If by charity or desperation, you ever have a chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out…

Chronic alcoholics’ hearts are – for reasons no M.D. has been able to explain – swollen to nearly twice the size of civilians’ human hearts, and they never again return to standard size. That there’s a specific type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their wallet. Black and Hispanic people can be as big or more prominent racists as white people, and they can get even more hostile and unpleasant when this realization surprises you. That some people really do look like rodents. That certain people simply will not like you no matter what you do. Over 50% of persons with a substance addiction also suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder. That intentional sleep deprivation can also be an abusable escape. You do not have to like a person to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. It is possible to get so angry that you see everything red. Those evil people never believe they are bad but that everyone else is wrong. It is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than for high-IQ people. Sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and be hurt. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. Cats will, in fact, get violent diarrhoea if you feed them milk, contrary to the popular image of cats and milk. It is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That pretty much everybody masturbates. Different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene. That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. Having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place afterwards. That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as relatively low on his/her/its list of things if s/he/it’s interested in you…

 #wrapture

Photography by Andreas Roed and Arthur Sopin
Text by David Foster Wallace