It would be like a heroin addict not shooting up after making a buy or an alcoholic not downing the drink after it’s been poured. Every fiber of my being was telling me that what I was doing was wrong, stupid. Pick any word that means that same thing and it had crossed my mind. I couldn’t count the number of times I told myself to leave, to give up this stupidity, or how many times I ran through the scenarios in which things went wrong. But all of that was just posturing, just a means to fool myself into thinking that I was under the control of some unseen force and not responsible for my actions. I was definitely responsible, because I had made the decision to stop at this strip mall, thought about where I should park, determined where I should run if things got out of hand, and worked out all the little details that were necessary when one robbed a bank. It’s something addicts do all the time. The rest of their lives may be messy and chaotic, but there is always a ritual involved in every addiction, a set of steps that an addict takes in order to feed his addiction.
