Archives for 2008

Because I’m having trouble thinking of something coherent to write beyond “Whoo, hoo! My boss is encouraging me to use up my 80 hours of comp time which means I’m done for the year on December 23rd!” (That’s 12 days’ vacation for 5 days’ worth of comp time), I provide you with two Christmas Classics, bunny style

Both of these want Flash.

Check out the rest of the bunnies’ work at Angry Alien

The 18th Amendment
Ratified January 16, 1919

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of America’s long, dry, teetotaling spell. My great-grandfather stopped making wine for his restaurant after they passed the 18th Amendment even though the local law would have looked the other way. And even though it is gone now, replaced by a monstrous office building, the 21st Amendment was one of DC’s finest bars (OK, it was a dive but it was a quality dive).

The 21st Amendment
Ratified December 5, 1933

Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use there in of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Learn more about repeal day.

I really like the library. Because the books are effectively free (we won’t talk about the capital improvement costs that are built into the tax structure), I get an opportunity to indulge my curiosity at the library. I can pick up a book by a new author and if I don’t like it I don’t feel obligated to finish it because I shelled out $24.95 for a hard cover. Or, if I really want and my timing is good, I can pick up the hottest trendy book while it’s still trendy. More likely, though, I pick up the hottest trendy book a few years later just to see with some perspective why it was so hot and trendy in the first place.

A couple of weeks ago I snagged a hard-cover copy of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. The book itself is a rarity as it does not include the author’s note that Frey said would be added to future soft and hard cover editions of the book after Frey was first exposed as a fraud and then admitted that he had made up details of his life and presented them as fact in his memoir.

Frey’s book rose to the top of the best-seller charts after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her bookclub making the announcement on her October 26, 2005 show saying that the book is “…like nothing you’ve ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we’d come in the next morning saying, ‘What page are you on?'” according to an extensive article on The Smoking Gun.

Regardless of what I think about the quality of Frey’s prose or his annoying habit of randomly capitalizing words in his text as a lazy way of emphasizing them: indeed, throughout the book he repeats the phrase “I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal.” written just so, what surprises me most is not that Frey embellished or wholly made up incidents in his past (really, read the TSG article for a glimpse into just how big a liar this guy really is). No, what surprises me most is how many people bought his lies and just how sheltered from real life Oprah Winfrey really is.

Addicts lie. It’s a simple fact. They lie about what they’ve smoked, shot, drank, swallowed, and snorted. They lie about how much they’ve smoked, shot, drank, swallowed, and snorted. They lie about when they started smoking, shooting, drinking, swallowing, or snorting whatever their substances of choice might be. They lie about when they stopped. They lie about how much money they’ve spent buying substances to smoke, shoot, drink, swallow, or snort. They lie about who they’ve stolen from. They lie about how much they’ve stolen. They lie about who they’ve fucked while they’re high. They lie about who they’d fuck for another chance to get high. But most of all, addicts lie about why they smoke, drink, swallow, or snort whatever it is they dump into their bodies.

I’ve known several addicts in my life. For most their drug of choice was booze; easily available, socially acceptable, and 100% legal. A few, though, imbibed substances significantly harder: mini mounds of meth off the web between thumb and forefinger casually in the darkest back corner of the bar; thin lines of coke off house keys, three people jammed into a dirty bathroom stall, a valium, xanax, or a whole lot of pot to even out later; Mexican viagra by the handful like it wasn’t legally available from their own doctors. I had the misfortune many years ago to be disruptive to the sobriety of one of them which is how I know that the biggest lie any addict can tell is why he uses.

In this particular case I got a dose of honesty about what and how much and when but the story about why and how the chosen drug came to be available was in distant restrospect too convoluted to be believed. I suspect that our relationship caused stress enough that falling off the proverbial wagon to the tune of hundreds of dollars and the literal lost weekend seemed like a good idea.

Except…

The biggest lie that addicts tell is the one that blames their smoking, shooting, drinking, swallowing, and snorting on some external factor, some trauma or stress. And it’s the lie Frey told repeatedly and with brio to make his book more interesting and more saleable. My friend, I suspect, lied equally out of self-protection, protection of my feelings, and fear that the truth might fracture our friendship.

Whether addiction is a disease the way cancer is a disease is immaterial; a human being reaches a point at which she’s driven by the choices she’s made, a point at which past choices circumscribe future choices, and the initial choice to smoke, shoot, drink, swallow, or snort whatever the drug of choice may be is the first step toward that point.

So given that addicts lie, why was anyone surprised when it turned out that major dramatic elements in Frey’s book were either embellished or created out of whole cloth?

According to the UN Population Fund there are approximately 33,487,070 people living with HIV globally. The map looks something like this:

Check out their AIDS clock (it uses Flash) for more info.