I am fortunate

I I feel incredibly fortunate tonight.  I wont write about my visit to Kay today as it was quite normal.  What I intend to write about briefly is why I feel fortunate.  So many in their later years live a life brought on by going into drugs and alcohol in their younger years.  I just read an article  hris Hedges in informationclearinghouse.info which is normally a blog for exposing the depredations of Government and criminals.  Today it included an article by Chris Hedges  about an interview he had with a recovering addict.  I feel so fortunate that I did not fall into drugs and alcohol.  Perhaps in my younger days drugs was not as plentiful as they are not long after I was young and susceptible to their lure.  My condition as dirt poor in the depression was not something to keep me out of drugs. Shortly after  or during my impressionable later teen years I had developed a hate and fear of addiction.   Alcohol was a different matter but I got out of the lifestyle that would have gotten me into it when I met Kay and I also hated what it had done to my father.  Who, by the way, got out of alcohol dependency.  I encourage everyone to click on the link and read the article. 

I became more anti drugs when I became acquainted with a woman who lost her daughter to drugs.  This woman was on a crusade to fight drugs and asked me to make a slide show on the evils of drugs and it's consequences.  Up to this time in my early thirties I had not had one puff on a marijuana cigarette.  I had never had the desire as I hated being dependent on drugs that mixes up the mind. I had plenty of things to keep my mind busy.  I made the slide show and we showed it at various places including the UW.  Eventually we had done about all we could do which did nothing at all of course and we sort of disbanded out efforts to fight drugs.  During the time that Kay went to Singapore with Edith Brown the woman who I had collaborated with to make the slide show invited me to a party at a friends house. I went and all it was was a party to smoke dope and other things I suppose.  It was here that I took just one puff on a marijuana cigarette.  Just one.  This got a laugh from the onlookers.  But I decided that I would never smoke marijuana.  I thought it  was ironic that the person who had been harmed so greatly by drugs was now into drugs. 

I credit my marriage to Kay and my association with her culture to my ability to keep off drugs and alcohol. I am very fortunate.