THE DOPECOW

There is this really ugly cow that I have been trying not to write about. This cow comes to a roomful of addicts and the cow is the dope, or its not the dope,  or it is supposed to be bringing the dope, but its really not like that at all. I don't know what the cow is, except it is a killer. The cow comes into the room and the room is huge but the cow (its an ugly cow) is no bigger than a medium sized dog, with teeth like razors and iron hooves for paws, and its mangy, and places where the flesh is rotting right off the bone, and one eye is bulging and the other is sunken in so far there is really only a soggy blur of a socket. Like a bovine Cujo on a mean batch of crank.


It’s a dopecow.

And the dopecow has no dope, which is a real disappointment for the addicts. The dopecow is angry, and mean too, and starts attacking everyone, gnashing with all these broken rotted teeth, and everyone starts attacking the dopecow back, and they are kicking it, and some have baseball bats and are hitting it, and the battle surges back and forth across this huge room. Finally someone comes up with a big baggie, and we put the dopecow in the baggie to suffocate it, but even that doesn’t work and now there is an angry dopecow in a baggie (but the cow is not the dope) that still wants to kill us all. it wants to kill us all, but we cannot kill it.
The dopecow can't be killed.

This was a dream I had before I ever went to an NA meeting. I had about two months clean I guess, but had not gone to a meeting when I had this dream. My dreams are seldom this ugly.  I have wondered for three and a half years what the heck this dream was about.

I was at a meeting last week, and the topic was about how we will always be addicts no matter how long we stay clean. The dream came back to me, and for the first time I may have realized what the dream was about.
The dopecow represents addiction, and the solution to the problem was to get out of that room.
We will never beat the addiction on its own terms, because those terms are insane, but through the 12 Step Program known as Narcotics Anonymous, we do recover.
Anyway, I’ve wanted to write this for a few years now, and I’m not sure that I’ve written it the way I’d like to.

Just for today: I am an addict every day, but today I have the choice to be a recovering addict. I will make that choice by practicing my program.