Only 3 things.

This ain't no kinda country for old men, addicts, or dysfunctional cowboy poets. It's hard, at best. (pause)

Caliche: a crust of calcium carbonate that forms on the stony soil of arid regions (Webster online)

For months now, I've been reviewing and reciting a scene from my fave film, No Country For Old Men, specifically parts of the conversation between Tommy Lee Jones (Sheriff Tom Ed Bell) and Barry Corbin (Ellis, Tom Ed's father). And since I've been on sabatical here in the great Texas hill country, it seems to bubble up like natural spring water several times each day, everytime I hike around the perimeter of the reservation, on the stony cactus-thorned cliff walls or in the bottom of the dried up creek bed through the gulch below. I imagine being buried under this "hard old caliche." Or burying someone else, pick-axing thru the shale and dusty rain-starved terrain until my hands bleed. And the lines repeat, and my heart feels as hard and dry as the very ground I'm traversing. (pause)

And it goes a lil' sumpin' like kiss:

Ellis: "Well all the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from you, more is going out the door. After a while, you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it."

Ed: "I don’t know. I feel overmatched. I always figured when I got older, God would sort of come into my life somehow. And He didn’t. I don’t blame Him. If I was Him, I’d have the same opinion of me that He does."

Ellis: "I believe it was that night. She buried him the next morning. Digging in that hard old caliche. (pause) What you got ain’t nothin’ new. This country’s hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin’. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity."

12 days, 12 steps. I went to another AA meeting last night, underneath the exciting Friday Night Lights.
It was a small meeting at a little country church, but about 6 good ole boys...plenty of cussin' and fuckin' crazy stories. Aren't they all?
But I had an epiphany, in just one simple phrase, that this dude told me straight in my eyes about this "cold-blooded deadly fucking game" as he so eloquently put it to me.
Only 3 things happen to an alcoholic/addict, like me and them:
1. Locked up.
2. Covered up.
or
3. Sobered up.

I barely missed #1, a felony drug traffic rap a few years back. (lest i forget 2 DWIs over the last 20 years)
I have countless times barely missed #2, driving like a coked-up bat out of Hades, ummm-hmmm, 1 wrong move from an accidental suicide.
I've chosen #3. (pause)

I have to put a tourniquet on it. Or I'll be snorting this "hard old caliche" as a young dead man. That's no shit country.

n'm'out