Randall Hope is not my real name. I want to be clear about this from the beginning. My life is so full of lies and bullshit that I've decided I need one place where I can speak (write) the truth or I'm going to - I don't know what I'm saying here - I guess it's that I think bad things can happen when a man never tells the truth; he has to have at least one person or place or whatever where he tells the truth or else he begins to believe his own lies and that is the beginning of the descent into real babbling, drooling craziness and I don't want to go there.

Anyway, I'm sorry that I have to start this whole thing out with a lie, but it's, what do they call it, a necessary evil, as you will soon, I think, understand.

So, okay, it's not my real name, but everything else is true. I'm forty years old. I live in California. I'm a bus driver for the Santa Monica Blue Line. I am drunk from waking to sleep.

I thought it was going to take longer to get to this, but there it is, that's the whole problem: I drive a public bus, hauling five hundred passengers a day, and I'm drunk the whole time. That's it. Or, not entirely it, because there are a lot of things that regular people don't know about alcoholics, and it won't exactly cheer you up, but that's mostly it. Like, I rarely sleep more than three hours a night, I sometimes take drugs like speed and pot, and I'm going blind in one eye, but those are minor things.

It's mostly an ethical question for me, because I'm a very in-control drunk; you'd never notice that I was drinking at all. I'm just used to it, and I drive fine. My route manager never suspects, no passenger has ever complained, I'm accident free. But it still seems like maybe it's not exactly right.

How does this happen? Aren't there safeguards against this kind of thing? Well, yes, but it's much more lax than you would think. The only way they could find out would be by seeing me drink or smelling alcohol on my breath - which they never will - or with a piss test, but my piss-tests are very easy to pass. There's a guy that hangs out in front of the medical marijuana dispensary who sells his piss, and I buy a bag of it every week and keep it frozen. Santa Monica Public Transport tells me in the morning that they need me to stop by the office at the end of my shift, and I know it means piss test, so I pick up my frozen bag during the day, stick it in my shirt, it thaws, and fill the sample bottle in the afternoon when I'm done. The pisses are never supervised. That's it.

I wake up in the morning, have about short glasses of whiskey, fill a water bottle full of vodka and water for my work day, and go pick up my bus.

There it is. I actually feel better. Who knows what I might do next.