Fluffy Puppies

This is probably going to be the meanest harshest blog entry I may ever do. So, warning, stop reading now. But I don’t give a shit.

A friend of mine is dating an alcoholic. Boyfriends for her are projects. One needs a job, she finds it for him. One needs help with a business, she creates websites and more. One needs to figure out how to be human, she helps the tin man find a heart.

Now she is onto a BIG project.

She's fixing an alcoholic. Awesome!

I’ve known a number of addicts and alcoholics in my life. I learned a long time ago, you can’t change them or their behavior. For an addict to change, they have to get to a point where they want to change. It comes down to they change or they die. There is no middle ground. If an addict is forced into rehab before it’s going to take, they relapse. Multiple times. DUI means nothing. They are not the ones at fault. Going to jail, being beaten to a pulp in a bar fight means nothing. They are misunderstood. The world doesn’t understand them.

I do understand you.

You’re a DRUNK. You love alcohol more than you will ever love a person, a family member, anything on this planet. You have a genetic predisposition to destroy yourself and take down the people around you who might care before you drive them away. You are self centered and so full of self-loathing that you need to anesthetize yourself or you would blow your fucking brains out.

My friend is dating this. She’s a smart girl. But she’s like a cult member. She has cut herself off from every friend she had before the drunk. Maybe the problem is she has never been alone. She doesn’t know who she is. And she uses the guys she dates as defining factors. Example: One boyfriend liked motorcycles. She planned to buy one. They broke up. She doesn’t have a motorcycle. But she now drinks like a fish. Most people who date alcoholics end up being emotionally and sometimes physically abused. And tend to become alcoholic themselves. It’s a co-dependency thing. You do what the partner does.

She thinks she is a force that restrains his behavior. But his bad behavior is there as a control thing. When he misbehaves, treats people like shit, she is there to smooth it over, make excuses for his rude and stupid behavior. “Oh, that’s just the way he is,” she’ll say. How much time does she spend placating him, talking him down from his crazy drunken rants? Telling him that everything is all right and that people like him and that he is just misunderstood?

He’s a DRUNK.

Self-destructive behavior is not cute. Dealing with the highs and lows of his drunken Viking Emo self-loathing mood swings cannot be worth it. The drama he is does not make him special. It’s not that he’s a misunderstood artist, HE’S A DRUNK! You can’t change him. Alcoholics are too common. DUI convictions are a bad thing, but killing someone while driving drunk is worse. How long has he been tempting fate while the world got lucky? He’s had 3 or 4 drunk driving arrests. Richard Burton was brilliant, but he was also a drunk who dragged Elizabeth Taylor into addiction.

I can only take so much of the alcoholic. Maybe 15 minutes. Dude, it's not necessary for me to be as effusive and "Wow!" about everything that his drunken brain gets excited about. And when I don't get as excited, he's hurt. "Why do you have to be that way?" It's my fault. Right. I forgot that part. Why do you have to be drunk every night? Why do you have to be an asshole?

I know him: He's Don from college. A small prodigious alcoholic who would lie about drinking, get vicious and black out.

I know him: He's Reggie from Arizona. The life of the party who drove all his friends away within a year.

I know him: He's Roger who is enabled by his wife and has switched his addiction to weed.

I know him: He's Thumper. Who drank himself to death outside at his home in the outskirts of Tucson. When his body was found 5 days later, he'd been half eaten by coyotes. (Not kidding)

And now my dear friend is his emotional liver cleaning away all his toxic drunken shit. But diminishing herself in the process and pushing away all the friends who were always there for her. Enjoy your time in his dramatic and diseased world. I hope you come out of it alive.

I hope she comes to her senses and leaves him and everything he represents.