We died of pneumonia in furnished rooms where they found us three days later when somebody complained about the smell.
We died against bridge abutments and nobody knew if it was suicide
and we probably didn’t know either except in the sense that it was always suicide.
We died in hospitals, our stomachs huge, distended and there was nothing they could do.
We died in cells, never knowing whether we were guilty or not.
We went to priests, they gave us pledges, they told us to pray, they told us to go and sin no more, but go. We tried and we died.
We died of overdoses, we died in bed (but usually not the Big Bed)
We died in straitjackets, in the DT’s seeing God knows what, creeping skittering slithering shuffling things.
And you know what the worst thing was? The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.
We went to doctors and they gave us stuff to take that would make us sick when we drank on the principle of so crazy, it just might work, I guess, or maybe they just shook their heads and sent us to places like Dropkick Murphy’s.
And when we got out we were hooked on paraldehyde or maybe we lied to the doctors and they told us not to drink so much, just drink like me.
And we tried, and we died.
We drowned in our own vomit or choked on it, our broken jaws wired shut. We died playing Russian roulette and people thought we’d lost, but we knew better.
We died under the hoofs of horses, under the wheels of vehicles, under the knives and boot heels of our brother drunks.
We died in shame.
And you know what was even worse, was that we couldn’t believe it ourselves, that we had tried.
We figured we just thought we tried and we died believing that we hadn’t tried, believing that we didn’t know what it meant to try.
When we were desperate enough or hopeful or deluded or embattled enough to go for help we went to people with letters after their names
and prayed that they might have read the right books that had the right words in them, never suspecting the terrifying truth, that the right words, as simple as they were, had not been written yet.
We died falling off girders on high buildings, because of course ironworkers drink, of course they do.
We died with a shotgun in our mouth, or jumping off a bridge, and everybody knew it was suicide.
We died under the Southeast Expressway, with our hands tied behind us and a bullet in the back of our head, because this time the people that we disappointed were the wrong people.
We died in convulsions, or of “insult to the brain”, we died incontinent, and in disgrace, abandoned .
If we were women, we died degraded, because women have so much more to live up to.
We tried and we died and nobody cried. And the very worst thing was that for every one of us that died, there were another hundred of us, or another thousand, who wished that we could die, who went to sleep praying we would not have to wake up because what we were enduring was intolerable and we knew in our hearts it wasn’t ever gonna change.
One day in a hospital room in New York City, one of us had what the books call a transforming spiritual experience, and he said to himself “I’ve got it .” (no, you haven’t you’ve only got part of it) ” and I have to share it.” (now you’ve ALMOST got it) and he kept trying to give it away, but we couldn’t hear it. We tried and we died.
We died of one last cigarette, the comfort of its glowing in the dark.
We passed out and the bed caught fire. They said we suffocated before our body burned, they said we never felt a thing , that was the best way maybe that we died, except sometimes we took our family with us.
And the man in New York was so sure he had it, he tried to love us into sobriety, but that didn’t work either, love confuses drunks and he tried and we still died.
One after another we got his hopes up and we broke his heart,
Because that’s what we do.
And the worst thing was that every time we thought we knew what the worst thing was something happened that was worse.
Until a day came in a hotel lobby and it wasn’t in Rome, or Jerusalem,
Or Mecca or even Dublin, or South Boston, it was in Akron, Ohio, for Christ’s sake.
A day came when the man said I have to find a drunk because I need him As much as he needs me (NOW you’ve got it).
And the transmission line, after all those years, was open, the transmission line was open. And now we don’t go to priests, and we don’t go to doctors and people with letters after their names.
We come to people who have been there, we come to each other. We come to try and we don’t have to die………
Because another one died Friday...that's three this year that we know personally...
PALM COAST, FL -- The daughter of a Marine who served in the Vietnam 
Sgt. Michael Gares died last week in Riverside, California of natural causes.
His daughter, 18-year-old Jennifer Gares, and her brother, Andrew, live in Flagler County and could not afford a plane ticket to fly out to his funeral.
During the funeral, which took place at Riverside National Cemetery, the Patriot Guard Riders stood in the family's place.
As a tradition, the serviceman's burial flag is handed down to a widowed spouse, a parent, or the oldest child in the family.
When the riders learned Sgt. Gares' family was in Florida and his burial flag was to be mailed back home, they stepped in, and organized a hand delivery.
"The way the vets feel, this is a flag of honor. It is treated with respect and a whole bunch of love from the combat brotherhood," said Ernest Tucker, a Vietnam Veteran.
For six days, the flag traveled on the back of motorcycles, from rider to rider, state to state.
Read the comments, too.
What did Democrats expect with a bill like this? Roses and hosannas?
Byron York:As a reporter, how does one keep from rooting for the home team? And as a government official, how does one flack for the boss while ignoring the questions any journalist should ask?
This week Douglass undertook to debunk a video going around the Internet showing Barack Obama, before he became president, endorsing a single-payer national health care system. “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan,” Obama said at a conference in 2003, as he was beginning a run for the U.S. Senate. “That’s what I’d like to see.”
A viewer might reasonably conclude that, at least in 2003, Barack Obama was a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan. Not true, said Douglass. In a video posted on the White House Web site, she explained that there was a lot of “disinformation” going around these days about health care reform. Opponents of reform have been “taking sentences and phrases out of context” to create a “false impression.”
“There are people out there with a computer and a lot of free time, and they take a phrase here and there — they simply cherry-pick and put it together,” Douglass said, “and make it sound like he’s saying something that he didn’t really say.”
A few years ago, Linda Douglass the journalist might have asked just how Obama’s 2003 declaration of support for single-payer health care was taken out of context. Now, Douglass the White House spokeswoman didn’t even address the question.
On Jan. 20, 2009, after an eight year run, dissent ceased to be "the highest form of patriotism."Now, according to those who once assured us that even violent protests against the war in Iraq were patriotic, to express dissatisfaction with President Obama's plans for health care "reform" is mob rule, or worse.
