The Danger of Selective Forgetting – Tom B.
About This Speaker Tape
North Carolina, a textile mill town where the railroad tracks split the workers from the lawyers. Tom B. remembers being a "pudding head" with protruding shoulder blades and a face full of cysts, desperate to be a macho man like his Uncle Dud. He spent his youth pretending to be something he wasn't, a trait that morphed into a "Tasmanian Devil Syndrome" of obsessive excess. For Tom, the first drink at fifteen closed a hole in his soul, but it opened a door to a wreckage of a thousand stitches in his face and a car wreck that left him in traction for months.
He describes the "strange insanity" of the alcoholic—like a man who repeatedly puts his hand on a hot stove, convinced it won't burn this time. An academic who tried to memorize his way to sobriety, Tom found that knowledge was a useless tool. He had to stop playing God and admit he had lost his marbles. Only by surrendering to a Higher Power and the "ugly" old-timers did he find a way out.
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