I fell off the being-super-healthy bandwagon, which isn't nearly as interesting as most of your bandwagons.

Basically I used to be an athlete. I boxed for (seven? eight?) years which regularly involved cutting huge amounts of weight. I also played football, got some college scholarship offers. Lifted weights for about 3 hours per day for the better part of a decade. You get the picture. Ate a lot of tasteless, healthy food.

Grad school made me A) less interested in moving pieces of iron around in a gym regularly and B) realize the value of comforting oneself with food. I eat a lot of ice cream now. I'm not that fat, but I'm getting there. I've made my peace with it. Being a health nut required too much energy.

Josef K wrote:

Coach wrote: Moderation has no place within a guitar solo.

The inverse of this statement is actually true.

Yes, but it's called WAH-deration.

Dave/Eksvplot wrote:

lemur68 wrote:See what you did, Soup? You made Nerbly delete a post where he admitted to smoking crack.

I remember when I was 13, I told myself I was going to stop masturbating when I turned 14.

I not only fell off that wagon, I died of dysentery.

Oregon Trail represent!

Yeah! Like dftr said, sometimes you gotta get off and shoot some squirrels.

I admit, I was a bit smug when I was on the decaf.
"whoa, calm down, decaf!
"Try decaf!"
(you're freaking out)
"Yo, try the decaf dude!"
I drank the decaf for months.
It is now a quarter after twelve in the afternoon. I have about 4 and a half cups of regular coffee in me right now and I'm jamming pencils into a Styrofoam wig holder. So far I've wrecked my apartment, taken apart my television, listened to Rick James' entire discography and searched for people on facebook that I never really had a chance to get to know in high school, calling their posted numbers and screeching "I'm back on the caff" to the tune of Problem Child by AC/DC.
I'm spinning out of control into a vortex of caffeinated dementia.
I need to complete a task.
I need to make a list!
500 posts!

Prescription mouthwash that I was supposed to use twice a day in substitution to flossing. I was originally given two bottles, and I finished one and started the second in time for my next appointment. They gave me THREE MORE bottles when I told them I was on the second one of the original two. After that appointment though, I got distracted by other things and I stopped taking it altogether. So now I have four bottles of the stuff and no idea what to do with them.

What is prescription mouthwash for?

I can't wait till I feel no need to to get totally fucked up just to feel happy.

I've not found the medicine yet. Booze, women, money, Weed, Heroin, Crack. 100% of those things doesn't really work for me.

It may be a mild blend of all of these things for me.
At the moment I rely on coffee, hard work and booze.

Goddamn I'm pissed off, hungover, horny, tired and fancy some smack.

Ahhh, fuck. I truly hate my life.

Man, I just heard a nasty one.

A dude who I used to jam with in thrash and hardcore bands became a heroin junkie. We played in probably 10 different bands together. He was about as good a drummer as they come, seriously. Just an awesome drummer. He was all into Jesus and I still played in bands with him, that's how good he was. I stopped having anything to do with him when the heroin started and he tried to steal my mom's bike out of our garage. I tracked him down and we fistfought, I took it back and that was that.
He had spent a good ten years building up an enormous thrash metal drum set, tons of shit. Little 'pish' symbols, 3 bass drums for some reason, whole set of those little rototoms or whatever they are called, little electronic pads he could hit that made noises, big cage around the whole thing, just ridiculous. He'd have to get to shows early to set it up, took like an hour to set up.
Anyway, he could have seriously been a highly successful studio musician or metal band drummer. In fact he could play pretty much any instrument you gave him, one of those dudes.
The heroin got so bad he traded his entire drum set for something like a 2 days worth of junk. Sold everything he owned. Ended up straight up homeless living in the park.
His father is a religious man, some kind of preacher or something so he takes pity on him and pays for him to go to expensive rehab out in Utah or Arizona or something.
He stays there for a good 6 months getting sober.
Now the day he is coming home, his mother is moving to a new house. The thing is, she is in the hospital when he gets out. She had a heart attack the day before. The plan is for him to get off the plane, go to the U-haul place get a truck, go to the mom's old house and load it up with all her possessions then go unload it all for her, get the new house together and then go see her in the hospital.
That's the plan.
He gets off the plane, gets the U Haul and loads it up with all her stuff. That part went smooth.
Instead of driving it to her new house and unloading it, he decides to drive it to the ghetto, open the back and sell everything in it to whoever happens to come up and wants it.
He sold his mother's every possession. Her clothes, TV, furniture, picture books, everything. He even made 2 separate trips back and forth to get more shit to sell.
From what I hear he got about 3 or 4 days worth of junk for all of it.
I know his mom, she is not a wealthy woman by any stretch. She has a shitty job and lives paycheck to paycheck. She's a decent person, 400 pounds and all into Jesus but whatever.

He got his shit, left the truck and took off. Nobody has seen him since.
The truck was in his mom's name so now she even has them on her ass about the missing truck as well as having nothing left. They are threatening to sue her and sending cops to fuck with her.

Seriously. This seriously happened. People like this exist.

Marsupialized wrote: . . .Instead of driving it to her new house and unloading it, he decides to drive it to the ghetto, open the back and sell everything in it to whoever happens to come up and wants it.
He sold his mother's every possession. Her clothes, TV, furniture, picture books, everything. He even made 2 separate trips back and forth to get more shit to sell . . .

dang, to do that requires some emotional calculus that I can't even begin to comprehend. that is really fucked up.

It's really just par for the course, for a long-time drug addict. That shit takes a real toll on your sense of priorities.

At one point in the mid-90s, I'd been using hard dope pretty much every day for almost 2 years, when I suddenly realized that at the rate I was going, it was fairly certain I was going to lose my job soon. My own death was also an obvious possibility, but I didn't worry about that nearly as much as losing my job and being unable to support my habit. I had no idea when, but I knew it was bound to happen and when it did I was going to be in deep shit: desperately sick and having no money whatsoever. I'd never attempted armed robbery or breaking and entering, but I was pretty sure I'd be no good at that kind of thing.

So I wised up (or pussed out, depending on how you choose to look at it) and checked myself into a methadone clinic. In retrospect, that move probably saved my life.

After having been on the program for 2 or 3 months, I had stabilized myself to the point where I not only kept my job, but had quit using hard drugs altogether. It felt great to not have that Sword of Damocles hanging over my head, knowing that all it would take is one run-in with the cops or something to ruin my immediate future. I felt like maybe I was gaining some control over my habit after all.

Then one day, I get a phone call from one of my old junkie friends, whom I hadn't spoken to in about a month. She told me that a mutual friend had just died of an overdose the previous weekend. This guy had been my best friend for years. We had been roommates for a couple years, before he'd moved out of state in an attempt to clean up.

For the next few days, all I could think of was getting high. I hooked up with several of my late friend's non-doper buddies and we drove down to St. Louis to attend his funeral. It was terrible. Both of his divorced parents were there and the room was split into two very disparate groups who appeared not to intermingle whatsoever. His friends who weren't from Chicago had no idea about the cause of death and from what I gather, his parents didn't want it talked about, so we had all these people approaching us, asking "Do you have any idea of how this happened?" and we were supposed to keep our mouths shut about it. The whole experience was extremely awkward, uncomfortable, and guilt-ridden. The trip back to Chicago was rough for me, because his other friends were discussing hard drugs and asking me all these pointed questions about it. There was a tangible air of contemptuousness, and overtones in the conversation seemed to imply that by participating in drug use with him, I had somehow contributed to our friend's death.

As soon as I got back to Chicago, I went and scored some heroin. I avoided taking my medicine for several days and used only dope instead. This little "relapse" lasted about 2 weeks, until one morning while receiving my medication, I nodded out, staggered a bit and almost fell down right in front of the nurse. Of course she refused to medicate me and arranged an emergency meeting with my case counselor.

It took me several months to get back on track with my recovery, but to this day I have no explanation for why the funeral of a friend who died of OD had triggered me to start using again.