[ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ]	Mom tried everything. Grounding, cutting off my allowance, giving me extra chores, making me do volunteer work. But things just got worse. The more restrictions, the more I broke them. I snuck out, stole money from her purse, locked myself in my room refusing to do chores. She even caught me climbing down a rope from our five-story building. It was my life. I didn’t see why she needed to be interfering. And when you’re a pothead, you’re always right, everyone else is wrong. . . . . Then came the rehab. I remember the day I was sent to the principal’s office (it was middle school so we had principals not deans) and she had a bag of weed which she claimed to have found in my locker. I don’t know how she came upon it, but I didn’t ask. I remember looking at it, seeing Mary Jane lounging on the corner of the desk and feeling like I had just gotten caught having a secret love affair. Well, it was a secret love affair. But not the conventional kind. I remember getting that feeling in my stomach, the one where it feels like a boulder dropped there from a ten-story building. I remember the tennis ball lodging itself in my throat. And I remember the guilty feeling I got because all I could think about was the joint in my sock. I think my mother was there, but I’m not sure. Like I said, I have pothead amnesia. You remember feelings and ideas, but not specific people and places. I remember thinking that I wasn’t some north shore snob hopped up on coke, that I wasn’t a crackhead, that I wasn’t some acid junkie having fatal flashbacks. I didn’t belong in rehab. Who gets sent to rehab for pot? But off I went, three days a week to outpatient rehab. And the initial weeks of sobriety I remember as clear as crystal. I remember the tremors, the anxiousness, the irritability, the need to murder whoever rubbed me the wrong way, which was practically everyone. I couldn’t take it, couldn’t handle it. The invincibility I felt when I was high was stripped away and I was left as a pathetic weakling. I would yell and cry for no reason. I would be punching the bag eight hours a day. I would do push-ups until my arms turned to rubber. I would play guitar. I would write. I wouldn’t sleep. . . . . You see, with them it all comes back to G-d. If you find G-d, then you don’t need drugs. They tell you G-d doesn’t want you to be dependent on drugs and that you should pray for the strength to overcome your addiction. Personally, I think it is pure crap.