My friends, as an addict I’ve done some pretty repugnant shit. I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief as well as an addict.

Many people complain about the stigma associated with addicts. I am not one of them – I earned every bit of that stigma. You want to say I was a loser? You would have been right. I was. Honesty is the best policy and I was a tornado in the lives of anyone I came in contact with. What people like us do creates that vaunted, much maligned stigma. The point of the stigma and recovery is to sober (or clean) up and choose not to be that asshole anymore. Without the stigma you’d have people trying to just sober up rather than fix what’s really wrong. No thanks, that kind of recovery is for losers and I choose not to be one of those… Yet.

The other day, driving down to Ann Arbor to pick up my daughters’ team swimsuits I saw a friend of my wife’s working the expressway exit ramp. Not panhandling, mind you, she’d become a crack whore.

Now I suppose I shouldn’t use the term “crack whore” to describe her, even if it does fit, because I wouldn’t want to offend the sensibilities of a certain segment of… Oh, f*ck that. She fell far enough to literally be a crack whore.

My friends, that is a “yet” for me. I haven’t ever been a crack whore… yet (or any other drug whore, for that matter). That “yet” is out there waiting for me, though. If I choose to pick up.

So, most of you are probably wondering, did I stop and save her from her life of drugs and prostitution?

Um, no. I sped away from there as fast as I could and called my wife. Let her deal with it. I’m a married man, folks. Jesus dealt with whores, but he was a lot better at that temptation stuff than I am. I got the hell out of there. To thine own self be true. I have no business in the presence of that crap… lest those “yets” start becoming “oh yeah, I did that yesterday’s”. No thanks.

As for your stigma, cry me a river… played on the world’s smallest violin.