came out screaming, and I didn’t stop screaming. For weeks. I was a colicky kid—my stomach was a problem from the very start. My parents were being driven crazy by the amount I was crying. Crazy? Concerned, so they hauled me off to a doctor. This is 1969, a prehistoric time compared to now. That said, I don’t know how advanced civilization has to

idea, you give the drug to the child, the child stops crying. It was a different time. There I was, on the knee of my stressed mother, screaming over her twenty-one-year-old shoulder as some dinosaur in a white coat, barely looking up from his wide oak desk, tutted under his bad breath at “parents these days,” and wrote a script for a major

If you give me all the OxyContin I can stand, I feel taken care of, and when I’m taken care of, I can take care of everybody else and look outward and be in service to someone. But without medication, I feel that I would just sputter away into a sea of nothingness.

I guess the lesson is, take every opportunity, because something might come of it.

I’m not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud.

nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better.

Panic set in. My bag was full. I was not high. There was nothing separating me from me. I felt like a little kid scared of monsters in the dark. But was I the monster?

have always thought that the ocean mirrors the subconscious mind. There’s beauty—coral reefs, brightly colored fish, spume, and refracted sunlight—but there’s something darker, sharks and tiger fish and endless deeps just ready to swallow rickety fishing boats.

Know more, say less.