Weekly Wordzzle Challenge # 225

I forgot again.  Between the disruption (sort of) of Thanksgiving and my continuing sadness about Tara Grace, I just completely forgot it was Friday and Wordzzle day. Needless to day, since it's after 10 pm, I won't be posting anything until tomorrow. I do apologize for being so consistently inconsistent and late.

3:30 Saturday:  Done. I seem to have gone all serious and gloomy this weekend. Sorry. 

Words for this week's 10-word challenge:  humor, loss, marijuana, weekend, cold, wrist, Hercules, danger, mouse, disconnected,   And for the mini: girls, movies, compromise, tremendous, chalk


My mega:  

Hercules Montgomery - he had spent a lifetime paying a heavy price for his parents sense of "humor" - took another drag of his marijuana joint, knocking the ashes into a nearby ashtray with a deft flick of his wrist and shivered in the cold darkness of his home. He sat in front of the dark computer screen, mouse in hand, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was disconnected. It was only with tremendous effort that he pulled the frayed strands of his thoughts together enough to remember that it was his weekend to have custody and that and he was supposed to take his girls to the movies. The   herculean (no pun intended) efforts of his lawyer to get his ex wife to compromise and give him any access to their children would now be a total loss. She had warned him over and over of the danger his addictions posed and he had refused to listen. How ironic, that only now - when he had thrown away everything - could he truly hear her voice. He grasped a cup of cold coffee and drank it down in one gulp. It tasted like chalk, but it woke him up enough to push away some of the torpor of drugs and booze. Then, with shaking hands, he took his stash out of the desk drawer, headed to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. Next, he poured all the alcohol down the drain. Then - the hardest part - he dialed the phone and said the words she had prayed to hear all during their marriage. "Babe, I need help."


My mini:

 During the months of his rehab, one of the things that kept Herc Montgomery going was the desire to see his girls again and to redeem his broken promise to take them to the movies. His ex refused to compromise on the need for him to stay clean and sober for a full year before he could see the girls again. Years later - in retrospect - he recognized that her stubborn insistence and been a tremendous motivating force holding him firmly on course to recovery. The day when he did not react to those words like the sound of fingers on a chalk board, both he and his counselor knew he was truly on the road to recovery.



My 10-word:   

One of the best things about being recovered, Hercules thought, was that he had found his sense of humor again, although he had not recognized it's loss while he was actively in the thrall of his vices. In fact he had though himself the funniest guy in the room. That was perhaps the greatest danger of addition - the distortion of reality. Despite his heroic name, he had spent most of his life feeling more like a mouse than a man and had used drugs and booze to mask that pain. The irony was that marijuana and whiskey had in reality produced quite the opposite impression to others. That had been one of the greatest revelations during recovery. There had been a painful weekend at the clinic when his friends and family confronted him with the impact of his behavior on their lives. His wife and his parents had shared their devastation as he had become increasingly cold and disconnected.  The most devastating moment - the one that would be seared on his heart forever - was hearing his 12-year old daughter talk about her dread of hearing the words "you don't have to twist my wrist," which had apparently often preceded a major bout. Nothing he could ever do would take away the hurt he had caused these people - people he loved deeply - but he had known in that moment that he would spend the rest of his life doing his best to atone.

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Words for next week's 10-word challenge:  festive, bright red, hugs to all, macaroni and cheese, grief, obstreperous, fortune, mistake, zebra stripes, alphabetical 

And for the mini: your choice, drastic, hood, sparkling, smelly

Thanks you for playing.  Newcomers can check here for some guidelines to make the game more fun. There are no rules, just some general guidelines and tricks.