In the earlier years a lot of my money came from the business of addiction. The cocaine industry was then calculated to have an annual income of between 6 to 10 billion dollars. Among the mafias, the drug cartels, and even the Peruvian guerillas fighting for their political ideals, I had a small piece of the action for my own personal “ideals” (a moral corruption with which I’m still dealing in shame). But other than feeding a lucrative addiction, I never gave the disease much thought. Until yesterday.
I was doing pull-ups when some middle-age guy walked up to the big glass windows that stretch across the entire front of the health club. Maybe he was a father, a husband, a divorcee, or a CEO of some publicly traded company — but he definitely wasn’t a gym member. Anyway, he wasn’t obese, but you knew with a single glance he wasn’t fit and healthy: he was slouching, his skin was ashy in that cancer-patient look, his gut protruded with the ugly underbelly of self-negligence. And he was smoking. What struck me odd was the irony of which he seemed completely unaware: he stopped in front of the windows of a health club and looked in at over a dozen people huffing and puffing on cardio machines while he was huffing and puffing on Camel filterless.
He casually watched gym members as if standing in front of some electronic store staring at a display of big-screen televisions, while sucking down not just one cigarette but a total of three. So you could only conclude that his addiction was so deep it stomped out his self-awareness, just as easily as he stomped out his cigarette before lighting the next.
And then we all have heard how alternative healthcare professionals consider that food is a drug. I can assure you this can’t be more true. Last week I had dinner with my lawyer, who probably weigh north of 300 pounds. I watched him eat his penne pasta and meatballs with hardly a moment of mastication, shoving his mouth full of food before swallowing. He did this for the entire meal. I don’t think the guy tasted his food once. He ate with the same urgency a cocaine addict snorts from a vial in a public bathroom.
I also had a friend who was addicted to the thought that his girlfriend was cheating on him. We’d be out for some random activity like handball, or drinking espressos at a cafe, or looking at art, and he’d start to worry that she was cheating on him at the very moment, that she was doing it at her work, at some motel, in her car behind some shopping center. He’d talk about it, and the more he talked about it the more elaborate the imagination became. He said that, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, he constantly thought about her cheating on him, even though she never gave him any reason for such consuming paranoia. I told him that he had some deep-rooted emotional hang-ups that he needed to work out. I hadn’t seen him much since.
Anyway, I need to start thinking whether or not addiction has its claws on any part of my life. I’ll have to come back to this in another post… though hopefully not.
