Mexican Americans like education so they go to night school and take Spanish and get a "B"

I want full credit for the stuff that comes to me as easy as breathing. 

I was born on third base and I want credit for the tripple.  I'm what my Scottish friends would call a "clever cunt".  Too slick for my own good.

Nothing that I'm good at took any effort, practice or hard work.  I've been skating by on raw talent, intellectual horsepower and innate ability my entire life.

I tell myself "better" is the enemy of  "good enough" but that's just because I've never had to work hard to be good enough.  And really who wants to work hard?

I've been getting by on good enough all my life, made money, got to do interesting things.  My life has been, overall, a pretty good life.

w/ my nephews who both are now over six feet tall and tower over me

Interviewing Dave Underwood sitting at Dave Letterman's desk

there is no substitute

Pretty much I have done whatever I wanted to do. All without major effort, practice, study, or following the rules.  Almost always figuring it out on the fly assiduously avoiding anything that was hard or difficult.

The problem now is I have a life-threatening illness that is going to require me to develop and maintain a set of skills that demands maintenance and application over time.

Steadfast and dogged practice.  Day in and day out, no excuses, stick-to-itiveness, fucking intestinal fortitude whatever the fuck that is.

It's Sisyphian, the rock up the hill guy.  Or Promethian, the guy who gets his liver eaten every night by the eagle... basically it's  mythological torture.

That's what the requirements of recovery feel like, a lifetime of torture and torment, boredom and drudgery spanning from now into infiniti.  Okay that's a little melodramatic but it doesn't sound like rainbows and lollipops.

I can do it for a little while when the pressure's on... when the guns at my head. But when the immediate crisis blows over it's almost impossible for me to generate an attitude that will motivate me to do what's necessary to maintain vigilance.

Every time I've relapsed I've ended up in the gutter eventually.  The last 3 or 4 times closer and closer to death.

What does it take? Why is there a hole in my logic?

Why can't I just phone this in like I've done everything else? I know how to share great in meetings, I'm pretty sure I can fake the humble sincerity crap... that should be worth a C+/ B- right?

Addiction, it seems won't be charmed, conned, manipulated or pitched.  In fact just the opposite addiction does the charming.

The last 10 years have been a study in how to keep me sick. Dogged practice on how to keep me away from what's good for me.  Advanced exercises and homework in isolating me from those who would help me stay the course and recover.

So it's going to be a fight,  a battle.   I sure didn't think of it that way previously.   A fight to the death for which I'm uniquely illprepared.

A middle-aged adolescent. A dilettante, pampered and glib and unscarred.  All the hardship I've seen as been self-inflicted but I guess hardship is hardship and it's time to suit up and fight or lay down and die.

Addiction and Recovery is pass-fail, life or death.  I can't schmooze the teaching assistant and pull a "C".

It's not a sprint it's a marathon. It's not one skirmish, it's not one battle it's a war.  One that I will fight for the rest of my life and for war... you need generals.

Mexican Americans love General Zapata who said:

Evidently they also love spring time, and flowers and white girls named Debbie too... but who doesn't?