The White Flag AA meeting — "If you listen for the similarities…"
If you listen for the similarities, all these speakers’ Substance-careers seem to terminate at the same cliff’s edge. 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.
Context
The generic second-person Substance-career the White Flag section keeps returning to, arriving at the Bottom. The addict's terminal fork stated as exactly two choices, and the suicide branch phrased in the street's cartographic idiom, "eliminate your own map for keeps," complete with a consumer's guide to methods. The AA didactic voice and the yrstruly street voice turn out to share one vocabulary for death.