high. I was successfully avoiding the pipe, but it was a constant struggle. Telling myself "no, you can have some later; no, you can have some later; No. You can have some later" ten thousand times every day. I was rolling a boulder up a mountain, and each day was a little harder than the one before it. So I found myself really counting on this "New Life" I was moving into to give me the strength and the impetus to keep going with this daily battle with my darker side. I knew that it would be easier to not-smoke in this new life, because that life simply didn't include smoking. Everywhere I looked I would be surrounded by constant reminders of this new life; reminders of the new person I had become. And that person didn't smoke. So, it'd be easy. But, I also knew that if I gave in, if I smoked again, even once, then from that point on, smoking would be a part of that new life, and there'd be no way to undo that. And it wouldn't be easy anymore.

When I began to realize that it was going to be a lot longer than I thought before I got my "new life", before I got to be my "new Self", when I began to see just how much work it was going to take to get that life I needed so badly at that point, I got very, very depressed. I began to wonder if I'd made a huge mistake. It felt like I'd thought that I had almost rolled that huge rock all the way to the top of the mountain, only to realize that I had just reached the first ledge, still near the bottom. All the fight simply drained out of me. It had been so hard to keep fighting by that point, as it was; the only thing that had kept me going was the knowledge that it was almost over, that I'd almost reached my goal. And the realization that I'd barely begun just made the entire task suddenly seem utterly impossible. I'd never wanted to get high more in my entire life. I began to sneak into Ing's purse while she slept to get the keys to the trunk where we'd kept all our drugs and tools locked up these last few months (locked up from me). I'd sneak out to the living room and smoke a bowl, maybe do a line or two of some opiate or other, and get completely fucking wasted. More than once, I felt there was a good chance I'd gotten so high that I'd die sometime that night. My moods darkened even further at that point, knowing that I'd ruined any chance of using this massive external change to affect the inner changes I'd wanted, too. Getting high was now a part of my "new life" and there was no way to take it back, no way to undo the damage I'd done. This new pain only made me want to get high even more; being stoned became the only times I ever felt good at all. Eventually I confessed to Ing what I'd been doing, but only so that I wouldn't have to wait for her to go to sleep or leave for work in the mornings anymore. Once she knew that I was using again, I wouldn't have to hide it anymore, and I could start using freely again, anytime I wanted. I felt no remorse at all for violating her trust, or her privacy. I knew at that point that there was absolutely no doubt about it anymore: I was an addict. But I couldn't have cared less. I just wanted to stop fighting with myself, get stoned, and feel good. Beyond that, everything else was just noise in between bong hits.

During this entire period of moving out and moving back in, struggling with my addiction, etc., I was also trying to help prepare for the coming AGM in September. I was in charge of setting up the public seminars that go on for the first few days of the AGM. This is the period of the meeting where we give lectures, discussions, seminars, etc., and invite the public outside of the IOT to come participate. It's the one time of the year when we open up our doors and invite the outside world in to see what we're all about. Preparing for this was a major undertaking, to say the least. I had to find speakers, arrange their travel schedules, make sure they had all the props and equipment they'd need, arrange for advertising, make sure we got enough non-members to come to make it worthwhile (we needed to make a certain amount of money off of this just in order to cover our expenses), handle all the registrations, cancellations, questions and queries, etc. And I'd never done anything like this before in my life, so I had absolutely no experience to draw on. I'd never even attended the public seminars before! I always skipped them when I went to an AGM so that I could save some money on registration and travel expenses. (All I really cared about was the members-only half of the event, anyways; that was where we did all the magick.) And as if that wasn't pressure enough, I knew that my 2nd degree was on the line with this thing, as well. So, if I fucked up, not only would I completely humiliate myself in front of all my peers, but I could kiss the degree I'd been working towards for the past year goodbye, as well.

Spring flowed into Summer; the apartment was coming along nicely, if not quickly, and the AGM was fast approaching. I remembered my past experiences at Annual Grand Meetings. Surrounded by the best magickians in the world, working magicks of every kind for a solid week, partying every night, I always came back a very different person than I was when I'd left. (This was a rather disconcerting effect for Ingrid to try and deal with, to say the least.) I remembered that at my first AGM, I participated in a group healing ritual, with the intent to stop smoking. The next day, I started to get ill every time I smoked a cigarette. This effect got worse and worse until I quit shortly thereafter. I began to see this upcoming AGM as my next great opportunity to try and become the person I wanted to be; strong, sober, in control of my emotions and my desires. This gave me the impetus to start the addiction-struggle all over again. I used the AGM as the end-goal to reach towards just as I had with the new apartment a few months before. Towards that end, I decided to use the final weeks before the AGM to take on a monasticism. Basically, just as a mystic will sometimes fast from food in order to alter their consciousness and gain insight into reality, I decided I would fast from pot, in order to gain strength and to prepare myself for the final, massive transformation that would come at the AGM.

I performed invocatory rites of my warrior-self, reaching back through my bloodline to the Viking warriors that I descended from and summoning their spirit into my blood, giving myself the strength to keep up the fight; giving myself a warrior's mindset so that rather than being drained by the struggle, I would actually be energized by it, invigorated by each new opportunity to demonstrate my massive strength. I began to perceive my addiction as a demon-spirit that possessed me, using my ingrained rebellious streak to help me resist it. (Perceiving it as something I wanted had made me want it; perceiving it as an outside force trying to force me to do what it wanted, made me want to tell it to go fuck itself and do the exact opposite of what it wanted, just to spite it.) I performed more spells to attack The Demon, to imprison it, and to destroy it. And in a lot of ways, all of this worked. I changed my perception, it often was easier to resist the temptations, and I did feel a lot stronger and more capable than I ever had before. Still, despite all the changes and the new found powers and perceptions, it remained, as ever, a constant struggle. And no matter how strong I was, no matter how long I managed to maintain my virtue in that struggle, eventually I was bound to tire, and all it took was a single moment of weakness to undo everything I had accomplished up to that point. During the entire six weeks of my monasticism, I never managed to make it more than 10 days without smoking at least once.

I guess in hindsight, it was predictable that the AGM would turn out to be nothing that I expected it to be. Where every other AGM I'd ever attended or even heard tell of was a spiritual event without equal, my experience at this meeting was as mundane as a high school home-economics class. I didn't expect anything spectacular from the seminars; I just tried my best to do my job. It was work, nothing more. But I thought the work would end when the seminars did. Instead I found that throughout the entire event, I was expected to support everyone in any capacity that was required. While everyone else partied on the first night, I had to spend several hours developing the ritual schedule. While everyone else was experimenting with altered states of consciousness, I was required to sit outside the door and babysit the environment for them. When someone needed something, I was expected to get it. When something went wrong, I was expected to fix it. I couldn't even get a decent night's sleep before someone would wake me up first thing in the morning with some complaint or another. The experience couldn't have been more stressful or banal; there was nothing even remotely spiritual or uplifting or transcendent about it. I was simply working my ass off to make sure that everyone else could have a spiritually uplifting and transcendent experience. Predictably, I reacted to this stress and this disappointment by numbing myself with drugs. I smoked every night; I did lines all day, every day; I drank every chance I got.

And it got worse from there. Just before the AGM, George confided in me that he was done with chaos magick, and that after the AGM he would be leaving the IOT and dedicating himself to the practice of Buddhism. This really upset me, but I couldn't figure out why. I thought it was simply because he was my friend, and I knew that if he quit the IOT, I'd never see him anymore (as it was the only time I saw him was at Temple meetings). But then at one point during a conversation we were having at the AGM, he referred to himself as my mentor. I'd never thought of our relationship that way before; I'd always just thought of him as my friend. But he was right. He was the one who'd brought me into the IOT. He was the one who'd guided me through MMM. He was the one who'd initiated me, both times. He was the person who's opinion I sought on most matters related to magick and/or the IOT. He was the person who's approval I always sought, but never admitted I wanted. He was my mentor, and I'd never realized it. And no wonder I was so upset at his leaving! It's always a traumatic experience when the mentor releases the student, but even worse than that, he wasn't just saying "I've nothing left to teach you, it is time for you to go out on your own, young Grasshopper;" he was saying "I no longer believe in what I've been teaching you; I'm going to go devote myself to something completely different now." He wasn't telling me that I didn't need a mentor anymore, he was saying that he was turning his back on the system he'd been mentoring me in; the system I'd dedicated a third of my life to mastering at that point!

This situation naturally led me to begin to question whether the path I'd devoted my life to for so long now was really worthwhile. What if I'd wasted all those years on bullshit superstition? Combined with the utter banality of the AGM experience for me, this questioning mindset I had stumbled into led me to look at my peers in this group differently that I ever had before. I'd always just seen them as "the greatest magickians in the world." But when I looked at them now, I saw broken down old men and deluded outcast children, all trying desperately to convince themselves that they were really gods among men, just so they didn't feel so worthless, so they could convince themselves that they weren't really the failures that they were afraid to admit they really were. Where once I saw powerful sorcerers, I now saw drunks and addicts and psychotics. I began to look at the IOT and wonder if that was really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Did I really want to be 45 years-old and dedicating myself to these wannabe satanists? I began to think that maybe I didn't want my 2nd degree after all. I take my oaths very seriously; they aren't just empty promises, and you can't just take them back later. An oath is for life. And the 2nd degree oath describes a level of committment that I was no longer sure I was willing to make.

Thus began a deep questioning that would last for the next six months, and strip me of every belief I thought I knew. Each question led to another, and I couldn't find any answers. What if I'd wasted my life on a spiritual pursuit that meant nothing, when I should've been concentrating on things like work and school and home? What if the IOT were just a bunch of deluded misenthropes? What if magick were just a complicated 12-step program for losers? What had sorcery ever really gotten me anyways? Yeah, it got me this beautiful house. But what had that cost me? The money came from an inheritance, and in order for me to get it, my mother had to die, my grandfather had to sell the house at the beach that had been in our family for over 30 years, and then he had to die shortly thereafter. If any of those things hadn't happened, or had happened in a different order, I wouldn't have had the money to buy this home in the first place. And what about the home itself? In order for this place to transform from the ghetto it had been to this rich, urban center, all the poor people had to be pushed out. All the people who had been my neighbors for the past decade. My neighborhood was originally settled by freed slaves just before the Civil War; it had been a black neighborhood for the entirety of its existence, over 150 years. Not anymore. I ended that period of history. Or helped it to end, anyways. But if it was my sorcery that brought the rich, yuppie developers, then I couldn't see how I was any less responsible for it than they were.

And had I really caused my mother's death? I remembered one of the last times I saw her. It was just before Thanksgiving, 1999; I was in the middle of my MMM. She was in the psych ward of our local hospital for her last failed suicide attempt. She'd taken a bunch of sleeping pills, and my Dad had found her nearly dead in the bathtub. They'd had to pump her stomach. I only remember two things about that visit. I remember her excitedly telling my father and I, "I know how to do it now! Before I'd always used prescription medications like Xanax and Tramadol, because I assumed they would be stronger. But this time I just used plain, ordinary, over-the-counter sleeping pills, and they said that if I hadn't gotten to the hospital right when I did, I'd have died. I've never been that close before! I know how to do it now!" She said all of this with a smile on her face, like she was sharing some wonderful insight she'd discovered. I just kind of sat there, smiling politely, numb from shock. Also, by this point in my life, I'd sort of shut off my feelings for my mother. It was a lot easier than feeling the pain that her existence caused me. But my father began to freak out. "How can you say that?! Don't talk like that! Do you know how much it scares me when you say those things?!!" My mother seemed genuinely confused by his reaction. "But, I figured it out." Like, "don't you get it?" And then I remember leaving here there. She walked me to the automatic doors that separated the psych ward from the rest of the hospital. I said "see ya", gave her a little hug, and then walked away. I didn't look back. And it wasn't until I got to the elevators down the hall that I registered that she had stood there and watched me walk away as the doors shut between us and locked her in again. That was the 2nd to last time I would ever see her alive. (The last time was Christmas morning. She didn't make it to Thanksgiving dinner that year, being locked up in the psych ward, and she'd be dead by New Year's Eve.)

After I left the hospital, I decided to try and use magick to help her, if I could. I was young, and stupid, and still exploring the realms of what was possible with magick. My mother was obviously in a lot of pain, both physical and psychological. If there was any chance that I could help her, I really needed to try. I obviously couldn't help her any of the normal ways; our relationship had changed too much for me to expect that simply Loving her would make any difference at that point. So maybe magick could help. I was just starting to study Heathenry, and I felt certain that I could use that to our mutual benefit. I hadn't designed a ritual in that paradigm yet (hell, I'd only designed a handful of my own rituals in any paradigm at that point) so it would be an opportunity to learn and practice, as well. I went back to my father's house and designed a ritual with the intent of "end my mother's pain and bring her peace". I decided that since Odhinn was the head deity of the pantheon, and the god of magick, I would do a ritual to petition him to bring about my desire. I know now what a mistake that was. Odhinn is also the god of death. And though he is the head deity, as it were, he is not a friend of mankind. Ancient heathens were afraid of him, and would often not speak his name for fear of gaining his attention. His concern was the ordering of the universe, and if that required delivering massive suffering upon humanity, then so be it. Eventually, he would bring about the end of the world, because that was the way it had to be. The god that takes care of mankind, the god that people would pray to, was Thor. Never Odhinn. People who worshipped Odhinn were thought of as outcasts, crazies, lunatics, psychos, and were shunned by normal folk. But I didn't know any of that at the time.

So I wrote my Odhinnic ritual, designed to end my mother's pain and bring her peace. And then I went out into the woods around my parents house in the middle of that dark, cold November night, to a sacred spot that had been special to me for many years, and made my call to the Allfather. And I nailed it. Something that experience with magick will show you, is that when you totally fucking nail a ritual, you can tell. You can feel it. There's a sense about it when you just hit the nail right on the head, and reality has heard you and shifted to your will. And I nailed that ritual. I went home feeling content; feeling like I had finally helped my mother, when everyone had been helpless to do anything for her for so long now. And when I got that call from my father that New Year's Eve morning a few weeks later, one of the first thoughts that went through my head was my memory of this ritual, and the realization of what I had done. Don't think about that, I told myself. Maybe you did cause this, maybe you didn't. But since you'll never be able to know for sure, there's no point thinking about it. You're just going to bring yourself a lot of pointless misery that you won't be able to do anything about. And you've got more important things to deal with right now. So just don't even think about it. And so I didn't. For the next eight years, anytime that thought popped into my head, I would repeat that same thing to myself and push it aside. It got to the point where I almost forgot about it. But now I couldn't forget about it. Now I couldn't ignore it. What if I killed my mother? No, I had killed my mother. If I believed in magick, then I had killed my mother. And if I hadn't killed my mother, then how could I believe in magick?

Did I still believe in magick? And if I wasn't a magickian, then what was I? I always knew that part of the power of magick lay in self-delusion. The whole point is the power of belief. Nothing is really completely, objectively True. There is only perception, and belief. And people get trapped by their beliefs, thinking them to be objective, universal Truths. But there's really no reason why we can't choose what to believe at any given moment. We just have to try. There's nothing inherently contradictory about it, though it might seem that way on the surface. When we believe something, it is true for us. And when we believe something else, then that becomes what's true for us. And the power of the chaos magickian lies in being able to believe something completely enough to make it true, to make it real, and then believe something else completely different when the situation calls for it. I could believe in Heathen gods one day, and Voodoo loas the next, and put them all down to adopt a completely materialist worldview the day after that. The more we do this, the more flexible reality becomes for us, and the easier it becomes to shift our perceptions at will. And that's what magick is; the ability to make our image of things the reality, simply by believing it enough. The techniques we use, the belief-shifting, the trance states, the particular instruments and techniques of any given paradigm, etc., are all just different ways to essentially trick the mind into this believing intently.

But what if that's all it is? Tricks, self-delusion. What if all we're really doing is tricking ourselves into believing that we're powerful magickians so that we don't have to face the fact that we're essentially weak and powerless and unable to take care of ourselves? Why is it that magick always seems to attract the outcasts and the losers? I'd always thought it was just because those who were shunned by normal society were the ones most likely to look beyond the bounds of what's "normal" to try and make their way. But what if it's really just that the outcasts, rejects, and losers were the only ones who needed something like magick to believe in, in order to get by? What if it was that we were the only ones who weren't capable of making a decent life for ourselves if we didn't find some way to convince ourselves that we were special, that we were really better than everyone else, better than the ones who'd rejected us?

I couldn't answer any of these questions. I just didn't know what the answers were, or how to figure them out. And I found that as soon as I questioned my belief in magick, as soon as I started to wonder whether magick was real or just bullshit, I couldn't do magick anymore. I tried. I tried a lot. I kept doing rituals and spells and trying to manifest my will, but nothing would happen. As much as you can feel when a ritual is dead-on, it's just as easy to feel when there's absolutely nothing there. And that's what was happening now, every time. I likened the experience of ritual and magick at that point to masturbating with novacaine: I went through the motions, but I didn't feel anything, and ultimately, nothing came of it. I just felt like I was talking to myself. I felt silly and stupid and weak and useless. And if I couldn't do magick anymore, then I really wasn't a magickian. But if I wasn't a magickian, then who the hell was I? What had I done with my life? Had I wasted the best years of my life on bong hits and ridiculous superstitions that only deluded me into thinking I was better off than I really was?

Every question just led to more questions. And I couldn't find any answers. And at this point, I had questioned everything so much that I had no idea who I was anymore, or what I'd done with my life. Or who I wanted to be or what I wanted to do with my life, either, for that matter! It got to the point where I couldn't even figure out what I wanted to eat for lunch or what I wanted to watch on TV. I just felt like I didn't know anything anymore. And that, for me, was an incredibly miserable place to be. I couldn't enjoy anything if I couldn't understand it at least a little bit. If I had no idea whether something was good or bad, how I could be happy about it? Or how could I know that it was a problem that needed to be fixed, either, for that matter? I couldn't take care of myself, I couldn't better myself, I couldn't do anything effectively anymore. I felt broken and utterly useless. I spent months in this state, constantly asking the same questions over and over again. Trying desperately to find some answers, coming up with anything I could imagine, but only ever finding more of the same questions. Eventually I simply couldn't stand the pain anymore. I'd been using drugs regularly since the AGM, but after a couple of months of this existenstial angst bullshit, I really dove into using. At least pleasure was something real, something I could believe in. If I couldn't find joy or answers anywhere else, then I would just get as high as I possibly could. Then I would be happy, and then I would know exactly where I was and exactly what was going on.

I gave into every sensual desire I had, immediately, and without question. I masturbated constantly, and I had sex whenever I had the energy and the potency. I did every drug I could get my hands on. I was even doing coke for a couple of months during this period. I drank constantly. I mixed oxycontin, coke, scotch, and weed in my system without thinking twice about it. I nearly died on more than one occasion. An average day would start with two bowls, two scotches, and a line of some opiate or other. Then I'd drive to work. At lunch, I'd go out to the liquor store and buy 4 minis of scotch, and pound two of them at lunch, hopefully with another half a pill or so; the other two I would pound during the drive home from work that night. When I got home, I would drink and smoke and do lines until I passed out. Then I'd start all over again the next day.

I also started voraciously reading fiction. I'd always read both fiction and non-fiction, always feeling a bit unbalanced whenever I read too much of one category or the other. But now I found that I couldn't read non-fiction. Anytime I'd try, I wouldn't be able to focus my attention on what I was reading, and I'd find that I'd read the same page or paragraph or sentence a dozen times and still had no comprehension of what it had said. But I became addicted to reading fiction. I picked up the Wild Cards series again, which I hadn't read since college. They are a series of science-fiction superhero stories that get very involved, with an emphasis on realism ("what if the real world were suddenly populated by a bunch of people with strange powers?") and there are 18 books in the series so far. The perfect escape. I had a history with the stories, so they brought comfort, and because of their emphasis on fantasy-realism, and the sheer number of volumes, I could completely disappear into this other world whenever I wanted, and to my heart's content. And disappear into it I did. I remember at one point, while I was reading about a war between two different factions in the series, I ended up crying to Ingrid about it, weeping into my hands. "They're all dying! All my friends are dying! And I have to hear their last thoughts, and read what it feels like for them. It's horrible! It hurts so much!" Still, it was infinitely better than facing the emptiness of my own life at the time. Anything to get away for a few minutes. Anything to forget who I was and just feel something. Something enjoyable. Something other than a giant, empty question mark.

I started taking baths. I hadn't taken baths since I was a kid. From middle school on, it had always been showers. But now I really enjoyed baths again. I would smoke a bowl, do a line, grab a scotch and my current copy of Wild Cards, and go soak in a tub full of steaming water. The hot water accentuated the high, and gave me a perfect, relaxing environment to read in. Many days I'd take two or even three baths. Eventually, I started enjoying the baths themselves, rather than just enjoying them as an accentuation of my other forms of escapism. I started taking baths every morning when I woke up. I started looking forward to my next bath, getting excited about it, having a hard time taking my mind off of it. I'd get upset when it was time to get out of the bath and get depressed, knowing that it was going to be so long until my next one. I found myself getting through my work day by looking forward to getting home and jumping straight into the tub. There was no doubt about it: I was getting addicted to baths.

At the time, I didn't think anything of it; compared to my other addictions, baths seemed safe, and almost normal. But it would turn out to mean so much more than I could have ever anticipated. Next time, I'll reveal the strange story of just how baths ended up saving my life. But, that's going to have to wait for now. Until then, remember, There's Nothing Good nor Bad in this World, but Thinking Makes it So.