History of my life

I can no longer remember the exact dates and circumstances so this is the Reader's Digest version. Eruanno, this may help explain some things but I don't know, it's your head not mine. I've wanted to tell you for a while but, especially more recently, you've not talked to me. Now probably isn't the best time either but at least with this medium you can choose not to read it.
The time is late fall, my parents own an automotive repair shop where my dad is the mechanic and my mom runs the office. I spend time down there when I need a ride to a class at the community college or when I'm feeling especially lonely at home. It's dark outside and my mom has me take the shop guard dog to the back yard so we can close up and leave. She had told me a couple days or hours before that dad has been acting funny and to let her know if he is acting odd so she can know that it's not just her. He is supposedly working on a car but while I am walking back to the office he is just laying on the ground in the doorway to his tool crib(really it's a small room that has his tool box and stuff so that it can be locked away) staring at the ceiling. My dad has a condition known as cardiogenic syncopy. This is a fancy term to say that his heart will stop beating sometimes for no medically explainable reason. So I, fearing the worst, ask him if he is okay. He gets up and mutters that he's fine but the look on his face, the redness around his mouth and nose, and the rag in his hand all let me know that he is not okay. I tell my mom and she immediately figures out that he is huffing something. At the time we didn't know what but we now know that it is brake cleaner. We get him to close up the shop and we go home. My mom calls the pastor of our church, or maybe she called our elder first but, either way, the church people are notified. We were mostly relieved to know what is going on and were hoping that through pastoral counseling he could be helped to stop huffing chemicals. Everything was fine-ish for another couple of months where we found out his main reason for doing the huffing was that he wasn't handling the stress of owning a failing business very well.
After he "sells" the business to another person it doesn't take long before he starts huffing again. It is now summer. Once my mom becomes aware that he was at it again she makes the pastor of our church become more involved and the person who owned the business was told to switch chemicals or my dad was going to have to leave. My dad was also taken to rehab where we were told he would have to spend a minimum of 48 hours in detox. My mom stayed home and I went with B to the church retreat. While I was there I slept, alot. I probably slept for 36 hours of the 60 hours we were there. B was kind enough to keep most people from bothering me but of course the church elders and their wives all wanted to talk to me to make sure I was okay. C was there too but I didn't want to tell her because it was nice having one friend there that didn't actually know what was going on. Dad was checked into the rehab program on Friday but on Saturday when I called he answered the phone. I was more than a little stunned considering what we were told. Apparently he was able to check himself out because it was a voluntary commission. He had called my mom and gotten her to pick him up from the place even though she didn't think he was ready to leave. When B and I were ready to leave we invited C to come along too because without her the mood in the vehicle would have been several degrees heavier. We had a good time driving back home but I suggested we stop by to see you, mainly because I needed to be around some unrelated male that wasn't trying to make me talk about what was going on. Plus you have always made me feel better just by being around you, even when I was mad at you. It was good to laugh after such a hard couple of days.
The next week at church my dad had to stand before the congregation while the pastor told everyone what was going on. Nothing ever came of that. You weren't there that week but I think your parents were. I struggled about whether to tell you and decided that telling you at that time would have been more selfish than anything else. We were kind of on rocky ground anyways and I was just looking for a release.
The guy who owned the business didn't really care about my dad's health, he was just looking to make money. He didn't change the chemicals so my dad left. My dad ended up loosing alot of his tools because of the lack of a written contract about the turning over of the business. My dad went to another shop that he had subcontracted for and things seemed to be going well. Flash forward about a month and a half and my dad calls me from work and is crying and sputtering some nonsensical stuff about me needing to stay pure and not to trust any guy ever. My mom and I both knew that he was huffing something. Come to find out the place my dad was now working at had an even stronger version of the stuff he was doing before and the shop had less ventilation so he could get high just by walking in the door. He ended up having to quit and was out of work for quite a while.
He now works at the school I go to and, as the last blog post stated, has relapsed once. He has been diagnosed as bipolar but refuses to take medication for it. He also has said that if God wanted him to be better He wouldn't use drugs. Yeah it's been a real hoot over the past couple of years. If you made it this far and still have questions I would be willing to answer them. Even if you don't have any questions I would like to know if you read it, please.