"Insanity's Bouquet"

Patty’s addiction decided for her that she had suffered enough. The pain was enough. The pain of being unable to feel the pain was enough.

The unbearable pain of the struggle to be free of her addiction was a giant wave whose undertow drew her back to the ocean of her addiction. She could no longer live free. No longer free. Under she went. The undertow of addiction drowned her.

Patty’s addiction could not undecide her death.

(Sotto): He separates himself from her death with his words. He is using his words to separate himself from addiction. Not from his own inevitable death. He’s using his words to give himself one more day. Vatchi, his Patty is gone and he has no tears, but he is bringing a tear to my eyes. Do you think he knows that I can sometimes feel his words more than he can?

Like force-fed fowl grown fat before their bones have had a chance to grow, alcohol altered the maturing process and crippled me. My hollowed out bones could not support the weight of alcohol.

My head was a pumpkin carved from the inside. Collapsed. No candle ever lit. Slow motion implosion.

A building destroyed before it was ever built. I hit bottom, left with this ruin. I must pick up the pieces left living and build a new life. Destruction, deconstruction and reconstruction. It is all possible, so long as I keep moving forward. So long as I don't pick up.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 72)

Virtuous effects compounded....

“No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Stagnation = Relapse

Addiction is a God. Worship. Fear. Ceremonies. A culture. A belief. Idealized. Idolized.

I truly feel as if I have turned some mysterious corner here.

No one has pronounced, “Let there be Light!” or anything of such Biblical proportion. But here is a certain lack of darkness, barely felt and the darkness, complete darkness is gone.

Now, at last, sobriety is becoming familiar.

(Sotto): Vatchi? Who is the God of my addiction? Where is this God, Vatchi? Where can this thing called God be found? Vatchi?

I've tipped the scales between my addiction and a better life. My God, which was addiction, is now my demi-god, forever struggling for a return to power. The God of my addiction has not been replaced by a Santa Claus God or an Easter Bunny God or any God Whatsoever. Sobriety Itself whispers in the wind and I heed its call.

I've tipped the scales between my addiction and a better life. I now favor a philosophy of living clean derived through my desire to survive.

I hold that thought, then gently let it drift on by...

(Vatchi): Virtuous effects compounded, Sotto. (cont'd...)

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 71)

Something Old, Something New

This is one of many nows, this now. This sober day. This is a day of living where sobriety is a routine, a change of habits well rehearsed, a life reversed. This is what is left when the last tremors of the earthquake have subsided. This is where the illusion of illusions has melted.

This is Page One.

(Sotto): He is insane. This must be his insanity. Sober, but insane. One insane moment after the other. One paw print at a time until the beast is revealed. Vatchi! He’s making me nuts now, too.

Fear sat somewhere in my near immediate future, a crouching tiger, always ready to spring forward. I could feel and yet not feel the alcohol and its absence. Towards the end of nearly every relapse, anxiety attacks would consume me. I couldn't move forward because I was frozen in fear and anxiety.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 70)

Change

“…People don’t like change, but they like to have changed.”

Will Bowen

I’ve heard of miraculous recoveries and miraculous discovery (of a higher power), but I’ve never heard of a miraculous relapse (I am no longer an alcoholic and can drink like a normal person).

Why it took 69 Chapters to mention my last relapse has slipped out of my mind, but I do remember a nurse at the Atlantic City Rescue Mission’s AtlantiCare Health Clinic diminishing the impact of my last four day binge, which put me into the hospital and ended nearly two years of continuous sobriety. 

She called it “a slip”. 

Here’s what happened and what I learned from it:

 

[continued...]

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 69)

Nature/Nurture

    Let's play "Blame the Parents". Let's play "Blame the Blame Game". Let's play "I am Virtuous and True". Let's play "Screw You".

    I can't blame my parents for much of anything, I guess. They did the best they could. My mother was sixteen and my father was twenty-one when they married. They grew up as they raised us kids. They both lost their fathers in their early childhoods.

    Alcoholism is in my genes and in my jeans (excuse the bad pun on the nature/nurture controversy). Alcoholism was inside me at birth and the world I grew up in was awash in alcohol. Regardless: the progression of alcoholism is slow and torturous.

    Sober today, I have learned to grieve the death of my old and drinking self and celebrate the emergence of this new frontier, sobriety. My old self may have died for all sense and purpose, but my disease will never die. The zombie-killer lives within. Waiting to strike, to catch me off guard.

    But I cannot be off guard. The zombie-killer awaits. This is but a daily reprieve.

    Have a nice day, Mother-Fucker. See you in my dreams.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 68)

Chapter 67 ("Monkey Frocks") begins...

“Alcoholism isn't a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.” - Joyce Rebeta-Burditt

Sobriety is a gift. Recovery is earned.

Rehab and Recovery and Relapse and Rehab and Recovery. I’ve been in several Detoxes and Rehabs and Programs and Group Therapies- several times each. My second time in the Institute for Human Development (which is now the John Brooks Recovery Center) I was in a Librium fog, supine on my cot, listening to the two guys two cots down talking quietly with each other about their addiction to heroin.

They talked about how they would not have a problem with the heroin if they had the fame and money of rock stars. They professed that they didn’t need the right people, places and things for their recovery because they really believed that with the right people, places and things, they wouldn’t have a problem with their heroin.

There was a time when I had a false sense of the superiority of alcoholism over other addictions, and this false sense helped allow me to continue with abandon.

“Oh, the Humanity,” the announcer exclaimed as the Hindenburg went up in flames. “Oh, the Insanity…” of any and all addictions. Always wanting more and feeling empty, left out.

(Sotto): I feel like the priest in a confessional. He is talking, but I cannot hear the sin. The sin is inside of him. He is not the sin, he is its container and the sin is emptiness. Vatchi, this makes me feel sad. Alcoholism. His disease is emptiness.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 67)

Down the Drain

The only thing unusual about me drinking beer in the shower was the low alcohol content. Dr. Jim (that’s me) prescribed a drink in the shower for its medicinal sobering up qualities and its effervescent lilt. Beer was the Common Man’s brew. Dr. Jim only drank beer in public as a way to show that he flowed with the sea of humanity (or was too drunk to drink anything else). 

“Lather. Rinse. Repeat.”

I thought I could follow directions. But my direction faded. I and alcohol and fear went down the drain together, clockwise, north of the equator, yet directionless.

(Sotto): Moon walking. That’s it. Appearing to walk forward while sliding backward. Michael Jackson’s move. Drinking beer in the shower to get ready for work. Eureka . By Jove. Good Golly, Miss Molly. Jim’s moon walking! (laughing out loud) Drinking in the shower.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 66)

Phantom Toes Wiggling

I still have phantom memories of my drinking past, euphoric recall. It’s as if one of my legs were amputated, but that I can still sometimes, somehow feel those toes that are not there.

Triggers are phantom toes wiggling. Don’t take the bait. Don’t bite. Use your good leg, the sober leg. The bad leg is gone. Let it go. Say your eulogy. Mourn this death and move on.

Addiction is a beast that lives within you. You cannot kill the beast. Denial, anger, fear will not kill it. Begging, pleading, blaming will not tame it. Depression, self-pity, doubt: They only feed it. Confront it. Accept it. The beast will never die.

(Sotto): I’ve got it! He’s talking to himself. Whistling in the dark. Saying what he has to say to not pick up a drink. I don’t think he even knows we’re listening. That anyone is listening.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 65)

South Mountain

I can remember standing on the front porch of our house with my father when I was maybe ten years old. We lived in a small valley and a few miles away to the west was the rim of the valley. This was called South Mountain . We could watch storms approaching from the other side of the mountain.

My father taught me how to predict when the storm would reach us by counting the seconds between when we saw the lightning and when we would hear the thunder. The closer the storm, the less time it takes between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder.

It takes a long time, too, when you first get clean and sober to get a clear picture of reality. Relapse now and you may never hear the thunder and feel the rain wash clean the debris of your disease.

My father and I stood on the porch. We saw the storm get nearer, saw the lightning, heard the thunder, the dog and cat beneath the couch because they were frightened and did not understand. And then the rain would come down in buckets, the street still hot, giant puddles of water, the steam rising and sometimes, just sometimes, after the storm, we would see a rainbow.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft. Chapter 64)

Inject the Truth Slowly

Only in retrospect am I beginning to understand that alcohol merely muddied my emotions. Alcohol was not a solver of problems; it was a solvent of emotions.

 

Slow the injection of truth. Insert the needle of truth into my vein, into my brain, slowly.

First, hold the needle upright. Squeeze out any air. Leave only the clear, the liquid, the truth.

Inject me slowly. I want to want to watch that crystal clarity enter my vein.

The truth, too fast, could only scare me.

Inject me slowly, or quickly watch me die.

(Sotto): Don’t tell me he shoots up, too? Isn’t it a little late in the game, here, to be making that admission? What else has he left out? Nothing makes him blink. I swear.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 63)

Dry Drunk?

When the alcohol dries up, the dust that remains can be self-pity. This is a dry drunk. Through several relapses, I guess I, too, have been a dry drunk at times.

Gratitude, humility and the interconnectedness I find at my recovery meetings keep me alive. Meetings are my "Oxygen Network".

Today, I can breathe and my breath is free of alcohol. And for this one moment I am free. 

(Surimi): Can he hold his sobriety? Can sobriety be held? Or is it like a champagne bubble that will burst when held? Or does sobriety go flat, like stale beer?

Daily renewal, daily reprieve. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. Sobriety is Now.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 62)

Part III: Chapter 61, "Depression and Anxiety (Dissolve)" begins....

“It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.” - Andrew J. Holmes

Don’t burn bridges behind you; concentrate on building the bridge that is before you.

I would have refused “Tough Love” had anyone tried to offer it to me in my early sobriety. But I am learning now that I must perform some kind of "tough love" on myself if I am to survive. “I have to keep my sobriety on a very short leash,” as I’ve variously heard it described at my Twelve Step meetings.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside: The Destruction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction of An Alcoholic Animal (Rough Draft, Chapter 61)

Helpless

I don't know if I can do this. I just don't know if I can do this. I just don't know if I can do this. I just don't know if I can do this. I just don't know. 

(Surimi): (Speechless, sighs)

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 60)

Chapter 59: "Double-Visionary"

“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one.”- Eleanor Roosevelt

Addiction steals power by stealing everything except the illusion of power. 

Group therapy, I remember thinking, in a grey, grey kind of way, keeps you busy, keeps you distracted, kills some time.

Kill some time instead of killing yourself with alcohol. Sobering up is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Green paint. Hospital Green. Stand close to this wall. Closer. Stare at it, then relax your eyes. Everything, the world, fades away.

The Librium Shuffle. Shuffle down the hospital corridor with fifty other shufflers. It took me awhile to realize that this was a farm factory, a conveyor belt of recovery. Henry Ford would be proud (or would he?). Enter Stage Left on Day One and Exit Stage Right on Day Fourteen. Numbers moving along in a Librium Shuffle toward sobriety.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 58) 

Hatred and Self-Doubt

Is all of this doing me or anyone else any good? Should I care? Should I persevere? Do I really need the help of others to stay sober today? I did before, but do I still?

Sick of myself. Sick of my disase. Go ahead. Paste your hatred on me. Use those childish scissors so that you do not hurt yourself. Paste your hatred on me. Cut dark red, dark blue and dark green construction paper. No yellow, never any yellow. Open that big, white plastic jar of white glue, dried on top from exposure to the air. Use that horse hair brush to break through to that soft, white, gluey center beneath.

Paste your hatred on me. Use short brush strokes. Paste it until you can taste it.

(Sotto): Gone. I’m outta here. He's crazier than a bedbug. How did he get this way? This can’t be good. Can't be. 

There is too much hatred in the world. Hoping, wishing it were not so would not change that. I have my doubts that praying could change things. Is there power in positive thinking? Maybe not for the world. But, maybe for my world.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 58)

If I had been a whale...

If I had been a whale, would I have been a drunk whale? What kind of crazy life was I living? A whale leads a whale's life. Was this a human's life I was leading? This life I led was absolutely insane. A diseased life. A drunken life.

All humanity must certainly scream out against it.

But not my brain. Even at its worst, or perhaps even more so at its worst, all my brain wanted was another drink. A drink to kill the pain caused by drinking. Insane.

Turn it over.

(Sotto): Jim reminds me of one of those paddles with the string and ball attached. Or the stick with the cup attached, again with the string and ball. 

His attention is diverted easily. Not attention deficit disorder. Just attention diversion. He is a precocious child whose alcoholism never let him grow up. He's a sixty something, just now sober enough to grow up.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 57)

Piano Wires

The walnut tree stood outside the witch’s house. When you are ten years old, there is a distinct possibility that someone is a witch. English walnut or black walnut? I’m not so sure. Black. I like to think black. Her old house was unpainted or the paint had peeled and the wood was bleached by the sun. The wood was gray from age and the weather. And the witch sat in her living room on her rocker and she was gray from age and the weather. The sky was gray. My thoughts were gray.

But not the newly installed picture window that separated us. The glass was new and clear and unscratched. Perfect.

In this scene I stood by the side of the road as if I were part of the picture I am now painting. Scatter small flakes of yellows and greens, small shimmers, like wind chimes in a soundless landscape.

Oh, yes. And her hair was gray, like piano wires. 

(Sotto): He’s going off here. Why’s he going off? Piano wires? Where’s he going with this? He can be freakin’ scary, man.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Chapter 56) 

What kind of toast was I?

Admitting that I might need some kind of continuing psychiatric help after leaving Lakewood Rehabilitation Hospital was a real breakthrough for me. I broke through the social taboo of ever admitting that I might need professional psychiatric help.

Don't worry though: My defenses were such that as soon as I discovered a chink in the armor of any professional psychiatric facade, I was quick to see through their shams of perfection. As soon as I would see that any professional person was as human as I, my deduction would be something like, "they need help more than I do" and then I would start missing scheduled visits to their offices and sooner than later stop going altogether.

The present informs my past. I remember standing inside the Rodin Museum, not far from Philadelphia’s Art Museum. Frozen in my alcoholism, like an insect trapped in amber, its destructive powers gave me a certain strength. Entrapment, the permanence of my disease, gave me an insane sense of indestructibility.
Dying from my disease, that is what I might have known of eternity, what I should have felt, if I could have felt. The present informs my past.
There is a connection here. The god of alcohol led me to the god of frozen yogurt. 

   "I feel like a piece of burnt toast dropped on a shag carpet landing butter side up."

   That is how I felt when the Librium wore off.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 55)

Liquid Dream

My un-defining moment was being plastered and bowling a 276. Seven drunken strikes in a row in my bar’s bowling league. At that time, I really did do my best physically when I was drunk because drunk had become the new normal. My brain was used to drunk. My brain needed drunk to be in familiar territory. The liquid I had become used to navigating through was alcohol. Liquid me in a liquid dream swimming through alcohol. Alcohol bathed each and every cell in my body, separately and lusciously. Caressing each cell like a little warm oil rubdown at an expensive spa. Alcohol, the ultimate masseuse. I bowled a 276, plastered, shortly blacked out and still drinking, swimming through alcohol like Marlee Matlin swimming in stunning silence. There was no before or after, only this oblivion. 

(Sotto): He’s making me a little uncomfortable here. A little too enticing. An attractive numbness. I’m shifting my feet. Is this the place where fear starts?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 54)

Accused Murder Accomplice

I sat near the end of a long conference table. I was being questioned by two detectives in some office in Northfield , not far from Atlantic City .

They thought that I had been witness to a murder, and that possibly I had been an accomplice to the murderer. If I had known that at the time, I would never have agreed to meet with them without an attorney present because I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

…Until I saw the videotape of what looked like me coming out of the apartment complex at New Hampshire Avenue and the Boardwalk on the night of the murder. And it did look like me, even to me. Same height. Same weight. Same gym bag slung over the shoulder. In those grainy images, the only way I knew it wasn’t me was that I never carry a bag on my right shoulder and the shoes were of a different color than any I had at that time.

Prior to actually seeing the video, I had admitted that I frequently was in that building to visit a friend on the ninth floor (several floors above where the murder was committed) and that although I was a blackout drinker, I only and always blacked out after leaving the building (I was sure of this because the person I always visited always passed out from over-indulgence, whereas I had only been priming the pumps, and would not blackout until much later.). [Continued...]

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 53)

Drink OR Drive?

“John Lennon has just been shot!” That’s what we heard on the radio as we left the recording studio. I say “we”, but I can’t really remember who the driver was. The simple fact is that at the time of John Lennon’s murder, I was the co-owner of an advertising agency and had stopped driving cars years earlier after being unable to find my car on several mornings after several nights before.

I was apparently smart enough to know I shouldn’t drive while drunk, but not smart enough to understand the implications of always, every single night, without exception, being too drunk to drive.

I had ripped my Pennsylvania driver’s license into six little rectangles after one day spending four hours walking in ever larger concentric circles looking for my car, left God knows where the night before.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 52)

Broadway Musical

My brain knows my disease. My brain loves my disease and my brain will never forget my disease, because my disease has carved permanent grooves into my brain that no amount of sobriety can ever putty shut. The grooves in my brain lay waiting for me to pick up again so that the grooves can progressively deepen.

I must depend on the help of others. Acting alone, I will be devoured by my disease. For addicts, alcohol will devour memories of the past and anxiety about the future, drowning them in the unreal, insane world of addiction. A living lobotomy. A blind man descending a spiral staircase leading to nowhere. No past. No present. No future.

Addiction will survive by eating you alive. Now, in recovery, I’m learning how to thrive.

(Sotto): Well, isn’t that fucking beautiful? The guy gets sober and finally life is like a goddam Broadway Musical. He’s delusional: One nut short of a Crackerjack’s box.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 51)

Herding Cats

There is the mental illness that is alcoholism and the mental illness beyond alcoholism that my alcoholism has caused. Hitting my bottom brought on a state of severe clinical depression. There is the insanity of alcoholism and the further insanities that alcoholism sometimes cause.

Survival and addiction meet at ground zero. In the white light outside the emergency room in the dead of night, in a drunken epiphany, I hit bottom, the sum of all memories undissolved by alcohol, a life of alcoholism, my resentful teacher.

This world seems more wounded as I slowly heal.

(Surimi): When Jim said, "We are alcoholics," I was so pleased. 'Safety in numbers' to those who understand the power of alcohol and the powerlessness of the alcoholic. And for those who decide that 'the herd instinct' with all its negative connotations is not for them, I would have to say that except for rare instances the help of others is almost always needed in the battle with addiction. How could the same unaided brain diseased by alcoholism recover solely under its already diseased power? I don't know, Sotto, Vatchi, but some few can.

Alcohol is "a subtle foe," indeed.

And Jim? Subtle? Not so much.

Herd the cats in my brain, my alcoholic brain....

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 50)

Spoiler Alert: Self-Justification

Don’t get between me and the next drink. When I’m drinking, this is dangerous territory. And my disease was a great coach. It taught me how to use my charm as a weapon. To get what I wanted. When I wanted it. 

People, Places and Things (potential triggers in my recovery) were tools in my addiction. The forests were the trees in my disease, Louise.

Please, oh please Mr. Bartender, just one more for the road? Please? 

(Sotto): I like Jim’s “And my disease was a great coach.” I can almost hear ‘the coach’ saying things like, “Okay, Jim, shoot a few more baskets and I’ll take you and the rest of the team out for a pizza and some pitchers of beer.”

Easy, peas-y. Not too disease-y.

"Warning: Alcoholism Ahead"

There were no signs posted on the road my life was taking as I grew up. Even the supposed 'cultural revolution' of the sixties (and early '70's): the Beatles, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Women's Liberation and that whole ball of wax. No Warning Signs there. Or ignored, at best. 

Alcohol was not only socially acceptable (as was smoking cigarettes, really), it was expected. Alcoholism, like a thousand and one other subjects, was a taboo. 

The rooms of my childhood and adolescence were not big enough for all the elephants in those rooms. And the elephants in this room, the room that I am in right now, will not be recognized by me except in retrospect. 

 

Self-justification becomes a way of life.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 49)

"The World is on Fire"

A man jumps out of a burning building, his clothing consumed in flames. Ripping off his clothes, some of his skin and burning flesh comes off with the shirt he was wearing. The blisters are now just forming, the smoke and stench of burning hair in the air. Paramedics struggle to put him on a stretcher, his arms and legs flailing from the pain of his suffering, his screams drowning out the screams of the sirens.

Suddenly, he breaks free from the paramedics and runs back into the burning building, the wall now consumed in flames.

This is the insanity of alcoholism. This is relapse. And this will happen again and again, each time just a little bit differently, but each time progressively worse.

Insanity is doing the same things again and again and expecting different results. The insanity of my disease wants me to cross through the threshold of that door, cross back to drink, to think that more is more.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 48)

When I Drink...

When I drink, the only world there is is alcohol. I will drink until I blackout and I will continue drinking until I pass out. “More” is the only word I know. More, until I blackout and then still more until my body shuts down and I pass out. And somehow, even then, more is not enough. My disease cannot ever be satisfied. When there is nothing else, there is always more.

More is everything… and nothing.

I will never be like “most normal folks.”

When I drink, the only world there is is alcohol.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 47)

Implosion

"2011," I heard the announcer on TV say that that year was the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the 1986 Challenger Tragedy. "Everyone remembers where they were when it exploded," he said.

I was in a bar on that date in '86 thoughtlessly waiting for the empty coffin of myself to implode.

(Surimi): Implosion. No fireworks. No Fourth of July. An entire life crumbling in upon itself. Like a black hole, so dense that no light can escape. There are no rubber-neckers to implosions. Implosions are not cause to celebrate. There is nothing to see. Not communal. Nothing communal here. Solitary. Alone. Entirely.

If one, then, survives this implosion, then, I suppose that there is some hope of finding a way out.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 46)



... the culture that surrounded me.

Smoke cigarettes and play pinball across the street from my high school- that's what I did. I was never cool, no matter how many signs of coolness propped me up. Crutches of coolness in my terrible teens.... My groundwork had been laid by the culture that surrounded me. It was all I knew. Smoking and drinking for me were inevitable.

Today, I do not belong to yesterday.

Things can change.

 

Some people get sober and stay sober for the rest of their lives. Not so for me and the vast majority of alcoholics and addicts. My progress from drunk to sober has been accompanied by setbacks. For me, progressively longer periods of sobriety have been followed by progressively shorter periods of relapse. My next relapse could be my first death. "One is too many and a thousand never enough."

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapater 46)

'Hair of the Dog' is how this Chapter ends...

 I guess it's no wonder that when you get to the point where you can't hold a drink without spilling it that you also can no longer hold a job. Not that I'm making excuses, but it just seems that once you slide so far down into your alcoholic oblivion after so many years, you are so entrenched that it seems the only answer is another drink.

My life, condensed and frozen on the walls of my brain, could not be papered over. Scrape bottom, seek help, change. Of course, that's not how I hallucinated it at the time.

My emotions were addicted to alcohol. Every emotion stuck, stuffed, twisted and blown out of proportion. Luckily, under the influence, I never had a gun. I wouldn't have refused one at times, I guess. A powder keg. A powder head. Coked up, luded up, juiced up, stewing on my own stupored juices. Loose cannon. Emotions addicted. OMG, OCD, M-O-U-S-E.

"Humor is just another defense against the universe."- Mel Brooks

Where do you turn when '"More" is too much, too empty, too lost?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 44)

Steamroller Blues

I did not drink today.

I will not drink today.

I cannot drink today.

I can conjugate a drink. I just don't want to contemplate one. Find something else to do, Jim.

"Live, laugh, love."

Not "drink, drank, drunk."

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 43)

Day 42/Chapter 42: WTF?

Illusion: One bar I worked in sold draft beer cheaper that a glass of soda. The illusion is that it is cheaper to drink beer. For an alcoholic like me, the illusion is obvious: One five dollar soda or a three dollar beer turning into a three day blackout-binge.

And the guy who buys the bar a round of drinks just likes spreading the fun around. Illusion. Usually, he is a chronic alcoholic who knows, or denies knowing, that misery loves company.

I deserve a drink: illusion. What goes up, will come down.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 42)