IJ study archive

The White Flag AA meeting

quote

You are now Finished, as a Substance-user. It’s the jumping-off place. You now have two choices. You can either eliminate your own map for keeps—blades are the best, or else pills, or there’s always quietly sucking off the exhaust pipe of your repossessable car in the bank-owned garage of your familyless home. Something whimpery instead of banging. Better clean and quiet and (since your whole career’s been one long futile flight from pain) painless.

Context

The Bottom's two options, stated as flatly as a menu: suicide or the phone call. The map-elimination idiom's fullest, most practical statement (blades, pills, the exhaust pipe), with the terrible parenthesis that a painless exit is just the addict career's "one long futile flight from pain" completed. The motif catalog's Maps section skips this scene entirely.

In anthology