Hate to be a broken record but . . .

This is one of my all-time favorites - a man getting bullied by a cop immediately after an accident - because the same thing happened to me, only much, much worse. You can read the post by Joshua Karr (me) for the full story, but the short version is that I was in a really bad wreck, walked away from it . . . until the adrenaline wore off and then I wasn't doing too much walking after that. But I was not only thrown to the ground by police, I was handcuffed. It was a horrible accident, too. The car flipped six times, according to the guy behind me, and it was barely recognizable as a car when it was all said and done. I was badly injured, bleeding from my eyelid and a dozen other cuts and abrasions.

I was, admittedly, intoxicated. That is inexcusable and I am not trying to diminish that fact. In my defense, however, it had just rained and the roads were wet, it was a one-car accident, and the only person injured was myself. That said, the cops were so eager to get their DUI that they nearly denied my request to go to the hospital. At the hearing for the charge, the arresting officer said he saw no blood, no injuries of any kind. He must not have had his contacts in that night because I had to have five stitches in my eyelid (yes, my eyelid), and my face and hair were completely drenched in blood. I pulled 13 pieces of glass out of my forehead over the next few weeks.

The moral of the story, kids, is don't drink and drive. Not only is it grossly irresponsible, selfish, stupid, and potentially deadly, but if you do screw up and get into a wreck, the police will be far less likely to be gentle with you, injuries be damned. Take a cab, call a ride, or sleep in your fucking car. But do not drive drunk. It can, and will be if you continue you to do so (the odds are stacked against you), the most costly mistake you will ever make, in both dollars and lives. And it is just as likely to be someone else who pays - the ultimate price - in addition to yourself. DUIs are a nightmare. And you'll be walking around with a dark cloud over your head until your trial date, devoured by worry and anxiety, to the point where you will wish they would just go ahead and sentence you and be done with it, no matter how 'lawyered up' you are.

I was a 'seasoned drunk.' What that means is that I got drunk so often that I had gotten very good at being a drunk. I had my own business, pretty successful, so you could say I was a high-functioning alcoholic. I'll still say, even now with (the greater part of) seven years of sobriety under my belt, that I drove quite well intoxicated. Some people can. I didn't slur, I didn't stutter and I didn't stumble or sway when I walked. That's what baby drunks do. Seasoned drunks drink for maintenance, really. Seasoned drunks have long ago stopped drinking in order to get drunk. They drink to maintain.

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the "mother of thanatology" (or the study of death and grief) said about grieving, "The more you grieve, the better you get at grieving." That applies to pretty much anything in life, I've found. I've had my share of grief, certainly. Lost my brother when I was 23, my mother when I was 39, and I lost three of my closest friends in the space of a year: one to drunk driving, one to suicide, and one to overdose. I'm fucking awesome at grieving.

How does that relate to alcoholism, you might be asking? I drank a lot. I'm sure you've heard people say they drink a lot or know this or that person who drinks a lot. But my body would wake me up promptly at 5:00AM every morning, and my breakfast was a 32 oz. whiskey and Diet Coke, heavy on the whiskey that early. My body had some making up to do for all that pesky sleep it had recently been subject to . . . all three or four hours of it. And that 32 oz. cup stayed full the entire day until I fell asleep - okay, passed out - that night.

I did not intend for this to be a treatise on alcoholism. I just wanted to emphasize that I really was a high-functioning alcoholic for many years until it caught up with me. And when it finally did, it was a powerful, rapid, descent into illness. This was, of course, after all my contracts had been taken from me because I smelled like a whiskey rat at work And after a succession of very costly DUIs and subsequent trips to rehab, I finally realized that I was actually dying. That scared the shit out of me. I knew it in my soul that I was dying. Also, my doctor actually told me that I was dying, that I would die, if I kept it up. So I checked my damn self into rehab.

But that's when it finally took. I had heard that sobriety would never work unless you wanted it. I didn't want it the first three or four times because it had been forced on me, usually by my mother or a judge. But when I checked myself into rehab, all I knew for certain was that I wanted to live. I had worked too hard, made straight A's in college, and had too lofty an opinion of myself to die in obscurity and misery, as the drunk that I was.

More later . . .