The Human Machine: A Journey Through Drug Addiction and Alcoholism (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781432795962)

Michael "Curly" Sanford is a young man caught in a web of drugs and alcohol. A simple, happy life of adolescent leisure and adventure quickly deteriorates into an uncontrolled morass of incomprehensible demoralization after he leaves home and moves aimlessly from one city to another. He encounters situations with others arising out of their drunken rage, dalliance with street drugs, sexual interactions and even experiences violence and death. Following the pattern of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road", living his own 21st century version of the beat generation, searching for the prosaic "meaning of life," his intellectual and academic pursuits quickly become subverted by alcohol, drugs and sexual exploitation. He meets men and women from several walks of life, each facing their own demons, and sees life through the eyes of others. The book moves rapidly down his path of self-destruction and has two opposing endings from which the reader may choose. He finds final solace when he realizes that, in spite of his disease of addiction, his troubles were basically of his own making and the solution lays in finally deciding to take action and work a program of recovery; his life or death depends on this. Serendipity as well as planned action struggle against one another in the life of this and every addict and alcoholic. The novel is an exciting, action-packed journey but also a meditation on drug addiction and alcoholism written by an author who has worked in the field of recovery for over thirty years.

An excerpt from the book... once again "Curly" leaves a hospital only to pass quickly into his old habits:

"The disease of alcoholism, the scourge of the addicted, rapidly returned in all its profusion. He was soon into repeating the same behavior and, so characteristic of the alcoholic, expecting different results. He would close his eyes and then open them, almost magically expecting everything to be different, as if some force had divined a change. The fiction that is cinema, make-believe, even computer games, ran through the synapses of his mind. Why face reality when he could immerse himself in extreme fantasy, live vicariously through some imagined person, come alive through a bottle of alcohol. He could be an actor in real life wearing the mask of Janus with two faces, changing from sad to happy with a swallow of liquor as the transforming agent.

The delusion continued, only growing worse, with more and longer bouts of semi-consciousness, depression and lethargy. Within a week the stench and filth returned, his facial hair regrew and he once again took on the persona which had been temporarily washed away in the hospital."