GETTING CARRIED AWAY

[Brave-Heart]

I am a very impulsive/compulsive person so it doesn’t take much to get me carried away which sometimes can be a good thing like flying to Australia and New Zealand but also a bad thing as these three examples will show.
I weighed 200 pounds when I was 15 and none of it was muscle. I went to my family doctor and he prescribed diet pills and told me to take one a day and that I should come back the following week. I did and I did only to discover I had lost 7 pounds. This was a snap and I could see the fat melting away! My ***age mind thought that since I lost 7 pounds taking 7 pills I should be able to lose 14 pounds taking 14 pills which is what I proceeded to do--take 14 pills bit I didn’t lose 14 pounds. Making a long story short 4 months later I was rushed to the hospital having taken a drug overdose of diet pills. Nothing happened to the doctor--remember this was back in 1951--who continued to give me prescriptions. One good thing came of it--I developed a healthy *** of ‘street ***’.
I flew to New York City after the Tony awards in 1977 to see “A Chorus Line”. Talk about getting carried away! I fell in love with that show and became a groupie. I saw 101 different productions of this show not only flying to New York for a weekend to see Friday night, Saturday matinee and evening and a Sunday matinee but going to Dallas, Miami, Houston, St. Louis, Memphis and wherever else I could see it. (Let’s not talk about all this flying, buying tickets, staying in hotels, etc., helped me have to declare bankruptcy!
It was when I was six*** years old that I can say I got carried away now but then didn’t look at it that way. I ‘divorced’ my family. I moved out, got a room in the Village, continued in high school, got a job to pay the bills, graduated and went to college for a semester or two (don’t remember) before enlisting in the Marine Corps. Did I get carried away? Would I do the same thing today? Yes and yes.
Getting carried away, not thinking about what I was doing, got me into some very uncomfortable spots in my lifetime but the bottom line is that today, at 78, I am a very happy, contented, gay, poor old man!