Time, Clock of the Heart (Lifestyle remix)

Sex Rehab. It’s a TV show, it’s a religion.

Terror is recognizing you in those people. And I know terror.

Even their simple, made for TV techniques, however, have made a difference.

This week it was Amber Smith that showed me something about myself.

She was having a session with Dr. Drew and her mother about her now-dead alcoholic father. Somewhere in there, she starts wailing about the years she lost in a bedroom on a drugged-out haze. The time, she pleaded. Where did the time go?

Early this morning, when I first began struggling towards consciousness, I had a very vivid realization. All of THIS—the drugs, the porn, the debauchery—it’s all a reaction to a gaping hole of lost time in my life that has yet to be filled.

I’m not going to get into right now, but there was a long, drawn out stretch during my high school years where I became very acquainted with madness, and eventually the cold specter of death.

In many ways, I was a most unwilling warden of a makeshift prison hospital. I was a teenager. I was dealing with one of the hardest things humans have to go through, and I was completely unprepared for it.

As a result, there is the aforementioned hole of missing time in my life. Compounded with the fact that I was raised by good, hardworking people not exactly versed in the art of parenting, the results have been profound, to say the least.

For one it explains my last two relationships in alarming clarity.

It makes me realize that to be happy in life and in love, I have to finally make some hard admissions to myself. Then I have to deal with them.

Decisions that I only wish the people that came before me had been allowed to make. That they even knew that such options existed.

This one’s for both of you.

2. "Do another line and unzip my pants."