So I'm sitting in my living room, half-watching King Arthur and surfing the Internet in the usual places, when suddenly I hear a bevy of police cars coming my way and getting louder by the moment. Then comes the loud crashing sound, shaking the neighborhood and abruptly ending the chase. It seems that someone decided that it would be a good idea to try to outrun the police, forgetting the fact that even should you be able to get away from one officer you can't outrun their radios. Then I looked at the clock, and a series of horrible memories came flooding back.
You see, I am a recovering alcoholic, and my mind immediately went back in time to the day that has changed my life in so many ways: 25 November 2010. Thanksgiving morning, 1:30 a.m. It was then that my life was put on pause, my finances came completely unraveled and have yet to recover, and my military career, the one thing I valued more than anything else, came to an ignominious end. It was that night that I got liquored up and decided it would be a good idea to go to Sheetz for some food, and proceeded to wreck my car right in front of a Pennsylvania State Trooper. It was my second DUI in 18 months, and it signaled the end of my precipitous, seemingly irrevocable dive into the bottom of a bottle. It was the last night I ever consumed alcohol, but as with everything else, once the damage has been done there is nothing left but wreckage and the aftermath. Sleepless nights, crushing depression, fear and anxiety, those were my constant companions. Rehab was my home for the better part of a month, sitting in a room filled with human wreckage, wondering why I was there, until it dawned on me that I also was a devastated shell of a human being.
The best that can be said about the whole situation is that I didn't kill anybody. Every day I say a little prayer thanking God for that gift. And it was a gift. I was a menace on the road, a motorized bullet cocked-and-locked, aimed at a random target. I received one last chance, a final reprieve, the chance to live and a chance for others to live instead of dying at my hands.
I bring this up only to qualify what I am going to say next, and that is this:
Nothing good happens after midnight.
If my experience teaches you nothing else, it's that when the alcohol starts flowing and the judgment disappears, people are playing with cosmic dice when they get behind the wheel of a car. The person tonight, with the incident happening during prime drinking hours, was almost certainly drunk. It's a lesson (s)he never learned. Please do us all a favor, learn it now. Otherwise, next time it may be you driving into a telephone pole, sitting in the hoosegow with your head in your hands, wondering where it all went wrong. Or worse, you may never get the chance for remorse, you may be sitting on a gurney in the hospital or the morgue, lying in repose next to your victims.
Now I get to try to sleep, my nightmares of that event ever reminding me of what I have lost, and what I could still lose should I again be tempted by the demon rum. Wounds may heal, but the scars are ever present.
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