i saw this movie last night, i don't know what made me pick it, about drinking, i do know why, i still feel the drinker as ghost in me, and i've thought why belabor the past with the present mind, but it isn't past, and watching the movie i felt empathy and sadness, and i learned a little more about how drink changes the brain. they say drink is the basis for all the drinker's other problems. they showed how you lose reward function in the reward center and gain activity in the stress center, and more insidious, you lose ability in the frontal cortex to work properly, and that's the part that makes you who you are, the part that makes decisions and choices, the part where delay reinforcement occurs. if you lose that part of your brain you have no brake on impulsive behavior and stress-like responding. in the active drinker that promotes a vicious cycle. you end up drinking to fix the problem the drinking caused. 
was i a drinker even before i drank? was it in my genes from gramps and dad? was i a drinker before, and am i a drinker after? 
they say in the movie if you quit the brain is yet changed. i thought like my lungs getting pink again my brain might too, if pink is the right color, maybe coral pink. but it seems they say the brain shrinks in function and size and it is very very difficult to reverse the changes. they say the brain doesn't grow new neurons, but that it can strengthen other pathways that already exist.
i think the ghost was here when i came and i grew together with it and might have died and now must live with it and i am an ex-drinker too, forming new pathways, the same pathways every day, forming and following, the pathways of the brain, through the park, following and followed by dogs. the brain is resilient, and the dogs are light, and the trees are synapses.