File under self-help.

            She wore the ugliest lime green hat.  The oversized floppy bill dangled over her sunken eyes until it gripped the slightest breeze forcing it to escape my mother’s head.  The hat bounced across the yard slamming into the wire fence crucifying itself.   This happened every summer Sunday afternoon as she obsessively tended her tiny yard crop of sickly under-colored carrots, paper-thin beans and other forgettable vegetables.

            I must have been six, maybe seven.  It must have been six-months, maybe seven-months.  It was a cat, a fluffy little tiger striped ball of annoyance that everyone ooh’d and aah’d over.  It was a blob of nauseatingly cute softness that repeatedly used my mother’s hobby garden as a private litter box.  My most prominent memory is of the ammonia stench that overwhelmed the small corner of the yard where the carrots and peas and beans eventually turned a crisp dry dead yellow brown.

            Over time, her weak bounty of crops became nothing more than a foul smelling organic graveyard.  Taking action, as she always did, my mother created an elaborate wire cage out of garage scraps consisting of old fence posts, aluminum foil, some rusty chicken wire and a few random tetanus enhanced screws and nails.  The creepy infection laced trap was meant to keep the chemical burning urine off of the meager crops. 

            The wire cage stood proudly reflecting the bright summer sun in a series of starry blinding twinkles.  But that little gaggingly adorable kitten, full of stubborn desire, pushed his way through the tangling web of wires, stretching and pulling and tearing fur and skin as it continued day after day to lay waste to the plant life in the garden.  Each morning it left patches of soft puffy hair and dried blood scattered among the clumps of lifeless topsoil.  Stubborn and stupid, it continued to damage itself just to use the garden for a toilet until it hobbled along with foul infected paws and dark purple scabs covering its once cute face.

            I know what you are thinking now.  “You said this was self-help.  How is this going to help me?  I don’t have time for this.  I have a meeting to get to.”  Please allow me a moment of literary flair.  I’ll get to the crunchy stuff soon enough.  Relax and enjoy.  If you did that a little more, maybe you wouldn’t be here looking for help.

            Now, when my angry mother saw the little tragic mess of a cat, limping and howling out a sad meow frighteningly similar to a human baby cry, she pursed her lips and her eyes went all dopey and liquid, just like you are doing now.  Her anger dissolved.  She took the dirty cat into the house with his foul paws and disgusting face and cleaned him up, giving him milk and soft food out of a can.  After the kitten was suitably repaired, my mother let him back out into the suburban jungle.  A few weeks later, back in the false wild, the stubborn little kitten managed to tear his paws up again on my mother’s wire cage of a garden.  Eager and excited, my mother played doctor once more.

            But what I noticed wasn’t the kitten and his disgusting oozing wounds.  Instead my incredibly observant six year-old mind noticed a different cat, the seasoned cat that crouched stealthy in the bushes, never approaching the wire wrapped garden, watching and observing, behaving like a proper cat.  It was clean and unscarred, silent and cautious.  It hunted moths and mice and stalked the house, hoping to find a way inside to have a bite of that soft food from a can and tongue wash of fresh milk.  But he was only shooed away angrily by my mother in her green hat and referred to as mangy, feral, stray.  

            The smart cat was punished.  The stupid cat was rewarded.  This changed my life.  And it can change yours.

            Now we get to the part you were waiting for.

            How?

            Drugs.

            Let’s start with where you are.  Where you are is stuck somewhere in a mediocre job making a mediocre paycheck to pay your mediocre bills and have mediocre intercourse in the missionary position with your average looking wife or husband every other Saturday.  You tell yourself it could be worse.  You watch the news and read sensationalized internet articles about people who have it worse.  This keeps the gun barrel out of your mouth.

            Let’s talk about who you are.  Not your name, rank and serial number, but who you really are.  No one.  A grain of sand.  No one cares about you any more than any other piece of grit or debris washed up on a beach built from an infinite number of grains of sand.  Oh, I know, people care enough to say happy birthday and invite you over for Christmas.  But other than your family, no one really cares.  And how much does your family really care anyway?  Compared to the way they felt about when you were six years old, or better yet, six-months.

            You are the smart cat crouching in the bushes, doing everything right, being rewarded with mediocrity and camouflage.  You aren’t who you set out to be.  Don’t kid yourself.  I know, I know.  You tell yourself it could be worse.  But you’re wrong.  This is as bad as it gets.

            Don’t pull the trigger just yet, because the good news is; you can make it better.  You can make it better by making things worse.  You can be the cat with the lacerated face and infectious paws that gets to eat canned food and lick milk, rather than the mangy stray who gets the stiff end of a broom.

            How?

            Drugs.

            Have you ever noticed how much credit an addict receives for turning his life around?  Have you ever noticed that all innovative creative types have a sob story to legitimize their success?  Has anyone ever patted you on the back or congratulated you for not shoving a needle in your arm or drinking yourself into a coma every night?  But they get all smiley and gooey eyed when some self-inflicted over-dramatic addict asks for help.  And they will spend the rest of their lives checking up on the rehabilitated addict, and telling stories of their integral part of saving their life.

            You want success in something you’ve always wanted to do?  Tired of being in the cubicle doing nothing, carrying rocks from one end of your brain to the other and then back again?  Want to live that dream you had of being a rock god, or fashion icon, or screaming mad artist?

            Drugs.

            You need an addiction.  But not just any addiction, so don’t run out to the nearest corner and start demanding heroin from the nearest tweaker urinating in a garbage can.  You need a well thought out addiction, an addiction with a plan.  You need a downward spiral, controlled.

            So here it goes.

            Step one is to open up a second bank account.  You’ll need two bank accounts, full bank accounts, as full as you can afford.  An addiction isn’t cheap.  And getting back on your feet when the addiction is over is even more expensive.  One account is for your drugs, the second for your recovery.  If you are now saying to yourself “I can’t afford this,” then this is not for you.  You are not committed to changing your life.  Go away.  Buy a Tony Robbins CD.  Good riddance.

            The hardest part is making sure you don’t dip into the recovery account.  And trust me, if you do this right, you’ll want to.  In fact, you’ll think you need to.  To secure this account, make sure you screw up a few things on the account:  random password, wrong social security number, incorrect address.  Use a series of these things.  The idea is to make the money only accessible to a very patient version of you, a version of you that can go through several painstaking steps to get the money flowing.  Something a sweaty panting agitated addict could not possibly do without being pulled from a bank by an over muscled security guard.

            The next step, find a new job.  I don’t care how much you like your co-workers, or how sexy your receptionist is in her casual Friday black skirt.  As much as people like helping an addict, it can really put a damper on your career and you may need a job where you haven’t burnt bridges in your slobbery addict state when you recover.  These people will be your future backup plan if your art hasn’t sold, or your band hasn’t signed, or you haven’t been featured on reality television.

            
            Don’t make friends at your new job.   The poor bastards will begin to hate you soon enough so there is no point wasting your energy.

            
            Now for the third step, let’s talk about drugs.  You need to find an addiction.  This is harder than you might think.  Let’s evaluate your options.

1. Alcohol:  This would seem to be the most simple and easily identifiable addiction, but alcoholics are a different breed that tend to draw a different sort of sympathy.  The world is choked with alcoholics.  It’s very pedestrian and very sloppy.  Since the entire world drinks, probably too much, it will be an uphill battle full of nasty nights and terrible mornings before anyone even suspects a hint of addiction.  Lastly, no matter your drug choice, you may need to eventually get arrested to solidify the addiction and rid your friends and family of doubts.  The only real way to get tossed behind bars with alcohol is driving under the influence, which is very much frowned upon.  The sympathy you were looking for may manifest into something negative.

2. Marijuana:  Yeah, you smoked a lot of pot in college.  This does not qualify.  While I am sure it can be a serious addiction for some, getting the world to believe you have a terrible problem will be an even more monstrous battle than alcohol.  More than likely you will end up fat and lazy.  Avoid at all costs.

3. Heroin:  By all means, a definite yes for the bravest of men.  This is the definitive addiction.  But please realize that this is a serious drug for serious people only.  There are no doubts or questions surrounding the validity of heroin addiction.  This would be a bold choice.  Probably a little too bold.  If you can handle heroin in your life, well, your probably don’t need to be reading this because you are spawned from a different seed than most.  Try it if you’d like.  Just remember that you will be staring into the abyss, and you might not like what is staring back.

4. Sexual addiction:  No.  Just no.  Let’s not even go here.  This is the wrong direction, as much as you may enjoy it.  You will garner no sympathy.  In fact, I think you will end up with the opposite.  Stay away.

5. Prescription pills and cocaine:  This is my recommendation.  I combine these two because both are revered as serious drug problems in our modern culture, without the silly mess of alcohol or the deadly noose of heroin.  They are both ultra-trendy and get plenty of pop-media coverage.  And they tend to complement each other well.  Cocaine is expensive and can quickly rob your bank account before anyone even realizes you are using.  So cut your use with pills to extend the life of your problem.  Once you are discovered, you will immediately be categorized as an addict.  There is no casual user in the eyes of the layperson.

            
            Now the hard part is over.  You are on the last step, addiction.  There’s no trick here, no special path, just start using.  Whenever you can.  And when you can’t; do it anyway.  Addicts don’t worry about being late for work or missing a credit card payment or showing up for their nephew’s soccer game with a bloody nose and smelling of vomit, so neither should you.  This is important to remember.  You cannot do this part time.  You cannot be a part time addict.  So use, constantly.  In the morning, for dinner, when you have a stomach ache, when you can’t sleep, when can sleep, when you are angry, when you are horny, when you are alone, when you are with friends.  If you follow that pattern, you will fully submerge yourself into the drowning depths of addiction faster than you are able to notice.  Don’t worry; you need not look for any special signs or signals to let you know when you’ve reached full-blown addiction.  You probably won’t be conscious of it, but the world around you will.  And that is the point of the entire exercise.

            
            And that’s it.  Seriously, the rest is just floating off into your dreams.  There is nothing for you to do after this because the world will take care of you.  No matter how much of a bastard you become, someone will be there to pull you out of your hole.  Friends and family will emerge from the darkness and help you find recovery, pay your bills, mow your lawn, get your cavities filled, bake a cake.  Just sit back and let everyone feel good about being a vital part of your “healing process.”  Don’t feel guilty.  You are helping them as much as they are helping you.

            So network and make new friends.  Become a hero.  Talk at a high school.  Sleep with the people who are helping you.  You will be amazed at your sudden level of freedom and power and respect.  Do everything you have ever wanted to.  Want to backpack across Europe?  Tell your buddy that you haven’t seen in three years, the one that is helping you with your car payments, that you’ve always wanted to travel abroad.  The two of you will soon be lounging in Rome discussing how the Italian countryside really helps your sobriety.

            
            You are now the person you have always dreamed of being.  Loved and respected by the world around you.  Constant attention.  Set the bar high and never be afraid to tell people you are a recovering addict.  It is a permanent disease after all.

            
            So the next time someone tells you he or she is a recovering addict, you can smile and wink.  You know there is a good chance they pissed in mom’s worthless garden on purpose, because the world loves a happy ending, and someone has to give them one.