ADDICTION AND FAMILY

Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (New York: Norton, 2004) ("The Zen master tells me that my body is the communication of my father's body. This is a hard fact, he says. By now I've already spent countless hours in twelve-step meetings, perched on a folding chair, listening to sorry-assed people tell sorry-assed tales in one church basement after another. I've heard of a pilot talk about waking up in Paris, not remembering he had flown himself and three hundred passengers in the night before. I've befriended a guy who poured gasoline on his hand and lit it, just to get the morphine. It takes a year to realize I am no different form anyone else. The Zen master says that if I can understand the nature of my body I will understand the cosmos--this is one promise of Buddhism. Unfortunately, I learn, the path to understanding is through my father's body, which, it seems, is my body, inescapably. To be caught in a notion of self is bad. To be caught in a notion of nonself is worse. I saw him sleeping in the sun on a bench on the Esplanade, He  rose and staggered to the edge of the river to piss. Jesus said, Forgive! Buddha said, Awaken! The first warm day of spring, families out for a Sunday stroll. I watch them watch him, saw how they steered clear. That fucking little girl." Id. at 292-293.).