Photo by Kimby Caplan.

My need to photograph certain things in this world sometimes reaches a fever pitch, a compulsion that some might say borders on obsession. People talk about making a BUCKET LIST, but when I tried that, it felt a lot like I was just putting all my current and future obsessions down on paper. I don’t think my international photography agenda has quite reached the level of addiction just yet, but it is something I am always mindful of, as we know that addiction can take many forms.

In rehab, since Covid was happening and we were locked down (meaning no one could come to visit us, to chair our in-house AA MEETINGS), sometimes to change things up, we would listen to CDs of classic Speaker Meetings. And a lot of the speakers were on par with any good comedian, they were basically just solid stand-up sets. Hilarious.

However, I will never forget we listened to a CD of one lady that we eventually just had to turn off. Supposedly she was an alcoholic, but her ultimate preference was to drink expensive perfumes. Like, department store fragrances. Not because she was hard-up, and the bottle of Gucci was the only thing with alcohol content left in the house, no, she drank perfumes by choice.

We let the CD play on for a bit, all the while I’m thinking to myself— maybe I’m not really an alcoholic after all, because this makes no sense to me, I don’t relate to this one bit.

Well, it turns out, nope, I’m still an alcoholic, no one else in the room related to this woman one bit either. We voted to turn her off— probably before the whole group decided that they weren’t alcoholics either, since they’d also never felt the need to down a bottle of Obsession or CK1.

Addiction is addiction, and there are similarities in all the different form and vices it takes, but this was the first time I understood why some of the old school AA members like to keep alcohol and drug addictions in separate meetings.

Once the meeting becomes totally unrelatable to you, it stops being entirely helpful.

Personally, drugs and alcohol have always gone hand in hand for me, so I’m fine talking about them as one entity, but I do understand why this might not be the case for everyone.

For example, if someone started talking about their gambling or sex addictions, even though there are assuredly parallels to be drawn between their addictions and mine, I would invariably tune out.

Same with OVEREATING or, I don’t know, downing bottles of expensive perfumes.

Could you imagine—everyone has come to talk about their addictions to drugs and alcohol, and I hijack the meeting to discuss my concern that I might be addicted to international and EXOTIC PHOTOGRAPHY locales? Everyone can relate to that, right?

Hmm. No. That smells a lot like egotism and selfishness.

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Still not ready to go home yet? Click HERE to read about how God and an alcoholic created the Corona Virus together!