Ennet House culture: the many exotic facts you acquire, and the disease as DIS-EASE

pivotal · UNDATED (~YDAU residency)

• When: UNDATED — the standing texture of a stint in residency (YDAU-era; references current residents/staff)
• What: The thread's great compendium of what a Substance-recovery halfway facility teaches: the craving that, if gutted out unindulged, "will eventually pass"; the Hispanic term tecato gusano for the interior worm that drives the addict back; that AA/NA's "God" does not require belief before it will help; that the returning slippee has never once been glad he went back Out; that "acceptance" is mostly fatigue; that anonymous generosity is its own intoxication. It stages the classic definitional debate (addiction as disease / mental illness / spiritual condition; the veterans' DIS-EASE parsing, and G. Day's counter that it reduces to "a whiny insipid" feeling), as printed and left open. Tiny Ewell's tattoo obsession (the irrevocable intoxicated impulse) is character texture folded in; the litany's real freight is the disease model and the recovery culture the rest of the thread dramatizes.