Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Am The Table
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 8 | Aired on 08.04.2008
Did you ever read Infinite Jest? It's good as a novel, like as a literary thing, but it also says the smartest thing about addiction and recovery. You could say the entire novel comes down to this idea, which is that the thing that gets you into it is the thing that gets you out. You become addicted to something little by little, minute by minute, day by day. Nobody goes from trying a little blow to giving blowjobs for crack in the space of a week: it's little by little, moment by moment. The moments start to spread out until your objective sense of time is so out of whack that you are unable to count the days. And the thing about recovering from addiction -- and I'm not a great believer in mantras or conventional therapies because I believe strongly that the smarter you are, the crazier you get to be, because you have more answers for everything and you could conceivably justify yourself all the way to dead if you wanted, and people often do, and Nancy Botwin is the smartest person alive so she gets to be the craziest too -- is that the thing that gets you in is the thing that gets you out. Little by little, minute to minute, you don't feed the bear.
Every second that goes by that you want your fix or get it: that's the tunnel down; every second that goes by that you don't feed the bear, that's the tunnel up. And the real bitch about addiction is that feeding the bear is a lot more fun, and there's not really a good reason to avoid doing things that feel good when the alternative is feeling horrible. But second by second, you don't feed the bear and he gets weaker. Frankly I can't understand how anybody kicks their habits when you look at it that way. Because we always put addiction between us and something really bad, whatever it is, that we don't want to look at: that's the real bear. You eat the bear or the bear eats you -- the real truth is, in order to accomplish anything, you have to let the bear eat you if you're ever going to kill it. Like Nancy: on the other side of her addiction is grief and self-hatred and boredom, which are the three bears that Nancy's been running from forever. So as long as she keeps her eyes on the big fake bear, which is her ridiculously fucked up life, she doesn't have to deal with the actual bears. And she's super-smart, so ... somebody's going to have to kill the bear, because no matter what, she keeps missing him. You can't miss the bear.
Lisa, with Silas all over her, starts to ruminate about how Cheese Gotta Have It is very, very strong-smelling, as in, it overpowers all other smells. She shows him a storage room in the back and offers to let him rent it as a grow house. "You really don't want to make sandwiches, do you?" No, she does not. She wants to fuck teenagers and have a grow house, but no sandwiches.