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Michael

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Long Sleeved Summers

by Michael Janflone

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Michael said: " You can buy it here!

As the author, I am my own toughest critic! Not to mention, it feels pretty arrogant to give myself 5 stars. I wrote this as a true labor of love, and it goes way beyond becoming a best-selling author and making a lot of money.

A You can buy it here!

As the author, I am my own toughest critic! Not to mention, it feels pretty arrogant to give myself 5 stars. I wrote this as a true labor of love, and it goes way beyond becoming a best-selling author and making a lot of money.

As the reader will see, my life has been anything but typical, and for years, anyone who knew me casually was no doubt thinking I was living the American Dream, a success by any measuring stick. That is just one meaning of the title of the book, protecting my secrets, wearing a disguise to show the public while doing my best to never look in the mirror.

Anytime I see a true story dealing with heroin or other drug use, it always seems to be a celebrity. This is so far from a disease of the rich and famous, just as an addict does not have to be living in a cardboard box, begging for spare change. There is this degenerate stereotype placed on people that have this problem. It causes families and friends to speak in hushed whispers around the Thanksgiving dinner table. Is Michael still strung out? He'll never get better.

The problem has spread, and anyone can become an addict. It is your neighbor, who has a great job as an accountant, that spends his weekends gambling and doing 8-balls of cocaine. It is the captain of your high school football team, that blew out his knee in freshman year at practice, dealing with depression and prescription pain pill abuse, know he will never play again. It might even be your husband, who hides behind the locked bathroom door injecting speedballs (cocaine & heroin) into his foot so you will never see his track marks.

I don't want to be the poster boy for the disease, far from it. The notion that an addict is evil, just lacks willpower, or simply ignoring the problem as if it will magically go away, these are commonplace thoughts that must be erased. That I was a pharmacist, the most trusted profession in America at the time, should speak volumes on the equal opportunity of addictions. Even more so, I had all the knowledge of drugs drilled into me over 5 years of college.

Here I am, thankful to be alive, looking back on all the insane actions and unbelievable collisions of circumstance, knowing I have found my place in the world, however unlikely it is. I wrote this as a memoir because these are the things I went through, not some fictionalized character, as one publisher suggested. It took nine years to finish something I began while spending a year in jail, as I waited for the fairy tale ending, walking hand in hand with my beautiful wife, pushing a baby stroller into the disappearing behind a hill sun.

Just as fate has played a major role in my life, so it had to in penning the finale. Everything happens in due time, the space I occupy in the world, in my mind, is the perfect waypoint on the journey of life. And my destination? I don't know, and I don't care. I have been taken care of this long, completely lacking direction. Perhaps that really is a happily ever after ending, since I have flipped on the GPS inside my heart.

It is my sincere hope that anyone reading this will enjoy the ride, and find hope. Whether an addict or someone that loves an addict, there is always a reason for optimism, as long as there is a beating heart and the breath of life. While the specifics of my story are unique, addicts share many of the themes within these pages. It can be heroin, or prescription pills; cocaine, crystal meth, gambling, sex or food. These things merely fill some void only on the surface.

Buy the book, start filling up that hole instead of digging it deeper. No matter how lonely, how desperate life is, I am proof that it can not only get better, but it can become spectacular. ...more "

Dec 05, 2011 09:03PM · see review