And am I excused because I’d been drinking and smoking crack when I did it, back on the night when 1986 turned into 1987, standing on the side porch of a Long Beach home a few blocks south of Willow and Magnolia, with my friend Raymond Lewis, the former Verbum Dei star of the early 1970s, who is still perhaps the greatest high school basketball player in Southern California history — and who ultimately died in 2001 of the same disease of addiction that the Press-Telegram’s generous Employee Assistance Program, a couple of miraculous 12-step programs and a mysteriously loving God has enabled me to keep in one-day-at-a-time remission since September 11, 1994? Does that let me off the hook? No, it does not. For all I know, the single bullet I shot into the sky that night, killed somebody when it came down. I was sick, and I am sorry, but I am not excused. My little story only magnifies the words of Sheriff Lee Baca, who in today’s P-T story by Hanna Chu says that people who shoot guns into the air at midnight on New Year’s Eve are “people who don’t have any common sense.”

Tags: addiction, crack, Dave Wielenga, disease, guns, New Year's Eve, press telegram, Raymond Lewis, Sherriff Lee Baca, Verbum Dei