(Today's entry comes with a few caveats: 1) I will be talking about things today that have the potential to really upset family members, so I urge them [and anyone else who is sensitive about the topic of addiction] to skip it altogether; 2) I will neither be reading nor even opening emails sent to me regarding today's entry, either good or bad in nature; and 3) I want to make it as perfectly clear as I can that I am speaking only for myself today, and that anyone mentioned in today's entry may not necessarily hold the same opinions as me when it comes to all this stuff.)

So, last week I borrowed the movie Auto Focus from a friend of mine, which concerns the sad and scary sex life of actor Bob Crane, which in turn prompted me to write a two-part entry about the nature of addiction, the nature of co-dependent relationships and the like. And I got a bunch of nice emails because of those entries, from people who completely agreed with everything I was saying; and I got a fair share of nasty emails as well, most of which were along the lines of, "How dare someone as fucked-up as you take on such a subject as addiction." And specifically I got this intriguing email from someone calling themselves "Jennifer Trenchant" (yeah, I know - "Jennifer," you really got to change that alias), which basically issued a challenge to me; to 'fess up, specifically, about my own history with addiction and co-dependent behavior, and to give all of you a little more context about my own life so to better understand my opinions about all these subjects.

And that's actually a pretty good idea, and something I've been wanting to do myself here for awhile as well, because I know I'm always dropping little half-hints about my history with this subject but never going into detail. So, I've been spending the last two days thinking about how to even write such an entry like what we're talking about, and where to even start when it comes to the subject of addiction and my own life. So, maybe it would be best to start with this confession, which I've said here before - that the one thing on this planet that terrifies me more than anything else, I mean just gives me the absolute heebie-jeebies, is the idea of contracting Alzheimer's Disease when I get older. And the reason for this is probably going to be pretty obvious to most - because my entire life, every single aspect of it, is based around the idea of thinking, of intellectualism, of using my brain as smartly and as often as I possibly can.

I mean, let's face it - I'm not strong, I'm not particularly good-looking, I'm not rich and I'm not powerful. The only reason I get laid is because of my brain; the only reason I get jobs is because of my brain. Hell, the only reason you show up here every day and read this journal is because of my brain - so I would basically be fucked if anything ever happened to that brain, and my life would basically be over. So as a result, I've had a life-long fascination with the brain, with not only its infinite capacity for learning and analyzing, but also with all its various dysfunctions as well, all the ways a brain can hurt itself or destroy itself. Because, let's face it, that's a fascinating subject, of how it is that this organ controlling the rest of our body, this organ that is apparently so infinitely smart and adaptable, could turn on itself and impair its ability to do its job.

Just what causes people to "go crazy?" What happens in a human brain that suddenly makes a person believe that space aliens are trying to abduct them, or walk around talking to people who aren't there? We're way too early in medical history to have any kind of good answers to these questions, which I suppose is why it fascinates me so much. Is it a simple chemical imbalance? Does it really all boil down to biology? Can you even make such simplistic statements about something as infinitely complex as a human brain? But what I think is even more interesting than this is the concept of a brain going only half-bad; of still being able to function in society, to maybe even appear "normal" to the majority of the people around you, but to have this one little thing about your brain that's just totally fucked up. Why do some people get so obsessed about money that they would kill another person? Why do some people date the exact wrong type of person for them, over and over and over and over, even when they themselves know that they shouldn't be dating that kind of person?

And addiction, I think, is a perfect case study of this subject, mainly because there are so many of us who go through one form of it or another in our lives. I mean, I'm certainly no exception - I've been dealing with addictive behavior since puberty, sometimes well and sometimes not-so-well, and I doubt it will be going away anytime soon. Take, for example, pretty much the worst addictive experience I've gone through in my life - back when I was an undergraduate, in fact, in the early 1990s, and developed a pretty major appetite for combining amphetamines and liquor. And that was a pretty bad experience - bad enough that I flunked out of college, bad enough that I lost my apartment, bad enough that I was homeless for two months, sleeping on friends' couches when I could, sometimes sleeping in unlocked classrooms on campus, praying that I would wake the next morning before the first class of the day arrived. And that caused a lot of long-term damage to my system as well, to the point that it's now 2005 and I can barely drink liquor at all anymore, because my liver is so wrecked from all those undergraduate years of abuse.

The rational part of my brain understands how bad amphetamines and liquor are for you, and I even understood this while I was going through the middle of the worst of it. But God, you know, I can't even mention it now, 15 years after the fact, without immediately wanting to go out and do it again; to go pop a bunch of speed, wash it all down with a 40 of malt liquor, to let that wonderful and terrible trembling sensation take over my body, to lay down and know that for the next couple of hours, I don't have to think about anything intellectual at all. And for me in particular, this is what a lot of my addictive behavior boils down to - a simple desire to shut my brain down for a little bit, to have at least a little window of time where I'm not spending every second constantly contemplating and analyzing the world around me. The self-examined life is not an easy one to live, because you get no free passes; everything that happens in a day, every person you meet, every thought you have, is subject to intense and prolonged scrutiny. And that can be exhausting, to tell you the truth, and can lead me many times to wish I could simply shut that part of me down temporarily, to simply watch a television show or hang out with my friends without my brain constantly working in overtime, constantly taking in all the details around me and constantly analyzing those details.

But I can't shut that part of me down naturally, because that's just the way my particular brain works; so I have to rely on artificial things like drugs to do it for me, which is why I've been such a fan of specific drugs at specific points in my life. And I consider myself a pretty smart guy, or at least much smarter than most of the fucking mouth-breathers stumbling their way across the planet right now, but even I am not immune from crazy behavior; that even as I rationally realize how bad drugs are for me, I still have an almost supernatural compulsion to do them. And this isn't the end of the borderline-insane behavior in my life, to be sure; see my crazy-man rant against Borders Bookstore earlier this year for ample goddamn proof of that. Even as I acknowledge that all these things are crazy, even as I acknowledge that I'm smart enough to really know better, I still occasionally do crazy things and things that are just so, so bad for me. So then it becomes an intriguing question, an almost all-consuming one - if we know these things are so bad, why do we do them anyway? What is it about our brain that has gotten this corrupted, that we can simultaneously acknowledge the danger of certain behavior and then engage in the behavior at the same exact time? This, I think, is the ultimate question humanity can ask itself; and if we can ever actually come up with an answer for it, we will ultimately live in a world without drugs, without wars even, and certainly with no one ever having a sucky relationship again in the history of time. And God, how nice of world would that be?

Ah, well, fuck - so much more to get into regarding all of this, but it's time to go run errands with my mom here in St. Charles. So hold tight, I guess - more, more, more regarding this subject come tomorrow.