Sometimes we do stupid things for good reasons, and we pay the price. In 1997 I moved down to Lake Charles, Louisiana to study in an MFA program at McNeese State University with a great fiction writer, Robert Olen Butler. And while he's a major force behind the writer I've become, the overall experience didn't turn out so well. 

I blended into Lake Charles like an orangutan into a roomful of ballerinas. This big, snobby Yankee guy, mellowed only slightly by his years in Colorado, did not belong at all. So I did what anyone who teeters on the edge of alcoholism would do: I drank like a fish, regularly and indiscriminately, until I felt like such a piece of shit that I had no self left and had to roll on in search of one. 

At the time, I still deluded myself into believing that I didn't have a drinking problem. It was something I did "when things got bad," but this observation overlooked the fact that things turned bad all the time. I got into fights with neighbors and colleagues. I held protracted grudges. Anything I could to do that would allow me to go home, pop open a bottle of something, and wallow in the self-pity that drinking alone afforded—well, I'd do it. 

Or, when I felt like lashing out at people and/or punishing myself for not being able to fit in, I'd go out and party my brains out with my fellow grad students and try to get laid. That's always a good solution, right? I even experimented with whiskey, even though I hated it, because I figured that's what people drank in the South. But I couldn't hack it, like I couldn't hack the place. At that time, with the amount of booze I was putting into my system, I don't think I could have hacked a place that was custom-designed for my perfect and perpetual comfort. 

Self-pity is a funny thing. When you try to drown it with drugs and booze, it proves amazingly stubborn and refuses to die, replicating itself and becoming stronger. It must be one of the hardest emotions of all to kill, the most enduring spiritual materials on the planet. This Octet for Lake Charles, Louisiana captures my discovery of that fact pretty well. 

I survived and got away from it, and my drinking has never been the same since. Did "hit bottom" in Lake Charles and come back up from there? Not sure. More likely I started realizing just how much damn effort it would take to drink myself to death like my father did, and remembered that I had other things to do with my life.

It was the end of an era. Six weeks after I packed up my little car and left Lake Charles for Colorado, I was kissing the woman I'd marry and make babies with. I decided, as the Allman Brothers sang, that "I ain't wastin' time no more." 

It was a decision I could have made a thousand times before that moment, in the second immediately prior to putting a glass or bottle to my lips.