... One night Less Than Zero came on, a movie that the Chilli Peppers were in for a snipper, playing "Fight Like a Brave". I'd never seen it before, and I was blown away by Robert Downey Jr.'s amazing performance, which absolutely mirrored his life. And spoke to my life, which had pathetically revered back to the '80s. I'd gone back to less than zero. Was that what was waiting me, dying in a convertible on the way to the desert? ...


... At the beginning of December, Claire had to go back to New York on business, which was a recipe for disaster. No work, no girlfriend, no commitments: I went hog wild. Decembe was a pretty ugly month, because for twenty days in a row, I kept telling to myself, "I'm going to do this just one more day, and tomorrow I'll definitely quit" ...


... There was a huge floor-to-ceiling window in the hall ... I stared at the sky, and for the first time in my life, a voice went off my head: " You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you are going to do. You've taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you're going wherever the drug world takes you" ...


... Or I could walk through those doors and turn my life over to a power higher than myself, and start walking out the woods of my dependency. ...


... Having a moment of clarity is one thing; I'd had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercice. It's a write axiom, but practice does make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer oran accomplished musician, you have to practice. It's the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don't practice your program everyday, you're putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time. ...


All those years when I was going in and out, I'd lie to myself and say, "You're just relapsing, you're not going back to use for good. This is a temporary condition". It always went on longer than I planned, and I was able to come back, but now I knew that I had to come back for a purpose - it wasn't because I outwitted drug addiction. It was because something, somewhere, wanted me alive so I could be a part of creating something beautiful and helping somebody else.
I'd made the decition to stop doing drugs many times before, but I never followed up with the daily maintenance, the cultivation of a path to a spiritual awakening. ...


... In the song "Otherside" on Californication, I wrote, "How long, how long will I slide/Separate my side/I don't, I don't believe it's bad". I don't believe that drug addiction is inherently bad. It's a really dark and heavy and destructive experience, but would I trade my experience for that of a normal person? Hell no. It was ugly, and there is nothing I know that hurts as bad, but I wouldn't trade it for a minute. It's that appreciation of every emotion in the spectrum that I live for. I don't go out of my way to create it, but I have found a way to embrace all of it. ... I'm almost, by now, four years sober, so I'm in a position to be of service to hundreds of other suffering people. ...


... I'm going to meet some other person along the way who was clean for some time and can't get clean again, and I'll be able to say, I was there, I did that for years, I was going back and forth, and now... " ...


... After all those years of all kinds of abuse and crashing into trees at eighty miles an hour and jumping off buildings and living through overdoses and liver disease, I feel better now then I did ten years ago. I MIGHT HAVE SOME SCAR TISSUE, BUT THAT'S ALL RIGHT, I'M STILL MAKING PROGRESS...

Anthony Kiedis