Review: Addiction

I look around me and there are empty cartons of cigarettes and gallon-jugs of wine: perhaps the gravest testament to my addiction. But it is not the nicotine or the alcohol, as you might have presumed; it's the savings.

It's the savings that led me to drink. Indeed, it's the savings that drove me to beat my wife. One day, I asked the question that should be obvious to any man in my position: "why am I paying someone else to do this?" Perhaps it was vanity or the pressures of fashion. Or perhaps it was the tennis elbow I sustained from the many smackings I'd delivered over the years, with such grace, to the riff-raff.

Ah, how the savings beckon me as I belly-crawl my way out from under the toppled bookcases that are used to make my presence known to the prying staff (not my employees, mind you!). As the weight of a set of encyclopedias threatens to crush into oblivion the last of my many fingers, the savings to be had by purchasing these hefty tomes, which once filled me with a flirtatious giddiness, now reveal their true, duplicitous nature. Ah the treachery of knowing what I might have spent!

I would escape, once and for all, this foul reality, but the savings, unfortunately, are everywhere I intend to be. So, I must go to the uninteded places: high-end perfumeries (are the only ones that come to mind). There are no savings to be had here.

For most addiction, there is a kind of cure in that the sufferers try to find God in a some sense. But here, too, I am bombarded with the savings. "Jesus saves," they say. So, there is no consolation in the divine. It is as frail and vulnerable to the addiction as we. Perhaps this is the allure of the savings. Perhaps we believe that we can approach the divine by appealing to its faults. But fault, even with humans, is precisely what one doesn't want to admit. You may appeal to my faults, but insofar as I deny them, you haven't approached me. In fact, you've put me off. I believe the divine shares my attitude. But this is just an example of what I mean.