Dangerous Thinking:

Sometimes I’ll start feeling smug when I start considering how much I’ve been able to accomplish, even with an ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY and a raging COCAINE ADDICTION. But the easiest way to shut down that little mental party is to think about how much MORE I could have accomplished if I’d never went down that crazy path to begin with.

However, overly dwelling on that hypothetical scenario can turn things sour in my brain very, very quickly, so it’s a bit of delicate balancing act not to go too far down either train of thought.

My mom is inadvertently helpful in this regard, as she’ll say things like, “If it weren’t for drugs and alcohol, you could have already been to the moon by now!”

And it isn’t a sour grape scenario, I swear. This really is helpful, because I truly have no desire to go to the moon. It’s never interested me. Does outer space not seem incredibly boring to anyone but me? I didn’t even find it interesting or fun when Sandra Bullock was there, and under normal circumstances, she seems like she’d be delightful.

A lot of what I like to photograph is ancient civilizations, cultural anthropology, and exotic lifestyles, but insofar as I know, at this point, there’s none of that on the moon. It sounds like it would just be me, taking pictures of Elon Musk and his friends, and that sounds awful to me. Just awful.

Now there's a bullet I am grateful to have dodged…. and so I’ll come out of my melancholy reverie just thankful that drug and alcohol addiction saved me from moon-life and a career of having to photograph that crazy man.

(Who still hasn’t made my friend her Cyber Truck, by the way… what became of her deposit, Elon? The truck might have just been a conceptual lark, but her money was real… Where is it? Hmm?)