I was drunk four months after I checked out of the alcohol treatment center.

I got alcohol treatment twice. I was forty-one and had spent the better part of the last thirteen years in a blissful boozy haze. I still didn’t need some alcohol treatment egghead telling me what my problem was. I didn’t have a problem…at least not according to me. That whole alcohol treatment thing? Save it for somebody else.

I was drunk four-and-a-half-months after I checked out.

I got alcohol rehab thrice. I was forty-nine the third time. I’d chased away two wives. And four kids. I had three drunk driving arrests on my record. I thought about booze when I woke up in the morning, and when I went to bed at night. It’d gotten to the point where I was consumed by Want, and by Need…to the point where I lost any sense of who I was, except to the extent that I could get my lips around the bottle.

I paid attention to the alcohol treatment eggheads, that third time. I followed the alcohol treatment program. And it was hard. And I hated it. And it was the best thing I’ve done, in my whole entire life.

Funny what you can hear if you have the guts to listen.