It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

The fear of the drugs running out is manageable-the fear of time running down isn’t.

Addiction is a bargain with the cosmos: only stay time, and I'll remain in this holding pattern, too. The uncrossable gap between now and the past is given tangible form and conquered, daily, in the real but bridgeable gap between what I need and what I can get. Addiction creates a god so that time will stop--why all gods are created. God might be another story.

The fear of the drugs running out is managable-the fear of time running down isn't.

Heroin is a stand-in, a stop-gap, a mask, for what we believe is missing. Like the "objects" seen by Plato's man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can't see directly.