If you take my aunt Milla as an example, her calm, orderly existence suited her just fine. The only problem was that she stopped going to work—because she was retired. And every evening, instead of a video stream, a new volume of a detective novel would unfold in front of her, promising a fresh dose of bookish narcotic. Truly, there’s something similar in this.
For a while, a person is completely cut off from reality, and for a couple of hours they get an exciting journey into another world. I started to have something like that with videos—cassette tapes flew one after another—though unlike my dear aunt, I managed to keep myself under control. Because if it turned out to be a terrible evening when she didn’t have a new novel on hand, my aunt experienced the real thing—withdrawal.
And it started like this: a sweet and kind creature would turn… well, not exactly into a fury, but into its direct opposite. Milla wandered from corner to corner and cursed the weather, the government, the doctors, and the neighbors, as if she had all the sins in the world to blame. After barely surviving a couple of such evenings, I prudently began stocking up on “crime reading,” anticipating a possible depletion of my aunt’s supplies. Probably, that’s exactly how it is in families of heavy drinkers too—there’s always a bottle hidden away for a rainy day…