2010-03-10

Thank you, Corey Haim.

I was planning a cute-but-poignant entry in my head this morning, about seeing empty nip bottles in the trash at the bus stop, and I had it nearly composed when I logged on to Facebook this morning and started seeing the news on my feed.

God damn it, Corey Haim.

I was going to write about how I liked nip bottles, in theory. They were portable, easily concealed, fairly easily disposed of. But the problem with nip bottles, I found, was that two or three of them never quite did the job for me. So I "graduated" to buying half-pints. But they were harder to conceal and dispose of, especially since I had the habit of letting them pile up, and so I would have to take them out a couple at a time, to minimize the tell-tale clinking, because I didn't want my neighbors to think I had a drinking problem. Also, I had to keep track of which liquor store I'd purchased the last half-pint from (I had three such establishments), because if I went to the same one two days in a row, the person behind the counter would think I had a drinking problem.

And then Corey Haim had to go and be found dead in his apartment of a "probable drug overdose."

I planned on ending my clever-and-humorous screed by expressing my gratitude at not having to live that way anymore, because while recovery is undoubtedly hard work, being an active addict is way, WAY more work. All the lying and obsessing and worrying and covering up. In the end, you spend all of your energy on your addiction, never noticing that it is slowly and diabolically robbing you of any shred of sense of self. If you're lucky, you die quickly. But most people die a pretty slow and awful death, and in fact are actually dead way before the overdose, or the one too many that causes that accident. Oh, they're walking around, but look them in the eyes and you'll see no divine spark. Nobody's home.

You know, like Corey Haim.

I'm sure there will be plenty of jokes flying across the internet in the next few days. You'll pardon me if I have a hard time laughing. Paula, Jess and I had plenty of laughs at "The Coreys" over the years, but this isn't funny. It's sad. It's really fucking sad. It's sad when it's someone I vaguely remember from meetings, and it's sad when it's a "celebrity." It's sad when people don't "get it," that this shit will KILL THEM if they don't stop.

So thank you, Corey Haim, for the reminder.

lisamcc at 11:40 a.m.

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