Karl M. from Covina, CA telling his story at the Men Among Men Groups's conference in Reykjavik, Iceland

Good evening. My name's Carl. I'm an alcoholic. I have no idea whether what he just told you was true or not.

I do want to thank Arna for arranging to have me here. It's always an honor and a privilege to be anywhere in Alcoholics Anonymous.

But I got to tell you, I love being in Iceland. I am of Icelandic descent. And I actually am absolutely...

very proud to be be an icelander. I want to thank Arnor. He took me today to

to a genealogy society and we tracked down some of my relatives and

and I had known this for many many years that my great-grandfather,

Bjarna Yonison was a he left Iceland, he left a wife and a daughter

Haldora Bionadotter here and he married

Thor and Elizabeth on the ship on the way to Canada.

So he's now that he's also a documented alcoholic.

So he's an alcoholic and a bigamist.

So I come by my alcoholism from you.

That is...

And Arner and I found out that we are actually related.

We had them track it, and we found the culprit that we're related to.

1656, we have a common ancestor.

And I really enjoyed the first speaker.

I can't pronounce you.

Katya?

Something?

Didn't understand a word you said, but I could tell you love Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I want to tell another story that made me so proud to be in Icelander.

This is my fourth time in Iceland.

And on my third time in 2003, I was staying at a bed and breakfast downtown, and I woke up very early on a Sunday morning.

and maybe 5.30, 6 a.m. and I decided to take a walk into downtown Reykjavik.

And there were hundreds of you on the street.

Men were previously sharply dressed, but they were passed out in doorways.

There were women who were nicely dressed, but they had blood on the side of their face,

and they were helping each other up the street.

And in the United States, when you're at a sporting event, they play the national anthem,

and you stand there, and you are to be proud to be an American, or at least act like you're

proud to be an American.

And...

And that morning, as I stood there and watched you behave,

I was just so proud to be an Icelander.

I just...

Oh.

And then I saw the street cleaners sweeping everybody up and rounding you up.

That's a...

Oh, anyway, I'm an alcoholic.

It's the most important thing I can tell you about myself is that I'm an alcoholic.

And the reason I believe I'm an alcoholic is really very simple.

I've got a very bizarre and strange relationship with alcohol.

That's why I'm alcoholic, no other reason.

I will tell you a bunch of stories.

However, the reason I'm an alcoholic is because I've got a very strange relationship with alcohol.

And this first part of this strange relationship that I have with alcohol happens when I drink it.

A very strange thing happens when I drink alcohol.

The book calls it an allergic reaction, and the book says the symptom of this allergic reaction that I get when I drink alcohol is what they call the phenomena of craving.

And the best way that I can describe this thing that the book calls the phenomena craving is that whenever I drink booze, the more I drink, the thirstier I get.

It happens with nothing else.

Just booze.

An example of that is I've got this glass of water up here.

And over the next hour or so that I'm talking with you, I will probably drink half.

I don't know.

If my mouth gets dry, I might finish this whole glass of water.

But I can absolutely guarantee you that once I finish this glass of water, I am not going to go get a case of water and lock myself in my hotel room.

I'm not.

Okay.

But if that was the only thing that made me alcoholic, this strange physical reaction,

this craving that I get, if that was the only thing that made me alcoholic,

well then, just say no would solve alcoholism.

In the early 80s, our president's wife, Nancy Reagan, came out and had a national campaign saying,

just say no.

Right?

If...

If that were true, I would, and I imagine you would, just go, ha ha!

No.

And just go on and live a happy, successful life and just saying no.

But I have this other part of my strange relationship with alcohol.

And that happens when I'm not drinking it.

Of and by myself, if I don't drink for a day, a week, or a month...

I seem to have this mind that is able to paint a picture that makes it okay to take another drink,

no matter what the pain, humiliation, and suffering of a day, a week, or a month ago was,

and it does not matter whether it was my pain in humiliation or your pain in humiliation.

It does not matter.

But sooner or later, my mind is able to rationalize and justify my walk back to the next drink at all costs.

So I can't drink successfully because this physical craving that happens when I drink,

but I cannot, on my own, not drink successfully.

I'm damned if I do.

I'm damned if I don't.

It's the ultimate catch-22 we call alcoholism.

Because if I could do either one of those two things, if I could drink successfully,

that's what I would be doing tonight.

I would be drinking successfully.

Or if on my own, I could not drink successfully...

That's what I would be doing tonight.

I would just be at home not drinking, but I can't do either one of those.

So this is why I'm alcoholic.

And I set this relationship up with alcohol that I just described to you right from the get-go when I first started drinking.

And I started drinking a lot later than a lot of people in AA.

I was 11.

Yeah.

I feel that's kind of late.

I mean, I was feeling very old as I was listening to our first speaker because I did the math,

and I got sober when he was three years old.

Our family lived in Seattle.

A typical morning for me in seventh grade would be I'd show up early for school, not for study hall or anything, but to meet my new friends of the very edge of the school property, Losers Corner.

It's where kids would hang out in early morning smoke cigarettes and try to look cool.

And we would also have what I like to call the playground cocktail.

Okay.

That is a jar full of whatever we could rip off out of the parents' liquor cab the night before.

And that jar is very scary because none of us have been to bartending school yet.

So there are equal amounts of whiskey, vodka, cream to mint, vermouth in that jar.

I mean, there's green things floating around in that jar.

And you can imagine five or six of us, 11, 12-year-old trying to choke that down.

Oh!

And of course it was the early 1970s, so we were smoking what we call commercial pot.

Anybody remember that stuff?

Four finger lids, $10 a bag, seeds and stems, and the whole bit.

And it was even before Ziploc bags were invented, when it would just be a regular Glad

sandwich bag, and as you'd roll it up, there'd be like nine people spit on it.

Right?

And we pack all those seeds and stems and leaves into a homemade pipe, maybe made out of plumbing fittings and a screen.

Or if you're really desperate that morning, it would be a toilet paper roll with aluminum foil and pin holes in it.

Were you guys there too?

Yeah.

It's at this point that many people that speak in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, they often interrupt themselves.

And they say something like this.

I don't mean to offend anybody, but drugs are a part of my story.

I know and understand and have respect for what they're attempting to do when they apologize for that.

They're attempting to protect singleness of purpose or show respect for it.

Vidally important aspect of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But that idea aside, I still think it's a very bizarre practice for alcoholics to apologize to other alcoholics for doing drugs while drinking or in between drunks.

You see, I understand apologizing to police officers and judges and people that may still love us.

But I don't know why we apologize to each other.

In fact, the most bizarre example of that I've ever seen,

I was in a big meeting in West Los Angeles a number of years ago.

And that night, the speaker was up there giving one of the most ugly, heinous,

blow-by-blow drunk allogues I've ever heard.

And I've got to tell you, when I'm out there listening to a speaker,

and when his story gets ugly, the uglier it gets, the more excited I get.

That night I was on the edge of my chair drooling, looking up with this guy,

go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

And at one point in this really ugly story, this speaker said, you know, I had four DUIs, that's driving under the influence.

I had four of them.

I was in front of the judge.

And the judge said, if I get one more DUI, I'm going to prison for sure.

He says, two weeks later, I'm on the freeway.

And I hit a family of four, and I'm in a blackout.

And I wound up in prison.

And in prison, I sodomized men.

I was sodomized.

And I don't mean to offend anybody, but I did some drugs, too.

Okay.

I was the only one that thought that was strange that night.

Everybody else was, oh, okay.

So by the time I'm 14 there in Seattle, I'm the neighborhood drunk.

I'm the neighborhood pot dealer.

I forgot to mention, but my father was a neighborhood Lutheran minister.

No, he was not laughing.

And my parents, really good people, really, really good people.

And they tried to help.

They saw what was happening to me, but they didn't understand it.

See, they blamed my problems.

Well, you couldn't miss it.

You couldn't miss what was happening.

Because by the time I'm 14, I'm growing my hair down in front of my very bloodshot eyes,

and my vocabulary at 14 was, whoa.

Whoa, that's my vocabulary.

I'm regularly locked in my bedroom listening to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath,

deep purple, getting all the necessary tools for living from those lyrics, you know.

And my parents tried to help. They tried to help, but they didn't understand that their son was alcoholic.

They blamed my problems on people, places, and things.

They thought, if we can get them away from that damn group of kids he's hanging out with, things will get better.

If we can get them out of that damn public school system, things get better.

They tried all of the above. But you see, I'm an alcoholic.

My problems are not based upon people, place, and things.

My problems are based upon my physical and mental relationship to alcohol.

You see, if you change the people, places, and things in somebody's life like mine,

all that happens is that I'm loaded with different people,

in different places, ruining different things.

That's all that happens.

So by the time I was maybe close to 18, I barely scraped out of the public school system after being kicked out of the private school system.

I barely scraped out of the public school system there in Seattle.

And my parents decided that Seattle is the problem.

If we can get them out of Seattle, things to get better.

So they sent me 300 miles away to Washington State University, and I spent three years at that university on my parents' money.

And in that three years, I got almost 10 credits.

At any given time, my grade point average matched my blood alcohol content about a .25.

I did nothing at that school.

By the time I was 22, this little story I'm about to tell you will let you know exactly where I stood with my family.

Now, my father was Swedish, my mother is Icelandic, therefore I looked like a polar bear.

And I...

But at Christmas time, my parents wouldn't just send out, and I don't know whether this is a Scandinavian thing or whether it's a Lutheran thing, I don't know.

But at Christmas time, my parents wouldn't just send out Christmas cards to their friends and relatives.

My parents would send out this big, long Christmas letter that said everything the family had been doing that year.

And when I was about 22 years old, I got a hold of one of these letters that had been sent out the previous Christmas.

And as I read it, it let me know exactly where I stood with my family.

Now the first paragraph talked about what my parents had been doing that year, another impressive year, I'm sure.

The next paragraph talked about what the Morris children had been doing that year, and that paragraph went something like this.

Our oldest daughter, Christina, just graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a master's degree in human resources.

She's now working for a large pharmaceutical company in the Midwest.

She traveled to Europe this summer. She saw this, she saw that.

Her hobbies are this, this, and this.

She's a very happy young woman. We are very proud of her.

Our oldest son Eric just graduated from Western Washington State University with a degree in marketing.

He's now working for a large advertising firm here in downtown Seattle.

He loves to golf.

He loves to travel.

He's engaged to be married to this wonderful woman named Mary Lou, who works for a very small company here in Seattle named Microsoft.

It was small at one time.

And they love to golf together.

They love to travel together.

He's a very happy young man.

We are very proud of him.

Our youngest son, Carl, just turned 22.

It's about this same time that a really bad night happened.

It would take me till breakfast to describe everything that happened,

so I'm going to just say it in one sentence.

A really bad night happened, so I joined the Navy.

It was a bad night.

Okay.

And what I'm about to tell you should scare you if you fear the United States security.

But on my way into the Navy, I passed a potential test.

They call it the ASVAP test.

And this test that I took qualified me to become a nuclear engineer.

That should concern you.

that the United States Navy would even think maybe, possibly, or even remotely, about putting somebody like me near anything nuclear.

However, they made me take another test when I showed up at boot camp, and I could not pass that test.

That test, they call a urinalysis test, is what they call that.

And I still remember, I had been in boot camp for about a week, and a master's-at-arms, that's like the military police, came into the barracks.

And he had a clipboard, and there was about five or six names on that clipboard, and I knew my name would be on that clipboard.

We were taken out of the boot camp barracks, and we were taken over to the other side of the Great Lakes Naval Base to the administrative side.

And the other men were taken into one office, and I was taken into another office.

I was marched right into the commanding officer's office, the man who ran the whole Great Lakes Naval Base.

I mean, it was a big oak desk in his office and pictures of naval vessels on the wall.

And the man behind this desk had so much gold on that would blind you on a bad morning.

And he asked me my name, and I gave him my name.

And this would have been the early 80s.

And so he had this telephone on this big desk.

And attached to the telephone was a speakerphone attachment.

And he pushed the button on the speakerphone attachment.

And into this speakerphone, he said, Walter, that's my father's name.

My father had been a reservist chaplain in the United States Navy at that time for over 40 years.

This was an old World War II buddy of my father's.

And so into this phone, this man said, Walt, out of consideration for our long-term friendship, I thought I would call you first before I took any action.

But your son has gone positive on his first year analysis test, and I should be kicking him out right now.

but out of consideration for our long-term friendship I wanted to ask you

what do you feel we should do with your son? Now normally if you met my father

just in his body language and in his voice you could tell that this man was very

passionate about life that he was very grateful for what many of the experiences

that he'd had the privilege of having in his life you could tell that when you would meet

him you would feel it in his voice and in his body language but there was another

voice that would come out and it was a voice like somebody had just kicked him below

the belt

And I had heard that voice many times, and it was always when he was dealing with me.

And that was the voice that I heard come through that telephone that day as I stood there,

and I heard my father's very weak and destroyed voice say,

it's just none of my concern anymore.

Click dial tone.

Even as I stand here today, I can still hear that e of the dial tone as the man looked up at me.

That man decided to keep me in the Navy anyway, but they took away that nuclear status thing.

Thank God for you guys.

And a year and a half later, I'm a lower rank than when I first came in.

That can really happen to anybody.

I don't know if you know this, but in order to survive as a low-ranking enlisted man in the United States Navy,

all you have to do is show up in the same place each day in a uniform.

You just have to show up where you left the day before in a uniform, and you can get by.

I cannot accomplish that.

This apparently was my problem.

I would be out in the middle of Pacific Ocean and I would look at my surroundings.

I would look and I go, by God, I'm in the middle of Pacific Ocean.

I'm on a big gray ship.

I'm in a uniform.

No doubt about it, I am in the United States Navy.

However, that ship would pull into a port and I would leave that ship and I would take a drink.

And I would totally forget that I'm in the United States Navy.

And at this point in my life, whenever I took a drink, I have no idea once I take a drink whether the drunk is going to be three hours or three days.

I have no idea.

And it's a very strange feeling at 6 a.m. in a foreign country on a very large pier.

And I would be standing there going, there was a destroyer here the other day.

This one morning I was driving my car back into the base.

I was late to get back to the ship.

I'd been drinking all weekend.

And what I would be doing a typical Monday morning, if I had been drinking all weekend,

this is Carl's detox plan, his way of sliding into Tuesday, is that I would save one pint,

and I would drink half that pint on my way into the Navy base.

I would keep the other half a pint underneath the seat so at noon time I could run back out to the car and I drink the other half a pint,

and that would be my way of coming off of a drunk and sliding into Tuesday.

This particular morning, at the front of every American Navy base there is a guard shack where a Marine stands guard.

And if you're going to bring your car onto the base, you need to pull up at this guard shack.

You need to show him your military ID.

He needs to check the sticker that is on your car.

And if everything matches up, he allows you to proceed forward onto the base.

Okay.

This particular morning, I guess I was concentrating more on getting that half a pint in me

than watching where I was going, and all of a sudden I looked up, and I saw the Marine had his head out of the guard shack.

And I was wondering what he was so excited about until I looked down, and I was still going 40 miles an hour.

And I tried to swerve at the last minute, and the car hit this median that was on the right hand side.

The car flipped over and bam right through the guard shack.

I can still see that Marine doing this big dive out of there.

I remember in all of the twisted metal and broken glass as I was laying in the back of the car upside down and it was destruction all around.

The only thing I thought about, I wasn't thinking, oh my God, have I hurt this Marine?

Am I all? It's not what I was thinking.

My only thought process was, where's that bottle?

Yeah.

And I started to scramble around looking for that bottle.

Now, I'm not looking for that bottle because I need to hide it because that would be evidence to incriminate me.

I mean, it's this, you know, I'm looking for that bottle because, based upon my experience in situations like this, once the authorities arrive and they see what's going on, it's going to be a while till I get a drink.

So I want to get the last little bit in because I know it's going to be one of these times where powers that be take alcohol away from me.

That morning, the Marine was all right.

They were patching me up at the hospital for minor injuries, and they were reading new charges on me.

And new charges is nothing new in my life.

That's just what happens in a guy's life like mine about every 90 days.

If you're living the way I'm living, right, the alcoholic life becomes the only normal one.

So new charges, this is nothing new.

But the most significant thing that happened that morning while I was at the hospital

is the Navy doctors prescribed this thing called antibuse for me.

and they sent this prescription back to the ship's doctor,

and I was now under orders to show up at sick bay every morning before work, before quarters,

and the corpsman there would put this little white pill on my tongue

and make me sit there for a half an hour to make sure it actually ingested in my system.

Over the next seven to ten days, I started to experience the most cunning, baffling, and powerful size of this disease we call alcoholism,

and that is I had no alcohol in my system, and I was slowly going insane.

You see, you take alcohol away from an alcoholic of my type, and I assume your type.

And I literally become, I start to implode in on myself.

The best way that I can describe the way I feel, when you take alcohol away from you,

and you do not give me Alcoholics Anonymous, is that I feel like a scream looking for a mouth.

And I remember counting those days on that Antibuse, just, it's been four days.

And I'm on Antibuse.

Okay.

Now it's been six days, and I'm on an abuse.

Now it's been eight days, six hours, and 15 minutes.

And I'm on an abuse.

And I started to look around that ship.

The other men, they're talking behind my back, all 300 of them.

Have you ever felt that way in AA?

The only difference is that in AA, we are talking behind your back.

It's not an illusion. It's actually happening.

Only with love and tolerance in Iceland, I'm sure.

On the 10th day, I just snapped, and I went AWOL from my ship.

That's absent without leave.

I went AWOL from my ship, and I locked myself in a little hotel room in downtown San Diego.

It's called the Plaza Hotel.

This would have been 1986.

It was $13 a night.

They have rehabbed the downtown San Diego, along with the Plaza Hotel.

I checked a couple of years ago.

It's now $13.95 a night.

And I remember I locked myself in this little hotel room and I had a bottle of vodka and a shot glass.

And as I sat on the edge of the bed looking at this bottle of vodka that was on this rickety little end table,

I remembered that the Navy doctors had given me a very stern warning about drinking on top of antibuse when they had prescribed it for me.

They had told me, son, you need to understand that if you drink on top of this antibuse, you will get one of two reactions.

One reaction is you will get violently ill.

The other reaction is, you might die.

I remember looking at the bottle and I thought, well, I wonder which reaction I'm going to get.

And I took one shot and nothing happened.

Authority had lied to me again as far as I was concerned.

I waited about two minutes just to make sure.

And I took another shot.

All of a sudden, I felt tingly in the face.

So I looked in this cracked little mirror that was in this hotel room,

and I was bright red, blotchy and purple in places.

Hmm, took another shot.

All of a sudden, I could feel my heart going,

boom, boom, boom, look at my shirt, I was drenched in sweat,

and then all of a sudden I was like,

hyperventilating, we're doing all right so far.

You...

You guys are very sick if you think this is funny.

In fact, I have proof, although you all look very, very nice,

I have proof of how sick you are.

I'm going to skip ahead a couple of years,

two years sober and Alcoholics Anonymous,

and I got an honorable discharge out of the Navy,

and one of the amends that my first sponsor and his sponsor,

real sticklers about that ninth step,

and one of the amends that I was not able to accomplish

while I was still in the Navy...

was that my parents had paid for a bachelor's degree in college.

I did not have one.

I had two choices.

I either had to pay them back or I had to go get what they had paid for.

Those were my choices.

I know that's bad news for some of you young people.

But after I got out of the Navy, that's how I wound up living in the Los Angeles area where I live now.

And I signed up to take this business telecommunications bachelor's program.

And in the first couple of semesters of this bachelor's program and telecommunications and business that I took,

I had to take a business presentation course.

It's like a speech class, I guess.

And in the first couple of days of this speech class, the instructor was randomly pointing at the students,

having them come up front one at a time.

The instructor would throw out a topic, and each student was supposed to talk for two to three minutes on whatever the topic was.

And the instructor was just doing this to see what he had to work with for the semester.

And after about seven or eight students were called on, he called on me.

And I walk up to the front of the room, and from the back of the room, the instructor shouted out,

talk about a bizarre situation in your life.

So I told them about drinking on top of anabuse.

They did not respond the way you guys responded.

They were like, there were, though, a couple of guys in the back going,

right on, dude, all right.

So anyway, I'm back in the hotel room.

I'm red face.

I'm hyperventilating.

I'm sweating.

Okay.

And I took another shot.

And up it came.

My second sponsor, the late Eddie Cochran, one of the pioneers of Southern California Alcoholics Anonymous.

He used to call this the next thing that happened to me, projectile regurgitation.

This is a different type of puking.

We all know our normal puking.

It's like you're out there in the middle of a drunk, right?

Right.

and you get a little warning.

A little sour taste in the back of your throat.

Maybe a little bit comes up into your mouth and you go,

mm-hmm.

And you know, based upon experience,

you have between 30 seconds and about one minute

to find a bathroom if there happens to be one.

If you're driving, you just got to get the window down.

If it's your friend's shoe tonight, oh, well, that's the way it goes.

But you get the warning.

Here on this antibuse, no warning.

Just, oh, boom!

Kind of a spray across the room.

And thank God, the Plaza Hotel is the type of hotel room where the toilet is in the same room as the bed.

It's a design feature, I believe, maybe to make convicts feel more at home upon release.

I'm not really sure, but it came in handy.

but I found the magic of drinking on top of an abuse that if I would hang in there and not die.

And those are the two things that you need to get going on at the very same time

if you are going to drink on top of antibus.

You got to hang in there.

There's no half measuring this.

You've got to be committed.

And at the very same time after this commitment, don't die.

If you can piece those two things together, I encourage you.

Have at it.

Have at it.

But I found that if I kept drinking and I kept puking and I kept drinking and I kept

puking for approximately one hour, some nights it was an hour and a half.

But enough of the antibuse would kick out of my system and I would quit throwing up

and I would just be left with red face, hyperventilating and sweating.

And I'm all right with that.

So I drank on top of Antibuse the last seven months of my drinking.

The only words to describe this are desperation drinking.

My second to my last drunk, I was left for dead in a motel parking lot in an area of San Diego called National City.

You probably don't know what National City is like.

National City in relation to San Diego is kind of like south central Los Angeles is to Los Angeles.

I was in the middle of a two-day drunk, and all of a sudden I thought, well, I'd like a little crack cocaine.

So I started wandering around the streets of National City going, anybody know where there's crack cocaine.

Now, take a look at me. Does this seem like a good idea? I know right now, I can see it was a very bad idea.

But at the time, I thought it was brilliant. The next thing that I remember is that there were lots of fists flying.

They were not mine. And...

Then there was a lot of blood, and that apparently was mine.

And that's the last thing that I remember, and the next thing that I remember is I came to.

And you know how when you come to you out of a blackout, you start looking for evidence as to, am I in my own bedroom?

Am I in jail? Where am I? You start looking around to see where you are.

You've heard many times in AA people trying to describe pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization

and their gratitude for sobriety where they say,

I'm just so grateful to be sober.

When I wake up, I know who's next to me.

I just can't believe it.

When I'd be drinking, I'd come out of a blackout and look next to me and they're trying to describe

some sort of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization here.

But that's not really pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.

real demoralization is when you come out of a blackout, you look next to you and you go,

wow, not bad. And they wake up and look at you and they go,

and now they're out. You see, there's always two sides to every story, you know.

Anyway, this particular morning, this particular morning when I came to, I saw men and women with surgical masks on and tools in their hands and bright lights.

And I was on an operating table.

Now, anybody in the medical profession, I don't know if it's true here in Iceland, but in the United States, if someone shows up and they're obviously under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and they don't know, and I can't talk, my jaw was broken in three places.

They are doing surgery on my jaw.

But it's against the law to give them anesthesia when they don't know what combination of alcohol or drugs is in your system.

Because the anesthesia might kill you if you have the wrong combination of alcohol or drugs.

So there I was being operated on that morning with no anesthesia.

That was a fun morning.

My last night of drinking, I'm being led out of the San Diego jail,

being transferred from military authorities over to civilian,

I mean from civilian authorities over to military authorities.

I'm in handcuffs.

And it's one of those mornings where neck muscles aren't working too well.

And there was lots of angry people around, and I'm in handcuffs.

And that morning, as I was coming up with the military police up to the quarter deck of our ship,

the officer of the deck that morning put his arm up and said,

wrong answer.

Orders have already been processed on this loser last night.

The orders are, 90 days in the brig, bad conduct discharge, or treatment.

Now, as I stood there in handcuffs that morning, apparently some sort of option was thrown out on the table.

90 days in the brig, bad conduct discharge, or treatment.

Now, as I stood there in the handcuffs, I do not remember thinking...

Oh, God, you are so good to a bum like me.

I just can't go on living this way and look at this.

You've offered me treatment.

Oh, I am so great.

I don't remember thinking or feeling that.

Nor do I remember, and this would have been more likely, nor do I remember thinking,

hey,

If I just act like I want that treatment thing, maybe I can beat this charge too.

That would have been more likely, but I don't remember that either.

I now know that it would not have mattered what I was thinking or feeling that morning because I was in handcuffs.