Television Without Pity on addiction

This is a screed I never posted from a few years ago, from Television Without Pity. The site is closed now, although you can still read all the recaps, but I'm really sad there won't be any more. I 'watched' entire seasons on that site, and it told me more than watching some of the episodes myself would have.

From a recap of Weeds, season 4, episode 8.

Did you ever read Infinite Jest [by David Foster Wallace]? 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.

Jacob Clifton was my favourite writer on the site. Read all the True Blood recaps, you'll understand.