The addict's cage: the "one last time" cycle and cure-by-excess (Erdedy)

pivotal · UNDATED (~YDAU)

• When: UNDATED, YDAU (a single afternoon; the narrative present of active addiction)
• What: The novel's opening statement of the disease. Ken Erdedy waits, splay-legged and paralyzed, for a woman to bring marijuana he has vowed 70-80 times to quit, planning to "cure himself by excess" — smoke 200 grams in four days as a self-administered aversion regimen — while enacting the whole self-deceiving machinery of addiction (the third-party dealer so no one sees he is "creepy" about it, the discarded bongs, the resolve that this is positively the last time). An outpatient counselor's verdict names the disease's core: he is "insufficiently committed to the course of action that would be required to remove substances from his lifestyle." Erdedy later turns up as an Ennet House resident (See the Ennet thread), his marijuana addiction the same Substance that undoes Kate Gompert (event 4); here he is the thread's portrait of the still-active, still-caged will.