I Weaned Myself On The

I Read A Lot. I Always Have, But In Those Two Years I Gorged Myself On Books With A Voluptuous, Almost Erotic Gluttony. I Would Go To The Local Library And Take Out As Many As I Could, And Then Lock Myself In The Bedsit And Read Solidly For A Week. I Went For Old Books, The Older The Better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean Tragedies, A Dusty Translation Of Laclos - So That When I Finally Resurfaced, Blinking And Dazzled, It Took Me Days To Stop Thinking In Their Cool, Polished, Crystalline Rhythms.

I Had Been Right: Freedom Smelled Like Ozone And Thunderstorms And Gunpowder All At Once, Like Snow And Bonfires And Cut Grass, It Tasted Like Seawater And Oranges.

You Start Admiring Someone Who's Famous For Actually Doing Something---imagine That---and I Swear To You I Will Buy You Every Item In Her Entire Wardrobe. But Over My Own Dead Body Will I Spend My Own Time And Money Turning You Into A Clone Of Some Brain-dead Waste Of Skin Who Thinks The Pinnacle Of Achievement Is Selling Her Wedding Shots To A Magazine.

Regardless Of The Advertising Campaigns May Tell Us, We Can't Have It All. Sacrifice Is Not An Option, Or An Anachronism; It's A Fact Of Life. We All Cut Off Our Own Limbs To Burn On Some Altar. The Crucial Thing Is To Choose An Altar That's Worth It And A Limb You Can Accept Losing. To Go Consenting To The Sacrifice.

I Weaned Myself On The Nostalgia Equivalent Of Methadone (less Addictive, Less Obvious, Less Likely To Make You Crazy): Missing What I Had Never Had.