05-09-2010

Start Fiction:


My first drink came when I was seven, sipping my Dad's beer. It was an instant hit with my taste buds. I looked forward to helping my Dad do things around the house as each project culminated with a beer or two, and the delightful reward of getting a few sips for my hard work. As the years passed, my sips grew into drinks, then chugs and eventually I was given my own beer. Dad always thought it was cute, then funny and eventually treated it as though I was becoming a man. Little did he know those days as a budding man I was becoming anything other than a man.

Bu the time I was a senior in high school, I was already drinking at least a six pack a day, yet able to keep up with course work and maintain fairly well. I imagined college would be an easy transition, but my habit increased just by the fact it was easier to drink more with people than it was alone. Plus, at college I was able to keep beer in the fridge, not tucked behind my dirty laundry in the closet. Cold beer was a whole new world to me, but soon I was downing over a dozen beers a day. Needless to say it wasn't long before I escalated to hard liquor; whiskey to be exact.

Some how I was able to get solid C's through college, allowing me to graduate and move on to bigger and better things like working as a bar tender, for example. That was a great gig, at least until I was drinking more than the regulars, more than I made, which in the bar owner's eyes was paramount to theft. It was a sad day to lose that job; at times I wished I could have stayed on a few more months, maybe it would have killed me quicker than this slow and painful death I am experiencing from a failed liver.

But here I lay, in the hospital, lectured by every doctor and nurse that comes in to perform their latest checkup. "Still dying from a dead liver," I tell them each time they ask me how I am doing. It is beginning to drive me crazy, but then again that could also be the toxins building up in my system due to my "condition". And the odds of being a recipient from a organ donor were slim considering my addiction. However, that was not a great concern for me, I was ready.


End Fiction.