Well, I’m 18.

Feels weird saying it that way, partly because in six months I’ll be 50, and partly because it’s hard to believe it’s been that long since I started this journey.

But it’s really been 18 years since I took off down this winding road of recovery, 18 years since the beginning of the rest of my life started. It’s really not that line-in-the-sand black and white, but today is the date I define as the end of my addiction and beginning of my recovery, my sobriety date.

It’s just one of many reasons this month is special.

April 1^st was Lucy’s birthday, and this would have been her 20^th birthday. She obviously wouldn’t have lived to 20, but this marks 20 years of her ongoing presence in my life, especially as I also celebrate Lucy’s Way: A Dog, A Drunk, and The Tao turning one year old this month. Published on April 15 last year, I’ll celebrate that milestone with THREE events over the next two weeks.

Scrolling through social media earlier last week, I came across another April milestone, something I’d never noticed until this year, the release of Third Eye Blind’s self-titled debut album 29 years ago on April 8, 1997, which is important to me as it was a masterpiece in chaos that came into my life at the exact right moment.

When I put on the album this week, I could immediately FEEL that exact moment in time that I was living back in the summer of 1997 when I grabbed that CD off a music store shelf on the whim of the first single, “Semi-Charmed Life.” (Editorial note: compact discs were shiny silver discs that held entire albums of music and music stores were stores nearly entirely devoted to music with rows and rows of albums of every imaginable genre of music where someone like myself could spend hours).

Fun fact: my copy has a sepia(tan)-colored cover. This was the color of the first 500,000 copies and from there, Elektra Records shifted to a brighter red cover that the other 5.5 million owners of the album possess. So I was all in on this album pretty early in the game. Lucky me, because that first line of the album opener, “Losing a Whole Year”, hit me loud and clear, a big, blazing Chuck Norris roundhouse right in the feels, the next 58 minutes succinctly summarizing just how I felt about life in that moment and time.

Obviously, with over six million copies sold, many people connected with this album. For some, this album was a front-to-back masterpiece that perfectly captured the exact way this precise moment of the 90s felt. Call me some.

The album surfed a wave of chaos and pain, beautifully capturing the intensity of love and loss and longing, of addiction and despair, fear and freedom, a storm of hopelessness and hurt with raindrops of hope and happiness.

The lyrics were brilliant. The instruments were driven, the melodies captured the time period, offering the solace of similarity in the messy ocean of my life I was trying to navigate at the time. I related to it. I connected with it.

I can only hope, all these years later, that people have been able to connect with Lucy’s Way in similar ways to how I allowed this album to connect with me. Hearing the stories from people who were brought to tears in the first few pages is humbling, and it’s one of the greatest compliments an author can receive, knowing that their story has connected so deeply to people. I can only hope that others continue to connect deeply with this story.

My goal now is for others to “find” Lucy’s Way, to find a piece of themselves in the pages as they grieve the loss of an animal or struggle to understand the demons of addiction, or just to relate to the ups and downs of life and love and loss and to feel connected to something on a deeper level.

So all that said, there’s opportunities for that coming up this month as I celebrate the one year anniversary of publishing Lucy’s Way.

I’m starting the party this Thursday, April 16, with a reading of Lucy’s Way followed by a signing at my good friend (and Lucy’s Way SUPERFAN) Anne Click’s Grant County Extension Homemakers Association event. The event mission is to raise awareness of the Homemakers association and to invite new members. The event is open to the public if interested in attending to learn more about the association and will take place at the Grant County Fairgrounds in Marion, Indiana.

The following day, I’ll be at Huntington, Indiana’s first-ever Market on Main Street event with eight other area authors. The theme, A Fresh Chapter, is the perfect way to celebrate local authors and community organizations while welcoming spring into Downtown Huntington.

Then, the following weekend, on Saturday, April 25, I’ll be at the Bookworm Orchard’s grand opening event on the lower level of the Boston Hill Center right next to Los Amores restaurant. There will be 30 local authors at this event as we all promote Marion’s new bookstore for local and indie authors.

In addition to that, some of you may recall that I did a fundraiser for the Marion Grant-County Humane Society last September. I donated $10 of every copy of Lucy’s Way sold back to the shelter and ended up donating $600 to the shelter. Last weekend, Shea Buck, who helped organize the first fundraiser, reached out to me for more copies off Lucy’s Way, which are now available at Pipe Creek Animal Hospital and other upcoming humane society events. Shea and I discussed how happy we were with the results in September and decided to make this an ongoing thing! So, for any copy of Lucy’s Way purchased at Pipe Creek or at an upcoming humane society event, I will donate $10 of each sale back to the shelter. If you are not local and able to purchase a copy through these outlets, but want to purchase a book toward this cause, drop me a line at mark@lucy-books.com and we will make something happen. Be advised, I am not able to honor this for copies purchased through Amazon or other online retailers.

So tell your family and friends and anyone else about all these great upcoming events as I celebrate April with the memories of recovery and love and loss, and celebrate all that is yet to come.

Every year at this time, I reflect on what my journey in recovery means. This year, I can’t help but think that these events I’m promoting would not even be a possibility had I not taken that very difficult first step 18 years ago.

I clearly remember, less than a week out of jail, firing up a joint in the back room of my apartment on April 11, 2008. In the aftermath of that afternoon, that ton-of-bricks feeling hit me that I was already starting the cycle again. The decision that day that I was done with everything, including filling in the gaps between drinking sprees with other drugs I didn’t find as harmful, wasn’t easy or magical. It was only after I headed straight into that storm of pain that the magic would happen. I had to go through it. And it hurt, but I did it, one day at a time.

That moment, 18 years later, feels different today than it did then. Just like that album. Listening to it last week evoked some of the same emotions of 29 years ago while also recalling different emotions from when I listened to it 10 years ago, five years ago, two years ago. It’s the same album, with different memories and feelings associated over time.

Listening to the album again as I wrote this, I thought of how people can potentially continue to view Lucy’s Way through new lenses, how it can affect new readers differently over time as we enter this next year, as I continue to promote it in the hopes of getting it into the hands of whoever needs its message next.

I also realized one other thing.

That album, 29 years later, it’s still a masterpiece.