the gerbil-brain and the slow-drip faucet
After the initial crazed-gerbil-in-brain phase of early Withdrawal and detox, Bruce Green has now returned to his normal psychorepressed cerebral state where he has about one fully developed thought every sixty seconds
Context
The cognitive shape of the months after detox: past the crazed-gerbil phase of acute Withdrawal, Green settles into a thought-per-minute torpor that his counselor Calvin T. works, tough-lovingly and weekly, to crack open by trying to piss him off. The recovery institution shows its labor here — the assigned counselor, the deliberate provocation, the slow-drip patience required — because sobriety does not restore a self so much as leave a shut-down one that has to be drawn out drip by drip.