It never scared me so much, really, not before, not when it was still abstract. I’ve indulged in enough substances in my thirty years on earth not to have that somewhat irrational (or perhaps instinctively self-preserving?) horror of drug use. How is it that I had managed to drink until I fell down and hit my head on the bathtub, smoke pot from the minute I got out of bed until I went back to bed at night, to snort an eightball of coke – with very little help – in a few hours, to eat four, five, six tabs of ecstasy in one night, to wash five roofies down with a martini and still be dancing, to shoot ketamine in my thigh – and all this on a fairly regular basis for about five years straight – and just decide one day I wanted nothing more to do with it and stop, just like that? Poof. Left town, quit the drugs, slowed down on the booze, eventually all but gave that up too…effortlessly. Never missed it. How could I have done all that and quit so easily, and he end up a dog tangled in barbed wire?