## Metadata - Author: [[Joshua Mohr]] - Full Title: Model Citizen - Category: #books ## Highlights - When I was in kindergarten I stabbed myself with a pencil, on purpose— ([Location 34](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=34)) - It’s impossible to describe real shame to somebody who hasn’t thrived on self-destruction. ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=111)) - Denis Johnson’s Angels. The other was Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live. ([Location 195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=195)) - It’s that piece of cake you shouldn’t eat, that stranger you shouldn’t kiss. That bet you shouldn’t place. That cocktail that’s the same as swallowing smallpox. That bug you chase. That computer you can’t close. That nicotine parching your lungs, turning them to jerky. That blade you wanna run across your skin. That finger down a throat. That line of drugs. That blaring self-hate racing around your skull, screaming its dreary predictions. That pill that’s supposed to help, so why isn’t it—why can’t anything fucking help us? ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=269)) - wanted a lurid, loud affair, not with a woman, but with a bottle, a baggie, a syringe. I wanted to check into the most squalid motel I could find and drink so much that I threw up. And then drink some more. Then do every drug. Then drink some more. And then let the next wave of alcohol poisoning spray out of me like a reverse baptism. ([Location 285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=285)) - I still think about booze and drugs every day, ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=292)) - Drugs helped me for years. That’s what nobody tells you. Drugs help until they don’t. But by then, you can’t stop. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=339)) - You don’t steer trains, ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=538)) - Of course, you can only relapse if you’ve gotten clean, and you can only get clean if there are things you promise yourself that you’re never going to do, and you saw each of these promises in half like magicians’ assistants, this litany of lines you will never cross, coded beliefs that are sanctified and unimpeachable, maybe a moral compass that will always point in the other direction from certain degradations, certain bad ideas, but you trample these demarcations. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=777)) - electric shame—that accompanies a relapse is something to behold. ([Location 791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=791)) - They were teetotaling cowards. They were scared to live recklessly. They were cautious and safe and timid, all things I never wanted to be. ([Location 819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=819)) - The Rattler was wrong about the pills. They weren’t nuts. In fact, they weren’t even drugs. They were soul salve. You ingested a couple and suddenly all the things that made you ache dissipated. ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=1557)) - A couple days after that, we were told to take out our phones and delete every contact. ([Location 1911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=1911)) - The counselor was prepared for our incredulity. Every new crop of addicts must have reacted the same way. He countered our protestations with “Most of those people in your phone don’t care about you. Delete everyone and make them earn their way back in. If they’re good to you, reprogram their numbers. Otherwise, never talk to them again.” ([Location 1912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=1912)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Watch and I were chaos junkies. I’d once sucked his cock on Baker Beach, in front of a bunch of our friends, but mostly we were interested in mayhem, not sex. ([Location 1931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=1931)) - dressed in ill-fitting and bland Costco clothes. “Chickens? Where?” ([Location 1939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=1939)) - and my drug of choice is MORE.” ([Location 1956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=1956)) - That was the problem with being young in rehab. He hadn’t sacrificed enough people, hadn’t dismembered every promise he made, hadn’t doctored and botched his dreams, leaving them for dead. The rest of us had left no humiliation uninhabited. ([Location 1972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=1972)) - “They look so normal,” said Lelo. ([Location 2074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2074)) - “Does anyone know where the word addiction actually comes from? It’s Latin. From the word addictus. Meaning to devote yourself entirely. To worship.” ([Location 2079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2079)) - know where the word addiction actually comes from? It’s Latin. From the word addictus. Meaning to devote yourself entirely. To worship.” ([Location 2079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2079)) - Lelo quit drinking, too. Not that she was a drunkard, but she did it out of solidarity. It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me. ([Location 2158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2158)) - It barely looked 3D—2½D?—is that a thing?—but we couldn’t pull our eyes from the screen. Not caring at all. Because 2½D was as close to real life as I was capable of right then. ([Location 2180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2180)) - Keeping it a secret makes it worse, empowering these cravings, inflating their influence. ([Location 2252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2252)) - Writing about relapse roulette reminds me of this ([Location 2310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2310)) - There should have been no safer place on earth. A boy, in a building filled with cops. He and I went in there. You should stay out here. ([Location 2746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2746)) - It’s because everyone has an alcoholic or junkie in their family, and we don’t want to think about them going back out. They are our mothers and fathers, our children, our siblings. They are grandparents and lovers and spouses and friends we love like blood relations. ([Location 2804](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2804)) - It’s fine to have a checkered past. In fact, we dig people with histories splattered in mistakes. It gives them perspective, wisdom. We like it when they regale us with stories from their tawdry mythologies. So long as these stories are told from a removed distance. So long as they fit into a tidy, bleached binary: These people used to be dirty, and now they’re clean. Complimentary opposites. Cause and effect. Or maybe it’s not about someone you love. ([Location 2809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2809)) - that drugs have their hooks in me, and it’s almost impossible to rip a hook from a fish if it’s been swallowed. ([Location 2905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=2905)) - Beer pours into my mouth. All I have to do is swallow and I’m free. There’s nothing in the world I want to do more than drink this beer. There’s nothing in the world I want to do more than not drink this beer. ([Location 3652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=3652)) - Can a maybe-sip of beer become a nuclear weapon? Will one maybe-swallow take our family of three and make them a family of two? ([Location 3669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=3669)) - The band is Mount Eerie. The record is called A Crow Looked at Me. It’s written by Phil Elverum. ([Location 3684](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=3684)) - “Last time it rained here,” Phil is singing to his dead wife, “you were alive still.” ([Location 3700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=3700)) - Then I’m ready to go to church, which in my life means only one place of worship: City Lights bookstore. ([Location 3707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=3707)) - All it means is that we should stop striving to be fixed and simply settle into that gruesome realization: life is always messy, and no one will ever fix us. ([Location 3793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=3793)) - “AA is hard for smart people,” he says. “You think too much.” ([Location 3879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=3879)) - I’d hoped to be nearing a decade clean as this book wraps up, hoped you’d get to see me as a person showing up and honoring his family and responsibilities, even if his mind is its own Fukushima. ([Location 4719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088DR9DDR&location=4719))