Stay in the present. And that's not a glib answer. The way to stay in the present is to have a love for what you're doing and a vitality and a sense of well-being that is generated by your art.
Creativity is achieved in the doing, it's not achieved in the thinking.
The passion has never left me. I live as two people - myself, Dan Fante, and Bruno Dante or Mickey Di Salvo, or whoever I say I am in one of my books. I can tap that Bruno character any time I need to. He lives inside me like a quiet, simmering pool of magma. Years ago I stopped feeding him with booze and he was kind enough to stop trying to kill me. That's our truce.
I think we create our own reality by the thoughts we have. Recovery for me has been learning how to choose my thoughts, learning how to listen to my thinking and not choose the negativity. I don't have fights with people in supermarkets anymore. I honestly thought for years that my rage was who I was, that people who didn't think the way I thought were lying to themselves.
