"The gravitational pull of downward mobility"

I'm listening to an episode of This American Life about a man who goes to Florida for four months to take care of his mother and brother. I probably blogged about it before - this is the second time I've heard it and...it's just...

The narrator's parents divorced when he was young. He and one brother were raised with their father; his mother remarried and had another son who grew up with her. The father worked for NASA and occasionally lunched with Nobel Laureates; the mother's second husband was a drug-smuggling gangster who was killed by his associates. One of the narrator's brothers went away to study classical violin; the other went to court for multiple DUIs. Josh, the narrator, spends his time trying to restore his mother and brother's lives to manageability and figuring out how it got so out of control in the first place.

What's so stunning to me, besides how easy it is to get keep getting sucked deeper and deeper into the downward spiral, is how foreign Josh finds his family's life in Florida. Was his childhood air truly so rarefied that he didn't know people live like that? Maybe he assumed that those things happen to other people. I think that's what stands out the most to me - how blown away Josh is that his mother just continues to acclimate to living conditions that continue to degrade - when to me it all seems so easy to understand. Too easy.

To be fair, Josh does say over and over that he wished he'd been told when things started to get so out of hand so he could have helped out - he doesn't sound like a stupid or snobby kid. Just a remarkably charmed one, I guess.

Maybe what makes me so tired all the time is straining against the downward pull. I've seen how damned easy it would be for me to let myself slide down the slippery slope. What could I do with all the energy I spend not giving in to the negativity I do manage to push away? With all the energy I use pushing past the urge to drink? I remember hearing someone describe recovery as walking in the ocean against the current. How much further could I go if I could just get out of the water?