An Old Friend's Letter

[Bobb B.]

Hello, Old Friend:

I've come to visit you again. I live to see you suffer mentally, physically, spiritually, and socially. I want to make you restless so you can never relax. I want you to be jumpy and nervous and anxious. I want to make you agitated and irritable so that you can't think clearly or positively. I want to make you hate everything and everybody -- especially yourself ! I want you to feel guilty and remourseful for the things you have done in the past that you'll never be able to let go of. I want to make you angry and hateful toward the world for the way it is and the way you are. I want you to feel sorry for yourself and blame everything but your alclholism for the way things are. I want you to be deceitful and untrustworthy, and to manipulate and con as many people as possible. I want you to wake up during all hours of the night and scream for me. You know you can't sleep without me ! I'm even in your dreams.

I want to be the first thing you wake up to every morning and the last thing you touch before you black out. I would rather kill you, but I'll be happy enough to put you bake in the hospital, another institution or jail. But you know I'll still be waiting for you when you get out. I love to watch you slowly going insane. I love to see all the physical damage that I'm causing you. I can't help but sneer and chuckle when your shiver and shake, when your freeze and sweat al the same time, and when your wake with your sheets and blankets soaking wet. It's amusing to watch you make love to the toilet bowl -- heaving and wrenching and not able to hold me down. It's amazing how much destruction I can do to your internal organs while at the same time work on your brain. Destroying it bit by bit. I deeply appreciate how much you sacrifice for me.

The countless good jobs you've sacrificed for me. All the fine friends that you deeply cared for -- you gave up for me. And what's more, the ones you turned against yourself because of your inexcusable actions -- I'm even more grateful.

And especially -- your loved ones -- your family, the most important people in the world to you -- you even threw away for me. I cannot express in words the gratitude I have for the loyalty you have for me. You sacrificed all these beautiful things in life just to devote yourself completely to me. but do not despair, my friend, for on me you can always depend. For after you have lost all these things, you can still depend on me to take even more. You can depend on me to keep you in a living hell, to keep you -- mind, body and soul -- for I will not be satisfied until you are dead, my friend.

My name is ALCOHOL.

[Dan]

Relate. I do.
To every single word.
Thanks Bobb.

[Dunitall]

Bobb

I shall keep this just in case I ever feel any insane urge to pick up a drink.

Thank you very much.

Rich

[2dayzmuse]

Thank God, I no longer have to live with the fear, guilt, anxiety, pain and lies created by my drinking. It doesn't have to be that way...

[Bobb B.]

a

[dnswwood]

Powerful post bobb,it reminds me of another one I like to read about once a month by Jack M. its called drunks


Drunks by Jack M.
We died of pneumonia in furnished rooms where they found us three days later when somebody complained about the smell

We died against bridge abutments and nobody knew if it was suicide and we probably didn't know either except in the sense that it was always suicide

We died in hospitals our stomachs huge, distended and there was nothing they could do

We died in cells never knowing whether we were guilty or not.

We went to priests they gave us pledges they told us to pray they told us to go and sin no more, but go

We tried and we died we died of overdoses we died in bed (but usually not the Big Bed) we died in straitjackets in the DT's seeing God knows what creeping skittering slithering shuffling things

And you know what the worst thing was? The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried

We went to doctors and they gave us stuff to take that would make us sick when we drank on the principle of so crazy, it just might work, I guess or maybe they just shook their heads and sent us to places like Dropkick Murphy's and when we got out we were hooked on paraldehyde or maybe we lied to the doctors and they told us not to drink so much just drink like me and we tried and we died

We drowned in our own vomit or choked on it our broken jaws wired shut we died playing Russian roulette and people thought we'd lost but we knew better we died under the hoofs of horses under the wheels of vehicles under the knives and boot heels of our brother drunks we died in shame

And you know what was even worse? was that we couldn't believe it ourselves that we had tried we figured we just thought we tried and we died believing that we hadn't tried believing that we didn't know what it meant to try

When we were desperate enough or hopeful or deluded or embattled enough to go for help we went to people with letters after their names and prayed that they might have read the right books that had the right words in them never suspecting the terrifying truth that the right words, as simple as they were had not been written yet

We died falling off girders on high buildings because of course ironworkers drink of course they do

We died with a shotgun in our mouth or jumping off a bridge and everybody knew it was suicide we died under the Southeast Expressway with our hands tied behind us and a bullet in the back of our head because this time the people that we disappointed were the wrong people

We died in convulsions, or of "insult to the brain" we died incontinent, and in disgrace, abandoned if we were women, we died degraded, because women have so much more to live up to we tried and we died and nobody cried

And the very worst thing was that for every one of us that died there were another hundred of us, or another thousand who wished that he could die who went to sleep praying he would not have to wake up because what he was enduring was intolerable and he knew in his heart it wasn't ever gonna change

One day in a hospital room in New York City one of us had what the books call a transforming spiritual experience and he said to himself I've got it no, you haven't, you've only got part of it) and I have to share it now you've ALMOST got it)

And he kept trying to give it away but we couldn't hear it

We tried and we died we died of one last cigarette the comfort of its glowing in the dark we passed out and the bed caught fire they said we suffocated before our body burned they said we never felt a thing that was the best way maybe that we died except sometimes we took our family with us

And the man in New York was so sure he had it he tried to love us into sobriety but that didn't work either, love confuses drunks and he tried and we still died one after another we got his hopes up and we broke his heart because that's what we do

And the worst thing was that every time we thought we knew what the worst thing was something happened that was worse

Until a day came in a hotel lobby and it wasn't in Rome, or Jerusalem, or Mecca or even Dublin, or South Boston it was in Akron, Ohio, for Christ's sake a day came when the man said I have to find a drunk because I need him as much as he needs me (NOW you've got it) and the transmission line after all those years was open the transmission line was open

And now we don't go to priests and we don't go to doctors and people with letters after their names we come to people who have been there we come to each other and we don't have to die.