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On the days that I really fight the depression that often overwhelms me I find myself thinking a lot about when I started drinking and drugging, why I did so and how it has affected my life… I’m still no goody 2 shoes and I’m not cool with anyone telling me how to live so I don’t do it to others, but I sure think differently with a bit of age under my belt… I’ve lost friends, family and random people I once knew or knew of to the things I once lived to partake in and it’s painful… Like most adults I find myself saying: If I only knew then what I know now… I suppose that’s part of the living and learning involved with becoming more mature and growing into what we’re ultimately going to become or at least working to become… I certainly hope I haven’t realized all of my potential yet, if so, I should just give up now… Sorry, self hatred easily takes over when I have a lull in thought… In all honesty, even though I came from a large group of alcoholics on my father’s side of the family and I was pretty neglected as a child, it was curiosity and probably peer pressure that actually led me to taking my first drink at the age of 10 or 11… Jack Daniels, I’ll never forget it… My parents kept their liquor “hidden” in the top of their bedroom closet from my sister and I… Let me just say if you have children, you can’t hide shit from them past a certain age without a lock and key… Once you hit the road to go to work, kids begin exploring those interesting spaces they’re told not to enter into… I know good and well I wasn’t the Lone Ranger regarding this phenomenon… It took me all of ten seconds to find my fatass, disgusting, stepdad’s porn videos, liquor and weapons… Yes, handguns… I’d grown up around guns and had shot them under adult supervision so I never played with them, but I shudder to think how many unprepared children (well, I was a child so you could say I was unprepared too), handled guns and came closer than they know to ending their own life or someone else’s… Back to that first drink… My friend Chris, who lived in my neighborhood a few doors down, and I rode BMX bikes together… One day we went into my house during a hot summer day to snag something to drink and rehydrate before continuing on with our riding… I don’t recall the conversation leading up to me whipping out the fifth of Jack Daniels and watching his eyes light up as if it were XMas morning, but I did, and they did… Obviously, as children we had no damn clue about alcohol… How to drink it, what it tasted like, what it felt like and what it could do in a very short amount of time when enough of it was ingested… Chris, for some reason was stoked as hell… He was usually a fairly laid back, quiet, morose kinda guy, but the moment that bottle was brought out he turned into a damn spider monkey with ADHD… I remember clearly this worrying me a little, but not enough to put the bottle away and say no… In fact, I remember it being somewhat amusing… He went first, taking two huge gulps back to back… His face turned red, sweat broke out on his forehead and his top lip and he almost lost the second slug, but like a trooper he got it down… We sat watching MTV and having a few more shots before I became scared that my stepdad would see that his bottle had been tampered with… I went to put the bottle back in the closet and while doing so, Chris hit the kitchen… Apparently he found some Frito’s corn chips… Drinking must have made him hungry… I didn’t partake in the Frito’s… We sat around for about 30 minutes watching television and talking about how “fucked up” we were… I thought Chris was laying it on a bit thick for my benefit but it turns out he wasn’t… I remember hearing the chip bag hit the floor… Chris was leaning forward and hiccuping… I barely got Are you alri out of my mouth before he spewed Frito’s and Jack Daniels all over the living room carpet of my parent’s house… I don’t need to explain the smell of Jack Daniels and Frito vomit to you… I’m sure you can conjure this up on your own, but I was fucking pissed… After puking, Chris just fell out face first into the vomit… I feel somewhat bad about it now, but I grabbed his ass off the floor and made him clean up every last drop (a lot) of his regurgitation… He was clearly drunk, but I didn’t give a fuck… My parents were going to be home very soon and I damn sure wasn’t touching that shit… I remember helping him get some wet paper towels and when he cleaned up what he could with that I got out the vacuum and made him clean up the rest… He looked fucking green as he was running that old early 80’s, heavy ass vacuum around… He was pouring sweat… The minute he finished I kicked him out of my house and made him walk home to his mother… Damn, I was an asshole, but honestly I was afraid of getting caught myself… He was the one who fucked up so he paid the price… That would set a standard for any time somebody fucked up when they were drunk… If you did it, you were going to pay for it in some way… And we always did… Though I laugh about it now, things could have been so much worse… It was about a year after that experience that a kid we went to school with went to a party, funneled some Jim Beam, passed out and died at a party due to alcohol poisoning… I’m pretty sure Chris was close to having it himself that day we decided we would partake… As a former alcoholic, I’m no stranger to alcohol poisoning… I’ve had it a few times myself… I can’t tell you why I’m still here, but I can tell you the hangovers from it made me wish I were dead… No shit… So, that was my first experience with alcohol… I believe it was partial curiosity and partial peer pressure that led Chris and I to take up the bottle that dreaded day, but little did I know the seed had been planted that would waste many years of my life and cause me to hurt so many people I loved and cared for… Not to mention myself… Nature and nurture showed me who was boss… It certainly wasn’t me… Take from this little missive what you will… I appreciate you reading it…
Joe S. Thomas - Socialfit77 
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